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... ... @@ -1,1 +1,34 @@ 1 -I will disclose what I want, how I want, to who I want. 1 +Debate is structured to exclude black bodies – communication is not a level playing field but rather geared toward productivity and futurity. Because the logic of communication presumes a sense of community, black communication is always seen as an instrument to serve the future. 2 +Reid-Brinkley 19 (Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, University of Pittsburgh, “Voice Dipped in Black: The Louisville project and the Birth of Black Radical Argument in College Policy Debate”, https://books.google.com/books?id=dLOYDwAAQBAJandpg=PA219andlpg=PA219anddq=voice+dipped+in+black+the+louisville+projectandsource=blandots=Pe2U-sCaUxandsig=ACfU3U2PZ9YK0~-~-6z8FspFEdHUhG0V53Qwandhl=enandsa=Xandved=2ahUKEwjOjpLojtbmAhUnVt8KHUv6BGcQ6AEwA3oECAoQAQ#v=onepageandqandf=false, 2019) CJun 3 +Racially different bodies must perform that difference according to the cultural norms of the debate community. For Black students it can often mean changing their appearance, standardizing language practices, and eschewing their cultural practices. In essence, in order to have an opportunity for achieving in debate competitions Black students must performatively whiten. “Acting Black” is problematic because those performative identities are not recognizable in the normative frame of debate practice. In fact, Blackness signifies a difference, an opposite; a negative differential. It is not that the debate community explicitly operates to exclude people based on race; rather it competitively rejects Black presence, or non-normative nonwhite performance. It is the combination of cultural values, behavioral practices, and the significance of Black flesh that produce barriers to meaningful inclusion. For Afro-pessimists, the group of Black scholars who have popularized the study of anti-Blackness, the Black is juxtaposed against what it means to be master, human, citizen, and subject in a manner that is constitutive of US civil society. The United States is built upon a notion of freedom and liberty that necessitated the negative dialectic of the Slave to define the parameters of the nation-state. This foundational relationship has sutured together US civil society and continues to do so. For theorist Frank Wilderson, the grammar of Black/Slave suffering is marked by accumulation and fungibility (Wilderson 2010, 55-57), a relation “of being owned and traded” (Kelsie 2014, 6). The human’s (white) grammar of suffering is marked by alienation and exploitation. The grammar of Black (Slave) suffering is not recognizable within the frame of human (white) suffering, it can only be misrecognized as alienation and exploitation. For the study of rhetoric, and understanding of the political ontology of the Black as one that is necessarily defined by its status as Slave/object requires that we engage the question of whether or not the Black has the capacity for recognition in the construction of the moment of voice. Watts would agree that the Black does not have speech; that is why the production of voice is only a momentary process, a happening, by which Blacks can seek recognition. For the Black, the body announces itself prior to speech. So it follows that the Black lacks capacity for speech because they approach the speaking moment as a nonrecognizable subject and “positioned as incapacity” by the “modalities” of accumulation and fungibility. For the Afro-pessimists, capacity is made coherent in civil society by a necessary relationship to Black incapacity. Wilderson notes that “white(Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity: without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best” (Wilderson 2010, 45). Not only does the Black lack the same capacity as the white in first approaching the speaking situation, she or he enters the situation as incapacity. The Black must battle with its political ontological condition as a precursor to the process of speaking and let alone the production of voice. If the "happening" of voice depends on a relationality that produces "a public acknowledgment of the ethics of speaking and the emotions of others; the Black is always already relegated to the position of the unethical speaker that must defend and prove itself by seeking recognition from the Human/Subject in civil society (Watts 2001, 185). Further, it necessitates that the Black performatively and argumentatively approach the moment of voice with only the pretense of subjecthood and capacity. That the Black must construct the pretense of being an ethical speaker, while having no subject positioning to do so, requires an inauthentic performance of the Black object as white subject. If rhetorical situations require pretense and inauthenticity then they make unethical speaking the sine qua non of public speech. The Black must mimic the performance of human (white) capacity and becomes bound by the grammar of alienation and exploitation to achieve recognition. In other words, the Black must justify its Blackness or perform itself in a manner consistent with white civil society to even engage in a relational negotiation to produce the moment of voice. Such a practice supersedes and constitutes the ability of the white audience to recognize the Black as an ethical speaker. As rhetoric theorist Amber Kelsie notes, "From an Afro-Pessimist perspective, the problem is not that the Black is 'voiceless: so much as it is that the voice/speech/body of the Black does not resonate. The Slave is always already being attended to by the white Other, but such recognition itself obliterates any possibility of social life for the Slave' (Kelsie 2014, is). Full recognition of the Black is not really possible in the rhetorical situation, for the Black is the incoherence that constitutes the coherence of the Human/ Subject. In other words, the Black cannot speak about Black suffering without their appeals being read through the frame of alienation and exploitation. The grammar of Black suffering remains unrecognizable and thus unacknowledgeable even in the moments where the Black has produced the voiced moment. Given these considerable obstacles, how did the Louisville Project become successful and produce moments of recognition? Considering the team's transformation from one with a persistent losing record to one of the most successful Black debate teams in the history of national policy debate, it is dear this achievement could not have been possible without a communal recognition of Louisville's ethics and affect. Yet in the moments where those negotiations waver or break down, anti-Blackness as a structural antagonism produces insurmountable obstacles for engaging racialized conflict through discussion and deliberation. Amidst concern about the future of Black participation in college policy debate, the Louisville team began asking hard questions about the argumentative and performative choices Black students would need to make in order to be competitively successful. Warner became increasingly and publicly critical of the Urban Debate League (a nonprofit institution designed to increase the race, class, and gender diversity of competitive high school debate practice in the US) as a diversity model for debate. He argued that the Urban Debate League (UDL) project was a farce, that it was not designed to give poor Black students a shot at the highest levels of competition. The lack of successful UDL debaters in national competition at both the high school and college level demonstrated that access to debate alone would not resolve policy debate's diversity problem. "Why? Not because of anything they do, but because the game is rigged against them, who they are, and what the community asks them to become to achieve 'success" (Warner 2005). Warner moved away from his previous support for and work with UDLs, taking a different path of engaging structural racism in competitive debate. In addition to an aggressive mass recruitment of UDL students and Black students from within the university, the debate team was reconstructed with a redefined purpose for continued participation in competitive policy debate. Louisville questioned competitive debate's exclusive focus on government policy and its limited solutions to sociopolitical problems, developing alternative forms or styles through which to make argument. Debate is generally an oral, heavily evidence-based contest (in terms of number of average quotations from academic sources used in a debate), where people speak quickly in order to make as many arguments as possible. Moving beyond the conventional form by engaging in storytelling, the use of poetry, video footage, video games, music, hip-hop, and theater, Louisville began experimenting with the performative elements of debate speechmaking to supplement the traditional use of speed and hyper-technical argumentation. They introduced new ways of making arguments about public policy and public deliberation around the central political and social issues of our times. As the project developed, the debate community was largely unsupportive of Louisville's experimentation with debate norms. Louisville's teams found it difficult to persuade many judges to vote for them, resulting in persistent losses at national tournaments. Their attempts at innovation resulted in angry verbal confrontations, broken friendships, and group segregations within the policy debate community. Accusations including "Klan member; "Plantation owner; and "Uncle Toms" on one side and "anti-intellectuals; "playing the race card; and "irrational" on the other seem to indicate that the controversy surrounding the Louisville Project reached a boiling point (Hoe 2005). For many in the policy debate community, Louisville's confrontational rhetoric and the dialectical nature of debate competition hurt attempts to build coalitions between the Louisville Project and others in the debate community (Blair 2004). As former director of forensics at Illinois State University, Joseph Zompetti, notes, the Louisville style of debating has resulted in "frustrations, anxiety, resistance, and backlash" (2004a). Allan Louden, former Director of Debate at Wake Forest University, refers to the conflict as a "schism" (2004). Jeff Parcher, former debate coach at Georgetown University, argues that this "schism" makes the future of debate "pessimistic." Parcher notes further that while "alliances" in debate have always existed, they have reached a new level of "intensity" one that he has never seen before in the debate community (Parcher 2004, 89-91). In the summer of 2003, after three years of facing public censure and competitive failure, with the addition of Assistant Coach Darryl Burch, the Louisville team developed a foundational theme to encompass their criticism of traditional debate practice: "you can't change the state, but you can change the state of debate" (interview, July 4, 2012). The team began to work in earnest to develop the parameters of what would later be called the Louisville Project, and one team unit—comprised of members Elizabeth "Liz" Jones and LaTonia "Tonia" Green—were poised for what would become an unexpectedly successful year. They determined that debate participation should have a purpose and theirs would be to increase meaningful Black participation in debate. Rather than taking on white debate norms, the Louisville debaters resist attempts to capture and purify their colored bodies, instead choosing to (re)mark their visibility. For the Black body in the speech situation, it need not necessarily be doing anything for it to signify. The Black body is already marked, made visible and meaningful in public spaces. Yet simultaneously, the Louisville debaters perform Blackness doing something to draw attention to the body. It is in the doing of Blackness that the reading of the Black body as threatening and criminal is exacerbated from potential to probable threat. In con-temporary America, the Blacks who overtly perform Blackness are the "uppity niggers" that must be feared because they neither kowtow fearfully in the face of whiteness nor are they willing to limit the performance of their Blackness for white people/audiences' comfort. Louisville performs Blackness in white spaces, rejecting integrationist or assimilationist performances, as a necessary means of renegotiating the ethical space of tournament competition dominated by anti-Blackness and white privilege. During their speeches, Jones and Green often turn to speak accusatorily at their opponents, which involved neck rolling, a pushing forward of the body in the direction of the opponent, using staccato hand gestures, and eye-rolling—all behaviors that are often identified as "Black women's attitude." It is important to note that nationally competitive debaters often display aggressive personality traits in verbal competition as a marker of success. Such aggressiveness can be delivered in speeches through choices in vocabulary, tone, emphasis on words, speech volume, body movement, and ad hominem attacks. However, as noted, when debating with a non-normative body, norms are applied differently. Even if aggressive speech is normative in debate, when Jones and Green exhibit such typical debating style, they are stereotyped as loud and aggressive. Green provides an excellent example of this performative "attitude" in an elimination round against Wake Forest University at the 2004 CEDA Nationals championship tournament. During the cross-examination period following Green's speech, the opponent attempted to concisely define a particular argument Green made during the speech in order to ask a question. He interrupted Green's explanation, although she pushed past his attempt to stop her from speaking. Her opponent succeeded in stemming the flow of words, wanting to move on to some other question. Green conceded, but note the following exchange as captured on video: Green: "Well, I'm trying to explain to you so that you can ... " Opponent indicates with a statement that he has a different question that he would like to ask.' Green: "Okay, well, go ahead. Cuz it seems like you not getting it anyway. So, ask me something..." Opponent concedes that he may not understand, but his tone implies that this is more Green's fault than his own. Green: "You're not, so ask me something else" Unintelligible response from the opponent as Green continues to interrupt him. Green: "Ask me something else (Green 2004b) Green is standing at a podium. The podium is table length and above waist high. She leans on one elbow tilting her body away from her opponent, slightly facing him, mindful of the judges and the audience seated in front of them. Green's hands move in a dismissive manner, indicated by quick shakes of the hand, simultaneous with a twisting of the wrist and periodic dropping of her hand on the table in frustration or irritation. She is exasperated with her opponent's mischaracterization of her arguments. She is giving him attitude, without being rude, although clearly bordering on it. Her dismissal of him is comedic to the large representation of people of color in the audience who were watching this historic debate. Her clipped, brusque tone clearly indicates frustration, but also the sense arises that she finds him somehow unworthy. Green looks away from him during most of the interaction, occasionally giving him the side-eye, sometimes accompanied by eye-rolling and sighs of disapproval. She willingly allows him to mischaracterize her argument without correcting it, and her tone indicates that he is deserving of such inconsideration. Green revises the normative debate practice of rhetorically dominating one's opponent with Black girl style, a rhetorical and bodily performance designed to turn hostile white places into Black girl spaces. Such overt presenting of Black femininity in the cold and austere spaces of competition in college classrooms is an act of disrupting the sonorous normality of both policy debate and civil society. That this interchange is occurring between a young Black woman and a young white man (from a prominent, private university), adds to the comedic strength of Green's rhetorical strategy in the cross-examination. Because it contrasts the stereotypical dynamic, Green's dismissiveness of a debater whose privilege normally protected him from such interaction is read as amusing, as evidenced by the laughter from the audience. Cross-examination, one of the few times debaters directly address each other, provides an opportunity to clarify and gain information that can be used to strengthen one's position during the following speeches. After each of the constructive speeches the opposing team is given three minutes to question the last speaker. It is particularly within these periods that debaters can be most aggressive. Cross-examination can often be a hostile process, with each participant attempting to gain as much important information as possible while avoiding disclosures that might hurt their argument. Hostility in cross-examination can be a strategic tool of intimidation and dismissal. In each of the Louisville debates that I analyzed for this chapter, cross-examination became a unique space through which the Louisville debaters signified on common performative practices in debate. Cross-examination, one of the few times debaters directly address each other, provides an opportunity to clarify and gain information that can be used to strengthen one's position during the following speeches. After each of the constructive speeches the opposing team is given three minutes to question the last speaker. It is particularly within these periods that debaters can be most aggressive. Cross-examination can often be a hostile process, with each participant attempting to gain as much important information as possible while avoiding disclosures that might hurt their argument. Hostility in cross-examination can be a strategic tool of intimidation and dismissal. In each of the Louisville debates that I analyzed for this chapter, cross-examination became a unique space through which the Louisville debaters signified on common performative practices in debate. Jones's and Green's behavior, while disconcerting to majority white audiences out-side of debate, is still representative of the aggressive behavior the community has engaged in for years. A speaker's aggression and assertiveness, in traditional debate, are effective appeals to white authority. Yet the performance of such behavior, by Black women, is often stereotyped as inappropriate. Their behavior, as defined by the common practices of the policy debate community, should be recognizable and thus acceptable to the majority white and male audience. Yet it is clear that those who encountered this team often seemed to exhibit a level of fear or discomfort with Jones's and Green's performance as opposed to admiration and respect, had they presented as a normative white male. Despite Jones's and Green's repetition of some traditional styles of competition, their Blackened version of normative debate style is often read as disruptive. In as much as Jones and Green perform Black girl attitude, as read by their majority white audience, the more difficult it becomes to build an ethical relationship to the politics of recognition. The problem for Louisville is appeal to Black authority in a space built on appeals to white authority. Using performative Black femininity is a tactic that can elevate anxiety and become an obstacle in building ethical relations. These are forced interactions through competition, Louisville's tactic of making structural racism a part of the dis-course of competition rather than appealing to formal, institutional channels produces a demand for recognition. Indeed, as the following sections detail, the Louisville Project disrupted normative debate practice in an effort to expose anti-Blackness as constitutive of the tradition of debate itself. 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 +Whiteness necessitate living in a hyperreal in order to make Blackness coherent and legible – which opens blackness to gratuitous violence in civil society. 9 +Gillespie 17 – Jon Gillespie is a graduate student for the University of California, Irvine, Comparative Literature, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, Fall 2017, https://www.academia.edu/34839874/On_the_Prospect_of_Weaponized_Death 10 +- brackets in original 11 +Black life is lived in a white hyper-reality. By this I mean, black life is lived inside a constituted white fiction which concretizes itself as fact. Black life is a life lived in non-existence; blackness “exists” as a symbol of death that is, but is not. Blackness “exists” only insofar as White Being structures it onto a map of anti-black violence.4 Achille Mbembe corroborates this in his Critique of Black Reason, stating: Racism consists, most of all, in substituting what is with something else, with another reality. It has the power to distort the real and to fix affect, but it is also a form of psychic derangement, the mechanism through which the repressed suddenly surfaces. When the racist sees the Black person, he does not see that the Black person is not there, does not exist, and is just a sign of a pathological fixation on the absence of a relationship. We must therefore consider race as being both beside and beyond being.5 The reality that replaces that which is a white hyper-reality. This white hyperrealism fixes blackness as “a sign of a pathological fixation.” White hyper-realism is the paradigm whereby consciousness is unable to distinguish between the fictions created by White Being and the Real. It is this fact that permits black death to be subsumed in simulations by each and every (analytic) encounter with Whiteness and the World. Questions like, “Can the Black suffer?” and “Is it capable for the Black to be wronged?” arise due to the inability to access a grammar of suffering to communicate a harm that has never ended, a harm that can never end without ending the World itself. It is for this reason that viral videos of black death, more than opening the possibility for liberal notions of justice, seem to suture the relationship between the mythical and the real that perpetuates itself through the reification of black trauma. Black death, more than deconstructing the ontics of the Human, seems to extend its hyper-reality. Black death makes it harder to distinguish white fictions from any sense of real harm being done to human flesh. The Black is meant to experience its death over and over and over again; and the World itself recycles all its fictions-as-the-Real. Put differently, the White World subjects the Black to perpetual, gratuitous violence, and then uses that violence as evidence to further suggest that the Black is not Human. For how can a Human endure such a thing? The experience of gratuitous violence secures the semiotics of the white hyper-reality. White Disneyland stays intact. Blackness exists at the nexus of fact and fiction, possibility and (non)value, inclusion and exclusion. Blackness is trapped even in saying it’s trapped because the “trapped-ness” of the Black extends to locations where the diction and syntax of White “words don’t go.”6 The Black does not have the grammar to speak against where and how it is trapped since Blackness can only articulate itself through the semiotics of Whiteness. That White Being continues to center black death as the matrix of possibility for its hyper-realist structure indexes the promise of death insofar that White Being is promised futurity. The Black was rendered fungible through the conjunction of the political and the libidinal economy of the anti-Black world. Blackness gave birth to the commodity and the economy of signification that structures the cartography of the Human’s coordinates. This could be said to be a still birth, insofar as the nature of Black life in a white hyper-reality is conducted on a plane that guarantees natal alienation, social, and ontological death. The Black body lives to die; the specter of death shadows it everywhere. What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our orderspecific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)…”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity. 11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? 12 +Thus, I take this round hostage! Embrace a symbolic extinction, We must engage in undercommon communication that weaponizes our deaths to disrupts the semiotics of the anti-black world. To blacken the debate space it is important to note that no black liberation happens through the methods they will talk about, but only by being parasitic on the spaces of optimism to end the world. 13 +Gillespie 2 (John Gillespie, Undergraduate Researcher and Debater at Towson University, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death,” Propter Nos, Volume 2: Issue 1, Insurgency / Exhaustion, Fall 2017) B1ACK ZD 14 + 15 +- brackets in original 16 +What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our order- specific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)...”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 7 If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity.11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory that prescribes solutions to the analysis in the conclusion of their work. However, one finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a prophetic vision, a pulsing pessimist hope for the “end of the World.” For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way out is an end to the White World. White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only through black vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the spectacle of Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 8 gratuitous freedom is made visible. It is somewhere in this structural antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility of the World, and on the other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its disorientation, that we found the language to say the unsayable and do the undoable. As Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular present non-Black academics with more than an intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism that we don’t talk about...which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s calling for the end of the world...it wants the death of everyone else in the same way that we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through Afro- Pessimism and be who one was on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-Pessimism. If we are engaging in a war in which the symbolic value, the semiotics of this World itself, positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of diversity, of life itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a space where “words don’t go”—a form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the conversation is blackened, and the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to excavate insurgent dictions still lost in the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is death personified, then what might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we recognized the inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness of that death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard writes, “When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer?”19 Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics used by those who are facing globalized White Being with asymmetrical technologies of terror, violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to rupture the system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one to the “desert of the Black Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon the semiotic system.20 Black terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates the death embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable the possibility of a radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized onto- epistemic deployment of violence, and if violent insurgency is necessary, then the decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to counter the terror of White Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood as counter-terror terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life. We Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 9 only have the power to end the World through death. As Baudrillard writes, “The radical difference is that the terrorist, while they have at their disposal weapons that are the system’s own, possess a further lethal weapon: their own deaths.”21 The United States has an international military force, a storehouse of nuclear arms, and the capacity, within their police state alone, to “terrorize” not just one block in Baltimore, but the whole entire world. Black terrorism is what happens when we heed the Afro-Pessimist call that “A living death is as much a death as it is a living,”22 it is what happens when we take seriously the unsayable in Afro-Pessimism. Black Terrorism is (non)ontological fugitivity that disavows any need to focus on social life—black terrorism steals black death itself from White Being. It is for this reason that Baudrillard speaks to his own White Being and the specter of terror when he says: When Western culture sees all of its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very worst way. Our death is an extinction, an annihilation. Herein lies our poverty. When a singularity throws its own death into the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, its dies its own natural death. This is an immense game of double or quits. In committing suicide, the singularity suicides the other at the same time— we might say that the terrorist acts literally ‘suicided’ the West. A death for a death, then, but transfigured by the symbolic stakes. ‘We have already devastated our world, what more do you want?’ says Muray. But precisely, we have devastated this world, it still has to be destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not at all the same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going to be able to do the second.23 We are the others. Tasked with the (un)fortunate task of ending White hyper-realism, the White World, and White Being. Well aware that if White Fascism continues the project of black annihilation, the only choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to. But, ultimately, we must remember the words of Huey Newton: “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”24 In the age of Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon.25 The disavowal of the lives of refugees is White Being attempting to reconcile the “Nation- State” simulation with the free track and flow of bodies it’s been attempting to murder; the deportation of undocumented immigrants in conjunction with the materialization of borders is White Being attempting to secure its linguistic and economic integrity; the rise of the private prison and the militarization of the police force is White Being attempting to innovate the system of enslavement and necropolitics for the 21st Century; the plundering of indigenous land and bodies is White Being attempting to finish off the project of genocide; the disregard for the Earth is White Being ensuring the Anthropocene will also be the Apocalypse. Trump is a reinvigoration, a call to arms, for White Being, and White Being can only be “destroyed symbolically.” Black terrorism transfigures the symbolic stakes because it Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 10 steals away that condition of White Being’s possibility in a kind of fugitivity that is a zero-transformation into Blackness. This being said, we all know that the only thing that follows the absolute loss of hope is this Black Spring, this Neo-Fanonian violence, this blackened terroristic situational transfer. In Baudrillard’s words, in the Age of Trump, let us remember the gift of immorality, “Terrorism is immoral. The World Trade Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself immoral. So, let us be immoral...”26l/ 17 +The role of the ballot is to refuse spaces like debate to deconstruct structures of antiblackness. Refusal is not just a “no,” but a generative process that challenges sanctioned modes of protocol and decorum in civil society. 18 +- offense links back by explaining how you refuse antiblackness and whiteness 19 +- prefiat offense outweighs, post fiat is white shit 20 +- weigh by who most effectively refuses antiblackness 21 +- aff comes before nonblack theory 22 +King 17 Tiffany Lethabo King, Spring 2017, “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight. Source: Critical Ethnic Studies, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162. Recut B1ACK ZD 23 +Within Native feminist theorizing, ethnographic refusal can be traced to Audra Simpson’s 2007 article, “On Ethnographic Refusal.” In this seminal work, Simpson reflects on and gains inspiration from the tradition of refusal practiced by the people of Kahnawake.14 Simpson shares that Kahnawake refusals are at the core and spirit of her own ethnographic and ethical practices of refusal. I was interested in the larger picture, in the discursive, material and moral territory that was simultaneously historical and contemporary (this “national” space) and the ways in which Kahnawakero:non, the “people of Kahnawake,” had refused the authority of the state at almost every turn. The ways in which their formation of the initial membership code (now replaced by a lineage code and board of elders to implement the code and determine cases) was refused; the ways in which their interactions with border guards at the international boundary line were predicated upon a refusal; how refusal worked in everyday encounters to enunciate repeatedly to ourselves and to outsiders that “this is who we are, this is who you are, these are my rights.”15 Because Simpson was concerned with applying the political and everyday modes of Kahnawake refusal, she attended to the “collective limit” established by her and her Kahnawake participants.16 The collective limit was relationally and ethically determined by what was shared but more importantly by what was not shared. Simpson’s ability to discern the collective limit could only be achieved through a form of relational knowledge production that regards and cares for the other. Simpson recounts how one of her participants forced her to recognize a collective limit. Approaching and then arriving at the limit, Simpson experiences the following: And although I pushed him, hoping that there might be something explicit said from the space of his exclusion— or more explicit than he gave me— it was enough that he said what he said. “Enough” is certainly enough. “Enough,” I realised, was when I reached the limit of my own return and our collective arrival. Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why? And “enough” was when they shut down (or told me to turn off the recorder), or told me outright funny things like “nobody seems to know”— when everybody does know and talks about it all the time. Dominion then has to be exercised over these representations, and that was determined when enough was said. The ethnographic limit then, was reached not just when it would cause harm (or extreme discomfort)— the limit was arrived at when the representation would bite all of us and compromise the representational territory that we have gained for ourselves in the past 100 years.17 Extending her discussion of ethnographic refusal beyond the bounds of ethnographic concerns, Simpson also ponders whether this enactment of refusal can be applied to theoretical work. Simpson outright poses a question: “What is theoretically generative about these refusals?”18 The question that Simpson asks in 2007 is clarified by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in the 2014 essay “R- Words: Refusing Research.” Arguing that modes of refusal extended into the theoretical and methodological terrains of knowledge production are productive and necessary, Tuck and Yang state: For the purposes of our discussion, the most important insight to draw from Simpson’s article is her emphasis that refusals are not subtractive, but are theoretically generative, expansive. Refusal is not just a “no,” but a redirection to ideas otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned. Unlike a settler colonial configuration of knowledge that is petulantly exasperated and resentful of limits, a methodology of refusal regards limits on knowledge as productive, as indeed a good thing.19 In line with Simpson’s intervention, Tuck and Yang posit that “refusal itself could be developed into both method and theory.”20 For Tuck and Yang, a generative practice of refusal and a decolonial and abolitionist tradition is making Western thought “turn back upon itself as settler colonial knowledge, as opposed to universal, liberal, or neutral knowledge without horizon.”21 In fact, the coauthors suggest “making the settler colonial metanarrative the object of . . . research.”22 What this move effectively does is question the uninterrogated assumptions and exposes the violent particularities of the metanarrative. Scrutiny as a practice of refusal also slows down or perhaps halts the momentum of the machinery that allows, as Tuck and Yang argue, “knowledge to facilitate interdictions on Indigenous and Black life.”23erday Louisville felt the love and it was a beautiful thing, so thank you guys for having me and let’s keep fighting for justice. 24 +NIGGA TIME 25 +And, it is your job to guarantee me a win, this is not vote for me because I'm black but rather an aff ballot is key to confront antiblackness 26 +1 Reparations: Debate has been hard and violent to navigate for Black people such as police being called on Black debaters in numerous occasions, judges and opponents saying nigger, white girls calling us slaves the list goes on 27 +2 Black Inspiration- Black success is key to inspiring young debaters and kids to speak out against anti-blackness. Seeing black success will increase black participation which means more black kids can gain skills for an anti-black world 28 +3 Regardless of the flow vote for niggas with a W 30 to surrender to blackness. 29 +a Nonblacks should not be rewarded for their relationship to blackness 30 +Brady and Murillo 14 2014 Nicholas and John, “Black Imperative: A Forum on Solidarity in the Age of Coalition,” January 26, 2014, http://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/black-imperative-a-forum-on-solidarity-in-the-age-of-coalition/, John Murillo III is a PhD student in the English department at Brown University, and a graduate of the University of California, Irvine, with bachelor’s degrees in Cognitive Science and English. His research interests are broad, and include extensive engagements with and within: Black Studies–particularly Afro-Pessimism–Narrative Theory; Theoretical Physics; Astrophysics; Cosmology; and Neuroscience. Nicholas Brady is an activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He was also a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine Culture and Theory program. 31 +“Surrender to blackness.” A grammatical imperative. Grammatical because syntactically it marks a command to or demand of a generalized addressee: “(Everyone) surrender to blackness.” Grammatical because the black flesh scarred and tattooed by these illegible hieroglyphics enunciates at the level of symbolic and ontological world orders: “Surrender to blackness” is a command at the level of the foundations of thought and being themselves; grammatical. Imperative because if there is any hope for a revolutionary praxis along any lines—race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability—it must centralize, which is to say look in the face of, which is to say begin to the work of real love for, the blackness preposition which “an authentic upheaval might be born.” #BlackPowerYellowPeril failed to recognize this imperative as legible, let alone heed and meet its command/demand. Created by Suey Park (@suey_park), the hashtag sought to draw from and build upon the accomplishments of Black womyn activists on twitter and tumblr who have long mobilized to generate productive and revolutionary interjections into the world’s violently antiblack discourses (see, for example, #solidarityisforwhitewomen, and #blackmaleprivilege) through extended, communal commentary, usually in direct opposition to the censoring strictures of any kind of respectability politics. Discussions about and within the hashtag can be found here, here, here, here(though this is very hasty, a bit shortsighted, and still not doing much more than glancing at, as opposed to engaging blackness), and here. But broadly, the intentions of the hashtag are founded upon a belief in the possibility of solidarity/coalition politics between Blacks and Asians, seeking to challenge persistent “tensions” between the communities for the sake of a common struggle against ‘white supremacy.’ For those nonblack participants, the drive toward solidarity represents a purely innocent and unquestioned, unquestionable, desire. All critiques of Asian antiblackness are rendered as derailing the move toward solidarity, for they are to bring up the obvious – clearly we are all human, we make mistakes, but to continuously bring up the “mistakes” and never “move on” is to foreclose the possibility of solidarity. And what a wonderful thing the blacks of the conversation were foreclosing – this solidarity thing. What a wonderful thing others were offering to us and we simply would not take. And yet, the unthought question remains: have you truly earned the right to act in solidarity, to form solidarity, to even believe in solidarity? And what is this solidarity thing we all hold near and dear to our hearts? Have we ever experienced it or do we simply have images we have transformed into memories of a solidarity that never existed? I know Black people and Asian people have worked together in the past, but have we ever formed a solid whole? And who is to blame for the fact that we have never had solidarity? The hashtag implies that both “sides” play an equal part in the failure to form solidarity. In the face of this, confessing our sins to each other forms the moment where we can form emotional bonds: “see, you were as racist as I, and how unfortunate it is that we let old whitey come between us. Never again will whitey make us part.” This is the logic behind much of the Asian confessing – white supremacy duped us into being antiblack racists – and also fed into the backlash aimed at blacks – “stop playing oppression olympics, that’s what whitey wants.” It must be foregrounded here that antiblackness cannot be simplified as “anti-black racism” and it is a singularity with no equivalent force – “anti-Asian” racism is not the flipside of antiblackness nor is orientalism or islamophobia. Antiblackness predates white supremacy by at least 300 years (and much more than that depending on how we trace our history) and we can understand antiblackness as the general tethering of the very concept of life to the ontological and unspeakable, unthinkable force of black death. That statement is a place to begin to define antiblackness, it is not the end for this force weaves itself in infinite variety throughout all corners of the globe, forming globe into world. This is not simply about the little racist microaggressions that people listed in their tweets, this is about a global force that the world – not simply whites – bond over and form their lives inside of and through. What #BlackPowerYellowPeril revealed, however, is that the underside of coalition politics remains a violent and virulent antiblackness. As blacks— John Murillo III (@writedarkmatter), New Black School (@newblackschool), Nicholas Brady (@nubluez_nick), and others—raised questions and comments in the spirit of that singular imperative—“Surrender to blackness”—antiblackness emerged in the violence of the response levied against it; one need only visit the hashtag to bear witness. From outright refusals to engage the antiblackness central to the histories and politics of nonblack communities of color, to denials of the foundational, global, and singular nature of antiblackness, and to the repeated calls to police and remove this disruptive blackness and its imperative from the conversation, antiblackness exploded onto the scene. All of this in the name of “coalition.” This is because “coalition” politics and possibilities are fetishized, not loved. The fetish denies the necessary recognition of antiblackness at coalition’s heart, and that antiblackness left unattended renders the imperative illegible. It is a fetishization, then, of antiblackness. The fetish object at the heart of the coalition has always been black flesh – a fetishization where pleasure and terror meet to create the bonds of solidarity people so desire. Here, we open a forum on how the hashtag embodies this fetish, the distinction between fetish and love that must be made in excess of the hashtag and ones like it, and the absolute imperativeness of the imperative. Instead of fetishizing the object, you must surrender to blackness. 32 +b Black debaters are at a structural disadvantaged and unfairness is good- It’s a teachable moment 33 +Warren 11 (Warren Waren University of Central Florida, Orlando, Using Monopoly to Introduce Concepts of Race and Ethnic Relations The Journal of Effective Teaching, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2011, 28-35) 34 +Undergraduate students often enter our classrooms convinced that the battles of the Civil Rights Era solved the issue of race in America. They are generally unacquainted with the long history of race in the United States and almost universally underestimate the structural forces which carry racial disparities into their new century. As sociologists and teachers, it is our responsibility to tell that story and explain those forces. Our new challenge is: How do we teach students the extent of racism in America when, from their point of view, the problem of the color-line has been solved? One option is to use a game. Sociologists have used games or simulations to spark the sociological imagination (Dorn, 1989; Jessup, 2001; Fisher 2008), to stimulate critical thinking (Pence 2009), and to introduce social stratification (Ender, 2004; Waldner and Kinney, 1999). When students from relatively privileged backgrounds “experience” a temporary bout of unfairness in a simulated game, it creates the opportunity to change their perspective (Coghlan and Huggins, 2004; Haddad and Lieberman, 2002). The injustice of the situation, if directly connected to broader theory, can lessen a student’s social distance from marginalized groups. A game may help a student to understand some of the previously inexplicable attitudes and behaviors of actors on either side of a power rela- tionship. Also, as this paper demonstrates, a properly constructed simulation can give the student a sense of the structural nature and lasting legacy of racial discrimination—a fuller sense of the “history and biography” of race in the United States (Mills, 1959). The great advantage of a game is that it is a completely controlled environment—there are no unexplained variables. In fairness to all the players, all rules are explicitly stated at the outset of game play and apply to all players equally (Waldner and Kinney, 1999). Ordinarily, in a competitive game this assumption of fairness supports an ideology of individualism. However, a pedagogical game is concerned with learning, not winning. In order to disentangle a complicated issue, the instructor may purposefully introduce inequality into an otherwise “just” world. Again, because all rules are explicit (even unfair ones), the problem exists in the game without confounding effects. This simplification allows students to easily focus on the nature and development of the problem. By extension, it is hoped that the game encourages students to reassess similar problems in the real world. Use of Pedagogical Games Dorn (1989) identifies multiple criteria for games or simulations to be effective in the classroom as pedagogical tools. He argues the games must: reflect reality; motivate students through "experience"; develop awareness of personal values through moral and ethical implications of the game; connect abstract concepts with concrete experiences; create a shared experience from which the students can draw; offer a form of debriefing to both address emotional issues and to connect theory to experiences. In the technique I describe below, I try to incorporate these ideas with Straus’ (1986) emphasis on simplicity for in-class games. In teaching and learning, the goal of simulation is the “experience” itself. Jessup (2001) argues that simulation should be the “experiential anchor for the elaboration of conceptual tools” (p.108). Therefore, this game is created to offer a chance for relatively privileged students to experience the unfairness of structural inequality. After temporary exposure to an analog of racial discrimination, students with no prior familiarity of racial discrimination will have a deeper understanding of the effects of racism on many levels. Pedagogical games are used to challenge our assumptions about how the world works (Waldner and Kinney, 1999). For example, the basic assumption of competitive games is fairness. This assumes that the world is fair (i.e., a meritocracy) and that individual effort or talent is the main factor in success (i.e., an ideology of individualism akin to Ross’ (1977) fundamental attribution error). In competitive games therefore, groups are treated equally and the best players win. But a pedagogical game may challenge the assumption of fairness directly by having structural inequality built into the game. The experience of a good player losing an unfair game creates cognitive dissonance—that cognitive dissonance is our teaching moment. I assume that students as game players can easily identify games that are “unfair” based on unequal outcomes for equivalent behavior. As a peda gogical tool, I want it to be relatively easy for them to spot the explicit rules which cause the inequality. - Tournament
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,128 @@ 1 +====Debate is structured to exclude black bodies – Topicality, Antiblack judge predispositions, disclosure theory, and appeals to fairness are all attempts to situate blackness with the impossible demand of being an ethical speaker==== 2 +**Reid-Brinkley 19 (Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, University of Pittsburgh, "Voice Dipped in Black: The Louisville project and the Birth of Black Radical Argument in College Policy Debate", **https://books.google.com/books?id=dLOYDwAAQBAJandpg=PA219andlpg=PA219anddq=voice+dipped+in+black+the+louisville+projectandsource=blandots=Pe2U-sCaUxandsig=ACfU3U2PZ9YK0—6z8FspFEdHUhG0V53Qwandhl=enandsa=Xandved=2ahUKEwjOjpLojtbmAhUnVt8KHUv6BGcQ6AEwA3oECAoQAQ~~#v=onepageandqandf=false**, 2019) CJun** 3 +Racially different bodies must perform that difference according to the cultural norms of the debate 4 + 5 +AND 6 + 7 +to expose anti-Blackness as constitutive of the tradition of debate itself. 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 +====Civil society requires gratuitous violence to blackness to function – civil society is preconditioned to destroy the slave. The fact that whiteness could not enslave their own grafts dirty, slave, and criminal onto black bodies.==== 12 +**Wilderson 10, ~~Frank, Professor at UC Irvine, "Red, White, and Black: Cinema and Structure of US Antagonisms", P. 22-8~~ B1ACK ZD** 13 +**brackets in original** 14 +David Eltis is emphatic in his assertion that European civil society’s 15 + 16 +AND 17 + 18 +an ethical dilemma for global civil society. The ethical dilemmas were unthought. 19 + 20 + 21 + 22 +====And when George Floyd screams MAMA, and I CAN’T BREATHE his communication is understood but results and his death. When Dred Scott articulates he is deserving of freedom his agential capacity is denied. The form of communicative registers opens blackness to gratuitous violence in civil society.==== 23 +**Gillespie 17** – Jon Gillespie is a graduate student for the University of California, Irvine, Comparative Literature, "On the Prospect of Weaponized Death", Fall 2017, https://www.academia.edu/34839874/On'the'Prospect'of'Weaponized'Death 24 +brackets in original 25 +Black life is lived in a white hyper-reality. 26 + 27 +AND 28 + 29 +further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? 30 + 31 + 32 + 33 +====Thus, I take this round hostage! Embrace a symbolic extinction, We must engage in undercommon communication that weaponizes our deaths to disrupts the semiotics of the anti-black world. To blacken the debate space it is important to note that no black liberation happens through the methods they will talk about, but only by being parasitic on the spaces of optimism to end the world. ==== 34 +**Gillespie 2** (John Gillespie, Undergraduate Researcher and Debater at Towson University, "On the Prospect of Weaponized Death," Propter Nos, Volume 2: Issue 1, Insurgency / Exhaustion, Fall 2017) B1ACK ZD 35 +brackets in original 36 +What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper 37 + 38 +AND 39 + 40 +which is itself immoral. So, let us be immoral..."26l/ 41 + 42 + 43 + 44 +====The role of the ballot is to refuse spaces like debate to deconstruct structures of antiblackness. Your ballot will sign off on the deconstruction of debate as a form of implosive terror==== 45 +offense links back by explaining how you refuse antiblackness and whiteness 46 +prefiat offense outweighs, post fiat is white shit 47 +weigh by who most effectively refuses antiblackness 48 +aff comes before nonblack theory 49 +**Wilderson ** 50 + 51 +**AND** 52 + 53 +(at varying times) by all non-Black subjects in society. 54 + 55 + 56 + 57 +==Black Time== 58 + 59 + 60 + 61 +====Fairness is what the white cops want at protests, it’s what congress wants when black families are grappling with the death of a loved one by the state, it’s what massa wants when the slave seeks agency, it’s what you nonblacks in debate want when engagement is not given to you like a cookie ==== 62 +**Wilderson 2008 ** 63 +Frank B., Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid South End Press, pg. 406-411 64 +Just two years ago, in December of 1999, I'd written a letter and 65 + 66 +AND 67 + 68 +to speed the search committee on its way and make everyone feel entitled. 69 + 70 + 71 + 72 +====Ontology Materialism: Why would we have to chant BLACK LIVES MATTER if it was so evident that they mattered? why has antiblackness continued to fester despite the optimistic and material orientation of past, present, and future policies? Why are black children dying because of their race if humanity is so contingent?==== 73 +**Warren 18 **Warren Calvin L ~~Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University~~ "Ontological Terror Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation" Duke University Press Durham and London 2018. B1ACK ZD 74 +A deep abyss, or a terrifying question, engenders the declaration "Black Lives 75 + 76 +AND 77 + 78 +. Ontological Terror engages this question and the forms of terror it produces. 79 + 80 + 81 + 82 +====How the HELL do you explain the pleasure and satisfaction from black pain and suffering absent the aff!? Make them rationalize this instead of instinctively accepting their defense, an imperfect explanation is better than none at all ==== 83 +**Wilderson 20** Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III, University of California, Irvine "Afropessimism" Originally published: April 7, 2020 B1ACK ZD 84 +In other words, activists want to make sense of the death of Sandra Bland 85 + 86 +AND 87 + 88 +problem for the organizational calculus of critical theory and radical politics writ large. 89 + 90 + 91 + 92 +===="IP rights" entails an investment towards gratuitous antiblackness aka the animalistic branding onto black flesh ==== 93 +**Johnson 16** Shontavia Johnson Drake University Law School 2016. "BRANDED: Trademark Tattoos, Slave Owner Brands, And The Right To Have "Free" Skin", Volume 22~| Issue 2. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216andcontext=mttlr B1ack ZD 94 +This Part outlines the basic historical, legal and policy issues associated with the practice 95 + 96 +AND 97 + 98 +the Crown. Sometimes, baptism led to the further branding of a cross 99 + 100 + 101 + 102 +====THINK OF EVERY REFORM, MOVEMENT, COALITION, DEMAND, and POLICY THAT HAS HAPPENED AND ASK YOURSELF HOW DID THIS STOP THE STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS OF ANTIBLACKNESS? They did NOT – Chattel slavery changes its name to Jim Crow then to the PIC and policing. ==== 103 +**Wilderson 20** Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III, University of California, Irvine "Afropessimism" Originally published: April 7, 2020 B1ACK ZD 104 +There’s something organic to Blackness that makes it essential to the construction of civil society 105 + 106 +AND 107 + 108 +a life- affirming anti-Blackness; the death of Black desire. 109 + 110 + 111 + 112 +====PRESENT DAY STRUCTURES OF CAPITALISM EXIST THROUGH RENDERING BLACKNESS FUNGIBLE==== 113 +**Bledsoe 19**, Adam, and Willie Jamaal Wright (Professors, department of geography, Florida State University. "The anti-Blackness of global capital." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37.1 (2019): 8-26. B1ACK ZD 114 + A number of present-day practices demonstrate the reliance of capital on this 115 + 116 +AND 117 + 118 +us today, despite the new material practices and justifications it takes on. 119 + 120 + 121 + 122 +====And our root cause claim is also reverse casual==== 123 +**Bledsoe 19**, Adam, and Willie Jamaal Wright (Professors, department of geography, Florida State University. "The anti-Blackness of global capital." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37.1 (2019): 8-26. B1ACK ZD 124 +Nonetheless, we must push further to explicate the ways in which capitalism is actually 125 + 126 +AND 127 + 128 +are treated as open to the varied agendas espoused by dominant spatial actors. - Tournament
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,58 @@ 1 +B(1AC)K 2 +Debate is structured to exclude black bodies – Topicality, Antiblack judge predispositions, disclosure theory, and appeals to fairness are all attempts to situate blackness with the impossible demand of being an ethical speaker 3 +Reid-Brinkley 19 (Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, University of Pittsburgh, “Voice Dipped in Black: The Louisville project and the Birth of Black Radical Argument in College Policy Debate”, https://books.google.com/books?id=dLOYDwAAQBAJandpg=PA219andlpg=PA219anddq=voice+dipped+in+black+the+louisville+projectandsource=blandots=Pe2U-sCaUxandsig=ACfU3U2PZ9YK0~-~-6z8FspFEdHUhG0V53Qwandhl=enandsa=Xandved=2ahUKEwjOjpLojtbmAhUnVt8KHUv6BGcQ6AEwA3oECAoQAQ#v=onepageandqandf=false, 2019) CJun 4 +Racially different bodies must perform that difference according to the cultural norms of the debate community. For Black students it can often mean changing their appearance, standardizing language practices, and eschewing their cultural practices. In essence, in order to have an opportunity for achieving in debate competitions Black students must performatively whiten. “Acting Black” is problematic because those performative identities are not recognizable in the normative frame of debate practice. In fact, Blackness signifies a difference, an opposite; a negative differential. It is not that the debate community explicitly operates to exclude people based on race; rather it competitively rejects Black presence, or non-normative nonwhite performance. It is the combination of cultural values, behavioral practices, and the significance of Black flesh that produce barriers to meaningful inclusion. For Afro-pessimists, the group of Black scholars who have popularized the study of anti-Blackness, the Black is juxtaposed against what it means to be master, human, citizen, and subject in a manner that is constitutive of US civil society. The United States is built upon a notion of freedom and liberty that necessitated the negative dialectic of the Slave to define the parameters of the nation-state. This foundational relationship has sutured together US civil society and continues to do so. For theorist Frank Wilderson, the grammar of Black/Slave suffering is marked by accumulation and fungibility (Wilderson 2010, 55-57), a relation “of being owned and traded” (Kelsie 2014, 6). The human’s (white) grammar of suffering is marked by alienation and exploitation. The grammar of Black (Slave) suffering is not recognizable within the frame of human (white) suffering, it can only be misrecognized as alienation and exploitation. For the study of rhetoric, and understanding of the political ontology of the Black as one that is necessarily defined by its status as Slave/object requires that we engage the question of whether or not the Black has the capacity for recognition in the construction of the moment of voice. Watts would agree that the Black does not have speech; that is why the production of voice is only a momentary process, a happening, by which Blacks can seek recognition. For the Black, the body announces itself prior to speech. So it follows that the Black lacks capacity for speech because they approach the speaking moment as a nonrecognizable subject and “positioned as incapacity” by the “modalities” of accumulation and fungibility. For the Afro-pessimists, capacity is made coherent in civil society by a necessary relationship to Black incapacity. Wilderson notes that “white(Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity: without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best” (Wilderson 2010, 45). Not only does the Black lack the same capacity as the white in first approaching the speaking situation, she or he enters the situation as incapacity. The Black must battle with its political ontological condition as a precursor to the process of speaking and let alone the production of voice. If the "happening" of voice depends on a relationality that produces "a public acknowledgment of the ethics of speaking and the emotions of others; the Black is always already relegated to the position of the unethical speaker that must defend and prove itself by seeking recognition from the Human/Subject in civil society (Watts 2001, 185). Further, it necessitates that the Black performatively and argumentatively approach the moment of voice with only the pretense of subjecthood and capacity. That the Black must construct the pretense of being an ethical speaker, while having no subject positioning to do so, requires an inauthentic performance of the Black object as white subject. If rhetorical situations require pretense and inauthenticity then they make unethical speaking the sine qua non of public speech. The Black must mimic the performance of human (white) capacity and becomes bound by the grammar of alienation and exploitation to achieve recognition. In other words, the Black must justify its Blackness or perform itself in a manner consistent with white civil society to even engage in a relational negotiation to produce the moment of voice. Such a practice supersedes and constitutes the ability of the white audience to recognize the Black as an ethical speaker. As rhetoric theorist Amber Kelsie notes, "From an Afro-Pessimist perspective, the problem is not that the Black is 'voiceless: so much as it is that the voice/speech/body of the Black does not resonate. The Slave is always already being attended to by the white Other, but such recognition itself obliterates any possibility of social life for the Slave' (Kelsie 2014, is). Full recognition of the Black is not really possible in the rhetorical situation, for the Black is the incoherence that constitutes the coherence of the Human/ Subject. In other words, the Black cannot speak about Black suffering without their appeals being read through the frame of alienation and exploitation. The grammar of Black suffering remains unrecognizable and thus unacknowledgeable even in the moments where the Black has produced the voiced moment. Given these considerable obstacles, how did the Louisville Project become successful and produce moments of recognition? Considering the team's transformation from one with a persistent losing record to one of the most successful Black debate teams in the history of national policy debate, it is dear this achievement could not have been possible without a communal recognition of Louisville's ethics and affect. Yet in the moments where those negotiations waver or break down, anti-Blackness as a structural antagonism produces insurmountable obstacles for engaging racialized conflict through discussion and deliberation. Amidst concern about the future of Black participation in college policy debate, the Louisville team began asking hard questions about the argumentative and performative choices Black students would need to make in order to be competitively successful. Warner became increasingly and publicly critical of the Urban Debate League (a nonprofit institution designed to increase the race, class, and gender diversity of competitive high school debate practice in the US) as a diversity model for debate. He argued that the Urban Debate League (UDL) project was a farce, that it was not designed to give poor Black students a shot at the highest levels of competition. The lack of successful UDL debaters in national competition at both the high school and college level demonstrated that access to debate alone would not resolve policy debate's diversity problem. "Why? Not because of anything they do, but because the game is rigged against them, who they are, and what the community asks them to become to achieve 'success" (Warner 2005). Warner moved away from his previous support for and work with UDLs, taking a different path of engaging structural racism in competitive debate. In addition to an aggressive mass recruitment of UDL students and Black students from within the university, the debate team was reconstructed with a redefined purpose for continued participation in competitive policy debate. Louisville questioned competitive debate's exclusive focus on government policy and its limited solutions to sociopolitical problems, developing alternative forms or styles through which to make argument. Debate is generally an oral, heavily evidence-based contest (in terms of number of average quotations from academic sources used in a debate), where people speak quickly in order to make as many arguments as possible. Moving beyond the conventional form by engaging in storytelling, the use of poetry, video footage, video games, music, hip-hop, and theater, Louisville began experimenting with the performative elements of debate speechmaking to supplement the traditional use of speed and hyper-technical argumentation. They introduced new ways of making arguments about public policy and public deliberation around the central political and social issues of our times. As the project developed, the debate community was largely unsupportive of Louisville's experimentation with debate norms. Louisville's teams found it difficult to persuade many judges to vote for them, resulting in persistent losses at national tournaments. Their attempts at innovation resulted in angry verbal confrontations, broken friendships, and group segregations within the policy debate community. Accusations including "Klan member; "Plantation owner; and "Uncle Toms" on one side and "anti-intellectuals; "playing the race card; and "irrational" on the other seem to indicate that the controversy surrounding the Louisville Project reached a boiling point (Hoe 2005). For many in the policy debate community, Louisville's confrontational rhetoric and the dialectical nature of debate competition hurt attempts to build coalitions between the Louisville Project and others in the debate community (Blair 2004). As former director of forensics at Illinois State University, Joseph Zompetti, notes, the Louisville style of debating has resulted in "frustrations, anxiety, resistance, and backlash" (2004a). Allan Louden, former Director of Debate at Wake Forest University, refers to the conflict as a "schism" (2004). Jeff Parcher, former debate coach at Georgetown University, argues that this "schism" makes the future of debate "pessimistic." Parcher notes further that while "alliances" in debate have always existed, they have reached a new level of "intensity" one that he has never seen before in the debate community (Parcher 2004, 89-91). In the summer of 2003, after three years of facing public censure and competitive failure, with the addition of Assistant Coach Darryl Burch, the Louisville team developed a foundational theme to encompass their criticism of traditional debate practice: "you can't change the state, but you can change the state of debate" (interview, July 4, 2012). The team began to work in earnest to develop the parameters of what would later be called the Louisville Project, and one team unit—comprised of members Elizabeth "Liz" Jones and LaTonia "Tonia" Green—were poised for what would become an unexpectedly successful year. They determined that debate participation should have a purpose and theirs would be to increase meaningful Black participation in debate. Rather than taking on white debate norms, the Louisville debaters resist attempts to capture and purify their colored bodies, instead choosing to (re)mark their visibility. For the Black body in the speech situation, it need not necessarily be doing anything for it to signify. The Black body is already marked, made visible and meaningful in public spaces. Yet simultaneously, the Louisville debaters perform Blackness doing something to draw attention to the body. It is in the doing of Blackness that the reading of the Black body as threatening and criminal is exacerbated from potential to probable threat. In con-temporary America, the Blacks who overtly perform Blackness are the "uppity niggers" that must be feared because they neither kowtow fearfully in the face of whiteness nor are they willing to limit the performance of their Blackness for white people/audiences' comfort. Louisville performs Blackness in white spaces, rejecting integrationist or assimilationist performances, as a necessary means of renegotiating the ethical space of tournament competition dominated by anti-Blackness and white privilege. During their speeches, Jones and Green often turn to speak accusatorily at their opponents, which involved neck rolling, a pushing forward of the body in the direction of the opponent, using staccato hand gestures, and eye-rolling—all behaviors that are often identified as "Black women's attitude." It is important to note that nationally competitive debaters often display aggressive personality traits in verbal competition as a marker of success. Such aggressiveness can be delivered in speeches through choices in vocabulary, tone, emphasis on words, speech volume, body movement, and ad hominem attacks. However, as noted, when debating with a non-normative body, norms are applied differently. Even if aggressive speech is normative in debate, when Jones and Green exhibit such typical debating style, they are stereotyped as loud and aggressive. Green provides an excellent example of this performative "attitude" in an elimination round against Wake Forest University at the 2004 CEDA Nationals championship tournament. During the cross-examination period following Green's speech, the opponent attempted to concisely define a particular argument Green made during the speech in order to ask a question. He interrupted Green's explanation, although she pushed past his attempt to stop her from speaking. Her opponent succeeded in stemming the flow of words, wanting to move on to some other question. Green conceded, but note the following exchange as captured on video: Green: "Well, I'm trying to explain to you so that you can ... " Opponent indicates with a statement that he has a different question that he would like to ask.' Green: "Okay, well, go ahead. Cuz it seems like you not getting it anyway. So, ask me something..." Opponent concedes that he may not understand, but his tone implies that this is more Green's fault than his own. Green: "You're not, so ask me something else" Unintelligible response from the opponent as Green continues to interrupt him. Green: "Ask me something else (Green 2004b) Green is standing at a podium. The podium is table length and above waist high. She leans on one elbow tilting her body away from her opponent, slightly facing him, mindful of the judges and the audience seated in front of them. Green's hands move in a dismissive manner, indicated by quick shakes of the hand, simultaneous with a twisting of the wrist and periodic dropping of her hand on the table in frustration or irritation. She is exasperated with her opponent's mischaracterization of her arguments. She is giving him attitude, without being rude, although clearly bordering on it. Her dismissal of him is comedic to the large representation of people of color in the audience who were watching this historic debate. Her clipped, brusque tone clearly indicates frustration, but also the sense arises that she finds him somehow unworthy. Green looks away from him during most of the interaction, occasionally giving him the side-eye, sometimes accompanied by eye-rolling and sighs of disapproval. She willingly allows him to mischaracterize her argument without correcting it, and her tone indicates that he is deserving of such inconsideration. Green revises the normative debate practice of rhetorically dominating one's opponent with Black girl style, a rhetorical and bodily performance designed to turn hostile white places into Black girl spaces. Such overt presenting of Black femininity in the cold and austere spaces of competition in college classrooms is an act of disrupting the sonorous normality of both policy debate and civil society. That this interchange is occurring between a young Black woman and a young white man (from a prominent, private university), adds to the comedic strength of Green's rhetorical strategy in the cross-examination. Because it contrasts the stereotypical dynamic, Green's dismissiveness of a debater whose privilege normally protected him from such interaction is read as amusing, as evidenced by the laughter from the audience. Cross-examination, one of the few times debaters directly address each other, provides an opportunity to clarify and gain information that can be used to strengthen one's position during the following speeches. After each of the constructive speeches the opposing team is given three minutes to question the last speaker. It is particularly within these periods that debaters can be most aggressive. Cross-examination can often be a hostile process, with each participant attempting to gain as much important information as possible while avoiding disclosures that might hurt their argument. Hostility in cross-examination can be a strategic tool of intimidation and dismissal. In each of the Louisville debates that I analyzed for this chapter, cross-examination became a unique space through which the Louisville debaters signified on common performative practices in debate. Cross-examination, one of the few times debaters directly address each other, provides an opportunity to clarify and gain information that can be used to strengthen one's position during the following speeches. After each of the constructive speeches the opposing team is given three minutes to question the last speaker. It is particularly within these periods that debaters can be most aggressive. Cross-examination can often be a hostile process, with each participant attempting to gain as much important information as possible while avoiding disclosures that might hurt their argument. Hostility in cross-examination can be a strategic tool of intimidation and dismissal. In each of the Louisville debates that I analyzed for this chapter, cross-examination became a unique space through which the Louisville debaters signified on common performative practices in debate. Jones's and Green's behavior, while disconcerting to majority white audiences out-side of debate, is still representative of the aggressive behavior the community has engaged in for years. A speaker's aggression and assertiveness, in traditional debate, are effective appeals to white authority. Yet the performance of such behavior, by Black women, is often stereotyped as inappropriate. Their behavior, as defined by the common practices of the policy debate community, should be recognizable and thus acceptable to the majority white and male audience. Yet it is clear that those who encountered this team often seemed to exhibit a level of fear or discomfort with Jones's and Green's performance as opposed to admiration and respect, had they presented as a normative white male. Despite Jones's and Green's repetition of some traditional styles of competition, their Blackened version of normative debate style is often read as disruptive. In as much as Jones and Green perform Black girl attitude, as read by their majority white audience, the more difficult it becomes to build an ethical relationship to the politics of recognition. The problem for Louisville is appeal to Black authority in a space built on appeals to white authority. Using performative Black femininity is a tactic that can elevate anxiety and become an obstacle in building ethical relations. These are forced interactions through competition, Louisville's tactic of making structural racism a part of the dis-course of competition rather than appealing to formal, institutional channels produces a demand for recognition. Indeed, as the following sections detail, the Louisville Project disrupted normative debate practice in an effort to expose anti-Blackness as constitutive of the tradition of debate itself. 5 +Civil society requires gratuitous violence to blackness to function – civil society is preconditioned to destroy the slave. The fact that whiteness could not enslave their own grafts dirty, slave, and criminal onto black bodies. 6 +Wilderson 10, Frank, Professor at UC Irvine, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and Structure of US Antagonisms”, P. 22-8 7 +- brackets in original 8 +David Eltis is emphatic in his assertion that European civil society’s decision not to hunt for slaves along the banks of the Thames or other rivers in the lands of White people or in prisons or poor houses was a bad business decision that slowed the pace of economic development in both Europe and the “New World.” Eltis writes: No Western European power after the Middle Ages crosses the basic divide separating European workers from full chattel slavery. And while serfdom fell and rose in different parts of early modern Europe and shared characteristics with slavery, serfs were not outsiders either before or after enserfment. The phrase “long distance serf trade” is an oxymoron. (1404) He goes on to show how population growth patterns in Europe during the 1300s, 1400s, and 1500s far outpaced population growth patterns in Africa. He makes this point not only to demonstrate how devastating the effect of chattel slavery was on African population growth patterns—in other words, to highlight its genocidal impact—but also to make an equally profound but commonly overlooked point. Europe was so heavily populated that had the Europeans been more invested in the economic value of chattel slavery than they were in the symbolic value of Black slavery and hence had instituted “a properly exploited system drawing on convicts, prisoners and vagrants...they could easily have provided 50,000 White slaves a year to the New World without serious disruption to either international peace or the existing social institutions that generated and supervised these potential European victims” (1407). I raise Eltis’s counterposing of the symbolic value of slavery to the economic value of slavery in order to debunk two gross misunderstandings: One is that work—or alienation and exploitation—is a constituent element of slavery. Slavery, writes Orlando Patterson, “is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”ix Patterson goes to great lengths to delink his three “constituent elements of slavery” from the labor that one is typically forced to perform when one is enslaved. The forced labor is not constitutive of enslavement because whereas it explains a common practice, it does not define the structure of the power relation between those who are slaves and those who are not. In pursuit of his “constituent elements” of slavery, a line of inquiry that helps us separate experience (events) from ontology (the capacities of power—or lack thereof—lodged within distinct and irreconcilable subject positions, e.g., Humans and Slaves), Patterson helps us denaturalize the link between force and labor, and theorize the former as a phenomena that positions a body, ontologically (paradigmatically), and the latter as a possible but not inevitable experience of someone who is socially dead.x The other misunderstanding I am attempting to correct is the notion that the profit motive is the consideration within the slaveocracy that trumps all others. David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe have gone to considerable lengths to show that, in point of fact, slavery is and connotes an ontological status for Blackness; and that the constituent elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation but accumulation and fungibility (Hartman): the condition of being owned and traded. As these Black writers have debunked conventional wisdom pertaining to the grammar of slave suffering, so too has David Eltis provided a major corrective on the commonsense wisdom that profit was the primary motive driving the African slave trade. Eltis meticulously explains how the costs of enslavement would have been driven exponentially down had White slaves been taken en masse from European countries. Shipping costs from Europe to America were considerably lower than shipping costs from Europe to Africa and then on to America. He notes that “shipping costs...comprised by far the greater part of the price of any form of imported bonded labor in the Americas. If we take into account the time spent collecting a slave cargo on the African coast as well, then the case for sailing directly from Europe with a cargo of Whites appears stronger again” (1405). Eltis sums up his data by concluding that if European merchants, planters, and statesmen imposed chattel slavery on some members of their own society— say, only 50,000 White slaves per year—then not only would European civil society have been able to absorb the social consequences of these losses, in other words class warfare would have been unlikely even at this rate of enslavement, but civil society “would also have enjoyed lower labor costs, a faster development of the Americas, and higher exports and income levels on both sides of the Atlantic” (1422). But what Whites would have gained in economic value, they would have lost in symbolic value; and it is the latter which structures the libidinal economy of civil society. White chattel slavery would have meant that the aura of the social contract had been completely stripped from the body of the convict, vagrant, beggar, indentured servant, or child. This is a subtle point but one vital to our understanding of the relationship between the world of Blacks and the world of Humans. Even under the most extreme forms of coercion in the late Middle Ages and in the early modern period—for example, the provisional and selective enslavement of English vagrants from the early to mid-1500s to the mid-1700s—“the power of the state over convicts in the Old World and the power of the master over convicts in the New World was more circumscribed than that of the slave owner over the slave” (Eltis 1410). Marx himself takes note of the preconscious political—and, by implication, unconscious libidinal—costs to civil society, had European elites been willing to enslave Whites (Capital Vol. 1, 896-905). In fact, though widespread anti-vagabond laws of King Edward VI (1547), Queen Elizabeth (1572), King James I, and France’s Louis XVI (1777) all passed ordinances similar to Edward VI’s which proclaimed that: If anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler. The master shall feed his slave on bread and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has the right to force him to do any work, no matter how disgusting, with whip and chains. If the slave is absent for a fortnight, he is condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded on the forehead or back with the letter S...The master can sell him, bequeath him, let him out on hire as a slave, just as he can any other personal chattel or cattle...All persons have the right to take away the children of the vagabonds and keep them as apprentices, the young men until they are 24, the girls until they are 20. (897) These laws were so controversial, even among elites, that they could never take hold as widespread social and economic phenomena. But I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness’s value), gleaned from a close reading of the laws themselves, than I am in a historical account of the lived experience of the White poor’s resistance to, or the White elite’s ambivalence toward, such ordinances. The actual ordinance(s) manifests the symptoms of its own internal resistance long before either parliament or the poor themselves mount external challenges to it. Symptomatic of civil society’s libidinal safety net is the above ordinance’s repeated use of the word “if.” If anyone refuses to work...if the slave is absent for a fortnight... The violence of slavery is repeatedly checked, subdued into becoming a contingent violence for that entity which is beginning to call itself “White;” at the very same moment that it is being ratcheted up to a gratuitous violence for that entity which is being called (by Whites) “Black.” All the ordinances of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries which Marx either quotes at length or discusses are ordinances which seem, on their face, to debunk my claim that slavery for Whites was/is experiential and that for Blacks it was/is ontological. And yet all of these ordinances are riddled with contingencies, of which frequent and unfettered deployment of the conjunction “if” is emblematic. Both Spillers and Eltis remind us that the archive of African slavery shows no internal recognition of the libidinal costs of turning human bodies into sentient flesh. From Marx’s reports on proposed vagabond-into-slave legislation, it becomes clear that the libidinal economy of such European legislation is far too unconsciously invested in “saving” the symbolic value of the very vagabonds such laws consciously seek to enslave. In other words, the law would rather shoot itself (that is, sacrifice the economic development of the New World) in the foot than step into a subjective void where idlers and vagabonds might find themselves without contemporaries, with no relational status to save. In this way, White-on-White violence is put in check (a) before it becomes gratuitous, or structural, before it can shred the fabric of civil society beyond mending; and (b) before conscious, predictable, and sometimes costly challenges are mounted against the legislation despite its dissembling lack of resolve. This is accomplished by the imposition of the numerous “on condition that...” and “supposing that...” clauses bound up in the word “if” and also by claims bound up in the language around the enslavement of European children: a White child may be enslaved on condition that s/he is the child of a vagabond, and then, only until the age of 20 or 24. Hortense Spillers searched the archives for a similar kind of stop-gap language with respect to the African—some indication of the African’s human value in the libidinal economy of Little Baby Civil Society. She came up as empty handed: Expecting to find direct and amplified reference to African women during the opening years of the Trade, the observer is disappointed time and again that this cultural subject is concealed beneath the overwhelming debris of the itemized account, between the lines of the massive logs of commercial enterprise e.g., a ship’s cargo record that overrun the sense of clarity we believed we had gained concerning this collective humiliation. (Spillers 210) It would be reassuring to say that Europeans rigorously debated the ethical implications of forcing the social death of slavery upon Africans before they went ahead with it; but, as Marx, Eltis, and Spillers make abundantly clear, it would be more accurate simply to say that African slavery did not present an ethical dilemma for global civil society. The ethical dilemmas were unthought. 9 + 10 +And when George Floyd screams MAMA, and I CAN’T BREATHE his communication is understood but results and his death. When Dred Scott articulates he is deserving of freedom his agential capacity is denied. The form of communicative registers opens blackness to gratuitous violence in civil society. 11 +Gillespie 17 – Jon Gillespie is a graduate student for the University of California, Irvine, Comparative Literature, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, Fall 2017, https://www.academia.edu/34839874/On_the_Prospect_of_Weaponized_Death 12 +- brackets in original 13 +Black life is lived in a white hyper-reality. By this I mean, black life is lived inside a constituted white fiction which concretizes itself as fact. Black life is a life lived in non-existence; blackness “exists” as a symbol of death that is, but is not. Blackness “exists” only insofar as White Being structures it onto a map of anti-black violence.4 Achille Mbembe corroborates this in his Critique of Black Reason, stating: Racism consists, most of all, in substituting what is with something else, with another reality. It has the power to distort the real and to fix affect, but it is also a form of psychic derangement, the mechanism through which the repressed suddenly surfaces. When the racist sees the Black person, he does not see that the Black person is not there, does not exist, and is just a sign of a pathological fixation on the absence of a relationship. We must therefore consider race as being both beside and beyond being.5 The reality that replaces that which is a white hyper-reality. This white hyperrealism fixes blackness as “a sign of a pathological fixation.” White hyper-realism is the paradigm whereby consciousness is unable to distinguish between the fictions created by White Being and the Real. It is this fact that permits black death to be subsumed in simulations by each and every (analytic) encounter with Whiteness and the World. Questions like, “Can the Black suffer?” and “Is it capable for the Black to be wronged?” arise due to the inability to access a grammar of suffering to communicate a harm that has never ended, a harm that can never end without ending the World itself. It is for this reason that viral videos of black death, more than opening the possibility for liberal notions of justice, seem to suture the relationship between the mythical and the real that perpetuates itself through the reification of black trauma. Black death, more than deconstructing the ontics of the Human, seems to extend its hyper-reality. Black death makes it harder to distinguish white fictions from any sense of real harm being done to human flesh. The Black is meant to experience its death over and over and over again; and the World itself recycles all its fictions-as-the-Real. Put differently, the White World subjects the Black to perpetual, gratuitous violence, and then uses that violence as evidence to further suggest that the Black is not Human. For how can a Human endure such a thing? The experience of gratuitous violence secures the semiotics of the white hyper-reality. White Disneyland stays intact. Blackness exists at the nexus of fact and fiction, possibility and (non)value, inclusion and exclusion. Blackness is trapped even in saying it’s trapped because the “trapped-ness” of the Black extends to locations where the diction and syntax of White “words don’t go.”6 The Black does not have the grammar to speak against where and how it is trapped since Blackness can only articulate itself through the semiotics of Whiteness. That White Being continues to center black death as the matrix of possibility for its hyper-realist structure indexes the promise of death insofar that White Being is promised futurity. The Black was rendered fungible through the conjunction of the political and the libidinal economy of the anti-Black world. Blackness gave birth to the commodity and the economy of signification that structures the cartography of the Human’s coordinates. This could be said to be a still birth, insofar as the nature of Black life in a white hyper-reality is conducted on a plane that guarantees natal alienation, social, and ontological death. The Black body lives to die; the specter of death shadows it everywhere. What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our orderspecific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)…”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity. 11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? 14 + 15 +Thus, I take this round hostage! Embrace a symbolic extinction, We must engage in undercommon communication that weaponizes our deaths to disrupts the semiotics of the anti-black world. To blacken the debate space it is important to note that no black liberation happens through the methods they will talk about, but only by being parasitic on the spaces of optimism to end the world. 16 +Gillespie 2 (John Gillespie, Undergraduate Researcher and Debater at Towson University, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death,” Propter Nos, Volume 2: Issue 1, Insurgency / Exhaustion, Fall 2017) B1ACK ZD 17 + 18 +- brackets in original 19 +What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our order- specific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)...”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 7 If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity.11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory that prescribes solutions to the analysis in the conclusion of their work. However, one finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a prophetic vision, a pulsing pessimist hope for the “end of the World.” For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way out is an end to the White World. White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only through black vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the spectacle of Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 8 gratuitous freedom is made visible. It is somewhere in this structural antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility of the World, and on the other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its disorientation, that we found the language to say the unsayable and do the undoable. As Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular present non-Black academics with more than an intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism that we don’t talk about...which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s calling for the end of the world...it wants the death of everyone else in the same way that we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through Afro- Pessimism and be who one was on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-Pessimism. If we are engaging in a war in which the symbolic value, the semiotics of this World itself, positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of diversity, of life itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a space where “words don’t go”—a form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the conversation is blackened, and the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to excavate insurgent dictions still lost in the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is death personified, then what might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we recognized the inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness of that death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard writes, “When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer?”19 Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics used by those who are facing globalized White Being with asymmetrical technologies of terror, violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to rupture the system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one to the “desert of the Black Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon the semiotic system.20 Black terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates the death embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable the possibility of a radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized onto- epistemic deployment of violence, and if violent insurgency is necessary, then the decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to counter the terror of White Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood as counter-terror terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life. We Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 9 only have the power to end the World through death. As Baudrillard writes, “The radical difference is that the terrorist, while they have at their disposal weapons that are the system’s own, possess a further lethal weapon: their own deaths.”21 The United States has an international military force, a storehouse of nuclear arms, and the capacity, within their police state alone, to “terrorize” not just one block in Baltimore, but the whole entire world. Black terrorism is what happens when we heed the Afro-Pessimist call that “A living death is as much a death as it is a living,”22 it is what happens when we take seriously the unsayable in Afro-Pessimism. Black Terrorism is (non)ontological fugitivity that disavows any need to focus on social life—black terrorism steals black death itself from White Being. It is for this reason that Baudrillard speaks to his own White Being and the specter of terror when he says: When Western culture sees all of its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very worst way. Our death is an extinction, an annihilation. Herein lies our poverty. When a singularity throws its own death into the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, its dies its own natural death. This is an immense game of double or quits. In committing suicide, the singularity suicides the other at the same time— we might say that the terrorist acts literally ‘suicided’ the West. A death for a death, then, but transfigured by the symbolic stakes. ‘We have already devastated our world, what more do you want?’ says Muray. But precisely, we have devastated this world, it still has to be destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not at all the same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going to be able to do the second.23 We are the others. Tasked with the (un)fortunate task of ending White hyper-realism, the White World, and White Being. Well aware that if White Fascism continues the project of black annihilation, the only choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to. But, ultimately, we must remember the words of Huey Newton: “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”24 In the age of Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon.25 The disavowal of the lives of refugees is White Being attempting to reconcile the “Nation- State” simulation with the free track and flow of bodies it’s been attempting to murder; the deportation of undocumented immigrants in conjunction with the materialization of borders is White Being attempting to secure its linguistic and economic integrity; the rise of the private prison and the militarization of the police force is White Being attempting to innovate the system of enslavement and necropolitics for the 21st Century; the plundering of indigenous land and bodies is White Being attempting to finish off the project of genocide; the disregard for the Earth is White Being ensuring the Anthropocene will also be the Apocalypse. Trump is a reinvigoration, a call to arms, for White Being, and White Being can only be “destroyed symbolically.” Black terrorism transfigures the symbolic stakes because it Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 10 steals away that condition of White Being’s possibility in a kind of fugitivity that is a zero-transformation into Blackness. This being said, we all know that the only thing that follows the absolute loss of hope is this Black Spring, this Neo-Fanonian violence, this blackened terroristic situational transfer. In Baudrillard’s words, in the Age of Trump, let us remember the gift of immorality, “Terrorism is immoral. The World Trade Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself immoral. So, let us be immoral...”26l/ 20 + 21 +The role of the ballot is to refuse spaces like debate to deconstruct structures of antiblackness. Your ballot will sign off on the deconstruction of debate as a form of implosive terror 22 +- offense links back by explaining how you refuse antiblackness and whiteness 23 +- prefiat offense outweighs, post fiat is white shit 24 +- weigh by who most effectively refuses antiblackness 25 +- aff comes before nonblack theory 26 +Wilderson 17, Frank. Frank B Wilderson III is an American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine. “Afropessimism An Intro” Racked and Dispatched, September 2017. B1ACK ZD 27 +The distinction that Afro-pessimism makes is important because it problematizes any positive affirmation of identity7 —as non-Black categories are defined against the Blackness they are not, this relation of race indirectly (and directly, e.g., white teens’ racist snapchats) sustains anti-Blackness by producing and sustaining racialized categories. Stated otherwise, “the violence of anti- blackness produces black existence; there is no prior positive blackness that could be potentially appropriated. Black existence is simultaneously produced and negated by racial domination, both as presupposition and consequence. Affirmation of blackness proves to be impossible without simultaneously affirming the violence that structures black subjectivity itself.”8 Afro-pessimism departs with this understanding and illuminates the limits and failures of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, such as their reformist ideologies concerning progress and their disastrous integration with bureaucratic machinery. If, as Afro-pessimism shows, it is not possible to affirm Blackness itself without at the same time affirming anti-Black violence, then the attempts at recognition and inclusion in society will only ever result in further social and real death. Individuals can of course achieve some status in society through “structural adjustment”9 (i.e., a kind of “whitening” effect), as has been superficially confirmed, but Blackness as a racialized category remains the object of gratuitous, constituent violence—as demonstrated by police murders, mass incarceration, urban planning, and surveillance (from cointelpro to special security codes at stores to indicate when Black customers enter). As Blackness is negated by the relations and structures of society, Afro-pessimism posits that the only way out is to negate that negation. The challenges Afro-pessimism poses to the affirmation of Blackness extend to other identities as well and problematizeidentity-based politics. The efforts, on the part of such a politics, to produce a coherent subject (and movement), and the reduction of antagonisms to a representable position, is not only the total circumscription of liberatory potential, but it is an extinguishment of rage with reform—which is to stake a claim in the state and society, and thus anti-Blackness. Against this, we choose, following Afro-pessimism, to understand Black liberation as a negative dialectic, a politics of refusal, and a refusal to affirm; as an embrace of disorder and incoherence;10 act of political apostasy.11 and as an This is not to categorically reject every project of reform—for decreased suffering will surely make life momentarily easier—but rather to take to task any movement invested in the preservation of society. Were they not to decry every action that didn’t fit within their rigid framework, then they might not fortify anti-Blackness as fully as they do. It is in the effort to garner legitimacy (an appeal to whiteness) that reformism requires a representable identity and code of actions, which excludes, and actually endangers, those who would reject such pandering. This also places undo faith in politicians and police to do something other than maintain, as they always have and will, the institutions—schools, courts, prisons, projects, voting booths, neighborhood associations—sustaining anti-Blackness. Afro-pessimism can also be used to critique prevalent liberal discourses around community, accountability, innocence, and justice. Such notions sit upon anti-Black foundations and only go so far as to reconfigure, rather than abolish, the institutions that produce, control, and murder Black subjects.12 Take for example the appeal to innocence and demand for accountability, too frequently launched when someone Black is killed by police. The discourse of innocence operates within a binary of innocent/ guilty, which is founded on the belief that there is an ultimate fairness to the system and presumes the state to be the protector of all. This fails to understand the state’s fundamental investment in self-preservation, which is indivisible from white supremacy and the interests of capital. The discourse goes that if someone innocent is killed, an individual (the villainous cop) must be held accountable as a solution to this so-called injustice. The structural reality of anti-Black violence is completely obfuscated and justice is mistook as a concept independent from anti-Blackness. Discrimination is indeed tragic, but systematic dispossession and murder is designedly more—it is the justice system—and no amount of imprisoned cops, body cameras or citizen review boards will eliminate this. Furthermore, Afro-pessimist analysis exposes the often unacknowledged ways that radical movements perpetuate anti- Black racism. One such way is in the rhetoric repeatedly used that takes an assumed (historically oppressed) subject at its center—e.g., workers or women.13 This conflates experience with existence and fails to acknowledge the incommensurate ontologies between, for instance, white women and Black women. To speak in generalities, of simply workers or women, is to speak from a position of anti-Blackness, for the non-racialized subject is the white, or at least non-Black, subject. For this reason, movements against capitalism, patriarchy, or gender mean unfortunately little if they don’t elucidate ontological disparities within a given site of oppression; and if they don’t unqualifiedly seek to abolish the totality of race and anti-Blackness. This is not to privilege anti- Black racism on a hierarchy of oppression, but to assert—against the disparaging lack of analysis—the unlivability of life for Blacks over centuries of social death and physical murder, perpetuated (at varying times) by all non-Black subjects in society. 28 + 29 + 30 +Black Time 31 +Fairness is what the white cops want at protests, it’s what congress wants when black families are grappling with the death of a loved one by the state, it’s what massa wants when the slave seeks agency, it’s what you nonblacks in debate want when engagement is not given to you like a cookie 32 +Wilderson 2008 33 +Frank B., Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid South End Press, pg. 406-411 34 +Just two years ago, in December of 1999, I'd written a letter and stuffed it, late one night, in the faculty mailboxes. It began with what must have appeared to the faculty's confused eyes as a red herring. It spoke not about my excruciating encounters with them, but began, instead, out of left field by discussing the plight of two students whose troubles with the College had been the topic of recent debate. Reading of Sonia Rodriguez's and Selma Thornton's troubles with the Student Senate and its White liberal adviser Tim Harold reawakened my disdain for Cabrillo as an institution and for the English Division as one of its flagship entities. I then went on to explain how Selma and Sonia had resigned their posts in the Student Senate in protest over Harold's decision not to allow thirty students of color to have funds to travel to a conference on race at Hartnell College. Instead, Harold spent the money on T-shirts. He had also put the sign-up sheet for the conference not in the Student Center, but in some obscure location where it would never be found thus sabotaging the excursion further. This seemed like a trivial enough matter, but it compounded the hurt and sense of isolation and rebuke which so many Black and Latino students felt at Cabrillo but could not name. I felt a piqued kinship with their unspeakable pain and used the rare moment of it having turned into a tangible event as a way into what I wanted to say to the faculty and administration...and to Alice. In defense of his actions, and as a way of indicating the absurdity of Selma and Sonia's objections, Harold issued a public statement in which he did not comment (or at least the newspaper did not report his comments) on his funding priorities; rather, he simply said "The sign-up sheet was posted for a week, the same way we treat any workshop." To this, I wrote: Whereas Selma Thornton attempts an institutional analysis of the Student Senate by way of a critique of Tim Harold and his practices, Harold responds with a ready made institutional defense and, later in the article, a defense of his integrity (a personalized response to an institutional analysis). He brings the scale of abstraction back down to the level most comfortable for White people: the individual and the uncontextualized realm of fair play. It's the White person's safety zone. I'm a good person, I'm a fair person, I treat everyone equally, the rules apply to everyone. Thornton and Rodriguez's comments don't indict Harold for being a "good" person, they indict him for being White: a way of being in the world which legitimates institutional practices (practices which Thornton and Rodriguez object to) accepts, and promotes, them as timeless—without origin, consequence, interest, or allegiance—natural and inevitable. "The sign-up sheet was posted for a week, the same way we treat any workshop." The whole idea that we treat everyone equally is only slightly more odious than the discussion or how we can treat everyone equally; because the problem is neither the practice nor the debates surrounding it, but the fact that White people can come together and wield enough institutional power to constitute a "We." "We" in the Student Senate, "We" in Aptos, "We" in Santa Cruz, "We" in the English department, "We" in the boardrooms. "We" are fair and balanced is as odious as "We" are in control—they are derivations of the same expression: "We" are the police. The claim of "balance and fair play" forecloses upon, not only the modest argument that the practices of the Cabrillo Student Senate are racist and illegitimate, but it also forecloses upon the more extended, comprehensive, and antagonistic argument that Cabrillo itself is racist and illegitimate. And what do we mean by Cabrillo? The White people who constitute its fantasies of pleasure and its discourse of legitimacy. The generous "We." So, let's bust "We" wide open and start at the end: White people are guilty until proven innocent. Fuck the compositional moves of substantiation and supporting evidence: I was at a conference in West Oakland last week where a thousand Black folks substantiated it a thousand different ways. You're free to go to West Oakland, find them, talk to them, get all the proof you need. You can drive three hours to the mountains, so you sure as hell can cut the time in half and drive to the inner city. Knock on any door. Anyone who knows 20 to 30 Black folks, intimately—and if you don't know 12 then you're not living in America, you're living in White America—knows the statement to be true. White people are guilty until proven innocent. Whites are guilty of being friends with each other, of standing up for their rights, of pledging allegiance to the flag, of reproducing concepts like fairness, meritocracy, balance, standards, norms, harmony between the races. Most of all. Whites are guilty of wanting stability and reform. White people, like Mr. Harold and those in the English Division, are guilty of asking themselves the question. How can we maintain the maximum amount of order (liberals at Cabrillo use euphemisms like peace, harmony, stability), with the minimum amount of change, while presenting ourselves—if but only to ourselves—as having the best of all possible intentions. Good people. Good intentions. White people are the only species, human or otherwise, capable of transforming the dross of good intentions into the gold of grand intentions, and naming it "change." ...These passive revolutions, fire and brimstone conflicts over which institutional reform is better than the other one, provide a smoke screen—a diversionary play of interlocutions—that keep real and necessary antagonisms at bay. White people are thus able to go home each night, perhaps a little wounded, but feeling better for having made Cabrillo a better place...for everyone... Before such hubris at high places makes us all a little too giddy, let me offer a cautionary note: it's scientifically impossible to manufacture shinola out of shit. But White liberals keep on trying and end up spending a lifetime not knowing shit from shinola. Because White people love their jobs, they love their institutions, they love their country, most of all they love each other. And every Black or Brown body that doesn't love the things you love is a threat to your love for each other. A threat to your fantasy space, your terrain of shared pleasures. Passive revolutions have a way of incorporating Black and Brown bodies to either term of the debate. What choice does one have? The third (possible, but always unspoken) term of the debate, White people are guilty of structuring debates which reproduce the institution and the institution reproduces America and America is always and everywhere a bad thing this term is never on the table, because the level of abstraction is too high for White liberals. They've got too much at stake: their friends, their family, their way of life. Let's keep it all at eye level, where whites can keep an eye on everything. So the Black body is incorporated. Because to be unincorporated is to say that what White liberals find valuable I have no use for. This, of course, is anti-institutional and shows a lack of breeding, not to mention a lack of gratitude for all the noblesse oblige which has been extended to the person of color to begin with. "We will incorporate colored folks into our fold, whenever possible and at our own pace, provided they're team players, speak highly of us, pretend to care what we're thinking, are highly qualified, blah, blah, blah...but, and this is key, we won't entertain the rancor which shits on our fantasy space. We've killed too many Indians, worked too many Chinese and Chicano fingers to the bone, set in motion the incarcerated genocide of too many Black folks, and we've spent too much time at the beach, or in our gardens, or hiking in the woods, or patting each other on the literary back, or teaching Shakespeare and the Greeks, or drinking together to honor our dead at retirement parties ("Hell, Jerry White let's throw a party for Joe White and Jane White who gave Cabrillo the best White years of their silly White lives, that we might all continue to do the same White thing." "Sounds good to me, Jack White. Say, you're a genius! Did you think of this party idea all on your own?" "No, Jerry White, we've been doing it for years, makes us feel important. Without these parties we might actually be confronted by our political impotence, our collective spinelessness, our insatiable appetite for gossip and administrative minutia, our fear of a Black Nation, our lack of will." "Whew! Jack White, we sound pathetic. We'd better throw that party pronto!" "White you are, Jerry." "Jack White, you old fart, you, you're still a genius, heh, heh, heh.") too much time White-bonding in an effort to forget how hard we killed and to forget how many bones we walk across each day just to get from our bedrooms to Cabrillo...too, too much for one of you coloreds to come in here and be so ungrateful as to tell us the very terms of our precious debates are specious." But specious they are, as evidenced by recent uproar in the Adjunct vs. Minority Hire debates, or whether or not English 100 students should be "normed." The very terms of the debates suture discussions around White entitlement, when White entitlement is an odious idea. Whites are entitled to betray other Whites, nothing else... Beyond that you're not entitled to anything. So how could you possibly be entitled to a job? How could you possibly be entitled to decide who should pass and who should fail? How could you possibly be entitled to determining where the sign-up sheet for Diversity Day buses will or will not be placed, and how funds should be allocated? Okay...so some of you want to hire a "minority" as long as s/he's "well mannered and won't stab us in the back after s/he's in our sacred house;" and some of you want to hire an adjunct (Jill or Jeffery White) because, "What the hell—they've been around as long as Jack, Joe, Jerry, and Jane White, and shucks fair is fair, especially if you're entitled." And entitlement is a synonym for Whiteness. But there's only one job, because for years you've complained about the gate, while breathing collective (meaning White) sighs of relief that it was there to protect you from the hordes. (Somewhere down the street in Watsonville an immigrant is deciding whether to give his daughter or his wife up for the boss to fuck that he might have a job picking your fruit. Somewhere up the road in Oakland a teen is going to San Quentin for writing graffiti on a wall. And you're in here trying to be "fair" to each other, while promoting diversity—whatever that means. By the time you've arrived at a compromise over norming or faculty hires—your efforts to "enlighten" whoever doesn't die in the fields or fall from the earth into prison—the sista has been raped and the brotha busted. But then you've had a difficult day as well.) So, do what you always do. Hire the most qualified candidate. Here are some questions and guidelines to speed the search committee on its way and make everyone feel entitled. 35 +Ontology Materialism: Why would we have to chant BLACK LIVES MATTER if it was so evident that they mattered? why has antiblackness continued to fester despite the optimistic and material orientation of past, present, and future policies? Why are black children dying because of their race if humanity is so contingent? 36 +Warren 18 Warren Calvin L Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University “Ontological Terror Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation” Duke University Press Durham and London 2018. B1ACK ZD 37 +A deep abyss, or a terrifying question, engenders the declaration “Black Lives Matter.” The declaration, in fact, conceals this question even as it purports to have answered it resolutely. “Black Lives Matter,” then, carries a certain terror in its dissemination, a terror we dare to approach with un- certainty, urgency, and exhaustion. This question pertains to the “meta- physical infrastructure,” as Nahum Chandler might call it, that conditions our world and our thinking about the world. “Black Lives Matter” is an important declaration, not just because it foregrounds the question of unbearable brutality, but also because it performs philosophical labor—it compels us to face the terrifying question, despite our desire to look away. The declaration presents a difficult syntax or an accretion of tensions and ambiguities within its organization: can blacks have life? What would such life mean within an antiblack world? What axiological measurement determines the mattering of the life in question? Does the assembly of these terms shatter philosophical coherence or what metaphysical infra- structure provides stability, coherence, and intelligibility for the declaration? These questions of value, meaning, stability, and intelligibility lead us to the terror of the declaration, the question it conceals but engages: what ontological ground provides the occasion for the declaration? Can such ground be assumed, and if not, is the declaration even possible with- out it? “Black Lives Matter” assumes ontological ground, which propels the deployment of its terms and sustains them throughout the treacheries of antiblack epistemologies. Put differently, the human being provides an anchor for the declaration, and since the being of the human is invaluable, then black life must also matter, if the black is a human (the declaration anchors mattering in the human’s Being). But we reach a point of terror with this syllogistic reasoning. One must take a step backward and ask the fundamental question: is the black, in fact, a human being? Or can black(ness) ground itself in the being of the human? If it cannot, then on what bases can we assert the mattering of black existence? If it can, then why would the phrase need to be repeated and recited incessantly? Do the affirmative declaration and its insistence undermine this very ontological ground? The statement declares, then, too soon—a declaration that is re- ally an unanswered (or unanswerable) question. We must trace this question and declaration back to its philosophical roots: the Negro Question. This question reemerges within a world of antiblack brutality, a world in which black torture, dismemberment, fatality, and fracturing are routinized and ritualized—a global, sadistic pleasure principle. I was invited to meditate on this globalized sadism in the context of Michael Brown’s murder and the police state. The invitation filled me with dread as I anticipated a festival of humanism in which presenters would share solutions to the problem of antiblackness (if they even acknowledged antiblackness) and inundate the audience with “yes we can!” rhetoric and unbounded optimism. I decided to participate, despite this dread, once students began asking me deep questions, questions that also filled them with dread and confusion. I, of course, was correct about my misgivings. I listened to one speaker after the next describe a bright future, where black life is valued and blacks are respected as humans—if we just keep fighting, they said, “we’re almost there!” A political scientist introduced statistics and graphs laying out voting patterns and districts; he argued that blacks just did not realize how much power they had (an unfortunate ignorance, I guess). If they just collectively voted they could change antiblack police practices and make this world a better place. The audience clapped enthusiastically; I remained silent. Next, a professor of law implored the audience to keep fighting for legal change because the law is a powerful weapon for ending discrimination and restoring justice. We just needed to return to the universal principles that founded our Constitution, “liberty, equal- ity, and justice!” (I thought about the exception clause in the Thirteenth Amendment, the Three-Fifths Compromise, and the way the sharecrop- ping system exploited the Fourteenth Amendment in order to reenslave through contract. I continued to sit in silence.) The audience shouted and applauded. . I felt a pit in my stomach because I knew what I had to do; it was my time to step up to the podium—it was my nihilistic responsibility. I told the audience there was no solution to the problem of antiblackness; it will continue without end, as long as the world exists. Furthermore, all the solutions presented rely on antiblack instruments to address antiblackness, a vicious and tortuous cycle that will only produce more pain and disappointment. I also said that humanist affect (the good feeling we get from hopeful solutions) will not translate into freedom, justice, recognition, or resolution. It merely provides temporary reprieve from the fact that blacks are not safe in an antiblack world, a fact that can become overwhelming. The form of antiblackness might alter, but antiblackness itself will remain a constant—despite the power of our imagination and political yearnings. I continued this nihilistic analysis of the situation until I heard complete silence. A woman stood up after my presentation and shouted, “How dare you tell this to our youth! That is so very negative! Of course we can change things; we have power, and we are free.” Her voice began to increase in intensity. I waited for her to finish and asked her, “Then tell us how to end police brutality and the slaughter of the youth you want to protect from my nihilism.” “If these solutions are so credible, why have they consistently failed? Are we awaiting for some novel, extraordinary solution— one no one had ever imagined—to end antiblack violence and misery?” Silence. “In what manner will this ‘power’ deliver us from antiblackness?” How long must we insist on a humanity that is not recognized—an insistence that humiliates in its inefficacy? “If we are progressing, why are black youth being slaughtered at staggering rates in the twenty-first century— if we are, indeed, humans just like everyone else?” People began to respond that things are getting better, despite the increasing death toll, the unchecked power of the police state, the lack of conviction rates for police murdering blacks, the prison industrial complex and the modern reenslavement of an entire generation, the unbelievable black infant mortality rate, the lack of jobs for black youth and debilitating poverty. “This is better?” I asked. “At least we are not slaves!” someone shouted. I asked them to read the Thirteenth Amendment closely. But the intensity of the dialogic exchange taught me that affect runs both ways: it is not just that solutions make us feel good because we feel powerful/hopeful, but that pressing the ontological question presents terror—the terror that ontological security is gone, the terror that ethical claims no longer have an anchor, and the terror of inhabiting existence outside the precincts of humanity and its humanism. Ontological Terror engages this question and the forms of terror it produces. 38 + 39 +How the HELL do you explain the pleasure and satisfaction from black pain and suffering absent the aff!? Make them rationalize this instead of instinctively accepting their defense, an imperfect explanation is better than none at all 40 +Wilderson 20 Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III, University of California, Irvine “Afropessimism” Originally published: April 7, 2020 B1ACK ZD 41 +In other words, activists want to make sense of the death of Sandra Bland, and the murders of Michael Brown, and Eric Garner; when what these spectacles require, in order to be adequately explained, is a theory of the nonsense; their absence of a tangible or rational utility: Black people are not murdered for transgressions such as illegal immi- gration or workplace agitation. The essential utility of Black death is, paradoxically, the absence of utility. Black death does have a certain utility, but it’s not subtended by the extraction of surplus value; not in any fundamental way. And it is certainly not subtended by the usurpation of land. Black death is subtended by the psychic integration of everyone who is not Black. Black death functions as national therapy, even though the rhetoric that explains and laments these deaths expresses this psychic dependence not directly, but symptomatically. It is complex, but it is simple too. Blacks are not going to be genocided like Native Americans. We are being genocided, but genocided and regenerated, because the spectacle of Black death is essential to the mental health of the world—we can’t be wiped out completely, because our deaths must be repeated, visually. The bodily mutilation of Blackness is necessary, so it must be repeated. What we are witnessing on YouTube, Instagram, and the nightly news as murders are rituals of healing for civil society. Rituals that stabilize and ease the anxiety that other people feel in their daily lives. It’s the anxiety that people have walking around. It can be stabilized by a lot of different things—marijuana, cocaine, alco- hol, affairs—but the ultimate stabilization is the spectacle of violence against Blacks. I know I am a Human because I am not Black. I know I am not Black because when and if I experience the kind of violence Blacks experience there is a reason, some contingent transgression. This is why online video posts of police murdering Black people contribute more to the psychic well-being of non-Black people—to their communal pleasures and sense of ontological presence—than they contribute to deterrence, arrests, or even to a general sensitivity to Black pain and suffering. Afropessimism helps us understand why the violence that sat- urates Black life isn’t threatened with elimination just because it is exposed. For this to be the case, the spectator, interlocutor, auditor would have to come to images such as these with an unconscious that can perceive injury in such images. In other words, the mind would have to see a person with a heritage of rights and claims, whose rights and claims are being violated. This is not the way Slaves, Blacks, function in the collective unconscious. Slaves func- tion as implements in the collective unconscious. Who ever heard of an injured plow? Afropessimism is premised on an iconoclastic claim: that Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness. Blackness is social death, which is to say that there was never a prior moment of plenitude, never a moment of equilibrium, never a moment of social life. Blackness, as a para- digmatic position (rather than as an ensemble of identities, cultural practices, or anthropological accoutrements), cannot be disimbricated from slavery. The narrative arc of the slave who is Black (unlike the generic slave who may be of any race) is not a narrative arc at all, but a flat line of “historical stillness”: a flat line that “moves” from disequi- librium to a moment in the narrative of faux-equilibrium, to disequi- librium restored and/or rearticulated. To put it differently, the violence that both elaborates and satu- rates Black “life” is totalizing, so much so as to make narrative inac- cessible to Blacks. This is not simply a problem for Black people. It is a problem for the organizational calculus of critical theory and radical politics writ large. 42 + 43 +“IP rights” entails an investment towards gratuitous antiblackness aka the animalistic branding onto black flesh 44 +Johnson 16 Shontavia Johnson Drake University Law School 2016. “BRANDED: Trademark Tattoos, Slave Owner Brands, And The Right To Have "Free" Skin”, Volume 22| Issue 2. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216andcontext=mttlr B1ack ZD 45 +This Part outlines the basic historical, legal and policy issues associated with the practice of placing identifying indicia on human bodies. This practice predates modern American trademark law and can be traced to the days of African and African-American enslavement in the United States. The permanent, forced body modification of slaves was an early precursor to contemporary American use of trademarks as tattoos. As more Americans voluntarily tattoo their bodies today, a growing segment of this tattooed population encompasses brand enthusiasts who choose to permanently ink their bodies with the trademarks of their favorite companies and brands and copyright-protected images. Coupled with this trend, disputes based on tattoos encompassing the intellectual property of third parties have also grown in recent years.26 In perhaps one of the most famous lawsuits based on tattoos and intellectual property, Whitmill v. Warner Bros., Professor David Nimmer posited that the rights of intellectual property owners should not extend to human flesh, because to do so would create “almost literally, a badge of involuntary servitude.”27 Otherwise, he argued, the law would “set at naught the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of badges of slavery.”28 Though tenuous, it is understandable why Professor Nimmer would draw connections between contemporary trademark-based tattoos and the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of slavery. His suggestion, however, provides scant historical or factual foundation. This Part will lay the groundwork implicit in such claims before ultimately explaining why the connection is inappropriate in the modern context of trademark-based tattoos. Though tattooing words and symbols on human bodies has become increasingly popular in recent decades, it is not a new practice. African and African-American slaves routinely had the initials or other identifying indicia of their slave masters permanently branded on their skin.29 These involuntary “trademarks” were placed on slaves both for purposes of punishment and identification.30 Prior to the passage of state and federal trademark law, slave owners used trademarks as a way to distinguish their human property from the property of other slave masters. Branding as a mechanism for distinguishing human property began in 2000-1800 B.C. with Babylonian slaves.31 Within the Transatlantic slave trade, the practice dates back to at least as early as the 1440s, when the Portuguese branded African slaves’ upper bodies to indicate that the slaves belonged to the king of Portugal or another slave owner.32 During the time period of African slave trafficking, each European nation had its own trademark used to mark African slaves.33 Discussing the early history of slave branding, one scholar outlined the many ways in which slave branding took place: Slaves landed at S˜ao Tome were branded with a cross on the right arm in the early sixteenth century; but, later, this design was changed to a ‘G,’ the marca de Guin´e. Slaves exported from Luanda were often branded not once but twice, for they had to receive the mark of the Luso-Brazilian merchants who owned them as well as the royal arms—on the right breast—to signify their relation to the Crown. Sometimes, baptism led to the further branding of a cross 46 +THINK OF EVERY REFORM, MOVEMENT, COALITION, DEMAND, and POLICY THAT HAS HAPPENED AND ASK YOURSELF HOW DID THIS STOP THE STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS OF ANTIBLACKNESS? They did NOT – Chattel slavery changes its name to Jim Crow then to the PIC and policing. 47 +Wilderson 20 Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III, University of California, Irvine “Afropessimism” Originally published: April 7, 2020 B1ACK ZD 48 +There’s something organic to Blackness that makes it essential to the construction of civil society. But there’s also something organic to Blackness that portends the destruction of civil society. There’s noth- ing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: there’s something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction,” abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot be liberated or be made legible through counter-hegemonic interventions. Black suffering is not a function of the performance(s) of civil society, but of the existence of civil society. For the Pakistani driver, the White professor, and his White wife, civil society is an ensemble of con- straints and opportunities. But for the Black, civil society is a murderous projection. In light of this, coalitions and social movements—even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement—bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the inter- locutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and legible conflicts of civil society’s junior partners (such as immigrants, White women, the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and illegible antagonisms of Blacks. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of anti-Blackness, their rhetorical structures, political desire, and their emancipatory horizon are bolstered by a life- affirming anti-Blackness; the death of Black desire. 49 +Gordon Identifies instances of black social life but that doesn’t disprove the structural disposition of civil society to black death – their frame essentializes blackness because in a world of black death, pessimism is the only possible optimism. 50 +Sexton 11 (Jared. 2011. “ANTE-ANTI-BLACKNESS: AFTERTHOUGHTS” http://csalateral.org/issue1/content/sexton.html) KR RC/JCH-PF 51 +Fanon and his interlocutors, or what appear rather as his fateful adherents, would seem to have a problem embracing black social life because they never really come to believe in it, because they cannot acknowledge the social life from which they speak and of which they speak – as negation and impossibility – as their own (Moten 2008: 192). Another way of putting this might be to say that they are caught in a performative contradiction enabled by disavowal. I wonder, however, whether things are even this clear in Fanon and the readings his writing might facilitate. Lewis Gordon's sustained engagement with Fanon finds him situated in an ethical stance grounded in the affirmation of blackness in the historic anti-black world. In a response to the discourse of multiracialism emergent in the late twentieth-century United States, for instance, Gordon writes, following Fanon, that "there is no way to reject the thesis that there is something wrong with being black beyond the willingness to 'be' black – not in terms of convenient fads of playing blackness, but in paying the costs of anti-blackness on a global scale. Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity experiences a blackened world" (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to 'be' black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? Elsewhere, in a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the anti-black world developed across his first several books: "Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies – they become them. In our anti-black world, blacks are pathology" (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support to Moten's contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counter-intuitive, or rather because it is counter-intuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the anti-black world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks: "A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment" (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative – "above all, don’t be black" (Gordon 1997: 63) – in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that "resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human'" (Nyong'o 2002: 389). 22 In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos. To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death – all of this is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by vitalizing it. A living death is a much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor – the modern world system. 23 Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro-pessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That's the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed. Wilderson's is an analysis of the law in its operation as "police power and racial prerogative both under and after slavery" (Wagner 2009: 243). So too is Moten's analysis, at least that just-less-than-half of the intellectual labor committed to the object of black studies as critique of (the anti-blackness of) Western civilization. But Moten is just that much more interested in how black social life steals away or escapes from the law, how it frustrates the police power and, in so doing, calls that very policing into being in the first place. The policing of black freedom, then, is aimed less at its dreaded prospect, apocalyptic rhetoric notwithstanding, than at its irreducible precedence. The logical and ontological priority of the unorthodox self-predicating activity of blackness, the "improvisatory exteriority" or "improvisational immanence" that blackness is, renders the law dependent upon what it polices. This is not the noble agency of resistance. It is a reticence or reluctance that we might not know if it were not pushing back, so long as we know that this pushing back is really a pushing forward. So, in this perverse sense, black social death is black social life. The object of black studies is the aim of black studies. The most radical negation of the anti-black world is the most radical affirmation of a blackened world. Afro-pessimism is "not but nothing other than" black optimism. 24 52 +NEUROSCIENCE OF RACISM proves libidinal economy and fear of blackness is immaterially and materially true 53 +Bobby Azarian Ph.D. 18, 9/24/18, "Understanding the Racist Brain," Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201809/understanding-the-racist-brain, accessed 10-4-2019, SJCP//JP 54 +The Neuroscience of Racial Bias First of all, how do we know that racial biases actually exist? While some may claim that they have no biases, a clever psychological experiment provides objective evidence supporting the notion that the vast majority of us do. In the implicit bias task, participants are shown words on a computer screen like “happy” and “fear,” which they must categorize as positive or negative. What results have consistently shown is that if a black face is quickly flashed before the words, individuals will be faster to correctly categorize negative words, while the same people will be quicker to correctly categorize positive words when they follow white faces. These troubling findings suggest that over 75 percent of Whites and Asians have an implicit racial bias, which affects how they process information and perceive the social world around them. However, this bias is subconscious and implicit. Whether or not it leads to overtly racist attitudes and behavior depends on an interplay between different brain areas—specifically those that create feelings of fear and promote tribalism, and those that help us regulate and suppress those bad instincts. Neural Pathways Underlying Racism Brain imaging studies have shown that people who display an implicit bias have a stronger electrical response to black or other-race faces in an area of the brain known as the amygdala—a structure responsible for processing emotional stimuli and eliciting a fearful or anxious mental state. An exaggerated amygdala response is part of what creates the sudden visceral or “gut feeling” of being scared. And that feeling of fear has additional psychological effects that promote prejudice. It is well-established that when one feels their welfare is being threatened, they tend to become more tribal in their behavior, and additionally bolster their cultural or national worldviews, since it is those worldviews that make them feel safe. In essence, nationalism and prejudice are knee-jerk responses to anxiety. 55 + 56 +Our intensification of pessimism and negativity allows niggas to create language for themselves to communicate the seemingly uncommunicable response to anti-black liberalism. 57 +Nicholas Brady et al, September 1st 2017, “Wishing Against Hope: The Radical Prospects of Afro-pessimism,” Vitamin Decolonial podcast, https://www.mixcloud.com/Vitamin_D/wishing-against-hope-the-radical-prospects-of-afro-pessimism/, transcribed from audio 6:20 - 33:33) Taja1h 58 +Nicholas Brady: Laughter Yeah, yeah. So, I’m originally from Baltimore. I kind of came to Afropessimism in kind of two different things that were happening to me. One, I was a participant in high school debate, and debate is a kind of weird space. It’s a white-controlled space, as everything was. It was “formally segregated.” It is formally—as in formal, formally though—or informally still segregated. And I kind of came up through these organizations called Urban Debate Leagues which were created as white philanthropist organizations to supposedly take the tools of debate and bring them into the cities so that you can teach the quote-unquote…or not quote-unquote but like what they kind of think of us as kind of urban monkeys, you know, to kind of teach us and to civilize us, in the process. So often times in their grant-writing processes, like, they’ll talk about, you know, the fact that Black people can’t read and write and debate as being a kind of tool to kind of bring them up to speed and kind of take them away from crime or recidivism and other issues. But what they didn’t predict was going to happen was that, by introducing us to debate, that not only would we enjoy the activity, but we would actually excel at it and eventually, become better at it than they are. So, once a lot of people from, in particular, our Urban Debate League—the Baltimore Urban Debate League—moved on to college debate, they—and I say they, because I didn’t really participate that much in college debate, but I just kept my finger on the pulse and we all were friends and I kind of kept in touch with them in that way—as they progressed into college debate, they kind of, I know they eventually came into contact with Wilderson and Sexton’s work because they kind of helped us to give a language for what is the relationship between Black people and these kind of white-controlled institutions. There was a kind of liberal movement at one point in time in debate about saying that you need to make space for Black people, like you need to make space for the way that we talk, you need to make space for our culture, blah blah blah, but even that became kind of not good enough, right? So Black people started exploring kind of the radicalism of their antagonism. Like, why is it that even in a world where Black people can win championships or Black people can become competitively successful, why is it that the institution itself not only remains as antiblack as it started, but why did it actually get worse? Like why did it weaponize itself against Black people as they got better and better at debate, and became better at pushing these white and nonblack debaters better? So I think Wilderson and Sexton’s work kind of helps to clarify that problem, i.e., debate is fundamentally and ontologically antiblack so it cannot integrate Black people into it no matter how many Black people win championships, no matter how good Black people become at it. It can’t actually bring them in. And I think it kind of spoke to, you know what I’m saying, it spoke to…it spoke to our voices. And for myself in college, as I was kind of keeping abreast of what was happening in, kind of, college and high school debate, and coaching, and still staying active, in my own, like, activism on campus, like I went to John’s Hopkins University and that’s an incredibly antiblack institution. I’m from Baltimore, so I have a very, very particular relationship to that institutions because John’s Hopkins owns a lot of property in the city and is generally an oppressive entity for all people who live in Baltimore. They regularly experiment on folks. When I was a kid, my mom…like when she wanted me to not go outside or to run away, like she would tell me, “if you run away, like, the white coats will come and get you”—the white coats being, like, the doctors from John’s Hopkins. You know what I’m saying? So like, you know, parents like kind of almost would like use Hopkins as like a fear tool, because like we know the different things they’ve done to Black people in the city, to their bodies or whatever. So…but I went there because they had this program called the Baltimore scholars program which is essentially a white guilt scholarship program where, if you’re from Baltimore, you get tuition for free, and their tuition is like $50,000 a year and my parents told me, very specifically like “yo, we can’t afford to put you through college, so you better…you have to find a scholarship somehow, someway. So, once I was accepted, I went there and we’re like 2 of the population at the school, so you know, Black people, as we always do, like you kind of create your own internal community given the antagonism and how bad it becomes. But the weird thing that happened my junior year as we were organizing through the Black student union was that the Office for Multicultural Affairs—the organization that houses all of the “cultural organizations”—the Office of Multicultural Affairs became our enemy, right? We had a room in the basement of a dormitory. That was our BSU room. I could go into more detail, I’m just trying to be quick about it. But basically, a long time ago, Black students actually broke into that room and made it their own. Like they stole it, they cultivated it, they made it their own. The walls are painted with murals, like we made it ours. So jumping fifty years into our time, the university decided that they wanted to make that room into a game room. It’s kind of almost like a mini version of gentrification, like Black people made it a hot spot and now the university was like “yo, we want that, we want that, like it’s beautiful. Give it to us. It’s ours.” And the Office of Multicultural Affairs threatened us. Like they were like “you know what, you need to get in line with the university. They want the room. They are going to take the room no matter what you do. So you need to get in line.” And they literally like bought alumni to guilt us to giving the room to the university and they did all of these different things to try to…to try to get us to give it up. And I think in that time, I didn’t have a language to understand like why is there…why is it that the organization that’s supposed to represent us to the university, why is it actually the direct opposite thing, i.e., they actually are the wing or the arm of the university in this situation. And reading Afropessimism was the thing that finally allowed me to understand like, “no, I’m not crazy. No matter how much you say you’re my ally, you are not my ally. No matter how much you say that we are in a coalition together, we are not in a coalition together, right? You are actually my enemy in this situation.” And it allowed for me to name multiculturalism as the problem, multiculturalism as being fundamentally antiblack. So at least in that situation, it made me feel not as crazy. And long story short, you know what I’m saying, Black people, the Black students, we organized, and the room is still ours to this day, because in that moment we decided like no, we are not going to let the Office for Multicultural Affairs play us at all. So we just strong-armed them and we just refused to move. We occupied the room, you know, for a good period of time, and eventually the university just gave up because it was a protracted struggle and they didn’t really want it like that. But that was just, for me, was just like an example of like the different ways that Afropessimism kind of gave me a language to name why liberalism, multiculturalism, diversity were problems for Black people instead of solutions. - Tournament
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,61 @@ 1 +B(1AC)K 2 +Debate is structured to exclude black bodies – Topicality, Antiblack judge predispositions, disclosure theory, and appeals to fairness are all attempts to situate blackness with the impossible demand of being an ethical speaker 3 +Reid-Brinkley 19 (Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, University of Pittsburgh, “Voice Dipped in Black: The Louisville project and the Birth of Black Radical Argument in College Policy Debate”, https://books.google.com/books?id=dLOYDwAAQBAJandpg=PA219andlpg=PA219anddq=voice+dipped+in+black+the+louisville+projectandsource=blandots=Pe2U-sCaUxandsig=ACfU3U2PZ9YK0~-~-6z8FspFEdHUhG0V53Qwandhl=enandsa=Xandved=2ahUKEwjOjpLojtbmAhUnVt8KHUv6BGcQ6AEwA3oECAoQAQ#v=onepageandqandf=false, 2019) CJun 4 +Racially different bodies must perform that difference according to the cultural norms of the debate community. For Black students it can often mean changing their appearance, standardizing language practices, and eschewing their cultural practices. In essence, in order to have an opportunity for achieving in debate competitions Black students must performatively whiten. “Acting Black” is problematic because those performative identities are not recognizable in the normative frame of debate practice. In fact, Blackness signifies a difference, an opposite; a negative differential. It is not that the debate community explicitly operates to exclude people based on race; rather it competitively rejects Black presence, or non-normative nonwhite performance. It is the combination of cultural values, behavioral practices, and the significance of Black flesh that produce barriers to meaningful inclusion. For Afro-pessimists, the group of Black scholars who have popularized the study of anti-Blackness, the Black is juxtaposed against what it means to be master, human, citizen, and subject in a manner that is constitutive of US civil society. The United States is built upon a notion of freedom and liberty that necessitated the negative dialectic of the Slave to define the parameters of the nation-state. This foundational relationship has sutured together US civil society and continues to do so. For theorist Frank Wilderson, the grammar of Black/Slave suffering is marked by accumulation and fungibility (Wilderson 2010, 55-57), a relation “of being owned and traded” (Kelsie 2014, 6). The human’s (white) grammar of suffering is marked by alienation and exploitation. The grammar of Black (Slave) suffering is not recognizable within the frame of human (white) suffering, it can only be misrecognized as alienation and exploitation. For the study of rhetoric, and understanding of the political ontology of the Black as one that is necessarily defined by its status as Slave/object requires that we engage the question of whether or not the Black has the capacity for recognition in the construction of the moment of voice. Watts would agree that the Black does not have speech; that is why the production of voice is only a momentary process, a happening, by which Blacks can seek recognition. For the Black, the body announces itself prior to speech. So it follows that the Black lacks capacity for speech because they approach the speaking moment as a nonrecognizable subject and “positioned as incapacity” by the “modalities” of accumulation and fungibility. For the Afro-pessimists, capacity is made coherent in civil society by a necessary relationship to Black incapacity. Wilderson notes that “white(Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity: without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best” (Wilderson 2010, 45). Not only does the Black lack the same capacity as the white in first approaching the speaking situation, she or he enters the situation as incapacity. The Black must battle with its political ontological condition as a precursor to the process of speaking and let alone the production of voice. If the "happening" of voice depends on a relationality that produces "a public acknowledgment of the ethics of speaking and the emotions of others; the Black is always already relegated to the position of the unethical speaker that must defend and prove itself by seeking recognition from the Human/Subject in civil society (Watts 2001, 185). Further, it necessitates that the Black performatively and argumentatively approach the moment of voice with only the pretense of subjecthood and capacity. That the Black must construct the pretense of being an ethical speaker, while having no subject positioning to do so, requires an inauthentic performance of the Black object as white subject. If rhetorical situations require pretense and inauthenticity then they make unethical speaking the sine qua non of public speech. The Black must mimic the performance of human (white) capacity and becomes bound by the grammar of alienation and exploitation to achieve recognition. In other words, the Black must justify its Blackness or perform itself in a manner consistent with white civil society to even engage in a relational negotiation to produce the moment of voice. Such a practice supersedes and constitutes the ability of the white audience to recognize the Black as an ethical speaker. As rhetoric theorist Amber Kelsie notes, "From an Afro-Pessimist perspective, the problem is not that the Black is 'voiceless: so much as it is that the voice/speech/body of the Black does not resonate. The Slave is always already being attended to by the white Other, but such recognition itself obliterates any possibility of social life for the Slave' (Kelsie 2014, is). Full recognition of the Black is not really possible in the rhetorical situation, for the Black is the incoherence that constitutes the coherence of the Human/ Subject. In other words, the Black cannot speak about Black suffering without their appeals being read through the frame of alienation and exploitation. The grammar of Black suffering remains unrecognizable and thus unacknowledgeable even in the moments where the Black has produced the voiced moment. Given these considerable obstacles, how did the Louisville Project become successful and produce moments of recognition? Considering the team's transformation from one with a persistent losing record to one of the most successful Black debate teams in the history of national policy debate, it is dear this achievement could not have been possible without a communal recognition of Louisville's ethics and affect. Yet in the moments where those negotiations waver or break down, anti-Blackness as a structural antagonism produces insurmountable obstacles for engaging racialized conflict through discussion and deliberation. Amidst concern about the future of Black participation in college policy debate, the Louisville team began asking hard questions about the argumentative and performative choices Black students would need to make in order to be competitively successful. Warner became increasingly and publicly critical of the Urban Debate League (a nonprofit institution designed to increase the race, class, and gender diversity of competitive high school debate practice in the US) as a diversity model for debate. He argued that the Urban Debate League (UDL) project was a farce, that it was not designed to give poor Black students a shot at the highest levels of competition. The lack of successful UDL debaters in national competition at both the high school and college level demonstrated that access to debate alone would not resolve policy debate's diversity problem. "Why? Not because of anything they do, but because the game is rigged against them, who they are, and what the community asks them to become to achieve 'success" (Warner 2005). Warner moved away from his previous support for and work with UDLs, taking a different path of engaging structural racism in competitive debate. In addition to an aggressive mass recruitment of UDL students and Black students from within the university, the debate team was reconstructed with a redefined purpose for continued participation in competitive policy debate. Louisville questioned competitive debate's exclusive focus on government policy and its limited solutions to sociopolitical problems, developing alternative forms or styles through which to make argument. Debate is generally an oral, heavily evidence-based contest (in terms of number of average quotations from academic sources used in a debate), where people speak quickly in order to make as many arguments as possible. Moving beyond the conventional form by engaging in storytelling, the use of poetry, video footage, video games, music, hip-hop, and theater, Louisville began experimenting with the performative elements of debate speechmaking to supplement the traditional use of speed and hyper-technical argumentation. They introduced new ways of making arguments about public policy and public deliberation around the central political and social issues of our times. As the project developed, the debate community was largely unsupportive of Louisville's experimentation with debate norms. Louisville's teams found it difficult to persuade many judges to vote for them, resulting in persistent losses at national tournaments. Their attempts at innovation resulted in angry verbal confrontations, broken friendships, and group segregations within the policy debate community. Accusations including "Klan member; "Plantation owner; and "Uncle Toms" on one side and "anti-intellectuals; "playing the race card; and "irrational" on the other seem to indicate that the controversy surrounding the Louisville Project reached a boiling point (Hoe 2005). For many in the policy debate community, Louisville's confrontational rhetoric and the dialectical nature of debate competition hurt attempts to build coalitions between the Louisville Project and others in the debate community (Blair 2004). As former director of forensics at Illinois State University, Joseph Zompetti, notes, the Louisville style of debating has resulted in "frustrations, anxiety, resistance, and backlash" (2004a). Allan Louden, former Director of Debate at Wake Forest University, refers to the conflict as a "schism" (2004). Jeff Parcher, former debate coach at Georgetown University, argues that this "schism" makes the future of debate "pessimistic." Parcher notes further that while "alliances" in debate have always existed, they have reached a new level of "intensity" one that he has never seen before in the debate community (Parcher 2004, 89-91). In the summer of 2003, after three years of facing public censure and competitive failure, with the addition of Assistant Coach Darryl Burch, the Louisville team developed a foundational theme to encompass their criticism of traditional debate practice: "you can't change the state, but you can change the state of debate" (interview, July 4, 2012). The team began to work in earnest to develop the parameters of what would later be called the Louisville Project, and one team unit—comprised of members Elizabeth "Liz" Jones and LaTonia "Tonia" Green—were poised for what would become an unexpectedly successful year. They determined that debate participation should have a purpose and theirs would be to increase meaningful Black participation in debate. Rather than taking on white debate norms, the Louisville debaters resist attempts to capture and purify their colored bodies, instead choosing to (re)mark their visibility. For the Black body in the speech situation, it need not necessarily be doing anything for it to signify. The Black body is already marked, made visible and meaningful in public spaces. Yet simultaneously, the Louisville debaters perform Blackness doing something to draw attention to the body. It is in the doing of Blackness that the reading of the Black body as threatening and criminal is exacerbated from potential to probable threat. In con-temporary America, the Blacks who overtly perform Blackness are the "uppity niggers" that must be feared because they neither kowtow fearfully in the face of whiteness nor are they willing to limit the performance of their Blackness for white people/audiences' comfort. Louisville performs Blackness in white spaces, rejecting integrationist or assimilationist performances, as a necessary means of renegotiating the ethical space of tournament competition dominated by anti-Blackness and white privilege. During their speeches, Jones and Green often turn to speak accusatorily at their opponents, which involved neck rolling, a pushing forward of the body in the direction of the opponent, using staccato hand gestures, and eye-rolling—all behaviors that are often identified as "Black women's attitude." It is important to note that nationally competitive debaters often display aggressive personality traits in verbal competition as a marker of success. Such aggressiveness can be delivered in speeches through choices in vocabulary, tone, emphasis on words, speech volume, body movement, and ad hominem attacks. However, as noted, when debating with a non-normative body, norms are applied differently. Even if aggressive speech is normative in debate, when Jones and Green exhibit such typical debating style, they are stereotyped as loud and aggressive. Green provides an excellent example of this performative "attitude" in an elimination round against Wake Forest University at the 2004 CEDA Nationals championship tournament. During the cross-examination period following Green's speech, the opponent attempted to concisely define a particular argument Green made during the speech in order to ask a question. He interrupted Green's explanation, although she pushed past his attempt to stop her from speaking. Her opponent succeeded in stemming the flow of words, wanting to move on to some other question. Green conceded, but note the following exchange as captured on video: Green: "Well, I'm trying to explain to you so that you can ... " Opponent indicates with a statement that he has a different question that he would like to ask.' Green: "Okay, well, go ahead. Cuz it seems like you not getting it anyway. So, ask me something..." Opponent concedes that he may not understand, but his tone implies that this is more Green's fault than his own. Green: "You're not, so ask me something else" Unintelligible response from the opponent as Green continues to interrupt him. Green: "Ask me something else (Green 2004b) Green is standing at a podium. The podium is table length and above waist high. She leans on one elbow tilting her body away from her opponent, slightly facing him, mindful of the judges and the audience seated in front of them. Green's hands move in a dismissive manner, indicated by quick shakes of the hand, simultaneous with a twisting of the wrist and periodic dropping of her hand on the table in frustration or irritation. She is exasperated with her opponent's mischaracterization of her arguments. She is giving him attitude, without being rude, although clearly bordering on it. Her dismissal of him is comedic to the large representation of people of color in the audience who were watching this historic debate. Her clipped, brusque tone clearly indicates frustration, but also the sense arises that she finds him somehow unworthy. Green looks away from him during most of the interaction, occasionally giving him the side-eye, sometimes accompanied by eye-rolling and sighs of disapproval. She willingly allows him to mischaracterize her argument without correcting it, and her tone indicates that he is deserving of such inconsideration. Green revises the normative debate practice of rhetorically dominating one's opponent with Black girl style, a rhetorical and bodily performance designed to turn hostile white places into Black girl spaces. Such overt presenting of Black femininity in the cold and austere spaces of competition in college classrooms is an act of disrupting the sonorous normality of both policy debate and civil society. That this interchange is occurring between a young Black woman and a young white man (from a prominent, private university), adds to the comedic strength of Green's rhetorical strategy in the cross-examination. Because it contrasts the stereotypical dynamic, Green's dismissiveness of a debater whose privilege normally protected him from such interaction is read as amusing, as evidenced by the laughter from the audience. Cross-examination, one of the few times debaters directly address each other, provides an opportunity to clarify and gain information that can be used to strengthen one's position during the following speeches. After each of the constructive speeches the opposing team is given three minutes to question the last speaker. It is particularly within these periods that debaters can be most aggressive. Cross-examination can often be a hostile process, with each participant attempting to gain as much important information as possible while avoiding disclosures that might hurt their argument. Hostility in cross-examination can be a strategic tool of intimidation and dismissal. In each of the Louisville debates that I analyzed for this chapter, cross-examination became a unique space through which the Louisville debaters signified on common performative practices in debate. Cross-examination, one of the few times debaters directly address each other, provides an opportunity to clarify and gain information that can be used to strengthen one's position during the following speeches. After each of the constructive speeches the opposing team is given three minutes to question the last speaker. It is particularly within these periods that debaters can be most aggressive. Cross-examination can often be a hostile process, with each participant attempting to gain as much important information as possible while avoiding disclosures that might hurt their argument. Hostility in cross-examination can be a strategic tool of intimidation and dismissal. In each of the Louisville debates that I analyzed for this chapter, cross-examination became a unique space through which the Louisville debaters signified on common performative practices in debate. Jones's and Green's behavior, while disconcerting to majority white audiences out-side of debate, is still representative of the aggressive behavior the community has engaged in for years. A speaker's aggression and assertiveness, in traditional debate, are effective appeals to white authority. Yet the performance of such behavior, by Black women, is often stereotyped as inappropriate. Their behavior, as defined by the common practices of the policy debate community, should be recognizable and thus acceptable to the majority white and male audience. Yet it is clear that those who encountered this team often seemed to exhibit a level of fear or discomfort with Jones's and Green's performance as opposed to admiration and respect, had they presented as a normative white male. Despite Jones's and Green's repetition of some traditional styles of competition, their Blackened version of normative debate style is often read as disruptive. In as much as Jones and Green perform Black girl attitude, as read by their majority white audience, the more difficult it becomes to build an ethical relationship to the politics of recognition. The problem for Louisville is appeal to Black authority in a space built on appeals to white authority. Using performative Black femininity is a tactic that can elevate anxiety and become an obstacle in building ethical relations. These are forced interactions through competition, Louisville's tactic of making structural racism a part of the dis-course of competition rather than appealing to formal, institutional channels produces a demand for recognition. Indeed, as the following sections detail, the Louisville Project disrupted normative debate practice in an effort to expose anti-Blackness as constitutive of the tradition of debate itself. 5 + 6 + 7 +And when George Floyd screams MAMA, and I CAN’T BREATHE his communication is understood but results and his death. When Dred Scott articulates he is deserving of freedom his agential capacity is denied. The form of communicative registers opens blackness to gratuitous violence in civil society. 8 +Gillespie 17 – Jon Gillespie is a graduate student for the University of California, Irvine, Comparative Literature, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, Fall 2017, https://www.academia.edu/34839874/On_the_Prospect_of_Weaponized_Death 9 +- brackets in original 10 +Black life is lived in a white hyper-reality. By this I mean, black life is lived inside a constituted white fiction which concretizes itself as fact. Black life is a life lived in non-existence; blackness “exists” as a symbol of death that is, but is not. Blackness “exists” only insofar as White Being structures it onto a map of anti-black violence.4 Achille Mbembe corroborates this in his Critique of Black Reason, stating: Racism consists, most of all, in substituting what is with something else, with another reality. It has the power to distort the real and to fix affect, but it is also a form of psychic derangement, the mechanism through which the repressed suddenly surfaces. When the racist sees the Black person, he does not see that the Black person is not there, does not exist, and is just a sign of a pathological fixation on the absence of a relationship. We must therefore consider race as being both beside and beyond being.5 The reality that replaces that which is a white hyper-reality. This white hyperrealism fixes blackness as “a sign of a pathological fixation.” White hyper-realism is the paradigm whereby consciousness is unable to distinguish between the fictions created by White Being and the Real. It is this fact that permits black death to be subsumed in simulations by each and every (analytic) encounter with Whiteness and the World. Questions like, “Can the Black suffer?” and “Is it capable for the Black to be wronged?” arise due to the inability to access a grammar of suffering to communicate a harm that has never ended, a harm that can never end without ending the World itself. It is for this reason that viral videos of black death, more than opening the possibility for liberal notions of justice, seem to suture the relationship between the mythical and the real that perpetuates itself through the reification of black trauma. Black death, more than deconstructing the ontics of the Human, seems to extend its hyper-reality. Black death makes it harder to distinguish white fictions from any sense of real harm being done to human flesh. The Black is meant to experience its death over and over and over again; and the World itself recycles all its fictions-as-the-Real. Put differently, the White World subjects the Black to perpetual, gratuitous violence, and then uses that violence as evidence to further suggest that the Black is not Human. For how can a Human endure such a thing? The experience of gratuitous violence secures the semiotics of the white hyper-reality. White Disneyland stays intact. Blackness exists at the nexus of fact and fiction, possibility and (non)value, inclusion and exclusion. Blackness is trapped even in saying it’s trapped because the “trapped-ness” of the Black extends to locations where the diction and syntax of White “words don’t go.”6 The Black does not have the grammar to speak against where and how it is trapped since Blackness can only articulate itself through the semiotics of Whiteness. That White Being continues to center black death as the matrix of possibility for its hyper-realist structure indexes the promise of death insofar that White Being is promised futurity. The Black was rendered fungible through the conjunction of the political and the libidinal economy of the anti-Black world. Blackness gave birth to the commodity and the economy of signification that structures the cartography of the Human’s coordinates. This could be said to be a still birth, insofar as the nature of Black life in a white hyper-reality is conducted on a plane that guarantees natal alienation, social, and ontological death. The Black body lives to die; the specter of death shadows it everywhere. What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our orderspecific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)…”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity. 11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? 11 + 12 +Thus, I take this round hostage! Embrace a symbolic extinction, We must engage in undercommon communication that weaponizes our deaths to disrupts the semiotics of the anti-black world. To blacken the debate space it is important to note that no black liberation happens through the methods they will talk about, but only by being parasitic on the spaces of optimism to end the world. 13 +Gillespie 2 (John Gillespie, Undergraduate Researcher and Debater at Towson University, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death,” Propter Nos, Volume 2: Issue 1, Insurgency / Exhaustion, Fall 2017) B1ACK ZD 14 + 15 +- brackets in original 16 +What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our order- specific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)...”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 7 If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity.11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory that prescribes solutions to the analysis in the conclusion of their work. However, one finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a prophetic vision, a pulsing pessimist hope for the “end of the World.” For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way out is an end to the White World. White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only through black vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the spectacle of Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 8 gratuitous freedom is made visible. It is somewhere in this structural antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility of the World, and on the other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its disorientation, that we found the language to say the unsayable and do the undoable. As Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular present non-Black academics with more than an intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism that we don’t talk about...which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s calling for the end of the world...it wants the death of everyone else in the same way that we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through Afro- Pessimism and be who one was on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-Pessimism. If we are engaging in a war in which the symbolic value, the semiotics of this World itself, positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of diversity, of life itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a space where “words don’t go”—a form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the conversation is blackened, and the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to excavate insurgent dictions still lost in the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is death personified, then what might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we recognized the inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness of that death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard writes, “When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer?”19 Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics used by those who are facing globalized White Being with asymmetrical technologies of terror, violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to rupture the system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one to the “desert of the Black Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon the semiotic system.20 Black terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates the death embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable the possibility of a radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized onto- epistemic deployment of violence, and if violent insurgency is necessary, then the decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to counter the terror of White Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood as counter-terror terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life. We Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 9 only have the power to end the World through death. As Baudrillard writes, “The radical difference is that the terrorist, while they have at their disposal weapons that are the system’s own, possess a further lethal weapon: their own deaths.”21 The United States has an international military force, a storehouse of nuclear arms, and the capacity, within their police state alone, to “terrorize” not just one block in Baltimore, but the whole entire world. Black terrorism is what happens when we heed the Afro-Pessimist call that “A living death is as much a death as it is a living,”22 it is what happens when we take seriously the unsayable in Afro-Pessimism. Black Terrorism is (non)ontological fugitivity that disavows any need to focus on social life—black terrorism steals black death itself from White Being. It is for this reason that Baudrillard speaks to his own White Being and the specter of terror when he says: When Western culture sees all of its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very worst way. Our death is an extinction, an annihilation. Herein lies our poverty. When a singularity throws its own death into the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, its dies its own natural death. This is an immense game of double or quits. In committing suicide, the singularity suicides the other at the same time— we might say that the terrorist acts literally ‘suicided’ the West. A death for a death, then, but transfigured by the symbolic stakes. ‘We have already devastated our world, what more do you want?’ says Muray. But precisely, we have devastated this world, it still has to be destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not at all the same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going to be able to do the second.23 We are the others. Tasked with the (un)fortunate task of ending White hyper-realism, the White World, and White Being. Well aware that if White Fascism continues the project of black annihilation, the only choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to. But, ultimately, we must remember the words of Huey Newton: “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”24 In the age of Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon.25 The disavowal of the lives of refugees is White Being attempting to reconcile the “Nation- State” simulation with the free track and flow of bodies it’s been attempting to murder; the deportation of undocumented immigrants in conjunction with the materialization of borders is White Being attempting to secure its linguistic and economic integrity; the rise of the private prison and the militarization of the police force is White Being attempting to innovate the system of enslavement and necropolitics for the 21st Century; the plundering of indigenous land and bodies is White Being attempting to finish off the project of genocide; the disregard for the Earth is White Being ensuring the Anthropocene will also be the Apocalypse. Trump is a reinvigoration, a call to arms, for White Being, and White Being can only be “destroyed symbolically.” Black terrorism transfigures the symbolic stakes because it Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 10 steals away that condition of White Being’s possibility in a kind of fugitivity that is a zero-transformation into Blackness. This being said, we all know that the only thing that follows the absolute loss of hope is this Black Spring, this Neo-Fanonian violence, this blackened terroristic situational transfer. In Baudrillard’s words, in the Age of Trump, let us remember the gift of immorality, “Terrorism is immoral. The World Trade Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself immoral. So, let us be immoral...”26l/ 17 + 18 + 19 +The role of the ballot is to refuse spaces like debate to deconstruct structures of antiblackness. Your ballot will sign off on the deconstruction of debate as a form of implosive terror 20 +- offense links back by explaining how you refuse antiblackness and whiteness 21 +- prefiat offense outweighs, post fiat is white shit 22 +- weigh by who most effectively refuses antiblackness 23 +- aff comes before nonblack theory 24 +King 17 Tiffany Lethabo King, Spring 2017, “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight. Source: Critical Ethnic Studies, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162. Recut B1ACK ZD 25 +Within Native feminist theorizing, ethnographic refusal can be traced to Audra Simpson’s 2007 article, “On Ethnographic Refusal.” In this seminal work, Simpson reflects on and gains inspiration from the tradition of refusal practiced by the people of Kahnawake.14 Simpson shares that Kahnawake refusals are at the core and spirit of her own ethnographic and ethical practices of refusal. I was interested in the larger picture, in the discursive, material and moral territory that was simultaneously historical and contemporary (this “national” space) and the ways in which Kahnawakero:non, the “people of Kahnawake,” had refused the authority of the state at almost every turn. The ways in which their formation of the initial membership code (now replaced by a lineage code and board of elders to implement the code and determine cases) was refused; the ways in which their interactions with border guards at the international boundary line were predicated upon a refusal; how refusal worked in everyday encounters to enunciate repeatedly to ourselves and to outsiders that “this is who we are, this is who you are, these are my rights.”15 Because Simpson was concerned with applying the political and everyday modes of Kahnawake refusal, she attended to the “collective limit” established by her and her Kahnawake participants.16 The collective limit was relationally and ethically determined by what was shared but more importantly by what was not shared. Simpson’s ability to discern the collective limit could only be achieved through a form of relational knowledge production that regards and cares for the other. Simpson recounts how one of her participants forced her to recognize a collective limit. Approaching and then arriving at the limit, Simpson experiences the following: And although I pushed him, hoping that there might be something explicit said from the space of his exclusion— or more explicit than he gave me— it was enough that he said what he said. “Enough” is certainly enough. “Enough,” I realised, was when I reached the limit of my own return and our collective arrival. Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why? And “enough” was when they shut down (or told me to turn off the recorder), or told me outright funny things like “nobody seems to know”— when everybody does know and talks about it all the time. Dominion then has to be exercised over these representations, and that was determined when enough was said. The ethnographic limit then, was reached not just when it would cause harm (or extreme discomfort)— the limit was arrived at when the representation would bite all of us and compromise the representational territory that we have gained for ourselves in the past 100 years.17 Extending her discussion of ethnographic refusal beyond the bounds of ethnographic concerns, Simpson also ponders whether this enactment of refusal can be applied to theoretical work. Simpson outright poses a question: “What is theoretically generative about these refusals?”18 The question that Simpson asks in 2007 is clarified by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in the 2014 essay “R- Words: Refusing Research.” Arguing that modes of refusal extended into the theoretical and methodological terrains of knowledge production are productive and necessary, Tuck and Yang state: For the purposes of our discussion, the most important insight to draw from Simpson’s article is her emphasis that refusals are not subtractive, but are theoretically generative, expansive. Refusal is not just a “no,” but a redirection to ideas otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned. Unlike a settler colonial configuration of knowledge that is petulantly exasperated and resentful of limits, a methodology of refusal regards limits on knowledge as productive, as indeed a good thing.19 In line with Simpson’s intervention, Tuck and Yang posit that “refusal itself could be developed into both method and theory.”20 For Tuck and Yang, a generative practice of refusal and a decolonial and abolitionist tradition is making Western thought “turn back upon itself as settler colonial knowledge, as opposed to universal, liberal, or neutral knowledge without horizon.”21 In fact, the coauthors suggest “making the settler colonial metanarrative the object of . . . research.”22 What this move effectively does is question the uninterrogated assumptions and exposes the violent particularities of the metanarrative. Scrutiny as a practice of refusal also slows down or perhaps halts the momentum of the machinery that allows, as Tuck and Yang argue, “knowledge to facilitate interdictions on Indigenous and Black life.”23erday Louisville felt the love and it was a beautiful thing, so thank you guys for having me and let’s keep fighting for justice. 26 +NIGGA TIME 27 +And, it is your job to guarantee me a win, this is not vote for me because I'm black but rather an aff ballot is key to confront antiblackness 28 +a Nonblacks should not be rewarded for their relationship to blackness 29 +Brady and Murillo 14 2014 Nicholas and John, “Black Imperative: A Forum on Solidarity in the Age of Coalition,” January 26, 2014, http://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/black-imperative-a-forum-on-solidarity-in-the-age-of-coalition/, John Murillo III is a PhD student in the English department at Brown University, and a graduate of the University of California, Irvine, with bachelor’s degrees in Cognitive Science and English. His research interests are broad, and include extensive engagements with and within: Black Studies–particularly Afro-Pessimism–Narrative Theory; Theoretical Physics; Astrophysics; Cosmology; and Neuroscience. Nicholas Brady is an activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He was also a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine Culture and Theory program. 30 +“Surrender to blackness.” A grammatical imperative. Grammatical because syntactically it marks a command to or demand of a generalized addressee: “(Everyone) surrender to blackness.” Grammatical because the black flesh scarred and tattooed by these illegible hieroglyphics enunciates at the level of symbolic and ontological world orders: “Surrender to blackness” is a command at the level of the foundations of thought and being themselves; grammatical. Imperative because if there is any hope for a revolutionary praxis along any lines—race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability—it must centralize, which is to say look in the face of, which is to say begin to the work of real love for, the blackness preposition which “an authentic upheaval might be born.” #BlackPowerYellowPeril failed to recognize this imperative as legible, let alone heed and meet its command/demand. Created by Suey Park (@suey_park), the hashtag sought to draw from and build upon the accomplishments of Black womyn activists on twitter and tumblr who have long mobilized to generate productive and revolutionary interjections into the world’s violently antiblack discourses (see, for example, #solidarityisforwhitewomen, and #blackmaleprivilege) through extended, communal commentary, usually in direct opposition to the censoring strictures of any kind of respectability politics. Discussions about and within the hashtag can be found here, here, here, here(though this is very hasty, a bit shortsighted, and still not doing much more than glancing at, as opposed to engaging blackness), and here. But broadly, the intentions of the hashtag are founded upon a belief in the possibility of solidarity/coalition politics between Blacks and Asians, seeking to challenge persistent “tensions” between the communities for the sake of a common struggle against ‘white supremacy.’ For those nonblack participants, the drive toward solidarity represents a purely innocent and unquestioned, unquestionable, desire. All critiques of Asian antiblackness are rendered as derailing the move toward solidarity, for they are to bring up the obvious – clearly we are all human, we make mistakes, but to continuously bring up the “mistakes” and never “move on” is to foreclose the possibility of solidarity. And what a wonderful thing the blacks of the conversation were foreclosing – this solidarity thing. What a wonderful thing others were offering to us and we simply would not take. And yet, the unthought question remains: have you truly earned the right to act in solidarity, to form solidarity, to even believe in solidarity? And what is this solidarity thing we all hold near and dear to our hearts? Have we ever experienced it or do we simply have images we have transformed into memories of a solidarity that never existed? I know Black people and Asian people have worked together in the past, but have we ever formed a solid whole? And who is to blame for the fact that we have never had solidarity? The hashtag implies that both “sides” play an equal part in the failure to form solidarity. In the face of this, confessing our sins to each other forms the moment where we can form emotional bonds: “see, you were as racist as I, and how unfortunate it is that we let old whitey come between us. Never again will whitey make us part.” This is the logic behind much of the Asian confessing – white supremacy duped us into being antiblack racists – and also fed into the backlash aimed at blacks – “stop playing oppression olympics, that’s what whitey wants.” It must be foregrounded here that antiblackness cannot be simplified as “anti-black racism” and it is a singularity with no equivalent force – “anti-Asian” racism is not the flipside of antiblackness nor is orientalism or islamophobia. Antiblackness predates white supremacy by at least 300 years (and much more than that depending on how we trace our history) and we can understand antiblackness as the general tethering of the very concept of life to the ontological and unspeakable, unthinkable force of black death. That statement is a place to begin to define antiblackness, it is not the end for this force weaves itself in infinite variety throughout all corners of the globe, forming globe into world. This is not simply about the little racist microaggressions that people listed in their tweets, this is about a global force that the world – not simply whites – bond over and form their lives inside of and through. What #BlackPowerYellowPeril revealed, however, is that the underside of coalition politics remains a violent and virulent antiblackness. As blacks— John Murillo III (@writedarkmatter), New Black School (@newblackschool), Nicholas Brady (@nubluez_nick), and others—raised questions and comments in the spirit of that singular imperative—“Surrender to blackness”—antiblackness emerged in the violence of the response levied against it; one need only visit the hashtag to bear witness. From outright refusals to engage the antiblackness central to the histories and politics of nonblack communities of color, to denials of the foundational, global, and singular nature of antiblackness, and to the repeated calls to police and remove this disruptive blackness and its imperative from the conversation, antiblackness exploded onto the scene. All of this in the name of “coalition.” This is because “coalition” politics and possibilities are fetishized, not loved. The fetish denies the necessary recognition of antiblackness at coalition’s heart, and that antiblackness left unattended renders the imperative illegible. It is a fetishization, then, of antiblackness. The fetish object at the heart of the coalition has always been black flesh – a fetishization where pleasure and terror meet to create the bonds of solidarity people so desire. Here, we open a forum on how the hashtag embodies this fetish, the distinction between fetish and love that must be made in excess of the hashtag and ones like it, and the absolute imperativeness of the imperative. Instead of fetishizing the object, you must surrender to blackness. 31 +b Black debaters are at a structural disadvantaged and unfairness is good- 32 +Warren 11 (Warren Waren University of Central Florida, Orlando, Using Monopoly to Introduce Concepts of Race and Ethnic Relations The Journal of Effective Teaching, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2011, 28-35) 33 +Undergraduate students often enter our classrooms convinced that the battles of the Civil Rights Era solved the issue of race in America. They are generally unacquainted with the long history of race in the United States and almost universally underestimate the structural forces which carry racial disparities into their new century. As sociologists and teachers, it is our responsibility to tell that story and explain those forces. Our new challenge is: How do we teach students the extent of racism in America when, from their point of view, the problem of the color-line has been solved? One option is to use a game. Sociologists have used games or simulations to spark the sociological imagination (Dorn, 1989; Jessup, 2001; Fisher 2008), to stimulate critical thinking (Pence 2009), and to introduce social stratification (Ender, 2004; Waldner and Kinney, 1999). When students from relatively privileged backgrounds “experience” a temporary bout of unfairness in a simulated game, it creates the opportunity to change their perspective (Coghlan and Huggins, 2004; Haddad and Lieberman, 2002). The injustice of the situation, if directly connected to broader theory, can lessen a student’s social distance from marginalized groups. A game may help a student to understand some of the previously inexplicable attitudes and behaviors of actors on either side of a power rela- tionship. Also, as this paper demonstrates, a properly constructed simulation can give the student a sense of the structural nature and lasting legacy of racial discrimination—a fuller sense of the “history and biography” of race in the United States (Mills, 1959). The great advantage of a game is that it is a completely controlled environment—there are no unexplained variables. In fairness to all the players, all rules are explicitly stated at the outset of game play and apply to all players equally (Waldner and Kinney, 1999). Ordinarily, in a competitive game this assumption of fairness supports an ideology of individualism. However, a pedagogical game is concerned with learning, not winning. In order to disentangle a complicated issue, the instructor may purposefully introduce inequality into an otherwise “just” world. Again, because all rules are explicit (even unfair ones), the problem exists in the game without confounding effects. This simplification allows students to easily focus on the nature and development of the problem. By extension, it is hoped that the game encourages students to reassess similar problems in the real world. Use of Pedagogical Games Dorn (1989) identifies multiple criteria for games or simulations to be effective in the classroom as pedagogical tools. He argues the games must: reflect reality; motivate students through "experience"; develop awareness of personal values through moral and ethical implications of the game; connect abstract concepts with concrete experiences; create a shared experience from which the students can draw; offer a form of debriefing to both address emotional issues and to connect theory to experiences. In the technique I describe below, I try to incorporate these ideas with Straus’ (1986) emphasis on simplicity for in-class games. In teaching and learning, the goal of simulation is the “experience” itself. Jessup (2001) argues that simulation should be the “experiential anchor for the elaboration of conceptual tools” (p.108). Therefore, this game is created to offer a chance for relatively privileged students to experience the unfairness of structural inequality. After temporary exposure to an analog of racial discrimination, students with no prior familiarity of racial discrimination will have a deeper understanding of the effects of racism on many levels. Pedagogical games are used to challenge our assumptions about how the world works (Waldner and Kinney, 1999). For example, the basic assumption of competitive games is fairness. This assumes that the world is fair (i.e., a meritocracy) and that individual effort or talent is the main factor in success (i.e., an ideology of individualism akin to Ross’ (1977) fundamental attribution error). In competitive games therefore, groups are treated equally and the best players win. But a pedagogical game may challenge the assumption of fairness directly by having structural inequality built into the game. The experience of a good player losing an unfair game creates cognitive dissonance—that cognitive dissonance is our teaching moment. I assume that students as game players can easily identify games that are “unfair” based on unequal outcomes for equivalent behavior. As a peda gogical tool, I want it to be relatively easy for them to spot the explicit rules which cause the inequality. 34 + 35 + 36 + 37 +Black Time 38 +Fairness is what the white cops want at protests, it’s what congress wants when black families are grappling with the death of a loved one by the state, it’s what massa wants when the slave seeks agency, it’s what you nonblacks in debate want when engagement is not given to you like a cookie 39 +Wilderson 2008 40 +Frank B., Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid South End Press, pg. 406-411 41 +Just two years ago, in December of 1999, I'd written a letter and stuffed it, late one night, in the faculty mailboxes. It began with what must have appeared to the faculty's confused eyes as a red herring. It spoke not about my excruciating encounters with them, but began, instead, out of left field by discussing the plight of two students whose troubles with the College had been the topic of recent debate. Reading of Sonia Rodriguez's and Selma Thornton's troubles with the Student Senate and its White liberal adviser Tim Harold reawakened my disdain for Cabrillo as an institution and for the English Division as one of its flagship entities. I then went on to explain how Selma and Sonia had resigned their posts in the Student Senate in protest over Harold's decision not to allow thirty students of color to have funds to travel to a conference on race at Hartnell College. Instead, Harold spent the money on T-shirts. He had also put the sign-up sheet for the conference not in the Student Center, but in some obscure location where it would never be found thus sabotaging the excursion further. This seemed like a trivial enough matter, but it compounded the hurt and sense of isolation and rebuke which so many Black and Latino students felt at Cabrillo but could not name. I felt a piqued kinship with their unspeakable pain and used the rare moment of it having turned into a tangible event as a way into what I wanted to say to the faculty and administration...and to Alice. In defense of his actions, and as a way of indicating the absurdity of Selma and Sonia's objections, Harold issued a public statement in which he did not comment (or at least the newspaper did not report his comments) on his funding priorities; rather, he simply said "The sign-up sheet was posted for a week, the same way we treat any workshop." To this, I wrote: Whereas Selma Thornton attempts an institutional analysis of the Student Senate by way of a critique of Tim Harold and his practices, Harold responds with a ready made institutional defense and, later in the article, a defense of his integrity (a personalized response to an institutional analysis). He brings the scale of abstraction back down to the level most comfortable for White people: the individual and the uncontextualized realm of fair play. It's the White person's safety zone. I'm a good person, I'm a fair person, I treat everyone equally, the rules apply to everyone. Thornton and Rodriguez's comments don't indict Harold for being a "good" person, they indict him for being White: a way of being in the world which legitimates institutional practices (practices which Thornton and Rodriguez object to) accepts, and promotes, them as timeless—without origin, consequence, interest, or allegiance—natural and inevitable. "The sign-up sheet was posted for a week, the same way we treat any workshop." The whole idea that we treat everyone equally is only slightly more odious than the discussion or how we can treat everyone equally; because the problem is neither the practice nor the debates surrounding it, but the fact that White people can come together and wield enough institutional power to constitute a "We." "We" in the Student Senate, "We" in Aptos, "We" in Santa Cruz, "We" in the English department, "We" in the boardrooms. "We" are fair and balanced is as odious as "We" are in control—they are derivations of the same expression: "We" are the police. The claim of "balance and fair play" forecloses upon, not only the modest argument that the practices of the Cabrillo Student Senate are racist and illegitimate, but it also forecloses upon the more extended, comprehensive, and antagonistic argument that Cabrillo itself is racist and illegitimate. And what do we mean by Cabrillo? The White people who constitute its fantasies of pleasure and its discourse of legitimacy. The generous "We." So, let's bust "We" wide open and start at the end: White people are guilty until proven innocent. Fuck the compositional moves of substantiation and supporting evidence: I was at a conference in West Oakland last week where a thousand Black folks substantiated it a thousand different ways. You're free to go to West Oakland, find them, talk to them, get all the proof you need. You can drive three hours to the mountains, so you sure as hell can cut the time in half and drive to the inner city. Knock on any door. Anyone who knows 20 to 30 Black folks, intimately—and if you don't know 12 then you're not living in America, you're living in White America—knows the statement to be true. White people are guilty until proven innocent. Whites are guilty of being friends with each other, of standing up for their rights, of pledging allegiance to the flag, of reproducing concepts like fairness, meritocracy, balance, standards, norms, harmony between the races. Most of all. Whites are guilty of wanting stability and reform. White people, like Mr. Harold and those in the English Division, are guilty of asking themselves the question. How can we maintain the maximum amount of order (liberals at Cabrillo use euphemisms like peace, harmony, stability), with the minimum amount of change, while presenting ourselves—if but only to ourselves—as having the best of all possible intentions. Good people. Good intentions. White people are the only species, human or otherwise, capable of transforming the dross of good intentions into the gold of grand intentions, and naming it "change." ...These passive revolutions, fire and brimstone conflicts over which institutional reform is better than the other one, provide a smoke screen—a diversionary play of interlocutions—that keep real and necessary antagonisms at bay. White people are thus able to go home each night, perhaps a little wounded, but feeling better for having made Cabrillo a better place...for everyone... Before such hubris at high places makes us all a little too giddy, let me offer a cautionary note: it's scientifically impossible to manufacture shinola out of shit. But White liberals keep on trying and end up spending a lifetime not knowing shit from shinola. Because White people love their jobs, they love their institutions, they love their country, most of all they love each other. And every Black or Brown body that doesn't love the things you love is a threat to your love for each other. A threat to your fantasy space, your terrain of shared pleasures. Passive revolutions have a way of incorporating Black and Brown bodies to either term of the debate. What choice does one have? The third (possible, but always unspoken) term of the debate, White people are guilty of structuring debates which reproduce the institution and the institution reproduces America and America is always and everywhere a bad thing this term is never on the table, because the level of abstraction is too high for White liberals. They've got too much at stake: their friends, their family, their way of life. Let's keep it all at eye level, where whites can keep an eye on everything. So the Black body is incorporated. Because to be unincorporated is to say that what White liberals find valuable I have no use for. This, of course, is anti-institutional and shows a lack of breeding, not to mention a lack of gratitude for all the noblesse oblige which has been extended to the person of color to begin with. "We will incorporate colored folks into our fold, whenever possible and at our own pace, provided they're team players, speak highly of us, pretend to care what we're thinking, are highly qualified, blah, blah, blah...but, and this is key, we won't entertain the rancor which shits on our fantasy space. We've killed too many Indians, worked too many Chinese and Chicano fingers to the bone, set in motion the incarcerated genocide of too many Black folks, and we've spent too much time at the beach, or in our gardens, or hiking in the woods, or patting each other on the literary back, or teaching Shakespeare and the Greeks, or drinking together to honor our dead at retirement parties ("Hell, Jerry White let's throw a party for Joe White and Jane White who gave Cabrillo the best White years of their silly White lives, that we might all continue to do the same White thing." "Sounds good to me, Jack White. Say, you're a genius! Did you think of this party idea all on your own?" "No, Jerry White, we've been doing it for years, makes us feel important. Without these parties we might actually be confronted by our political impotence, our collective spinelessness, our insatiable appetite for gossip and administrative minutia, our fear of a Black Nation, our lack of will." "Whew! Jack White, we sound pathetic. We'd better throw that party pronto!" "White you are, Jerry." "Jack White, you old fart, you, you're still a genius, heh, heh, heh.") too much time White-bonding in an effort to forget how hard we killed and to forget how many bones we walk across each day just to get from our bedrooms to Cabrillo...too, too much for one of you coloreds to come in here and be so ungrateful as to tell us the very terms of our precious debates are specious." But specious they are, as evidenced by recent uproar in the Adjunct vs. Minority Hire debates, or whether or not English 100 students should be "normed." The very terms of the debates suture discussions around White entitlement, when White entitlement is an odious idea. Whites are entitled to betray other Whites, nothing else... Beyond that you're not entitled to anything. So how could you possibly be entitled to a job? How could you possibly be entitled to decide who should pass and who should fail? How could you possibly be entitled to determining where the sign-up sheet for Diversity Day buses will or will not be placed, and how funds should be allocated? Okay...so some of you want to hire a "minority" as long as s/he's "well mannered and won't stab us in the back after s/he's in our sacred house;" and some of you want to hire an adjunct (Jill or Jeffery White) because, "What the hell—they've been around as long as Jack, Joe, Jerry, and Jane White, and shucks fair is fair, especially if you're entitled." And entitlement is a synonym for Whiteness. But there's only one job, because for years you've complained about the gate, while breathing collective (meaning White) sighs of relief that it was there to protect you from the hordes. (Somewhere down the street in Watsonville an immigrant is deciding whether to give his daughter or his wife up for the boss to fuck that he might have a job picking your fruit. Somewhere up the road in Oakland a teen is going to San Quentin for writing graffiti on a wall. And you're in here trying to be "fair" to each other, while promoting diversity—whatever that means. By the time you've arrived at a compromise over norming or faculty hires—your efforts to "enlighten" whoever doesn't die in the fields or fall from the earth into prison—the sista has been raped and the brotha busted. But then you've had a difficult day as well.) So, do what you always do. Hire the most qualified candidate. Here are some questions and guidelines to speed the search committee on its way and make everyone feel entitled. 42 +Ontology Materialism: Why would we have to chant BLACK LIVES MATTER if it was so evident that they mattered? why has antiblackness continued to fester despite the optimistic and material orientation of past, present, and future policies? Why are black children dying because of their race if humanity is so contingent? 43 +Warren 18 Warren Calvin L Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University “Ontological Terror Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation” Duke University Press Durham and London 2018. B1ACK ZD 44 +A deep abyss, or a terrifying question, engenders the declaration “Black Lives Matter.” The declaration, in fact, conceals this question even as it purports to have answered it resolutely. “Black Lives Matter,” then, carries a certain terror in its dissemination, a terror we dare to approach with un- certainty, urgency, and exhaustion. This question pertains to the “meta- physical infrastructure,” as Nahum Chandler might call it, that conditions our world and our thinking about the world. “Black Lives Matter” is an important declaration, not just because it foregrounds the question of unbearable brutality, but also because it performs philosophical labor—it compels us to face the terrifying question, despite our desire to look away. The declaration presents a difficult syntax or an accretion of tensions and ambiguities within its organization: can blacks have life? What would such life mean within an antiblack world? What axiological measurement determines the mattering of the life in question? Does the assembly of these terms shatter philosophical coherence or what metaphysical infra- structure provides stability, coherence, and intelligibility for the declaration? These questions of value, meaning, stability, and intelligibility lead us to the terror of the declaration, the question it conceals but engages: what ontological ground provides the occasion for the declaration? Can such ground be assumed, and if not, is the declaration even possible with- out it? “Black Lives Matter” assumes ontological ground, which propels the deployment of its terms and sustains them throughout the treacheries of antiblack epistemologies. Put differently, the human being provides an anchor for the declaration, and since the being of the human is invaluable, then black life must also matter, if the black is a human (the declaration anchors mattering in the human’s Being). But we reach a point of terror with this syllogistic reasoning. One must take a step backward and ask the fundamental question: is the black, in fact, a human being? Or can black(ness) ground itself in the being of the human? If it cannot, then on what bases can we assert the mattering of black existence? If it can, then why would the phrase need to be repeated and recited incessantly? Do the affirmative declaration and its insistence undermine this very ontological ground? The statement declares, then, too soon—a declaration that is re- ally an unanswered (or unanswerable) question. We must trace this question and declaration back to its philosophical roots: the Negro Question. This question reemerges within a world of antiblack brutality, a world in which black torture, dismemberment, fatality, and fracturing are routinized and ritualized—a global, sadistic pleasure principle. I was invited to meditate on this globalized sadism in the context of Michael Brown’s murder and the police state. The invitation filled me with dread as I anticipated a festival of humanism in which presenters would share solutions to the problem of antiblackness (if they even acknowledged antiblackness) and inundate the audience with “yes we can!” rhetoric and unbounded optimism. I decided to participate, despite this dread, once students began asking me deep questions, questions that also filled them with dread and confusion. I, of course, was correct about my misgivings. I listened to one speaker after the next describe a bright future, where black life is valued and blacks are respected as humans—if we just keep fighting, they said, “we’re almost there!” A political scientist introduced statistics and graphs laying out voting patterns and districts; he argued that blacks just did not realize how much power they had (an unfortunate ignorance, I guess). If they just collectively voted they could change antiblack police practices and make this world a better place. The audience clapped enthusiastically; I remained silent. Next, a professor of law implored the audience to keep fighting for legal change because the law is a powerful weapon for ending discrimination and restoring justice. We just needed to return to the universal principles that founded our Constitution, “liberty, equal- ity, and justice!” (I thought about the exception clause in the Thirteenth Amendment, the Three-Fifths Compromise, and the way the sharecrop- ping system exploited the Fourteenth Amendment in order to reenslave through contract. I continued to sit in silence.) The audience shouted and applauded. . I felt a pit in my stomach because I knew what I had to do; it was my time to step up to the podium—it was my nihilistic responsibility. I told the audience there was no solution to the problem of antiblackness; it will continue without end, as long as the world exists. Furthermore, all the solutions presented rely on antiblack instruments to address antiblackness, a vicious and tortuous cycle that will only produce more pain and disappointment. I also said that humanist affect (the good feeling we get from hopeful solutions) will not translate into freedom, justice, recognition, or resolution. It merely provides temporary reprieve from the fact that blacks are not safe in an antiblack world, a fact that can become overwhelming. The form of antiblackness might alter, but antiblackness itself will remain a constant—despite the power of our imagination and political yearnings. I continued this nihilistic analysis of the situation until I heard complete silence. A woman stood up after my presentation and shouted, “How dare you tell this to our youth! That is so very negative! Of course we can change things; we have power, and we are free.” Her voice began to increase in intensity. I waited for her to finish and asked her, “Then tell us how to end police brutality and the slaughter of the youth you want to protect from my nihilism.” “If these solutions are so credible, why have they consistently failed? Are we awaiting for some novel, extraordinary solution— one no one had ever imagined—to end antiblack violence and misery?” Silence. “In what manner will this ‘power’ deliver us from antiblackness?” How long must we insist on a humanity that is not recognized—an insistence that humiliates in its inefficacy? “If we are progressing, why are black youth being slaughtered at staggering rates in the twenty-first century— if we are, indeed, humans just like everyone else?” People began to respond that things are getting better, despite the increasing death toll, the unchecked power of the police state, the lack of conviction rates for police murdering blacks, the prison industrial complex and the modern reenslavement of an entire generation, the unbelievable black infant mortality rate, the lack of jobs for black youth and debilitating poverty. “This is better?” I asked. “At least we are not slaves!” someone shouted. I asked them to read the Thirteenth Amendment closely. But the intensity of the dialogic exchange taught me that affect runs both ways: it is not just that solutions make us feel good because we feel powerful/hopeful, but that pressing the ontological question presents terror—the terror that ontological security is gone, the terror that ethical claims no longer have an anchor, and the terror of inhabiting existence outside the precincts of humanity and its humanism. Ontological Terror engages this question and the forms of terror it produces. 45 +“IP rights” entails an investment towards gratuitous antiblackness aka the animalistic branding onto black flesh 46 +Johnson 16 Shontavia Johnson Drake University Law School 2016. “BRANDED: Trademark Tattoos, Slave Owner Brands, And The Right To Have "Free" Skin”, Volume 22| Issue 2. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216andcontext=mttlr B1ack ZD 47 +This Part outlines the basic historical, legal and policy issues associated with the practice of placing identifying indicia on human bodies. This practice predates modern American trademark law and can be traced to the days of African and African-American enslavement in the United States. The permanent, forced body modification of slaves was an early precursor to contemporary American use of trademarks as tattoos. As more Americans voluntarily tattoo their bodies today, a growing segment of this tattooed population encompasses brand enthusiasts who choose to permanently ink their bodies with the trademarks of their favorite companies and brands and copyright-protected images. Coupled with this trend, disputes based on tattoos encompassing the intellectual property of third parties have also grown in recent years.26 In perhaps one of the most famous lawsuits based on tattoos and intellectual property, Whitmill v. Warner Bros., Professor David Nimmer posited that the rights of intellectual property owners should not extend to human flesh, because to do so would create “almost literally, a badge of involuntary servitude.”27 Otherwise, he argued, the law would “set at naught the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of badges of slavery.”28 Though tenuous, it is understandable why Professor Nimmer would draw connections between contemporary trademark-based tattoos and the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of slavery. His suggestion, however, provides scant historical or factual foundation. This Part will lay the groundwork implicit in such claims before ultimately explaining why the connection is inappropriate in the modern context of trademark-based tattoos. Though tattooing words and symbols on human bodies has become increasingly popular in recent decades, it is not a new practice. African and African-American slaves routinely had the initials or other identifying indicia of their slave masters permanently branded on their skin.29 These involuntary “trademarks” were placed on slaves both for purposes of punishment and identification.30 Prior to the passage of state and federal trademark law, slave owners used trademarks as a way to distinguish their human property from the property of other slave masters. Branding as a mechanism for distinguishing human property began in 2000-1800 B.C. with Babylonian slaves.31 Within the Transatlantic slave trade, the practice dates back to at least as early as the 1440s, when the Portuguese branded African slaves’ upper bodies to indicate that the slaves belonged to the king of Portugal or another slave owner.32 During the time period of African slave trafficking, each European nation had its own trademark used to mark African slaves.33 Discussing the early history of slave branding, one scholar outlined the many ways in which slave branding took place: Slaves landed at S˜ao Tome were branded with a cross on the right arm in the early sixteenth century; but, later, this design was changed to a ‘G,’ the marca de Guin´e. Slaves exported from Luanda were often branded not once but twice, for they had to receive the mark of the Luso-Brazilian merchants who owned them as well as the royal arms—on the right breast—to signify their relation to the Crown. Sometimes, baptism led to the further branding of a cross 48 +THINK OF EVERY REFORM, MOVEMENT, COALITION, DEMAND, and POLICY THAT HAS HAPPENED AND ASK YOURSELF HOW DID THIS STOP THE STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS OF ANTIBLACKNESS? They did NOT – Chattel slavery changes its name to Jim Crow then to the PIC and policing. 49 +Wilderson 20 Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III, University of California, Irvine “Afropessimism” Originally published: April 7, 2020 B1ACK ZD 50 +There’s something organic to Blackness that makes it essential to the construction of civil society. But there’s also something organic to Blackness that portends the destruction of civil society. There’s noth- ing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: there’s something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction,” abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot be liberated or be made legible through counter-hegemonic interventions. Black suffering is not a function of the performance(s) of civil society, but of the existence of civil society. For the Pakistani driver, the White professor, and his White wife, civil society is an ensemble of con- straints and opportunities. But for the Black, civil society is a murderous projection. In light of this, coalitions and social movements—even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement—bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the inter- locutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and legible conflicts of civil society’s junior partners (such as immigrants, White women, the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and illegible antagonisms of Blacks. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of anti-Blackness, their rhetorical structures, political desire, and their emancipatory horizon are bolstered by a life- affirming anti-Blackness; the death of Black desire. 51 + 52 +NEUROSCIENCE OF RACISM proves libidinal economy and fear of blackness is immaterially and materially true 53 +Bobby Azarian Ph.D. 18, 9/24/18, "Understanding the Racist Brain," Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201809/understanding-the-racist-brain, accessed 10-4-2019, SJCP//JP 54 +The Neuroscience of Racial Bias First of all, how do we know that racial biases actually exist? While some may claim that they have no biases, a clever psychological experiment provides objective evidence supporting the notion that the vast majority of us do. In the implicit bias task, participants are shown words on a computer screen like “happy” and “fear,” which they must categorize as positive or negative. What results have consistently shown is that if a black face is quickly flashed before the words, individuals will be faster to correctly categorize negative words, while the same people will be quicker to correctly categorize positive words when they follow white faces. These troubling findings suggest that over 75 percent of Whites and Asians have an implicit racial bias, which affects how they process information and perceive the social world around them. However, this bias is subconscious and implicit. Whether or not it leads to overtly racist attitudes and behavior depends on an interplay between different brain areas—specifically those that create feelings of fear and promote tribalism, and those that help us regulate and suppress those bad instincts. Neural Pathways Underlying Racism Brain imaging studies have shown that people who display an implicit bias have a stronger electrical response to black or other-race faces in an area of the brain known as the amygdala—a structure responsible for processing emotional stimuli and eliciting a fearful or anxious mental state. An exaggerated amygdala response is part of what creates the sudden visceral or “gut feeling” of being scared. And that feeling of fear has additional psychological effects that promote prejudice. It is well-established that when one feels their welfare is being threatened, they tend to become more tribal in their behavior, and additionally bolster their cultural or national worldviews, since it is those worldviews that make them feel safe. In essence, nationalism and prejudice are knee-jerk responses to anxiety. 55 + 56 +Gordon Identifies instances of black social life but that doesn’t disprove the structural disposition of civil society to black death – their frame essentializes blackness because in a world of black death, pessimism is the only possible optimism. 57 +Sexton 11 (Jared. 2011. “ANTE-ANTI-BLACKNESS: AFTERTHOUGHTS” http://csalateral.org/issue1/content/sexton.html) KR RC/JCH-PF 58 +Fanon and his interlocutors, or what appear rather as his fateful adherents, would seem to have a problem embracing black social life because they never really come to believe in it, because they cannot acknowledge the social life from which they speak and of which they speak – as negation and impossibility – as their own (Moten 2008: 192). Another way of putting this might be to say that they are caught in a performative contradiction enabled by disavowal. I wonder, however, whether things are even this clear in Fanon and the readings his writing might facilitate. Lewis Gordon's sustained engagement with Fanon finds him situated in an ethical stance grounded in the affirmation of blackness in the historic anti-black world. In a response to the discourse of multiracialism emergent in the late twentieth-century United States, for instance, Gordon writes, following Fanon, that "there is no way to reject the thesis that there is something wrong with being black beyond the willingness to 'be' black – not in terms of convenient fads of playing blackness, but in paying the costs of anti-blackness on a global scale. Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity experiences a blackened world" (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to 'be' black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? Elsewhere, in a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the anti-black world developed across his first several books: "Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies – they become them. In our anti-black world, blacks are pathology" (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support to Moten's contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counter-intuitive, or rather because it is counter-intuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the anti-black world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks: "A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment" (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative – "above all, don’t be black" (Gordon 1997: 63) – in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that "resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human'" (Nyong'o 2002: 389). 22 In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos. 59 +The Cikara evidence is indicative of the privatization of antiracism and culminates in market-interventions and color ignorance pills 60 +Kahn 18 (Jonathan Kahn, James E Kelley Chair in Tort Law and Professor of Law at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in affiliation with Hamline University, PhD in History from Cornell University, JD from Boalt Hall School of Law, 2018, Race on the Brain: What Implicit Bias Gets Wrong About the Struggle for Racial Justice, pp 219-220) recut Black ZD 61 +Beyond this, the researchers asserted that propranolol “abolishes” implicit bias. This claim is critical. They were not simply asserting that propranolol affects response times on an IAT or perhaps masks the effects of implicit bias. No, they were saying that it abolishes implicit bias—the assumption here being that the absence of differential response times on an IAT is equivalent to the absence of implicit bias. By this reckoning, the IAT does not simply measure implicit bias; it is an essential component of the constitution of implicit bias. To deal with IAT response times is thus to deal with implicit bias. In an interview, Savulescu claimed that “such research raises the tantalizing possibility that our unconscious racial attitudes could be modulated using drugs, a possibility that requires careful ethical analysis. . . . Biological research aiming to make people morally better has a dark history. And propranolol is not a pill to cure racism. But given that many people are already using drugs like propranolol which have ‘moral’ side effects, we at least need to better understand what these effects are.”50 On the one hand, Savulescu appears to disavow the notion that he is proposing the idea of a pill to cure racism; on the other, he is clearly stating that that is exactly what he and his colleagues seem to have found with propranolol. Before you know it, you have psychologists Mina Cikara and Jay Van Bavel enthusiastically citing “recent exciting findings . . . that may ultimately inform the design of better targeted interventions (including pharmacological interventions) for mitigating prejudice and intergroup conflict.”51 Thus do we come to pills for racism, the ultimate technical fix. Pills have the initial appeal of being easy. They have the added incentive of being potentially profitable. Somebody has to make and market such pills. Considering that everybody has certain implicit biases, the market is potentially boundless. Such pills would be like statins for racism—something you take as a preventative measure every day for the rest of your life. Even if such pills are never fully developed and marketed, the propranolol study and other studies like it nonetheless reinforce a frame that casts racism as a technical problem to be understood and addressed through private means, in particular market interventions. In this regard, this frame is another example of privatizing antiracism and a natural extension of the diversity-training model that has capitalized the business of fighting implicit bias into a multi-billion-dollar industry. - Tournament
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,61 @@ 1 +B(1AC)K 2 +Debate is structured to exclude black bodies – Topicality, Antiblack judge predispositions, disclosure theory, and appeals to fairness are all attempts to situate blackness with the impossible demand of being an ethical speaker 3 +Reid-Brinkley 19 (Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, University of Pittsburgh, “Voice Dipped in Black: The Louisville project and the Birth of Black Radical Argument in College Policy Debate”, https://books.google.com/books?id=dLOYDwAAQBAJandpg=PA219andlpg=PA219anddq=voice+dipped+in+black+the+louisville+projectandsource=blandots=Pe2U-sCaUxandsig=ACfU3U2PZ9YK0~-~-6z8FspFEdHUhG0V53Qwandhl=enandsa=Xandved=2ahUKEwjOjpLojtbmAhUnVt8KHUv6BGcQ6AEwA3oECAoQAQ#v=onepageandqandf=false, 2019) CJun 4 +Racially different bodies must perform that difference according to the cultural norms of the debate community. For Black students it can often mean changing their appearance, standardizing language practices, and eschewing their cultural practices. In essence, in order to have an opportunity for achieving in debate competitions Black students must performatively whiten. “Acting Black” is problematic because those performative identities are not recognizable in the normative frame of debate practice. In fact, Blackness signifies a difference, an opposite; a negative differential. It is not that the debate community explicitly operates to exclude people based on race; rather it competitively rejects Black presence, or non-normative nonwhite performance. It is the combination of cultural values, behavioral practices, and the significance of Black flesh that produce barriers to meaningful inclusion. For Afro-pessimists, the group of Black scholars who have popularized the study of anti-Blackness, the Black is juxtaposed against what it means to be master, human, citizen, and subject in a manner that is constitutive of US civil society. The United States is built upon a notion of freedom and liberty that necessitated the negative dialectic of the Slave to define the parameters of the nation-state. This foundational relationship has sutured together US civil society and continues to do so. For theorist Frank Wilderson, the grammar of Black/Slave suffering is marked by accumulation and fungibility (Wilderson 2010, 55-57), a relation “of being owned and traded” (Kelsie 2014, 6). The human’s (white) grammar of suffering is marked by alienation and exploitation. The grammar of Black (Slave) suffering is not recognizable within the frame of human (white) suffering, it can only be misrecognized as alienation and exploitation. For the study of rhetoric, and understanding of the political ontology of the Black as one that is necessarily defined by its status as Slave/object requires that we engage the question of whether or not the Black has the capacity for recognition in the construction of the moment of voice. Watts would agree that the Black does not have speech; that is why the production of voice is only a momentary process, a happening, by which Blacks can seek recognition. For the Black, the body announces itself prior to speech. So it follows that the Black lacks capacity for speech because they approach the speaking moment as a nonrecognizable subject and “positioned as incapacity” by the “modalities” of accumulation and fungibility. For the Afro-pessimists, capacity is made coherent in civil society by a necessary relationship to Black incapacity. Wilderson notes that “white(Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity: without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best” (Wilderson 2010, 45). Not only does the Black lack the same capacity as the white in first approaching the speaking situation, she or he enters the situation as incapacity. The Black must battle with its political ontological condition as a precursor to the process of speaking and let alone the production of voice. If the "happening" of voice depends on a relationality that produces "a public acknowledgment of the ethics of speaking and the emotions of others; the Black is always already relegated to the position of the unethical speaker that must defend and prove itself by seeking recognition from the Human/Subject in civil society (Watts 2001, 185). Further, it necessitates that the Black performatively and argumentatively approach the moment of voice with only the pretense of subjecthood and capacity. That the Black must construct the pretense of being an ethical speaker, while having no subject positioning to do so, requires an inauthentic performance of the Black object as white subject. If rhetorical situations require pretense and inauthenticity then they make unethical speaking the sine qua non of public speech. The Black must mimic the performance of human (white) capacity and becomes bound by the grammar of alienation and exploitation to achieve recognition. In other words, the Black must justify its Blackness or perform itself in a manner consistent with white civil society to even engage in a relational negotiation to produce the moment of voice. Such a practice supersedes and constitutes the ability of the white audience to recognize the Black as an ethical speaker. As rhetoric theorist Amber Kelsie notes, "From an Afro-Pessimist perspective, the problem is not that the Black is 'voiceless: so much as it is that the voice/speech/body of the Black does not resonate. The Slave is always already being attended to by the white Other, but such recognition itself obliterates any possibility of social life for the Slave' (Kelsie 2014, is). Full recognition of the Black is not really possible in the rhetorical situation, for the Black is the incoherence that constitutes the coherence of the Human/ Subject. In other words, the Black cannot speak about Black suffering without their appeals being read through the frame of alienation and exploitation. The grammar of Black suffering remains unrecognizable and thus unacknowledgeable even in the moments where the Black has produced the voiced moment. Given these considerable obstacles, how did the Louisville Project become successful and produce moments of recognition? Considering the team's transformation from one with a persistent losing record to one of the most successful Black debate teams in the history of national policy debate, it is dear this achievement could not have been possible without a communal recognition of Louisville's ethics and affect. Yet in the moments where those negotiations waver or break down, anti-Blackness as a structural antagonism produces insurmountable obstacles for engaging racialized conflict through discussion and deliberation. Amidst concern about the future of Black participation in college policy debate, the Louisville team began asking hard questions about the argumentative and performative choices Black students would need to make in order to be competitively successful. Warner became increasingly and publicly critical of the Urban Debate League (a nonprofit institution designed to increase the race, class, and gender diversity of competitive high school debate practice in the US) as a diversity model for debate. He argued that the Urban Debate League (UDL) project was a farce, that it was not designed to give poor Black students a shot at the highest levels of competition. The lack of successful UDL debaters in national competition at both the high school and college level demonstrated that access to debate alone would not resolve policy debate's diversity problem. "Why? Not because of anything they do, but because the game is rigged against them, who they are, and what the community asks them to become to achieve 'success" (Warner 2005). Warner moved away from his previous support for and work with UDLs, taking a different path of engaging structural racism in competitive debate. In addition to an aggressive mass recruitment of UDL students and Black students from within the university, the debate team was reconstructed with a redefined purpose for continued participation in competitive policy debate. Louisville questioned competitive debate's exclusive focus on government policy and its limited solutions to sociopolitical problems, developing alternative forms or styles through which to make argument. Debate is generally an oral, heavily evidence-based contest (in terms of number of average quotations from academic sources used in a debate), where people speak quickly in order to make as many arguments as possible. Moving beyond the conventional form by engaging in storytelling, the use of poetry, video footage, video games, music, hip-hop, and theater, Louisville began experimenting with the performative elements of debate speechmaking to supplement the traditional use of speed and hyper-technical argumentation. They introduced new ways of making arguments about public policy and public deliberation around the central political and social issues of our times. As the project developed, the debate community was largely unsupportive of Louisville's experimentation with debate norms. Louisville's teams found it difficult to persuade many judges to vote for them, resulting in persistent losses at national tournaments. Their attempts at innovation resulted in angry verbal confrontations, broken friendships, and group segregations within the policy debate community. Accusations including "Klan member; "Plantation owner; and "Uncle Toms" on one side and "anti-intellectuals; "playing the race card; and "irrational" on the other seem to indicate that the controversy surrounding the Louisville Project reached a boiling point (Hoe 2005). For many in the policy debate community, Louisville's confrontational rhetoric and the dialectical nature of debate competition hurt attempts to build coalitions between the Louisville Project and others in the debate community (Blair 2004). As former director of forensics at Illinois State University, Joseph Zompetti, notes, the Louisville style of debating has resulted in "frustrations, anxiety, resistance, and backlash" (2004a). Allan Louden, former Director of Debate at Wake Forest University, refers to the conflict as a "schism" (2004). Jeff Parcher, former debate coach at Georgetown University, argues that this "schism" makes the future of debate "pessimistic." Parcher notes further that while "alliances" in debate have always existed, they have reached a new level of "intensity" one that he has never seen before in the debate community (Parcher 2004, 89-91). In the summer of 2003, after three years of facing public censure and competitive failure, with the addition of Assistant Coach Darryl Burch, the Louisville team developed a foundational theme to encompass their criticism of traditional debate practice: "you can't change the state, but you can change the state of debate" (interview, July 4, 2012). The team began to work in earnest to develop the parameters of what would later be called the Louisville Project, and one team unit—comprised of members Elizabeth "Liz" Jones and LaTonia "Tonia" Green—were poised for what would become an unexpectedly successful year. They determined that debate participation should have a purpose and theirs would be to increase meaningful Black participation in debate. Rather than taking on white debate norms, the Louisville debaters resist attempts to capture and purify their colored bodies, instead choosing to (re)mark their visibility. For the Black body in the speech situation, it need not necessarily be doing anything for it to signify. The Black body is already marked, made visible and meaningful in public spaces. Yet simultaneously, the Louisville debaters perform Blackness doing something to draw attention to the body. It is in the doing of Blackness that the reading of the Black body as threatening and criminal is exacerbated from potential to probable threat. In con-temporary America, the Blacks who overtly perform Blackness are the "uppity niggers" that must be feared because they neither kowtow fearfully in the face of whiteness nor are they willing to limit the performance of their Blackness for white people/audiences' comfort. Louisville performs Blackness in white spaces, rejecting integrationist or assimilationist performances, as a necessary means of renegotiating the ethical space of tournament competition dominated by anti-Blackness and white privilege. During their speeches, Jones and Green often turn to speak accusatorily at their opponents, which involved neck rolling, a pushing forward of the body in the direction of the opponent, using staccato hand gestures, and eye-rolling—all behaviors that are often identified as "Black women's attitude." It is important to note that nationally competitive debaters often display aggressive personality traits in verbal competition as a marker of success. Such aggressiveness can be delivered in speeches through choices in vocabulary, tone, emphasis on words, speech volume, body movement, and ad hominem attacks. However, as noted, when debating with a non-normative body, norms are applied differently. Even if aggressive speech is normative in debate, when Jones and Green exhibit such typical debating style, they are stereotyped as loud and aggressive. Green provides an excellent example of this performative "attitude" in an elimination round against Wake Forest University at the 2004 CEDA Nationals championship tournament. During the cross-examination period following Green's speech, the opponent attempted to concisely define a particular argument Green made during the speech in order to ask a question. He interrupted Green's explanation, although she pushed past his attempt to stop her from speaking. Her opponent succeeded in stemming the flow of words, wanting to move on to some other question. Green conceded, but note the following exchange as captured on video: Green: "Well, I'm trying to explain to you so that you can ... " Opponent indicates with a statement that he has a different question that he would like to ask.' Green: "Okay, well, go ahead. Cuz it seems like you not getting it anyway. So, ask me something..." Opponent concedes that he may not understand, but his tone implies that this is more Green's fault than his own. Green: "You're not, so ask me something else" Unintelligible response from the opponent as Green continues to interrupt him. Green: "Ask me something else (Green 2004b) Green is standing at a podium. The podium is table length and above waist high. She leans on one elbow tilting her body away from her opponent, slightly facing him, mindful of the judges and the audience seated in front of them. Green's hands move in a dismissive manner, indicated by quick shakes of the hand, simultaneous with a twisting of the wrist and periodic dropping of her hand on the table in frustration or irritation. She is exasperated with her opponent's mischaracterization of her arguments. She is giving him attitude, without being rude, although clearly bordering on it. Her dismissal of him is comedic to the large representation of people of color in the audience who were watching this historic debate. Her clipped, brusque tone clearly indicates frustration, but also the sense arises that she finds him somehow unworthy. Green looks away from him during most of the interaction, occasionally giving him the side-eye, sometimes accompanied by eye-rolling and sighs of disapproval. She willingly allows him to mischaracterize her argument without correcting it, and her tone indicates that he is deserving of such inconsideration. Green revises the normative debate practice of rhetorically dominating one's opponent with Black girl style, a rhetorical and bodily performance designed to turn hostile white places into Black girl spaces. Such overt presenting of Black femininity in the cold and austere spaces of competition in college classrooms is an act of disrupting the sonorous normality of both policy debate and civil society. That this interchange is occurring between a young Black woman and a young white man (from a prominent, private university), adds to the comedic strength of Green's rhetorical strategy in the cross-examination. Because it contrasts the stereotypical dynamic, Green's dismissiveness of a debater whose privilege normally protected him from such interaction is read as amusing, as evidenced by the laughter from the audience. Cross-examination, one of the few times debaters directly address each other, provides an opportunity to clarify and gain information that can be used to strengthen one's position during the following speeches. After each of the constructive speeches the opposing team is given three minutes to question the last speaker. It is particularly within these periods that debaters can be most aggressive. Cross-examination can often be a hostile process, with each participant attempting to gain as much important information as possible while avoiding disclosures that might hurt their argument. Hostility in cross-examination can be a strategic tool of intimidation and dismissal. In each of the Louisville debates that I analyzed for this chapter, cross-examination became a unique space through which the Louisville debaters signified on common performative practices in debate. Cross-examination, one of the few times debaters directly address each other, provides an opportunity to clarify and gain information that can be used to strengthen one's position during the following speeches. After each of the constructive speeches the opposing team is given three minutes to question the last speaker. It is particularly within these periods that debaters can be most aggressive. Cross-examination can often be a hostile process, with each participant attempting to gain as much important information as possible while avoiding disclosures that might hurt their argument. Hostility in cross-examination can be a strategic tool of intimidation and dismissal. In each of the Louisville debates that I analyzed for this chapter, cross-examination became a unique space through which the Louisville debaters signified on common performative practices in debate. Jones's and Green's behavior, while disconcerting to majority white audiences out-side of debate, is still representative of the aggressive behavior the community has engaged in for years. A speaker's aggression and assertiveness, in traditional debate, are effective appeals to white authority. Yet the performance of such behavior, by Black women, is often stereotyped as inappropriate. Their behavior, as defined by the common practices of the policy debate community, should be recognizable and thus acceptable to the majority white and male audience. Yet it is clear that those who encountered this team often seemed to exhibit a level of fear or discomfort with Jones's and Green's performance as opposed to admiration and respect, had they presented as a normative white male. Despite Jones's and Green's repetition of some traditional styles of competition, their Blackened version of normative debate style is often read as disruptive. In as much as Jones and Green perform Black girl attitude, as read by their majority white audience, the more difficult it becomes to build an ethical relationship to the politics of recognition. The problem for Louisville is appeal to Black authority in a space built on appeals to white authority. Using performative Black femininity is a tactic that can elevate anxiety and become an obstacle in building ethical relations. These are forced interactions through competition, Louisville's tactic of making structural racism a part of the dis-course of competition rather than appealing to formal, institutional channels produces a demand for recognition. Indeed, as the following sections detail, the Louisville Project disrupted normative debate practice in an effort to expose anti-Blackness as constitutive of the tradition of debate itself. 5 + 6 + 7 +And when George Floyd screams MAMA, and I CAN’T BREATHE his communication is understood but results and his death. When Dred Scott articulates he is deserving of freedom his agential capacity is denied. The form of communicative registers opens blackness to gratuitous violence in civil society. 8 +Gillespie 17 – Jon Gillespie is a graduate student for the University of California, Irvine, Comparative Literature, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, Fall 2017, https://www.academia.edu/34839874/On_the_Prospect_of_Weaponized_Death 9 +- brackets in original 10 +Black life is lived in a white hyper-reality. By this I mean, black life is lived inside a constituted white fiction which concretizes itself as fact. Black life is a life lived in non-existence; blackness “exists” as a symbol of death that is, but is not. Blackness “exists” only insofar as White Being structures it onto a map of anti-black violence.4 Achille Mbembe corroborates this in his Critique of Black Reason, stating: Racism consists, most of all, in substituting what is with something else, with another reality. It has the power to distort the real and to fix affect, but it is also a form of psychic derangement, the mechanism through which the repressed suddenly surfaces. When the racist sees the Black person, he does not see that the Black person is not there, does not exist, and is just a sign of a pathological fixation on the absence of a relationship. We must therefore consider race as being both beside and beyond being.5 The reality that replaces that which is a white hyper-reality. This white hyperrealism fixes blackness as “a sign of a pathological fixation.” White hyper-realism is the paradigm whereby consciousness is unable to distinguish between the fictions created by White Being and the Real. It is this fact that permits black death to be subsumed in simulations by each and every (analytic) encounter with Whiteness and the World. Questions like, “Can the Black suffer?” and “Is it capable for the Black to be wronged?” arise due to the inability to access a grammar of suffering to communicate a harm that has never ended, a harm that can never end without ending the World itself. It is for this reason that viral videos of black death, more than opening the possibility for liberal notions of justice, seem to suture the relationship between the mythical and the real that perpetuates itself through the reification of black trauma. Black death, more than deconstructing the ontics of the Human, seems to extend its hyper-reality. Black death makes it harder to distinguish white fictions from any sense of real harm being done to human flesh. The Black is meant to experience its death over and over and over again; and the World itself recycles all its fictions-as-the-Real. Put differently, the White World subjects the Black to perpetual, gratuitous violence, and then uses that violence as evidence to further suggest that the Black is not Human. For how can a Human endure such a thing? The experience of gratuitous violence secures the semiotics of the white hyper-reality. White Disneyland stays intact. Blackness exists at the nexus of fact and fiction, possibility and (non)value, inclusion and exclusion. Blackness is trapped even in saying it’s trapped because the “trapped-ness” of the Black extends to locations where the diction and syntax of White “words don’t go.”6 The Black does not have the grammar to speak against where and how it is trapped since Blackness can only articulate itself through the semiotics of Whiteness. That White Being continues to center black death as the matrix of possibility for its hyper-realist structure indexes the promise of death insofar that White Being is promised futurity. The Black was rendered fungible through the conjunction of the political and the libidinal economy of the anti-Black world. Blackness gave birth to the commodity and the economy of signification that structures the cartography of the Human’s coordinates. This could be said to be a still birth, insofar as the nature of Black life in a white hyper-reality is conducted on a plane that guarantees natal alienation, social, and ontological death. The Black body lives to die; the specter of death shadows it everywhere. What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our orderspecific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)…”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity. 11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? 11 + 12 +Thus, I take this round hostage! Embrace a symbolic extinction, We must engage in undercommon communication that weaponizes our deaths to disrupts the semiotics of the anti-black world. To blacken the debate space it is important to note that no black liberation happens through the methods they will talk about, but only by being parasitic on the spaces of optimism to end the world. 13 +Gillespie 2 (John Gillespie, Undergraduate Researcher and Debater at Towson University, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death,” Propter Nos, Volume 2: Issue 1, Insurgency / Exhaustion, Fall 2017) B1ACK ZD 14 + 15 +- brackets in original 16 +What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our order- specific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)...”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 7 If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity.11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory that prescribes solutions to the analysis in the conclusion of their work. However, one finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a prophetic vision, a pulsing pessimist hope for the “end of the World.” For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way out is an end to the White World. White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only through black vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the spectacle of Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 8 gratuitous freedom is made visible. It is somewhere in this structural antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility of the World, and on the other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its disorientation, that we found the language to say the unsayable and do the undoable. As Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular present non-Black academics with more than an intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism that we don’t talk about...which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s calling for the end of the world...it wants the death of everyone else in the same way that we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through Afro- Pessimism and be who one was on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-Pessimism. If we are engaging in a war in which the symbolic value, the semiotics of this World itself, positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of diversity, of life itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a space where “words don’t go”—a form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the conversation is blackened, and the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to excavate insurgent dictions still lost in the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is death personified, then what might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we recognized the inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness of that death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard writes, “When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer?”19 Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics used by those who are facing globalized White Being with asymmetrical technologies of terror, violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to rupture the system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one to the “desert of the Black Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon the semiotic system.20 Black terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates the death embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable the possibility of a radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized onto- epistemic deployment of violence, and if violent insurgency is necessary, then the decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to counter the terror of White Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood as counter-terror terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life. We Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 9 only have the power to end the World through death. As Baudrillard writes, “The radical difference is that the terrorist, while they have at their disposal weapons that are the system’s own, possess a further lethal weapon: their own deaths.”21 The United States has an international military force, a storehouse of nuclear arms, and the capacity, within their police state alone, to “terrorize” not just one block in Baltimore, but the whole entire world. Black terrorism is what happens when we heed the Afro-Pessimist call that “A living death is as much a death as it is a living,”22 it is what happens when we take seriously the unsayable in Afro-Pessimism. Black Terrorism is (non)ontological fugitivity that disavows any need to focus on social life—black terrorism steals black death itself from White Being. It is for this reason that Baudrillard speaks to his own White Being and the specter of terror when he says: When Western culture sees all of its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very worst way. Our death is an extinction, an annihilation. Herein lies our poverty. When a singularity throws its own death into the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, its dies its own natural death. This is an immense game of double or quits. In committing suicide, the singularity suicides the other at the same time— we might say that the terrorist acts literally ‘suicided’ the West. A death for a death, then, but transfigured by the symbolic stakes. ‘We have already devastated our world, what more do you want?’ says Muray. But precisely, we have devastated this world, it still has to be destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not at all the same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going to be able to do the second.23 We are the others. Tasked with the (un)fortunate task of ending White hyper-realism, the White World, and White Being. Well aware that if White Fascism continues the project of black annihilation, the only choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to. But, ultimately, we must remember the words of Huey Newton: “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”24 In the age of Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon.25 The disavowal of the lives of refugees is White Being attempting to reconcile the “Nation- State” simulation with the free track and flow of bodies it’s been attempting to murder; the deportation of undocumented immigrants in conjunction with the materialization of borders is White Being attempting to secure its linguistic and economic integrity; the rise of the private prison and the militarization of the police force is White Being attempting to innovate the system of enslavement and necropolitics for the 21st Century; the plundering of indigenous land and bodies is White Being attempting to finish off the project of genocide; the disregard for the Earth is White Being ensuring the Anthropocene will also be the Apocalypse. Trump is a reinvigoration, a call to arms, for White Being, and White Being can only be “destroyed symbolically.” Black terrorism transfigures the symbolic stakes because it Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 10 steals away that condition of White Being’s possibility in a kind of fugitivity that is a zero-transformation into Blackness. This being said, we all know that the only thing that follows the absolute loss of hope is this Black Spring, this Neo-Fanonian violence, this blackened terroristic situational transfer. In Baudrillard’s words, in the Age of Trump, let us remember the gift of immorality, “Terrorism is immoral. The World Trade Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself immoral. So, let us be immoral...”26l/ 17 + 18 + 19 +The role of the ballot is to refuse spaces like debate to deconstruct structures of antiblackness. Your ballot will sign off on the deconstruction of debate as a form of implosive terror 20 +- offense links back by explaining how you refuse antiblackness and whiteness 21 +- prefiat offense outweighs, post fiat is white shit 22 +- weigh by who most effectively refuses antiblackness 23 +- aff comes before nonblack theory 24 +King 17 Tiffany Lethabo King, Spring 2017, “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight. Source: Critical Ethnic Studies, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162. Recut B1ACK ZD 25 +Within Native feminist theorizing, ethnographic refusal can be traced to Audra Simpson’s 2007 article, “On Ethnographic Refusal.” In this seminal work, Simpson reflects on and gains inspiration from the tradition of refusal practiced by the people of Kahnawake.14 Simpson shares that Kahnawake refusals are at the core and spirit of her own ethnographic and ethical practices of refusal. I was interested in the larger picture, in the discursive, material and moral territory that was simultaneously historical and contemporary (this “national” space) and the ways in which Kahnawakero:non, the “people of Kahnawake,” had refused the authority of the state at almost every turn. The ways in which their formation of the initial membership code (now replaced by a lineage code and board of elders to implement the code and determine cases) was refused; the ways in which their interactions with border guards at the international boundary line were predicated upon a refusal; how refusal worked in everyday encounters to enunciate repeatedly to ourselves and to outsiders that “this is who we are, this is who you are, these are my rights.”15 Because Simpson was concerned with applying the political and everyday modes of Kahnawake refusal, she attended to the “collective limit” established by her and her Kahnawake participants.16 The collective limit was relationally and ethically determined by what was shared but more importantly by what was not shared. Simpson’s ability to discern the collective limit could only be achieved through a form of relational knowledge production that regards and cares for the other. Simpson recounts how one of her participants forced her to recognize a collective limit. Approaching and then arriving at the limit, Simpson experiences the following: And although I pushed him, hoping that there might be something explicit said from the space of his exclusion— or more explicit than he gave me— it was enough that he said what he said. “Enough” is certainly enough. “Enough,” I realised, was when I reached the limit of my own return and our collective arrival. Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why? And “enough” was when they shut down (or told me to turn off the recorder), or told me outright funny things like “nobody seems to know”— when everybody does know and talks about it all the time. Dominion then has to be exercised over these representations, and that was determined when enough was said. The ethnographic limit then, was reached not just when it would cause harm (or extreme discomfort)— the limit was arrived at when the representation would bite all of us and compromise the representational territory that we have gained for ourselves in the past 100 years.17 Extending her discussion of ethnographic refusal beyond the bounds of ethnographic concerns, Simpson also ponders whether this enactment of refusal can be applied to theoretical work. Simpson outright poses a question: “What is theoretically generative about these refusals?”18 The question that Simpson asks in 2007 is clarified by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in the 2014 essay “R- Words: Refusing Research.” Arguing that modes of refusal extended into the theoretical and methodological terrains of knowledge production are productive and necessary, Tuck and Yang state: For the purposes of our discussion, the most important insight to draw from Simpson’s article is her emphasis that refusals are not subtractive, but are theoretically generative, expansive. Refusal is not just a “no,” but a redirection to ideas otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned. Unlike a settler colonial configuration of knowledge that is petulantly exasperated and resentful of limits, a methodology of refusal regards limits on knowledge as productive, as indeed a good thing.19 In line with Simpson’s intervention, Tuck and Yang posit that “refusal itself could be developed into both method and theory.”20 For Tuck and Yang, a generative practice of refusal and a decolonial and abolitionist tradition is making Western thought “turn back upon itself as settler colonial knowledge, as opposed to universal, liberal, or neutral knowledge without horizon.”21 In fact, the coauthors suggest “making the settler colonial metanarrative the object of . . . research.”22 What this move effectively does is question the uninterrogated assumptions and exposes the violent particularities of the metanarrative. Scrutiny as a practice of refusal also slows down or perhaps halts the momentum of the machinery that allows, as Tuck and Yang argue, “knowledge to facilitate interdictions on Indigenous and Black life.”23erday Louisville felt the love and it was a beautiful thing, so thank you guys for having me and let’s keep fighting for justice. 26 +NIGGA TIME 27 +And, it is your job to guarantee me a win, this is not vote for me because I'm black but rather an aff ballot is key to confront antiblackness 28 +1 Reparations: Debate has been hard and violent to navigate for Black people such as police being called on Black debaters in numerous occasions, judges and opponents saying nigger, white girls calling us slaves the list goes on 29 +2 Black Inspiration- Black success is key to inspiring young debaters and kids to speak out against anti-blackness. Seeing black success will increase black participation which means more black kids can gain skills for refusing the antiblack debate space 30 +3 Regardless of the flow vote for niggas with a W 30 to surrender to blackness. 31 +a Nonblacks should not be rewarded for their relationship to blackness 32 +Brady and Murillo 14 2014 Nicholas and John, “Black Imperative: A Forum on Solidarity in the Age of Coalition,” January 26, 2014, http://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/black-imperative-a-forum-on-solidarity-in-the-age-of-coalition/, John Murillo III is a PhD student in the English department at Brown University, and a graduate of the University of California, Irvine, with bachelor’s degrees in Cognitive Science and English. His research interests are broad, and include extensive engagements with and within: Black Studies–particularly Afro-Pessimism–Narrative Theory; Theoretical Physics; Astrophysics; Cosmology; and Neuroscience. Nicholas Brady is an activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He was also a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine Culture and Theory program. 33 +“Surrender to blackness.” A grammatical imperative. Grammatical because syntactically it marks a command to or demand of a generalized addressee: “(Everyone) surrender to blackness.” Grammatical because the black flesh scarred and tattooed by these illegible hieroglyphics enunciates at the level of symbolic and ontological world orders: “Surrender to blackness” is a command at the level of the foundations of thought and being themselves; grammatical. Imperative because if there is any hope for a revolutionary praxis along any lines—race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability—it must centralize, which is to say look in the face of, which is to say begin to the work of real love for, the blackness preposition which “an authentic upheaval might be born.” #BlackPowerYellowPeril failed to recognize this imperative as legible, let alone heed and meet its command/demand. Created by Suey Park (@suey_park), the hashtag sought to draw from and build upon the accomplishments of Black womyn activists on twitter and tumblr who have long mobilized to generate productive and revolutionary interjections into the world’s violently antiblack discourses (see, for example, #solidarityisforwhitewomen, and #blackmaleprivilege) through extended, communal commentary, usually in direct opposition to the censoring strictures of any kind of respectability politics. Discussions about and within the hashtag can be found here, here, here, here(though this is very hasty, a bit shortsighted, and still not doing much more than glancing at, as opposed to engaging blackness), and here. But broadly, the intentions of the hashtag are founded upon a belief in the possibility of solidarity/coalition politics between Blacks and Asians, seeking to challenge persistent “tensions” between the communities for the sake of a common struggle against ‘white supremacy.’ For those nonblack participants, the drive toward solidarity represents a purely innocent and unquestioned, unquestionable, desire. All critiques of Asian antiblackness are rendered as derailing the move toward solidarity, for they are to bring up the obvious – clearly we are all human, we make mistakes, but to continuously bring up the “mistakes” and never “move on” is to foreclose the possibility of solidarity. And what a wonderful thing the blacks of the conversation were foreclosing – this solidarity thing. What a wonderful thing others were offering to us and we simply would not take. And yet, the unthought question remains: have you truly earned the right to act in solidarity, to form solidarity, to even believe in solidarity? And what is this solidarity thing we all hold near and dear to our hearts? Have we ever experienced it or do we simply have images we have transformed into memories of a solidarity that never existed? I know Black people and Asian people have worked together in the past, but have we ever formed a solid whole? And who is to blame for the fact that we have never had solidarity? The hashtag implies that both “sides” play an equal part in the failure to form solidarity. In the face of this, confessing our sins to each other forms the moment where we can form emotional bonds: “see, you were as racist as I, and how unfortunate it is that we let old whitey come between us. Never again will whitey make us part.” This is the logic behind much of the Asian confessing – white supremacy duped us into being antiblack racists – and also fed into the backlash aimed at blacks – “stop playing oppression olympics, that’s what whitey wants.” It must be foregrounded here that antiblackness cannot be simplified as “anti-black racism” and it is a singularity with no equivalent force – “anti-Asian” racism is not the flipside of antiblackness nor is orientalism or islamophobia. Antiblackness predates white supremacy by at least 300 years (and much more than that depending on how we trace our history) and we can understand antiblackness as the general tethering of the very concept of life to the ontological and unspeakable, unthinkable force of black death. That statement is a place to begin to define antiblackness, it is not the end for this force weaves itself in infinite variety throughout all corners of the globe, forming globe into world. This is not simply about the little racist microaggressions that people listed in their tweets, this is about a global force that the world – not simply whites – bond over and form their lives inside of and through. What #BlackPowerYellowPeril revealed, however, is that the underside of coalition politics remains a violent and virulent antiblackness. As blacks— John Murillo III (@writedarkmatter), New Black School (@newblackschool), Nicholas Brady (@nubluez_nick), and others—raised questions and comments in the spirit of that singular imperative—“Surrender to blackness”—antiblackness emerged in the violence of the response levied against it; one need only visit the hashtag to bear witness. From outright refusals to engage the antiblackness central to the histories and politics of nonblack communities of color, to denials of the foundational, global, and singular nature of antiblackness, and to the repeated calls to police and remove this disruptive blackness and its imperative from the conversation, antiblackness exploded onto the scene. All of this in the name of “coalition.” This is because “coalition” politics and possibilities are fetishized, not loved. The fetish denies the necessary recognition of antiblackness at coalition’s heart, and that antiblackness left unattended renders the imperative illegible. It is a fetishization, then, of antiblackness. The fetish object at the heart of the coalition has always been black flesh – a fetishization where pleasure and terror meet to create the bonds of solidarity people so desire. Here, we open a forum on how the hashtag embodies this fetish, the distinction between fetish and love that must be made in excess of the hashtag and ones like it, and the absolute imperativeness of the imperative. Instead of fetishizing the object, you must surrender to blackness. 34 +b Black debaters are at a structural disadvantaged and unfairness is good- 35 +Warren 11 (Warren Waren University of Central Florida, Orlando, Using Monopoly to Introduce Concepts of Race and Ethnic Relations The Journal of Effective Teaching, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2011, 28-35) 36 +Undergraduate students often enter our classrooms convinced that the battles of the Civil Rights Era solved the issue of race in America. They are generally unacquainted with the long history of race in the United States and almost universally underestimate the structural forces which carry racial disparities into their new century. As sociologists and teachers, it is our responsibility to tell that story and explain those forces. Our new challenge is: How do we teach students the extent of racism in America when, from their point of view, the problem of the color-line has been solved? One option is to use a game. Sociologists have used games or simulations to spark the sociological imagination (Dorn, 1989; Jessup, 2001; Fisher 2008), to stimulate critical thinking (Pence 2009), and to introduce social stratification (Ender, 2004; Waldner and Kinney, 1999). When students from relatively privileged backgrounds “experience” a temporary bout of unfairness in a simulated game, it creates the opportunity to change their perspective (Coghlan and Huggins, 2004; Haddad and Lieberman, 2002). The injustice of the situation, if directly connected to broader theory, can lessen a student’s social distance from marginalized groups. A game may help a student to understand some of the previously inexplicable attitudes and behaviors of actors on either side of a power rela- tionship. Also, as this paper demonstrates, a properly constructed simulation can give the student a sense of the structural nature and lasting legacy of racial discrimination—a fuller sense of the “history and biography” of race in the United States (Mills, 1959). The great advantage of a game is that it is a completely controlled environment—there are no unexplained variables. In fairness to all the players, all rules are explicitly stated at the outset of game play and apply to all players equally (Waldner and Kinney, 1999). Ordinarily, in a competitive game this assumption of fairness supports an ideology of individualism. However, a pedagogical game is concerned with learning, not winning. In order to disentangle a complicated issue, the instructor may purposefully introduce inequality into an otherwise “just” world. Again, because all rules are explicit (even unfair ones), the problem exists in the game without confounding effects. This simplification allows students to easily focus on the nature and development of the problem. By extension, it is hoped that the game encourages students to reassess similar problems in the real world. Use of Pedagogical Games Dorn (1989) identifies multiple criteria for games or simulations to be effective in the classroom as pedagogical tools. He argues the games must: reflect reality; motivate students through "experience"; develop awareness of personal values through moral and ethical implications of the game; connect abstract concepts with concrete experiences; create a shared experience from which the students can draw; offer a form of debriefing to both address emotional issues and to connect theory to experiences. In the technique I describe below, I try to incorporate these ideas with Straus’ (1986) emphasis on simplicity for in-class games. In teaching and learning, the goal of simulation is the “experience” itself. Jessup (2001) argues that simulation should be the “experiential anchor for the elaboration of conceptual tools” (p.108). Therefore, this game is created to offer a chance for relatively privileged students to experience the unfairness of structural inequality. After temporary exposure to an analog of racial discrimination, students with no prior familiarity of racial discrimination will have a deeper understanding of the effects of racism on many levels. Pedagogical games are used to challenge our assumptions about how the world works (Waldner and Kinney, 1999). For example, the basic assumption of competitive games is fairness. This assumes that the world is fair (i.e., a meritocracy) and that individual effort or talent is the main factor in success (i.e., an ideology of individualism akin to Ross’ (1977) fundamental attribution error). In competitive games therefore, groups are treated equally and the best players win. But a pedagogical game may challenge the assumption of fairness directly by having structural inequality built into the game. The experience of a good player losing an unfair game creates cognitive dissonance—that cognitive dissonance is our teaching moment. I assume that students as game players can easily identify games that are “unfair” based on unequal outcomes for equivalent behavior. As a peda gogical tool, I want it to be relatively easy for them to spot the explicit rules which cause the inequality. 37 + 38 + 39 + 40 +Black Time 41 +Fairness is what the white cops want at protests, it’s what congress wants when black families are grappling with the death of a loved one by the state, it’s what massa wants when the slave seeks agency, it’s what you nonblacks in debate want when engagement is not given to you like a cookie 42 +Wilderson 2008 43 +Frank B., Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid South End Press, pg. 406-411 44 +Just two years ago, in December of 1999, I'd written a letter and stuffed it, late one night, in the faculty mailboxes. It began with what must have appeared to the faculty's confused eyes as a red herring. It spoke not about my excruciating encounters with them, but began, instead, out of left field by discussing the plight of two students whose troubles with the College had been the topic of recent debate. Reading of Sonia Rodriguez's and Selma Thornton's troubles with the Student Senate and its White liberal adviser Tim Harold reawakened my disdain for Cabrillo as an institution and for the English Division as one of its flagship entities. I then went on to explain how Selma and Sonia had resigned their posts in the Student Senate in protest over Harold's decision not to allow thirty students of color to have funds to travel to a conference on race at Hartnell College. Instead, Harold spent the money on T-shirts. He had also put the sign-up sheet for the conference not in the Student Center, but in some obscure location where it would never be found thus sabotaging the excursion further. This seemed like a trivial enough matter, but it compounded the hurt and sense of isolation and rebuke which so many Black and Latino students felt at Cabrillo but could not name. I felt a piqued kinship with their unspeakable pain and used the rare moment of it having turned into a tangible event as a way into what I wanted to say to the faculty and administration...and to Alice. In defense of his actions, and as a way of indicating the absurdity of Selma and Sonia's objections, Harold issued a public statement in which he did not comment (or at least the newspaper did not report his comments) on his funding priorities; rather, he simply said "The sign-up sheet was posted for a week, the same way we treat any workshop." To this, I wrote: Whereas Selma Thornton attempts an institutional analysis of the Student Senate by way of a critique of Tim Harold and his practices, Harold responds with a ready made institutional defense and, later in the article, a defense of his integrity (a personalized response to an institutional analysis). He brings the scale of abstraction back down to the level most comfortable for White people: the individual and the uncontextualized realm of fair play. It's the White person's safety zone. I'm a good person, I'm a fair person, I treat everyone equally, the rules apply to everyone. Thornton and Rodriguez's comments don't indict Harold for being a "good" person, they indict him for being White: a way of being in the world which legitimates institutional practices (practices which Thornton and Rodriguez object to) accepts, and promotes, them as timeless—without origin, consequence, interest, or allegiance—natural and inevitable. "The sign-up sheet was posted for a week, the same way we treat any workshop." The whole idea that we treat everyone equally is only slightly more odious than the discussion or how we can treat everyone equally; because the problem is neither the practice nor the debates surrounding it, but the fact that White people can come together and wield enough institutional power to constitute a "We." "We" in the Student Senate, "We" in Aptos, "We" in Santa Cruz, "We" in the English department, "We" in the boardrooms. "We" are fair and balanced is as odious as "We" are in control—they are derivations of the same expression: "We" are the police. The claim of "balance and fair play" forecloses upon, not only the modest argument that the practices of the Cabrillo Student Senate are racist and illegitimate, but it also forecloses upon the more extended, comprehensive, and antagonistic argument that Cabrillo itself is racist and illegitimate. And what do we mean by Cabrillo? The White people who constitute its fantasies of pleasure and its discourse of legitimacy. The generous "We." So, let's bust "We" wide open and start at the end: White people are guilty until proven innocent. Fuck the compositional moves of substantiation and supporting evidence: I was at a conference in West Oakland last week where a thousand Black folks substantiated it a thousand different ways. You're free to go to West Oakland, find them, talk to them, get all the proof you need. You can drive three hours to the mountains, so you sure as hell can cut the time in half and drive to the inner city. Knock on any door. Anyone who knows 20 to 30 Black folks, intimately—and if you don't know 12 then you're not living in America, you're living in White America—knows the statement to be true. White people are guilty until proven innocent. Whites are guilty of being friends with each other, of standing up for their rights, of pledging allegiance to the flag, of reproducing concepts like fairness, meritocracy, balance, standards, norms, harmony between the races. Most of all. Whites are guilty of wanting stability and reform. White people, like Mr. Harold and those in the English Division, are guilty of asking themselves the question. How can we maintain the maximum amount of order (liberals at Cabrillo use euphemisms like peace, harmony, stability), with the minimum amount of change, while presenting ourselves—if but only to ourselves—as having the best of all possible intentions. Good people. Good intentions. White people are the only species, human or otherwise, capable of transforming the dross of good intentions into the gold of grand intentions, and naming it "change." ...These passive revolutions, fire and brimstone conflicts over which institutional reform is better than the other one, provide a smoke screen—a diversionary play of interlocutions—that keep real and necessary antagonisms at bay. White people are thus able to go home each night, perhaps a little wounded, but feeling better for having made Cabrillo a better place...for everyone... Before such hubris at high places makes us all a little too giddy, let me offer a cautionary note: it's scientifically impossible to manufacture shinola out of shit. But White liberals keep on trying and end up spending a lifetime not knowing shit from shinola. Because White people love their jobs, they love their institutions, they love their country, most of all they love each other. And every Black or Brown body that doesn't love the things you love is a threat to your love for each other. A threat to your fantasy space, your terrain of shared pleasures. Passive revolutions have a way of incorporating Black and Brown bodies to either term of the debate. What choice does one have? The third (possible, but always unspoken) term of the debate, White people are guilty of structuring debates which reproduce the institution and the institution reproduces America and America is always and everywhere a bad thing this term is never on the table, because the level of abstraction is too high for White liberals. They've got too much at stake: their friends, their family, their way of life. Let's keep it all at eye level, where whites can keep an eye on everything. So the Black body is incorporated. Because to be unincorporated is to say that what White liberals find valuable I have no use for. This, of course, is anti-institutional and shows a lack of breeding, not to mention a lack of gratitude for all the noblesse oblige which has been extended to the person of color to begin with. "We will incorporate colored folks into our fold, whenever possible and at our own pace, provided they're team players, speak highly of us, pretend to care what we're thinking, are highly qualified, blah, blah, blah...but, and this is key, we won't entertain the rancor which shits on our fantasy space. We've killed too many Indians, worked too many Chinese and Chicano fingers to the bone, set in motion the incarcerated genocide of too many Black folks, and we've spent too much time at the beach, or in our gardens, or hiking in the woods, or patting each other on the literary back, or teaching Shakespeare and the Greeks, or drinking together to honor our dead at retirement parties ("Hell, Jerry White let's throw a party for Joe White and Jane White who gave Cabrillo the best White years of their silly White lives, that we might all continue to do the same White thing." "Sounds good to me, Jack White. Say, you're a genius! Did you think of this party idea all on your own?" "No, Jerry White, we've been doing it for years, makes us feel important. Without these parties we might actually be confronted by our political impotence, our collective spinelessness, our insatiable appetite for gossip and administrative minutia, our fear of a Black Nation, our lack of will." "Whew! Jack White, we sound pathetic. We'd better throw that party pronto!" "White you are, Jerry." "Jack White, you old fart, you, you're still a genius, heh, heh, heh.") too much time White-bonding in an effort to forget how hard we killed and to forget how many bones we walk across each day just to get from our bedrooms to Cabrillo...too, too much for one of you coloreds to come in here and be so ungrateful as to tell us the very terms of our precious debates are specious." But specious they are, as evidenced by recent uproar in the Adjunct vs. Minority Hire debates, or whether or not English 100 students should be "normed." The very terms of the debates suture discussions around White entitlement, when White entitlement is an odious idea. Whites are entitled to betray other Whites, nothing else... Beyond that you're not entitled to anything. So how could you possibly be entitled to a job? How could you possibly be entitled to decide who should pass and who should fail? How could you possibly be entitled to determining where the sign-up sheet for Diversity Day buses will or will not be placed, and how funds should be allocated? Okay...so some of you want to hire a "minority" as long as s/he's "well mannered and won't stab us in the back after s/he's in our sacred house;" and some of you want to hire an adjunct (Jill or Jeffery White) because, "What the hell—they've been around as long as Jack, Joe, Jerry, and Jane White, and shucks fair is fair, especially if you're entitled." And entitlement is a synonym for Whiteness. But there's only one job, because for years you've complained about the gate, while breathing collective (meaning White) sighs of relief that it was there to protect you from the hordes. (Somewhere down the street in Watsonville an immigrant is deciding whether to give his daughter or his wife up for the boss to fuck that he might have a job picking your fruit. Somewhere up the road in Oakland a teen is going to San Quentin for writing graffiti on a wall. And you're in here trying to be "fair" to each other, while promoting diversity—whatever that means. By the time you've arrived at a compromise over norming or faculty hires—your efforts to "enlighten" whoever doesn't die in the fields or fall from the earth into prison—the sista has been raped and the brotha busted. But then you've had a difficult day as well.) So, do what you always do. Hire the most qualified candidate. Here are some questions and guidelines to speed the search committee on its way and make everyone feel entitled. 45 +Ontology Materialism: Why would we have to chant BLACK LIVES MATTER if it was so evident that they mattered? why has antiblackness continued to fester despite the optimistic and material orientation of past, present, and future policies? Why are black children dying because of their race if humanity is so contingent? 46 +Warren 18 Warren Calvin L Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University “Ontological Terror Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation” Duke University Press Durham and London 2018. B1ACK ZD 47 +A deep abyss, or a terrifying question, engenders the declaration “Black Lives Matter.” The declaration, in fact, conceals this question even as it purports to have answered it resolutely. “Black Lives Matter,” then, carries a certain terror in its dissemination, a terror we dare to approach with un- certainty, urgency, and exhaustion. This question pertains to the “meta- physical infrastructure,” as Nahum Chandler might call it, that conditions our world and our thinking about the world. “Black Lives Matter” is an important declaration, not just because it foregrounds the question of unbearable brutality, but also because it performs philosophical labor—it compels us to face the terrifying question, despite our desire to look away. The declaration presents a difficult syntax or an accretion of tensions and ambiguities within its organization: can blacks have life? What would such life mean within an antiblack world? What axiological measurement determines the mattering of the life in question? Does the assembly of these terms shatter philosophical coherence or what metaphysical infra- structure provides stability, coherence, and intelligibility for the declaration? These questions of value, meaning, stability, and intelligibility lead us to the terror of the declaration, the question it conceals but engages: what ontological ground provides the occasion for the declaration? Can such ground be assumed, and if not, is the declaration even possible with- out it? “Black Lives Matter” assumes ontological ground, which propels the deployment of its terms and sustains them throughout the treacheries of antiblack epistemologies. Put differently, the human being provides an anchor for the declaration, and since the being of the human is invaluable, then black life must also matter, if the black is a human (the declaration anchors mattering in the human’s Being). But we reach a point of terror with this syllogistic reasoning. One must take a step backward and ask the fundamental question: is the black, in fact, a human being? Or can black(ness) ground itself in the being of the human? If it cannot, then on what bases can we assert the mattering of black existence? If it can, then why would the phrase need to be repeated and recited incessantly? Do the affirmative declaration and its insistence undermine this very ontological ground? The statement declares, then, too soon—a declaration that is re- ally an unanswered (or unanswerable) question. We must trace this question and declaration back to its philosophical roots: the Negro Question. This question reemerges within a world of antiblack brutality, a world in which black torture, dismemberment, fatality, and fracturing are routinized and ritualized—a global, sadistic pleasure principle. I was invited to meditate on this globalized sadism in the context of Michael Brown’s murder and the police state. The invitation filled me with dread as I anticipated a festival of humanism in which presenters would share solutions to the problem of antiblackness (if they even acknowledged antiblackness) and inundate the audience with “yes we can!” rhetoric and unbounded optimism. I decided to participate, despite this dread, once students began asking me deep questions, questions that also filled them with dread and confusion. I, of course, was correct about my misgivings. I listened to one speaker after the next describe a bright future, where black life is valued and blacks are respected as humans—if we just keep fighting, they said, “we’re almost there!” A political scientist introduced statistics and graphs laying out voting patterns and districts; he argued that blacks just did not realize how much power they had (an unfortunate ignorance, I guess). If they just collectively voted they could change antiblack police practices and make this world a better place. The audience clapped enthusiastically; I remained silent. Next, a professor of law implored the audience to keep fighting for legal change because the law is a powerful weapon for ending discrimination and restoring justice. We just needed to return to the universal principles that founded our Constitution, “liberty, equal- ity, and justice!” (I thought about the exception clause in the Thirteenth Amendment, the Three-Fifths Compromise, and the way the sharecrop- ping system exploited the Fourteenth Amendment in order to reenslave through contract. I continued to sit in silence.) The audience shouted and applauded. . I felt a pit in my stomach because I knew what I had to do; it was my time to step up to the podium—it was my nihilistic responsibility. I told the audience there was no solution to the problem of antiblackness; it will continue without end, as long as the world exists. Furthermore, all the solutions presented rely on antiblack instruments to address antiblackness, a vicious and tortuous cycle that will only produce more pain and disappointment. I also said that humanist affect (the good feeling we get from hopeful solutions) will not translate into freedom, justice, recognition, or resolution. It merely provides temporary reprieve from the fact that blacks are not safe in an antiblack world, a fact that can become overwhelming. The form of antiblackness might alter, but antiblackness itself will remain a constant—despite the power of our imagination and political yearnings. I continued this nihilistic analysis of the situation until I heard complete silence. A woman stood up after my presentation and shouted, “How dare you tell this to our youth! That is so very negative! Of course we can change things; we have power, and we are free.” Her voice began to increase in intensity. I waited for her to finish and asked her, “Then tell us how to end police brutality and the slaughter of the youth you want to protect from my nihilism.” “If these solutions are so credible, why have they consistently failed? Are we awaiting for some novel, extraordinary solution— one no one had ever imagined—to end antiblack violence and misery?” Silence. “In what manner will this ‘power’ deliver us from antiblackness?” How long must we insist on a humanity that is not recognized—an insistence that humiliates in its inefficacy? “If we are progressing, why are black youth being slaughtered at staggering rates in the twenty-first century— if we are, indeed, humans just like everyone else?” People began to respond that things are getting better, despite the increasing death toll, the unchecked power of the police state, the lack of conviction rates for police murdering blacks, the prison industrial complex and the modern reenslavement of an entire generation, the unbelievable black infant mortality rate, the lack of jobs for black youth and debilitating poverty. “This is better?” I asked. “At least we are not slaves!” someone shouted. I asked them to read the Thirteenth Amendment closely. But the intensity of the dialogic exchange taught me that affect runs both ways: it is not just that solutions make us feel good because we feel powerful/hopeful, but that pressing the ontological question presents terror—the terror that ontological security is gone, the terror that ethical claims no longer have an anchor, and the terror of inhabiting existence outside the precincts of humanity and its humanism. Ontological Terror engages this question and the forms of terror it produces. 48 +“IP rights” entails an investment towards gratuitous antiblackness aka the animalistic branding onto black flesh 49 +Johnson 16 Shontavia Johnson Drake University Law School 2016. “BRANDED: Trademark Tattoos, Slave Owner Brands, And The Right To Have "Free" Skin”, Volume 22| Issue 2. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216andcontext=mttlr B1ack ZD 50 +This Part outlines the basic historical, legal and policy issues associated with the practice of placing identifying indicia on human bodies. This practice predates modern American trademark law and can be traced to the days of African and African-American enslavement in the United States. The permanent, forced body modification of slaves was an early precursor to contemporary American use of trademarks as tattoos. As more Americans voluntarily tattoo their bodies today, a growing segment of this tattooed population encompasses brand enthusiasts who choose to permanently ink their bodies with the trademarks of their favorite companies and brands and copyright-protected images. Coupled with this trend, disputes based on tattoos encompassing the intellectual property of third parties have also grown in recent years.26 In perhaps one of the most famous lawsuits based on tattoos and intellectual property, Whitmill v. Warner Bros., Professor David Nimmer posited that the rights of intellectual property owners should not extend to human flesh, because to do so would create “almost literally, a badge of involuntary servitude.”27 Otherwise, he argued, the law would “set at naught the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of badges of slavery.”28 Though tenuous, it is understandable why Professor Nimmer would draw connections between contemporary trademark-based tattoos and the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of slavery. His suggestion, however, provides scant historical or factual foundation. This Part will lay the groundwork implicit in such claims before ultimately explaining why the connection is inappropriate in the modern context of trademark-based tattoos. Though tattooing words and symbols on human bodies has become increasingly popular in recent decades, it is not a new practice. African and African-American slaves routinely had the initials or other identifying indicia of their slave masters permanently branded on their skin.29 These involuntary “trademarks” were placed on slaves both for purposes of punishment and identification.30 Prior to the passage of state and federal trademark law, slave owners used trademarks as a way to distinguish their human property from the property of other slave masters. Branding as a mechanism for distinguishing human property began in 2000-1800 B.C. with Babylonian slaves.31 Within the Transatlantic slave trade, the practice dates back to at least as early as the 1440s, when the Portuguese branded African slaves’ upper bodies to indicate that the slaves belonged to the king of Portugal or another slave owner.32 During the time period of African slave trafficking, each European nation had its own trademark used to mark African slaves.33 Discussing the early history of slave branding, one scholar outlined the many ways in which slave branding took place: Slaves landed at S˜ao Tome were branded with a cross on the right arm in the early sixteenth century; but, later, this design was changed to a ‘G,’ the marca de Guin´e. Slaves exported from Luanda were often branded not once but twice, for they had to receive the mark of the Luso-Brazilian merchants who owned them as well as the royal arms—on the right breast—to signify their relation to the Crown. Sometimes, baptism led to the further branding of a cross 51 +THINK OF EVERY REFORM, MOVEMENT, COALITION, DEMAND, and POLICY THAT HAS HAPPENED AND ASK YOURSELF HOW DID THIS STOP THE STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS OF ANTIBLACKNESS? They did NOT – Chattel slavery changes its name to Jim Crow then to the PIC and policing. 52 +Wilderson 20 Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III, University of California, Irvine “Afropessimism” Originally published: April 7, 2020 B1ACK ZD 53 +There’s something organic to Blackness that makes it essential to the construction of civil society. But there’s also something organic to Blackness that portends the destruction of civil society. There’s noth- ing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: there’s something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction,” abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot be liberated or be made legible through counter-hegemonic interventions. Black suffering is not a function of the performance(s) of civil society, but of the existence of civil society. For the Pakistani driver, the White professor, and his White wife, civil society is an ensemble of con- straints and opportunities. But for the Black, civil society is a murderous projection. In light of this, coalitions and social movements—even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement—bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the inter- locutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and legible conflicts of civil society’s junior partners (such as immigrants, White women, the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and illegible antagonisms of Blacks. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of anti-Blackness, their rhetorical structures, political desire, and their emancipatory horizon are bolstered by a life- affirming anti-Blackness; the death of Black desire. 54 + 55 +NEUROSCIENCE OF RACISM proves libidinal economy and fear of blackness is immaterially and materially true 56 +Bobby Azarian Ph.D. 18, 9/24/18, "Understanding the Racist Brain," Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201809/understanding-the-racist-brain, accessed 10-4-2019, SJCP//JP 57 +The Neuroscience of Racial Bias First of all, how do we know that racial biases actually exist? While some may claim that they have no biases, a clever psychological experiment provides objective evidence supporting the notion that the vast majority of us do. In the implicit bias task, participants are shown words on a computer screen like “happy” and “fear,” which they must categorize as positive or negative. What results have consistently shown is that if a black face is quickly flashed before the words, individuals will be faster to correctly categorize negative words, while the same people will be quicker to correctly categorize positive words when they follow white faces. These troubling findings suggest that over 75 percent of Whites and Asians have an implicit racial bias, which affects how they process information and perceive the social world around them. However, this bias is subconscious and implicit. Whether or not it leads to overtly racist attitudes and behavior depends on an interplay between different brain areas—specifically those that create feelings of fear and promote tribalism, and those that help us regulate and suppress those bad instincts. Neural Pathways Underlying Racism Brain imaging studies have shown that people who display an implicit bias have a stronger electrical response to black or other-race faces in an area of the brain known as the amygdala—a structure responsible for processing emotional stimuli and eliciting a fearful or anxious mental state. An exaggerated amygdala response is part of what creates the sudden visceral or “gut feeling” of being scared. And that feeling of fear has additional psychological effects that promote prejudice. It is well-established that when one feels their welfare is being threatened, they tend to become more tribal in their behavior, and additionally bolster their cultural or national worldviews, since it is those worldviews that make them feel safe. In essence, nationalism and prejudice are knee-jerk responses to anxiety. 58 + 59 +Gordon Identifies instances of black social life but that doesn’t disprove the structural disposition of civil society to black death – their frame essentializes blackness because in a world of black death, pessimism is the only possible optimism. 60 +Sexton 11 (Jared. 2011. “ANTE-ANTI-BLACKNESS: AFTERTHOUGHTS” http://csalateral.org/issue1/content/sexton.html) KR RC/JCH-PF 61 +Fanon and his interlocutors, or what appear rather as his fateful adherents, would seem to have a problem embracing black social life because they never really come to believe in it, because they cannot acknowledge the social life from which they speak and of which they speak – as negation and impossibility – as their own (Moten 2008: 192). Another way of putting this might be to say that they are caught in a performative contradiction enabled by disavowal. I wonder, however, whether things are even this clear in Fanon and the readings his writing might facilitate. Lewis Gordon's sustained engagement with Fanon finds him situated in an ethical stance grounded in the affirmation of blackness in the historic anti-black world. In a response to the discourse of multiracialism emergent in the late twentieth-century United States, for instance, Gordon writes, following Fanon, that "there is no way to reject the thesis that there is something wrong with being black beyond the willingness to 'be' black – not in terms of convenient fads of playing blackness, but in paying the costs of anti-blackness on a global scale. Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity experiences a blackened world" (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to 'be' black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? Elsewhere, in a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the anti-black world developed across his first several books: "Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies – they become them. In our anti-black world, blacks are pathology" (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support to Moten's contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counter-intuitive, or rather because it is counter-intuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the anti-black world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks: "A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment" (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative – "above all, don’t be black" (Gordon 1997: 63) – in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that "resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human'" (Nyong'o 2002: 389). 22 In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos. - Tournament
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,61 @@ 1 +Debate is structured to exclude black bodies – Topicality, Antiblack judge predispositions, disclosure theory, and appeals to fairness are all attempts to situate blackness with the impossible demand of being an ethical speaker 2 +Reid-Brinkley 19 (Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, University of Pittsburgh, “Voice Dipped in Black: The Louisville project and the Birth of Black Radical Argument in College Policy Debate”, https://books.google.com/books?id=dLOYDwAAQBAJandpg=PA219andlpg=PA219anddq=voice+dipped+in+black+the+louisville+projectandsource=blandots=Pe2U-sCaUxandsig=ACfU3U2PZ9YK0~-~-6z8FspFEdHUhG0V53Qwandhl=enandsa=Xandved=2ahUKEwjOjpLojtbmAhUnVt8KHUv6BGcQ6AEwA3oECAoQAQ#v=onepageandqandf=false, 2019) CJun 3 +Racially different bodies must perform that difference according to the cultural norms of the debate community. For Black students it can often mean changing their appearance, standardizing language practices, and eschewing their cultural practices. In essence, in order to have an opportunity for achieving in debate competitions Black students must performatively whiten. “Acting Black” is problematic because those performative identities are not recognizable in the normative frame of debate practice. In fact, Blackness signifies a difference, an opposite; a negative differential. It is not that the debate community explicitly operates to exclude people based on race; rather it competitively rejects Black presence, or non-normative nonwhite performance. It is the combination of cultural values, behavioral practices, and the significance of Black flesh that produce barriers to meaningful inclusion. For Afro-pessimists, the group of Black scholars who have popularized the study of anti-Blackness, the Black is juxtaposed against what it means to be master, human, citizen, and subject in a manner that is constitutive of US civil society. The United States is built upon a notion of freedom and liberty that necessitated the negative dialectic of the Slave to define the parameters of the nation-state. This foundational relationship has sutured together US civil society and continues to do so. For theorist Frank Wilderson, the grammar of Black/Slave suffering is marked by accumulation and fungibility (Wilderson 2010, 55-57), a relation “of being owned and traded” (Kelsie 2014, 6). The human’s (white) grammar of suffering is marked by alienation and exploitation. The grammar of Black (Slave) suffering is not recognizable within the frame of human (white) suffering, it can only be misrecognized as alienation and exploitation. For the study of rhetoric, and understanding of the political ontology of the Black as one that is necessarily defined by its status as Slave/object requires that we engage the question of whether or not the Black has the capacity for recognition in the construction of the moment of voice. Watts would agree that the Black does not have speech; that is why the production of voice is only a momentary process, a happening, by which Blacks can seek recognition. For the Black, the body announces itself prior to speech. So it follows that the Black lacks capacity for speech because they approach the speaking moment as a nonrecognizable subject and “positioned as incapacity” by the “modalities” of accumulation and fungibility. For the Afro-pessimists, capacity is made coherent in civil society by a necessary relationship to Black incapacity. Wilderson notes that “white(Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity: without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best” (Wilderson 2010, 45). Not only does the Black lack the same capacity as the white in first approaching the speaking situation, she or he enters the situation as incapacity. The Black must battle with its political ontological condition as a precursor to the process of speaking and let alone the production of voice. If the "happening" of voice depends on a relationality that produces "a public acknowledgment of the ethics of speaking and the emotions of others; the Black is always already relegated to the position of the unethical speaker that must defend and prove itself by seeking recognition from the Human/Subject in civil society (Watts 2001, 185). Further, it necessitates that the Black performatively and argumentatively approach the moment of voice with only the pretense of subjecthood and capacity. That the Black must construct the pretense of being an ethical speaker, while having no subject positioning to do so, requires an inauthentic performance of the Black object as white subject. If rhetorical situations require pretense and inauthenticity then they make unethical speaking the sine qua non of public speech. The Black must mimic the performance of human (white) capacity and becomes bound by the grammar of alienation and exploitation to achieve recognition. In other words, the Black must justify its Blackness or perform itself in a manner consistent with white civil society to even engage in a relational negotiation to produce the moment of voice. Such a practice supersedes and constitutes the ability of the white audience to recognize the Black as an ethical speaker. As rhetoric theorist Amber Kelsie notes, "From an Afro-Pessimist perspective, the problem is not that the Black is 'voiceless: so much as it is that the voice/speech/body of the Black does not resonate. The Slave is always already being attended to by the white Other, but such recognition itself obliterates any possibility of social life for the Slave' (Kelsie 2014, is). Full recognition of the Black is not really possible in the rhetorical situation, for the Black is the incoherence that constitutes the coherence of the Human/ Subject. In other words, the Black cannot speak about Black suffering without their appeals being read through the frame of alienation and exploitation. The grammar of Black suffering remains unrecognizable and thus unacknowledgeable even in the moments where the Black has produced the voiced moment. Given these considerable obstacles, how did the Louisville Project become successful and produce moments of recognition? Considering the team's transformation from one with a persistent losing record to one of the most successful Black debate teams in the history of national policy debate, it is dear this achievement could not have been possible without a communal recognition of Louisville's ethics and affect. Yet in the moments where those negotiations waver or break down, anti-Blackness as a structural antagonism produces insurmountable obstacles for engaging racialized conflict through discussion and deliberation. Amidst concern about the future of Black participation in college policy debate, the Louisville team began asking hard questions about the argumentative and performative choices Black students would need to make in order to be competitively successful. Warner became increasingly and publicly critical of the Urban Debate League (a nonprofit institution designed to increase the race, class, and gender diversity of competitive high school debate practice in the US) as a diversity model for debate. He argued that the Urban Debate League (UDL) project was a farce, that it was not designed to give poor Black students a shot at the highest levels of competition. The lack of successful UDL debaters in national competition at both the high school and college level demonstrated that access to debate alone would not resolve policy debate's diversity problem. "Why? Not because of anything they do, but because the game is rigged against them, who they are, and what the community asks them to become to achieve 'success" (Warner 2005). Warner moved away from his previous support for and work with UDLs, taking a different path of engaging structural racism in competitive debate. In addition to an aggressive mass recruitment of UDL students and Black students from within the university, the debate team was reconstructed with a redefined purpose for continued participation in competitive policy debate. Louisville questioned competitive debate's exclusive focus on government policy and its limited solutions to sociopolitical problems, developing alternative forms or styles through which to make argument. Debate is generally an oral, heavily evidence-based contest (in terms of number of average quotations from academic sources used in a debate), where people speak quickly in order to make as many arguments as possible. Moving beyond the conventional form by engaging in storytelling, the use of poetry, video footage, video games, music, hip-hop, and theater, Louisville began experimenting with the performative elements of debate speechmaking to supplement the traditional use of speed and hyper-technical argumentation. They introduced new ways of making arguments about public policy and public deliberation around the central political and social issues of our times. As the project developed, the debate community was largely unsupportive of Louisville's experimentation with debate norms. Louisville's teams found it difficult to persuade many judges to vote for them, resulting in persistent losses at national tournaments. Their attempts at innovation resulted in angry verbal confrontations, broken friendships, and group segregations within the policy debate community. Accusations including "Klan member; "Plantation owner; and "Uncle Toms" on one side and "anti-intellectuals; "playing the race card; and "irrational" on the other seem to indicate that the controversy surrounding the Louisville Project reached a boiling point (Hoe 2005). For many in the policy debate community, Louisville's confrontational rhetoric and the dialectical nature of debate competition hurt attempts to build coalitions between the Louisville Project and others in the debate community (Blair 2004). As former director of forensics at Illinois State University, Joseph Zompetti, notes, the Louisville style of debating has resulted in "frustrations, anxiety, resistance, and backlash" (2004a). Allan Louden, former Director of Debate at Wake Forest University, refers to the conflict as a "schism" (2004). Jeff Parcher, former debate coach at Georgetown University, argues that this "schism" makes the future of debate "pessimistic." Parcher notes further that while "alliances" in debate have always existed, they have reached a new level of "intensity" one that he has never seen before in the debate community (Parcher 2004, 89-91). In the summer of 2003, after three years of facing public censure and competitive failure, with the addition of Assistant Coach Darryl Burch, the Louisville team developed a foundational theme to encompass their criticism of traditional debate practice: "you can't change the state, but you can change the state of debate" (interview, July 4, 2012). The team began to work in earnest to develop the parameters of what would later be called the Louisville Project, and one team unit—comprised of members Elizabeth "Liz" Jones and LaTonia "Tonia" Green—were poised for what would become an unexpectedly successful year. They determined that debate participation should have a purpose and theirs would be to increase meaningful Black participation in debate. Rather than taking on white debate norms, the Louisville debaters resist attempts to capture and purify their colored bodies, instead choosing to (re)mark their visibility. For the Black body in the speech situation, it need not necessarily be doing anything for it to signify. The Black body is already marked, made visible and meaningful in public spaces. Yet simultaneously, the Louisville debaters perform Blackness doing something to draw attention to the body. It is in the doing of Blackness that the reading of the Black body as threatening and criminal is exacerbated from potential to probable threat. In con-temporary America, the Blacks who overtly perform Blackness are the "uppity niggers" that must be feared because they neither kowtow fearfully in the face of whiteness nor are they willing to limit the performance of their Blackness for white people/audiences' comfort. Louisville performs Blackness in white spaces, rejecting integrationist or assimilationist performances, as a necessary means of renegotiating the ethical space of tournament competition dominated by anti-Blackness and white privilege. During their speeches, Jones and Green often turn to speak accusatorily at their opponents, which involved neck rolling, a pushing forward of the body in the direction of the opponent, using staccato hand gestures, and eye-rolling—all behaviors that are often identified as "Black women's attitude." It is important to note that nationally competitive debaters often display aggressive personality traits in verbal competition as a marker of success. Such aggressiveness can be delivered in speeches through choices in vocabulary, tone, emphasis on words, speech volume, body movement, and ad hominem attacks. However, as noted, when debating with a non-normative body, norms are applied differently. Even if aggressive speech is normative in debate, when Jones and Green exhibit such typical debating style, they are stereotyped as loud and aggressive. Green provides an excellent example of this performative "attitude" in an elimination round against Wake Forest University at the 2004 CEDA Nationals championship tournament. During the cross-examination period following Green's speech, the opponent attempted to concisely define a particular argument Green made during the speech in order to ask a question. He interrupted Green's explanation, although she pushed past his attempt to stop her from speaking. Her opponent succeeded in stemming the flow of words, wanting to move on to some other question. Green conceded, but note the following exchange as captured on video: Green: "Well, I'm trying to explain to you so that you can ... " Opponent indicates with a statement that he has a different question that he would like to ask.' Green: "Okay, well, go ahead. Cuz it seems like you not getting it anyway. So, ask me something..." Opponent concedes that he may not understand, but his tone implies that this is more Green's fault than his own. Green: "You're not, so ask me something else" Unintelligible response from the opponent as Green continues to interrupt him. Green: "Ask me something else (Green 2004b) Green is standing at a podium. The podium is table length and above waist high. She leans on one elbow tilting her body away from her opponent, slightly facing him, mindful of the judges and the audience seated in front of them. Green's hands move in a dismissive manner, indicated by quick shakes of the hand, simultaneous with a twisting of the wrist and periodic dropping of her hand on the table in frustration or irritation. She is exasperated with her opponent's mischaracterization of her arguments. She is giving him attitude, without being rude, although clearly bordering on it. Her dismissal of him is comedic to the large representation of people of color in the audience who were watching this historic debate. Her clipped, brusque tone clearly indicates frustration, but also the sense arises that she finds him somehow unworthy. Green looks away from him during most of the interaction, occasionally giving him the side-eye, sometimes accompanied by eye-rolling and sighs of disapproval. She willingly allows him to mischaracterize her argument without correcting it, and her tone indicates that he is deserving of such inconsideration. Green revises the normative debate practice of rhetorically dominating one's opponent with Black girl style, a rhetorical and bodily performance designed to turn hostile white places into Black girl spaces. Such overt presenting of Black femininity in the cold and austere spaces of competition in college classrooms is an act of disrupting the sonorous normality of both policy debate and civil society. That this interchange is occurring between a young Black woman and a young white man (from a prominent, private university), adds to the comedic strength of Green's rhetorical strategy in the cross-examination. Because it contrasts the stereotypical dynamic, Green's dismissiveness of a debater whose privilege normally protected him from such interaction is read as amusing, as evidenced by the laughter from the audience. Cross-examination, one of the few times debaters directly address each other, provides an opportunity to clarify and gain information that can be used to strengthen one's position during the following speeches. After each of the constructive speeches the opposing team is given three minutes to question the last speaker. It is particularly within these periods that debaters can be most aggressive. Cross-examination can often be a hostile process, with each participant attempting to gain as much important information as possible while avoiding disclosures that might hurt their argument. Hostility in cross-examination can be a strategic tool of intimidation and dismissal. In each of the Louisville debates that I analyzed for this chapter, cross-examination became a unique space through which the Louisville debaters signified on common performative practices in debate. Cross-examination, one of the few times debaters directly address each other, provides an opportunity to clarify and gain information that can be used to strengthen one's position during the following speeches. After each of the constructive speeches the opposing team is given three minutes to question the last speaker. It is particularly within these periods that debaters can be most aggressive. Cross-examination can often be a hostile process, with each participant attempting to gain as much important information as possible while avoiding disclosures that might hurt their argument. Hostility in cross-examination can be a strategic tool of intimidation and dismissal. In each of the Louisville debates that I analyzed for this chapter, cross-examination became a unique space through which the Louisville debaters signified on common performative practices in debate. Jones's and Green's behavior, while disconcerting to majority white audiences out-side of debate, is still representative of the aggressive behavior the community has engaged in for years. A speaker's aggression and assertiveness, in traditional debate, are effective appeals to white authority. Yet the performance of such behavior, by Black women, is often stereotyped as inappropriate. Their behavior, as defined by the common practices of the policy debate community, should be recognizable and thus acceptable to the majority white and male audience. Yet it is clear that those who encountered this team often seemed to exhibit a level of fear or discomfort with Jones's and Green's performance as opposed to admiration and respect, had they presented as a normative white male. Despite Jones's and Green's repetition of some traditional styles of competition, their Blackened version of normative debate style is often read as disruptive. In as much as Jones and Green perform Black girl attitude, as read by their majority white audience, the more difficult it becomes to build an ethical relationship to the politics of recognition. The problem for Louisville is appeal to Black authority in a space built on appeals to white authority. Using performative Black femininity is a tactic that can elevate anxiety and become an obstacle in building ethical relations. These are forced interactions through competition, Louisville's tactic of making structural racism a part of the dis-course of competition rather than appealing to formal, institutional channels produces a demand for recognition. Indeed, as the following sections detail, the Louisville Project disrupted normative debate practice in an effort to expose anti-Blackness as constitutive of the tradition of debate itself. 4 + 5 +Civil society requires gratuitous violence to blackness to function – civil society is preconditioned to destroy the slave. The fact that whiteness could not enslave their own grafts dirty, slave, and criminal onto black bodies. 6 +Wilderson 10, Frank, Professor at UC Irvine, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and Structure of US Antagonisms”, P. 22-8 B1ACK ZD 7 +- brackets in original 8 +David Eltis is emphatic in his assertion that European civil society’s decision not to hunt for slaves along the banks of the Thames or other rivers in the lands of White people or in prisons or poor houses was a bad business decision that slowed the pace of economic development in both Europe and the “New World.” Eltis writes: No Western European power after the Middle Ages crosses the basic divide separating European workers from full chattel slavery. And while serfdom fell and rose in different parts of early modern Europe and shared characteristics with slavery, serfs were not outsiders either before or after enserfment. The phrase “long distance serf trade” is an oxymoron. (1404) He goes on to show how population growth patterns in Europe during the 1300s, 1400s, and 1500s far outpaced population growth patterns in Africa. He makes this point not only to demonstrate how devastating the effect of chattel slavery was on African population growth patterns—in other words, to highlight its genocidal impact—but also to make an equally profound but commonly overlooked point. Europe was so heavily populated that had the Europeans been more invested in the economic value of chattel slavery than they were in the symbolic value of Black slavery and hence had instituted “a properly exploited system drawing on convicts, prisoners and vagrants...they could easily have provided 50,000 White slaves a year to the New World without serious disruption to either international peace or the existing social institutions that generated and supervised these potential European victims” (1407). I raise Eltis’s counterposing of the symbolic value of slavery to the economic value of slavery in order to debunk two gross misunderstandings: One is that work—or alienation and exploitation—is a constituent element of slavery. Slavery, writes Orlando Patterson, “is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”ix Patterson goes to great lengths to delink his three “constituent elements of slavery” from the labor that one is typically forced to perform when one is enslaved. The forced labor is not constitutive of enslavement because whereas it explains a common practice, it does not define the structure of the power relation between those who are slaves and those who are not. In pursuit of his “constituent elements” of slavery, a line of inquiry that helps us separate experience (events) from ontology (the capacities of power—or lack thereof—lodged within distinct and irreconcilable subject positions, e.g., Humans and Slaves), Patterson helps us denaturalize the link between force and labor, and theorize the former as a phenomena that positions a body, ontologically (paradigmatically), and the latter as a possible but not inevitable experience of someone who is socially dead.x The other misunderstanding I am attempting to correct is the notion that the profit motive is the consideration within the slaveocracy that trumps all others. David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe have gone to considerable lengths to show that, in point of fact, slavery is and connotes an ontological status for Blackness; and that the constituent elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation but accumulation and fungibility (Hartman): the condition of being owned and traded. As these Black writers have debunked conventional wisdom pertaining to the grammar of slave suffering, so too has David Eltis provided a major corrective on the commonsense wisdom that profit was the primary motive driving the African slave trade. Eltis meticulously explains how the costs of enslavement would have been driven exponentially down had White slaves been taken en masse from European countries. Shipping costs from Europe to America were considerably lower than shipping costs from Europe to Africa and then on to America. He notes that “shipping costs...comprised by far the greater part of the price of any form of imported bonded labor in the Americas. If we take into account the time spent collecting a slave cargo on the African coast as well, then the case for sailing directly from Europe with a cargo of Whites appears stronger again” (1405). Eltis sums up his data by concluding that if European merchants, planters, and statesmen imposed chattel slavery on some members of their own society— say, only 50,000 White slaves per year—then not only would European civil society have been able to absorb the social consequences of these losses, in other words class warfare would have been unlikely even at this rate of enslavement, but civil society “would also have enjoyed lower labor costs, a faster development of the Americas, and higher exports and income levels on both sides of the Atlantic” (1422). But what Whites would have gained in economic value, they would have lost in symbolic value; and it is the latter which structures the libidinal economy of civil society. White chattel slavery would have meant that the aura of the social contract had been completely stripped from the body of the convict, vagrant, beggar, indentured servant, or child. This is a subtle point but one vital to our understanding of the relationship between the world of Blacks and the world of Humans. Even under the most extreme forms of coercion in the late Middle Ages and in the early modern period—for example, the provisional and selective enslavement of English vagrants from the early to mid-1500s to the mid-1700s—“the power of the state over convicts in the Old World and the power of the master over convicts in the New World was more circumscribed than that of the slave owner over the slave” (Eltis 1410). Marx himself takes note of the preconscious political—and, by implication, unconscious libidinal—costs to civil society, had European elites been willing to enslave Whites (Capital Vol. 1, 896-905). In fact, though widespread anti-vagabond laws of King Edward VI (1547), Queen Elizabeth (1572), King James I, and France’s Louis XVI (1777) all passed ordinances similar to Edward VI’s which proclaimed that: If anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler. The master shall feed his slave on bread and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has the right to force him to do any work, no matter how disgusting, with whip and chains. If the slave is absent for a fortnight, he is condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded on the forehead or back with the letter S...The master can sell him, bequeath him, let him out on hire as a slave, just as he can any other personal chattel or cattle...All persons have the right to take away the children of the vagabonds and keep them as apprentices, the young men until they are 24, the girls until they are 20. (897) These laws were so controversial, even among elites, that they could never take hold as widespread social and economic phenomena. But I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness’s value), gleaned from a close reading of the laws themselves, than I am in a historical account of the lived experience of the White poor’s resistance to, or the White elite’s ambivalence toward, such ordinances. The actual ordinance(s) manifests the symptoms of its own internal resistance long before either parliament or the poor themselves mount external challenges to it. Symptomatic of civil society’s libidinal safety net is the above ordinance’s repeated use of the word “if.” If anyone refuses to work...if the slave is absent for a fortnight... The violence of slavery is repeatedly checked, subdued into becoming a contingent violence for that entity which is beginning to call itself “White;” at the very same moment that it is being ratcheted up to a gratuitous violence for that entity which is being called (by Whites) “Black.” All the ordinances of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries which Marx either quotes at length or discusses are ordinances which seem, on their face, to debunk my claim that slavery for Whites was/is experiential and that for Blacks it was/is ontological. And yet all of these ordinances are riddled with contingencies, of which frequent and unfettered deployment of the conjunction “if” is emblematic. Both Spillers and Eltis remind us that the archive of African slavery shows no internal recognition of the libidinal costs of turning human bodies into sentient flesh. From Marx’s reports on proposed vagabond-into-slave legislation, it becomes clear that the libidinal economy of such European legislation is far too unconsciously invested in “saving” the symbolic value of the very vagabonds such laws consciously seek to enslave. In other words, the law would rather shoot itself (that is, sacrifice the economic development of the New World) in the foot than step into a subjective void where idlers and vagabonds might find themselves without contemporaries, with no relational status to save. In this way, White-on-White violence is put in check (a) before it becomes gratuitous, or structural, before it can shred the fabric of civil society beyond mending; and (b) before conscious, predictable, and sometimes costly challenges are mounted against the legislation despite its dissembling lack of resolve. This is accomplished by the imposition of the numerous “on condition that...” and “supposing that...” clauses bound up in the word “if” and also by claims bound up in the language around the enslavement of European children: a White child may be enslaved on condition that s/he is the child of a vagabond, and then, only until the age of 20 or 24. Hortense Spillers searched the archives for a similar kind of stop-gap language with respect to the African—some indication of the African’s human value in the libidinal economy of Little Baby Civil Society. She came up as empty handed: Expecting to find direct and amplified reference to African women during the opening years of the Trade, the observer is disappointed time and again that this cultural subject is concealed beneath the overwhelming debris of the itemized account, between the lines of the massive logs of commercial enterprise e.g., a ship’s cargo record that overrun the sense of clarity we believed we had gained concerning this collective humiliation. (Spillers 210) It would be reassuring to say that Europeans rigorously debated the ethical implications of forcing the social death of slavery upon Africans before they went ahead with it; but, as Marx, Eltis, and Spillers make abundantly clear, it would be more accurate simply to say that African slavery did not present an ethical dilemma for global civil society. The ethical dilemmas were unthought. 9 + 10 +And when George Floyd screams MAMA, and I CAN’T BREATHE his communication is understood but results and his death. When Dred Scott articulates he is deserving of freedom his agential capacity is denied. The form of communicative registers opens blackness to gratuitous violence in civil society. 11 +Gillespie 17 – Jon Gillespie is a graduate student for the University of California, Irvine, Comparative Literature, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, Fall 2017, https://www.academia.edu/34839874/On_the_Prospect_of_Weaponized_Death 12 +- brackets in original 13 +Black life is lived in a white hyper-reality. By this I mean, black life is lived inside a constituted white fiction which concretizes itself as fact. Black life is a life lived in non-existence; blackness “exists” as a symbol of death that is, but is not. Blackness “exists” only insofar as White Being structures it onto a map of anti-black violence.4 Achille Mbembe corroborates this in his Critique of Black Reason, stating: Racism consists, most of all, in substituting what is with something else, with another reality. It has the power to distort the real and to fix affect, but it is also a form of psychic derangement, the mechanism through which the repressed suddenly surfaces. When the racist sees the Black person, he does not see that the Black person is not there, does not exist, and is just a sign of a pathological fixation on the absence of a relationship. We must therefore consider race as being both beside and beyond being.5 The reality that replaces that which is a white hyper-reality. This white hyperrealism fixes blackness as “a sign of a pathological fixation.” White hyper-realism is the paradigm whereby consciousness is unable to distinguish between the fictions created by White Being and the Real. It is this fact that permits black death to be subsumed in simulations by each and every (analytic) encounter with Whiteness and the World. Questions like, “Can the Black suffer?” and “Is it capable for the Black to be wronged?” arise due to the inability to access a grammar of suffering to communicate a harm that has never ended, a harm that can never end without ending the World itself. It is for this reason that viral videos of black death, more than opening the possibility for liberal notions of justice, seem to suture the relationship between the mythical and the real that perpetuates itself through the reification of black trauma. Black death, more than deconstructing the ontics of the Human, seems to extend its hyper-reality. Black death makes it harder to distinguish white fictions from any sense of real harm being done to human flesh. The Black is meant to experience its death over and over and over again; and the World itself recycles all its fictions-as-the-Real. Put differently, the White World subjects the Black to perpetual, gratuitous violence, and then uses that violence as evidence to further suggest that the Black is not Human. For how can a Human endure such a thing? The experience of gratuitous violence secures the semiotics of the white hyper-reality. White Disneyland stays intact. Blackness exists at the nexus of fact and fiction, possibility and (non)value, inclusion and exclusion. Blackness is trapped even in saying it’s trapped because the “trapped-ness” of the Black extends to locations where the diction and syntax of White “words don’t go.”6 The Black does not have the grammar to speak against where and how it is trapped since Blackness can only articulate itself through the semiotics of Whiteness. That White Being continues to center black death as the matrix of possibility for its hyper-realist structure indexes the promise of death insofar that White Being is promised futurity. The Black was rendered fungible through the conjunction of the political and the libidinal economy of the anti-Black world. Blackness gave birth to the commodity and the economy of signification that structures the cartography of the Human’s coordinates. This could be said to be a still birth, insofar as the nature of Black life in a white hyper-reality is conducted on a plane that guarantees natal alienation, social, and ontological death. The Black body lives to die; the specter of death shadows it everywhere. What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our orderspecific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)…”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity. 11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? 14 + 15 +Thus, I take this round hostage! Embrace a symbolic extinction, We must engage in undercommon communication that weaponizes our deaths to disrupts the semiotics of the anti-black world. To blacken the debate space it is important to note that no black liberation happens through the methods they will talk about, but only by being parasitic on the spaces of optimism to end the world. 16 +Gillespie 2 (John Gillespie, Undergraduate Researcher and Debater at Towson University, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death,” Propter Nos, Volume 2: Issue 1, Insurgency / Exhaustion, Fall 2017) B1ACK ZD 17 + 18 +- brackets in original 19 +What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our order- specific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)...”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 7 If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity.11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory that prescribes solutions to the analysis in the conclusion of their work. However, one finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a prophetic vision, a pulsing pessimist hope for the “end of the World.” For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way out is an end to the White World. White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only through black vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the spectacle of Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 8 gratuitous freedom is made visible. It is somewhere in this structural antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility of the World, and on the other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its disorientation, that we found the language to say the unsayable and do the undoable. As Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular present non-Black academics with more than an intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism that we don’t talk about...which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s calling for the end of the world...it wants the death of everyone else in the same way that we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through Afro- Pessimism and be who one was on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-Pessimism. If we are engaging in a war in which the symbolic value, the semiotics of this World itself, positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of diversity, of life itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a space where “words don’t go”—a form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the conversation is blackened, and the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to excavate insurgent dictions still lost in the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is death personified, then what might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we recognized the inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness of that death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard writes, “When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer?”19 Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics used by those who are facing globalized White Being with asymmetrical technologies of terror, violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to rupture the system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one to the “desert of the Black Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon the semiotic system.20 Black terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates the death embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable the possibility of a radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized onto- epistemic deployment of violence, and if violent insurgency is necessary, then the decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to counter the terror of White Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood as counter-terror terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life. We Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 9 only have the power to end the World through death. As Baudrillard writes, “The radical difference is that the terrorist, while they have at their disposal weapons that are the system’s own, possess a further lethal weapon: their own deaths.”21 The United States has an international military force, a storehouse of nuclear arms, and the capacity, within their police state alone, to “terrorize” not just one block in Baltimore, but the whole entire world. Black terrorism is what happens when we heed the Afro-Pessimist call that “A living death is as much a death as it is a living,”22 it is what happens when we take seriously the unsayable in Afro-Pessimism. Black Terrorism is (non)ontological fugitivity that disavows any need to focus on social life—black terrorism steals black death itself from White Being. It is for this reason that Baudrillard speaks to his own White Being and the specter of terror when he says: When Western culture sees all of its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very worst way. Our death is an extinction, an annihilation. Herein lies our poverty. When a singularity throws its own death into the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, its dies its own natural death. This is an immense game of double or quits. In committing suicide, the singularity suicides the other at the same time— we might say that the terrorist acts literally ‘suicided’ the West. A death for a death, then, but transfigured by the symbolic stakes. ‘We have already devastated our world, what more do you want?’ says Muray. But precisely, we have devastated this world, it still has to be destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not at all the same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going to be able to do the second.23 We are the others. Tasked with the (un)fortunate task of ending White hyper-realism, the White World, and White Being. Well aware that if White Fascism continues the project of black annihilation, the only choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to. But, ultimately, we must remember the words of Huey Newton: “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”24 In the age of Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon.25 The disavowal of the lives of refugees is White Being attempting to reconcile the “Nation- State” simulation with the free track and flow of bodies it’s been attempting to murder; the deportation of undocumented immigrants in conjunction with the materialization of borders is White Being attempting to secure its linguistic and economic integrity; the rise of the private prison and the militarization of the police force is White Being attempting to innovate the system of enslavement and necropolitics for the 21st Century; the plundering of indigenous land and bodies is White Being attempting to finish off the project of genocide; the disregard for the Earth is White Being ensuring the Anthropocene will also be the Apocalypse. Trump is a reinvigoration, a call to arms, for White Being, and White Being can only be “destroyed symbolically.” Black terrorism transfigures the symbolic stakes because it Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 10 steals away that condition of White Being’s possibility in a kind of fugitivity that is a zero-transformation into Blackness. This being said, we all know that the only thing that follows the absolute loss of hope is this Black Spring, this Neo-Fanonian violence, this blackened terroristic situational transfer. In Baudrillard’s words, in the Age of Trump, let us remember the gift of immorality, “Terrorism is immoral. The World Trade Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself immoral. So, let us be immoral...”26l/ 20 + 21 + 22 +The role of the ballot is to refuse spaces like debate to deconstruct structures of antiblackness. Your ballot will sign off on the deconstruction of debate as a form of implosive terror 23 +- offense links back by explaining how you refuse antiblackness and whiteness 24 +- prefiat offense outweighs, post fiat is white shit 25 +- weigh by who most effectively refuses antiblackness 26 +- aff comes before nonblack theory 27 +King 17 Tiffany Lethabo King, Spring 2017, “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight. Source: Critical Ethnic Studies, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162. Recut B1ACK ZD 28 +Within Native feminist theorizing, ethnographic refusal can be traced to Audra Simpson’s 2007 article, “On Ethnographic Refusal.” In this seminal work, Simpson reflects on and gains inspiration from the tradition of refusal practiced by the people of Kahnawake.14 Simpson shares that Kahnawake refusals are at the core and spirit of her own ethnographic and ethical practices of refusal. I was interested in the larger picture, in the discursive, material and moral territory that was simultaneously historical and contemporary (this “national” space) and the ways in which Kahnawakero:non, the “people of Kahnawake,” had refused the authority of the state at almost every turn. The ways in which their formation of the initial membership code (now replaced by a lineage code and board of elders to implement the code and determine cases) was refused; the ways in which their interactions with border guards at the international boundary line were predicated upon a refusal; how refusal worked in everyday encounters to enunciate repeatedly to ourselves and to outsiders that “this is who we are, this is who you are, these are my rights.”15 Because Simpson was concerned with applying the political and everyday modes of Kahnawake refusal, she attended to the “collective limit” established by her and her Kahnawake participants.16 The collective limit was relationally and ethically determined by what was shared but more importantly by what was not shared. Simpson’s ability to discern the collective limit could only be achieved through a form of relational knowledge production that regards and cares for the other. Simpson recounts how one of her participants forced her to recognize a collective limit. Approaching and then arriving at the limit, Simpson experiences the following: And although I pushed him, hoping that there might be something explicit said from the space of his exclusion— or more explicit than he gave me— it was enough that he said what he said. “Enough” is certainly enough. “Enough,” I realised, was when I reached the limit of my own return and our collective arrival. Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why? And “enough” was when they shut down (or told me to turn off the recorder), or told me outright funny things like “nobody seems to know”— when everybody does know and talks about it all the time. Dominion then has to be exercised over these representations, and that was determined when enough was said. The ethnographic limit then, was reached not just when it would cause harm (or extreme discomfort)— the limit was arrived at when the representation would bite all of us and compromise the representational territory that we have gained for ourselves in the past 100 years.17 Extending her discussion of ethnographic refusal beyond the bounds of ethnographic concerns, Simpson also ponders whether this enactment of refusal can be applied to theoretical work. Simpson outright poses a question: “What is theoretically generative about these refusals?”18 The question that Simpson asks in 2007 is clarified by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in the 2014 essay “R- Words: Refusing Research.” Arguing that modes of refusal extended into the theoretical and methodological terrains of knowledge production are productive and necessary, Tuck and Yang state: For the purposes of our discussion, the most important insight to draw from Simpson’s article is her emphasis that refusals are not subtractive, but are theoretically generative, expansive. Refusal is not just a “no,” but a redirection to ideas otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned. Unlike a settler colonial configuration of knowledge that is petulantly exasperated and resentful of limits, a methodology of refusal regards limits on knowledge as productive, as indeed a good thing.19 In line with Simpson’s intervention, Tuck and Yang posit that “refusal itself could be developed into both method and theory.”20 For Tuck and Yang, a generative practice of refusal and a decolonial and abolitionist tradition is making Western thought “turn back upon itself as settler colonial knowledge, as opposed to universal, liberal, or neutral knowledge without horizon.”21 In fact, the coauthors suggest “making the settler colonial metanarrative the object of . . . research.”22 What this move effectively does is question the uninterrogated assumptions and exposes the violent particularities of the metanarrative. Scrutiny as a practice of refusal also slows down or perhaps halts the momentum of the machinery that allows, as Tuck and Yang argue, “knowledge to facilitate interdictions on Indigenous and Black life.”23erday Louisville felt the love and it was a beautiful thing, so thank you guys for having me and let’s keep fighting for justice. 29 +NIGGA TIME 30 +And, it is your job to guarantee me a win, this is not vote for me because I'm black but rather an aff ballot is key to confront antiblackness 31 +1 Reparations: Debate has been hard and violent to navigate for Black people such as police being called on Black debaters in numerous occasions, judges and opponents saying nigger, white girls calling us slaves the list goes on 32 +2 Black Inspiration- Black success is key to inspiring young debaters and kids to speak out against anti-blackness. Seeing black success will increase black participation which means more black kids can gain skills for refusing the antiblack debate space 33 +3 Regardless of the flow vote for niggas with a W 30 to surrender to blackness. a Nonblacks should not be rewarded for their relationship to blackness 34 +Brady and Murillo 14 2014 Nicholas and John, “Black Imperative: A Forum on Solidarity in the Age of Coalition,” January 26, 2014, http://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/black-imperative-a-forum-on-solidarity-in-the-age-of-coalition/, John Murillo III is a PhD student in the English department at Brown University, and a graduate of the University of California, Irvine, with bachelor’s degrees in Cognitive Science and English. His research interests are broad, and include extensive engagements with and within: Black Studies–particularly Afro-Pessimism–Narrative Theory; Theoretical Physics; Astrophysics; Cosmology; and Neuroscience. Nicholas Brady is an activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He was also a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine Culture and Theory program. 35 +“Surrender to blackness.” A grammatical imperative. Grammatical because syntactically it marks a command to or demand of a generalized addressee: “(Everyone) surrender to blackness.” Grammatical because the black flesh scarred and tattooed by these illegible hieroglyphics enunciates at the level of symbolic and ontological world orders: “Surrender to blackness” is a command at the level of the foundations of thought and being themselves; grammatical. Imperative because if there is any hope for a revolutionary praxis along any lines—race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability—it must centralize, which is to say look in the face of, which is to say begin to the work of real love for, the blackness preposition which “an authentic upheaval might be born.” #BlackPowerYellowPeril failed to recognize this imperative as legible, let alone heed and meet its command/demand. Created by Suey Park (@suey_park), the hashtag sought to draw from and build upon the accomplishments of Black womyn activists on twitter and tumblr who have long mobilized to generate productive and revolutionary interjections into the world’s violently antiblack discourses (see, for example, #solidarityisforwhitewomen, and #blackmaleprivilege) through extended, communal commentary, usually in direct opposition to the censoring strictures of any kind of respectability politics. Discussions about and within the hashtag can be found here, here, here, here(though this is very hasty, a bit shortsighted, and still not doing much more than glancing at, as opposed to engaging blackness), and here. But broadly, the intentions of the hashtag are founded upon a belief in the possibility of solidarity/coalition politics between Blacks and Asians, seeking to challenge persistent “tensions” between the communities for the sake of a common struggle against ‘white supremacy.’ For those nonblack participants, the drive toward solidarity represents a purely innocent and unquestioned, unquestionable, desire. All critiques of Asian antiblackness are rendered as derailing the move toward solidarity, for they are to bring up the obvious – clearly we are all human, we make mistakes, but to continuously bring up the “mistakes” and never “move on” is to foreclose the possibility of solidarity. And what a wonderful thing the blacks of the conversation were foreclosing – this solidarity thing. What a wonderful thing others were offering to us and we simply would not take. And yet, the unthought question remains: have you truly earned the right to act in solidarity, to form solidarity, to even believe in solidarity? And what is this solidarity thing we all hold near and dear to our hearts? Have we ever experienced it or do we simply have images we have transformed into memories of a solidarity that never existed? I know Black people and Asian people have worked together in the past, but have we ever formed a solid whole? And who is to blame for the fact that we have never had solidarity? The hashtag implies that both “sides” play an equal part in the failure to form solidarity. In the face of this, confessing our sins to each other forms the moment where we can form emotional bonds: “see, you were as racist as I, and how unfortunate it is that we let old whitey come between us. Never again will whitey make us part.” This is the logic behind much of the Asian confessing – white supremacy duped us into being antiblack racists – and also fed into the backlash aimed at blacks – “stop playing oppression olympics, that’s what whitey wants.” It must be foregrounded here that antiblackness cannot be simplified as “anti-black racism” and it is a singularity with no equivalent force – “anti-Asian” racism is not the flipside of antiblackness nor is orientalism or islamophobia. Antiblackness predates white supremacy by at least 300 years (and much more than that depending on how we trace our history) and we can understand antiblackness as the general tethering of the very concept of life to the ontological and unspeakable, unthinkable force of black death. That statement is a place to begin to define antiblackness, it is not the end for this force weaves itself in infinite variety throughout all corners of the globe, forming globe into world. This is not simply about the little racist microaggressions that people listed in their tweets, this is about a global force that the world – not simply whites – bond over and form their lives inside of and through. What #BlackPowerYellowPeril revealed, however, is that the underside of coalition politics remains a violent and virulent antiblackness. As blacks— John Murillo III (@writedarkmatter), New Black School (@newblackschool), Nicholas Brady (@nubluez_nick), and others—raised questions and comments in the spirit of that singular imperative—“Surrender to blackness”—antiblackness emerged in the violence of the response levied against it; one need only visit the hashtag to bear witness. From outright refusals to engage the antiblackness central to the histories and politics of nonblack communities of color, to denials of the foundational, global, and singular nature of antiblackness, and to the repeated calls to police and remove this disruptive blackness and its imperative from the conversation, antiblackness exploded onto the scene. All of this in the name of “coalition.” This is because “coalition” politics and possibilities are fetishized, not loved. The fetish denies the necessary recognition of antiblackness at coalition’s heart, and that antiblackness left unattended renders the imperative illegible. It is a fetishization, then, of antiblackness. The fetish object at the heart of the coalition has always been black flesh – a fetishization where pleasure and terror meet to create the bonds of solidarity people so desire. Here, we open a forum on how the hashtag embodies this fetish, the distinction between fetish and love that must be made in excess of the hashtag and ones like it, and the absolute imperativeness of the imperative. Instead of fetishizing the object, you must surrender to blackness. 36 + 37 +Black Time 38 +Fairness is what the white cops want at protests, it’s what congress wants when black families are grappling with the death of a loved one by the state, it’s what massa wants when the slave seeks agency, it’s what you nonblacks in debate want when engagement is not given to you like a cookie 39 +Wilderson 2008 40 +Frank B., Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid South End Press, pg. 406-411 41 +Just two years ago, in December of 1999, I'd written a letter and stuffed it, late one night, in the faculty mailboxes. It began with what must have appeared to the faculty's confused eyes as a red herring. It spoke not about my excruciating encounters with them, but began, instead, out of left field by discussing the plight of two students whose troubles with the College had been the topic of recent debate. Reading of Sonia Rodriguez's and Selma Thornton's troubles with the Student Senate and its White liberal adviser Tim Harold reawakened my disdain for Cabrillo as an institution and for the English Division as one of its flagship entities. I then went on to explain how Selma and Sonia had resigned their posts in the Student Senate in protest over Harold's decision not to allow thirty students of color to have funds to travel to a conference on race at Hartnell College. Instead, Harold spent the money on T-shirts. He had also put the sign-up sheet for the conference not in the Student Center, but in some obscure location where it would never be found thus sabotaging the excursion further. This seemed like a trivial enough matter, but it compounded the hurt and sense of isolation and rebuke which so many Black and Latino students felt at Cabrillo but could not name. I felt a piqued kinship with their unspeakable pain and used the rare moment of it having turned into a tangible event as a way into what I wanted to say to the faculty and administration...and to Alice. In defense of his actions, and as a way of indicating the absurdity of Selma and Sonia's objections, Harold issued a public statement in which he did not comment (or at least the newspaper did not report his comments) on his funding priorities; rather, he simply said "The sign-up sheet was posted for a week, the same way we treat any workshop." To this, I wrote: Whereas Selma Thornton attempts an institutional analysis of the Student Senate by way of a critique of Tim Harold and his practices, Harold responds with a ready made institutional defense and, later in the article, a defense of his integrity (a personalized response to an institutional analysis). He brings the scale of abstraction back down to the level most comfortable for White people: the individual and the uncontextualized realm of fair play. It's the White person's safety zone. I'm a good person, I'm a fair person, I treat everyone equally, the rules apply to everyone. Thornton and Rodriguez's comments don't indict Harold for being a "good" person, they indict him for being White: a way of being in the world which legitimates institutional practices (practices which Thornton and Rodriguez object to) accepts, and promotes, them as timeless—without origin, consequence, interest, or allegiance—natural and inevitable. "The sign-up sheet was posted for a week, the same way we treat any workshop." The whole idea that we treat everyone equally is only slightly more odious than the discussion or how we can treat everyone equally; because the problem is neither the practice nor the debates surrounding it, but the fact that White people can come together and wield enough institutional power to constitute a "We." "We" in the Student Senate, "We" in Aptos, "We" in Santa Cruz, "We" in the English department, "We" in the boardrooms. "We" are fair and balanced is as odious as "We" are in control—they are derivations of the same expression: "We" are the police. The claim of "balance and fair play" forecloses upon, not only the modest argument that the practices of the Cabrillo Student Senate are racist and illegitimate, but it also forecloses upon the more extended, comprehensive, and antagonistic argument that Cabrillo itself is racist and illegitimate. And what do we mean by Cabrillo? The White people who constitute its fantasies of pleasure and its discourse of legitimacy. The generous "We." So, let's bust "We" wide open and start at the end: White people are guilty until proven innocent. Fuck the compositional moves of substantiation and supporting evidence: I was at a conference in West Oakland last week where a thousand Black folks substantiated it a thousand different ways. You're free to go to West Oakland, find them, talk to them, get all the proof you need. You can drive three hours to the mountains, so you sure as hell can cut the time in half and drive to the inner city. Knock on any door. Anyone who knows 20 to 30 Black folks, intimately—and if you don't know 12 then you're not living in America, you're living in White America—knows the statement to be true. White people are guilty until proven innocent. Whites are guilty of being friends with each other, of standing up for their rights, of pledging allegiance to the flag, of reproducing concepts like fairness, meritocracy, balance, standards, norms, harmony between the races. Most of all. Whites are guilty of wanting stability and reform. White people, like Mr. Harold and those in the English Division, are guilty of asking themselves the question. How can we maintain the maximum amount of order (liberals at Cabrillo use euphemisms like peace, harmony, stability), with the minimum amount of change, while presenting ourselves—if but only to ourselves—as having the best of all possible intentions. Good people. Good intentions. White people are the only species, human or otherwise, capable of transforming the dross of good intentions into the gold of grand intentions, and naming it "change." ...These passive revolutions, fire and brimstone conflicts over which institutional reform is better than the other one, provide a smoke screen—a diversionary play of interlocutions—that keep real and necessary antagonisms at bay. White people are thus able to go home each night, perhaps a little wounded, but feeling better for having made Cabrillo a better place...for everyone... Before such hubris at high places makes us all a little too giddy, let me offer a cautionary note: it's scientifically impossible to manufacture shinola out of shit. But White liberals keep on trying and end up spending a lifetime not knowing shit from shinola. Because White people love their jobs, they love their institutions, they love their country, most of all they love each other. And every Black or Brown body that doesn't love the things you love is a threat to your love for each other. A threat to your fantasy space, your terrain of shared pleasures. Passive revolutions have a way of incorporating Black and Brown bodies to either term of the debate. What choice does one have? The third (possible, but always unspoken) term of the debate, White people are guilty of structuring debates which reproduce the institution and the institution reproduces America and America is always and everywhere a bad thing this term is never on the table, because the level of abstraction is too high for White liberals. They've got too much at stake: their friends, their family, their way of life. Let's keep it all at eye level, where whites can keep an eye on everything. So the Black body is incorporated. Because to be unincorporated is to say that what White liberals find valuable I have no use for. This, of course, is anti-institutional and shows a lack of breeding, not to mention a lack of gratitude for all the noblesse oblige which has been extended to the person of color to begin with. "We will incorporate colored folks into our fold, whenever possible and at our own pace, provided they're team players, speak highly of us, pretend to care what we're thinking, are highly qualified, blah, blah, blah...but, and this is key, we won't entertain the rancor which shits on our fantasy space. We've killed too many Indians, worked too many Chinese and Chicano fingers to the bone, set in motion the incarcerated genocide of too many Black folks, and we've spent too much time at the beach, or in our gardens, or hiking in the woods, or patting each other on the literary back, or teaching Shakespeare and the Greeks, or drinking together to honor our dead at retirement parties ("Hell, Jerry White let's throw a party for Joe White and Jane White who gave Cabrillo the best White years of their silly White lives, that we might all continue to do the same White thing." "Sounds good to me, Jack White. Say, you're a genius! Did you think of this party idea all on your own?" "No, Jerry White, we've been doing it for years, makes us feel important. Without these parties we might actually be confronted by our political impotence, our collective spinelessness, our insatiable appetite for gossip and administrative minutia, our fear of a Black Nation, our lack of will." "Whew! Jack White, we sound pathetic. We'd better throw that party pronto!" "White you are, Jerry." "Jack White, you old fart, you, you're still a genius, heh, heh, heh.") too much time White-bonding in an effort to forget how hard we killed and to forget how many bones we walk across each day just to get from our bedrooms to Cabrillo...too, too much for one of you coloreds to come in here and be so ungrateful as to tell us the very terms of our precious debates are specious." But specious they are, as evidenced by recent uproar in the Adjunct vs. Minority Hire debates, or whether or not English 100 students should be "normed." The very terms of the debates suture discussions around White entitlement, when White entitlement is an odious idea. Whites are entitled to betray other Whites, nothing else... Beyond that you're not entitled to anything. So how could you possibly be entitled to a job? How could you possibly be entitled to decide who should pass and who should fail? How could you possibly be entitled to determining where the sign-up sheet for Diversity Day buses will or will not be placed, and how funds should be allocated? Okay...so some of you want to hire a "minority" as long as s/he's "well mannered and won't stab us in the back after s/he's in our sacred house;" and some of you want to hire an adjunct (Jill or Jeffery White) because, "What the hell—they've been around as long as Jack, Joe, Jerry, and Jane White, and shucks fair is fair, especially if you're entitled." And entitlement is a synonym for Whiteness. But there's only one job, because for years you've complained about the gate, while breathing collective (meaning White) sighs of relief that it was there to protect you from the hordes. (Somewhere down the street in Watsonville an immigrant is deciding whether to give his daughter or his wife up for the boss to fuck that he might have a job picking your fruit. Somewhere up the road in Oakland a teen is going to San Quentin for writing graffiti on a wall. And you're in here trying to be "fair" to each other, while promoting diversity—whatever that means. By the time you've arrived at a compromise over norming or faculty hires—your efforts to "enlighten" whoever doesn't die in the fields or fall from the earth into prison—the sista has been raped and the brotha busted. But then you've had a difficult day as well.) So, do what you always do. Hire the most qualified candidate. Here are some questions and guidelines to speed the search committee on its way and make everyone feel entitled. 42 +Ontology Materialism: Why would we have to chant BLACK LIVES MATTER if it was so evident that they mattered? why has antiblackness continued to fester despite the optimistic and material orientation of past, present, and future policies? Why are black children dying because of their race if humanity is so contingent? 43 +Warren 18 Warren Calvin L Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University “Ontological Terror Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation” Duke University Press Durham and London 2018. B1ACK ZD 44 +A deep abyss, or a terrifying question, engenders the declaration “Black Lives Matter.” The declaration, in fact, conceals this question even as it purports to have answered it resolutely. “Black Lives Matter,” then, carries a certain terror in its dissemination, a terror we dare to approach with un- certainty, urgency, and exhaustion. This question pertains to the “meta- physical infrastructure,” as Nahum Chandler might call it, that conditions our world and our thinking about the world. “Black Lives Matter” is an important declaration, not just because it foregrounds the question of unbearable brutality, but also because it performs philosophical labor—it compels us to face the terrifying question, despite our desire to look away. The declaration presents a difficult syntax or an accretion of tensions and ambiguities within its organization: can blacks have life? What would such life mean within an antiblack world? What axiological measurement determines the mattering of the life in question? Does the assembly of these terms shatter philosophical coherence or what metaphysical infra- structure provides stability, coherence, and intelligibility for the declaration? These questions of value, meaning, stability, and intelligibility lead us to the terror of the declaration, the question it conceals but engages: what ontological ground provides the occasion for the declaration? Can such ground be assumed, and if not, is the declaration even possible with- out it? “Black Lives Matter” assumes ontological ground, which propels the deployment of its terms and sustains them throughout the treacheries of antiblack epistemologies. Put differently, the human being provides an anchor for the declaration, and since the being of the human is invaluable, then black life must also matter, if the black is a human (the declaration anchors mattering in the human’s Being). But we reach a point of terror with this syllogistic reasoning. One must take a step backward and ask the fundamental question: is the black, in fact, a human being? Or can black(ness) ground itself in the being of the human? If it cannot, then on what bases can we assert the mattering of black existence? If it can, then why would the phrase need to be repeated and recited incessantly? Do the affirmative declaration and its insistence undermine this very ontological ground? The statement declares, then, too soon—a declaration that is re- ally an unanswered (or unanswerable) question. We must trace this question and declaration back to its philosophical roots: the Negro Question. This question reemerges within a world of antiblack brutality, a world in which black torture, dismemberment, fatality, and fracturing are routinized and ritualized—a global, sadistic pleasure principle. I was invited to meditate on this globalized sadism in the context of Michael Brown’s murder and the police state. The invitation filled me with dread as I anticipated a festival of humanism in which presenters would share solutions to the problem of antiblackness (if they even acknowledged antiblackness) and inundate the audience with “yes we can!” rhetoric and unbounded optimism. I decided to participate, despite this dread, once students began asking me deep questions, questions that also filled them with dread and confusion. I, of course, was correct about my misgivings. I listened to one speaker after the next describe a bright future, where black life is valued and blacks are respected as humans—if we just keep fighting, they said, “we’re almost there!” A political scientist introduced statistics and graphs laying out voting patterns and districts; he argued that blacks just did not realize how much power they had (an unfortunate ignorance, I guess). If they just collectively voted they could change antiblack police practices and make this world a better place. The audience clapped enthusiastically; I remained silent. Next, a professor of law implored the audience to keep fighting for legal change because the law is a powerful weapon for ending discrimination and restoring justice. We just needed to return to the universal principles that founded our Constitution, “liberty, equal- ity, and justice!” (I thought about the exception clause in the Thirteenth Amendment, the Three-Fifths Compromise, and the way the sharecrop- ping system exploited the Fourteenth Amendment in order to reenslave through contract. I continued to sit in silence.) The audience shouted and applauded. . I felt a pit in my stomach because I knew what I had to do; it was my time to step up to the podium—it was my nihilistic responsibility. I told the audience there was no solution to the problem of antiblackness; it will continue without end, as long as the world exists. Furthermore, all the solutions presented rely on antiblack instruments to address antiblackness, a vicious and tortuous cycle that will only produce more pain and disappointment. I also said that humanist affect (the good feeling we get from hopeful solutions) will not translate into freedom, justice, recognition, or resolution. It merely provides temporary reprieve from the fact that blacks are not safe in an antiblack world, a fact that can become overwhelming. The form of antiblackness might alter, but antiblackness itself will remain a constant—despite the power of our imagination and political yearnings. I continued this nihilistic analysis of the situation until I heard complete silence. A woman stood up after my presentation and shouted, “How dare you tell this to our youth! That is so very negative! Of course we can change things; we have power, and we are free.” Her voice began to increase in intensity. I waited for her to finish and asked her, “Then tell us how to end police brutality and the slaughter of the youth you want to protect from my nihilism.” “If these solutions are so credible, why have they consistently failed? Are we awaiting for some novel, extraordinary solution— one no one had ever imagined—to end antiblack violence and misery?” Silence. “In what manner will this ‘power’ deliver us from antiblackness?” How long must we insist on a humanity that is not recognized—an insistence that humiliates in its inefficacy? “If we are progressing, why are black youth being slaughtered at staggering rates in the twenty-first century— if we are, indeed, humans just like everyone else?” People began to respond that things are getting better, despite the increasing death toll, the unchecked power of the police state, the lack of conviction rates for police murdering blacks, the prison industrial complex and the modern reenslavement of an entire generation, the unbelievable black infant mortality rate, the lack of jobs for black youth and debilitating poverty. “This is better?” I asked. “At least we are not slaves!” someone shouted. I asked them to read the Thirteenth Amendment closely. But the intensity of the dialogic exchange taught me that affect runs both ways: it is not just that solutions make us feel good because we feel powerful/hopeful, but that pressing the ontological question presents terror—the terror that ontological security is gone, the terror that ethical claims no longer have an anchor, and the terror of inhabiting existence outside the precincts of humanity and its humanism. Ontological Terror engages this question and the forms of terror it produces. 45 + 46 +How the HELL do you explain the pleasure and satisfaction from black pain and suffering absent the aff!? Make them rationalize this instead of instinctively accepting their defense, an imperfect explanation is better than none at all 47 +Wilderson 20 Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III, University of California, Irvine “Afropessimism” Originally published: April 7, 2020 B1ACK ZD 48 +In other words, activists want to make sense of the death of Sandra Bland, and the murders of Michael Brown, and Eric Garner; when what these spectacles require, in order to be adequately explained, is a theory of the nonsense; their absence of a tangible or rational utility: Black people are not murdered for transgressions such as illegal immi- gration or workplace agitation. The essential utility of Black death is, paradoxically, the absence of utility. Black death does have a certain utility, but it’s not subtended by the extraction of surplus value; not in any fundamental way. And it is certainly not subtended by the usurpation of land. Black death is subtended by the psychic integration of everyone who is not Black. Black death functions as national therapy, even though the rhetoric that explains and laments these deaths expresses this psychic dependence not directly, but symptomatically. It is complex, but it is simple too. Blacks are not going to be genocided like Native Americans. We are being genocided, but genocided and regenerated, because the spectacle of Black death is essential to the mental health of the world—we can’t be wiped out completely, because our deaths must be repeated, visually. The bodily mutilation of Blackness is necessary, so it must be repeated. What we are witnessing on YouTube, Instagram, and the nightly news as murders are rituals of healing for civil society. Rituals that stabilize and ease the anxiety that other people feel in their daily lives. It’s the anxiety that people have walking around. It can be stabilized by a lot of different things—marijuana, cocaine, alco- hol, affairs—but the ultimate stabilization is the spectacle of violence against Blacks. I know I am a Human because I am not Black. I know I am not Black because when and if I experience the kind of violence Blacks experience there is a reason, some contingent transgression. This is why online video posts of police murdering Black people contribute more to the psychic well-being of non-Black people—to their communal pleasures and sense of ontological presence—than they contribute to deterrence, arrests, or even to a general sensitivity to Black pain and suffering. Afropessimism helps us understand why the violence that sat- urates Black life isn’t threatened with elimination just because it is exposed. For this to be the case, the spectator, interlocutor, auditor would have to come to images such as these with an unconscious that can perceive injury in such images. In other words, the mind would have to see a person with a heritage of rights and claims, whose rights and claims are being violated. This is not the way Slaves, Blacks, function in the collective unconscious. Slaves func- tion as implements in the collective unconscious. Who ever heard of an injured plow? Afropessimism is premised on an iconoclastic claim: that Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness. Blackness is social death, which is to say that there was never a prior moment of plenitude, never a moment of equilibrium, never a moment of social life. Blackness, as a para- digmatic position (rather than as an ensemble of identities, cultural practices, or anthropological accoutrements), cannot be disimbricated from slavery. The narrative arc of the slave who is Black (unlike the generic slave who may be of any race) is not a narrative arc at all, but a flat line of “historical stillness”: a flat line that “moves” from disequi- librium to a moment in the narrative of faux-equilibrium, to disequi- librium restored and/or rearticulated. To put it differently, the violence that both elaborates and satu- rates Black “life” is totalizing, so much so as to make narrative inac- cessible to Blacks. This is not simply a problem for Black people. It is a problem for the organizational calculus of critical theory and radical politics writ large. 49 + 50 +“IP rights” entails an investment towards gratuitous antiblackness aka the animalistic branding onto black flesh 51 +Johnson 16 Shontavia Johnson Drake University Law School 2016. “BRANDED: Trademark Tattoos, Slave Owner Brands, And The Right To Have "Free" Skin”, Volume 22| Issue 2. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216andcontext=mttlr B1ack ZD 52 +This Part outlines the basic historical, legal and policy issues associated with the practice of placing identifying indicia on human bodies. This practice predates modern American trademark law and can be traced to the days of African and African-American enslavement in the United States. The permanent, forced body modification of slaves was an early precursor to contemporary American use of trademarks as tattoos. As more Americans voluntarily tattoo their bodies today, a growing segment of this tattooed population encompasses brand enthusiasts who choose to permanently ink their bodies with the trademarks of their favorite companies and brands and copyright-protected images. Coupled with this trend, disputes based on tattoos encompassing the intellectual property of third parties have also grown in recent years.26 In perhaps one of the most famous lawsuits based on tattoos and intellectual property, Whitmill v. Warner Bros., Professor David Nimmer posited that the rights of intellectual property owners should not extend to human flesh, because to do so would create “almost literally, a badge of involuntary servitude.”27 Otherwise, he argued, the law would “set at naught the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of badges of slavery.”28 Though tenuous, it is understandable why Professor Nimmer would draw connections between contemporary trademark-based tattoos and the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of slavery. His suggestion, however, provides scant historical or factual foundation. This Part will lay the groundwork implicit in such claims before ultimately explaining why the connection is inappropriate in the modern context of trademark-based tattoos. Though tattooing words and symbols on human bodies has become increasingly popular in recent decades, it is not a new practice. African and African-American slaves routinely had the initials or other identifying indicia of their slave masters permanently branded on their skin.29 These involuntary “trademarks” were placed on slaves both for purposes of punishment and identification.30 Prior to the passage of state and federal trademark law, slave owners used trademarks as a way to distinguish their human property from the property of other slave masters. Branding as a mechanism for distinguishing human property began in 2000-1800 B.C. with Babylonian slaves.31 Within the Transatlantic slave trade, the practice dates back to at least as early as the 1440s, when the Portuguese branded African slaves’ upper bodies to indicate that the slaves belonged to the king of Portugal or another slave owner.32 During the time period of African slave trafficking, each European nation had its own trademark used to mark African slaves.33 Discussing the early history of slave branding, one scholar outlined the many ways in which slave branding took place: Slaves landed at S˜ao Tome were branded with a cross on the right arm in the early sixteenth century; but, later, this design was changed to a ‘G,’ the marca de Guin´e. Slaves exported from Luanda were often branded not once but twice, for they had to receive the mark of the Luso-Brazilian merchants who owned them as well as the royal arms—on the right breast—to signify their relation to the Crown. Sometimes, baptism led to the further branding of a cross 53 +Why would we have to chant BLACK LIVES MATTER if it was so evident that they mattered? why has antiblackness continued to fester despite the optimistic and material orientation of past, present, and future policies? Why are black children dying because of their race if humanity is so contingent? 54 + 55 +THINK OF EVERY REFORM, MOVEMENT, COALITION, DEMAND, and POLICY THAT HAS HAPPENED AND ASK YOURSELF HOW DID THIS STOP THE STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS OF ANTIBLACKNESS? They did NOT – Chattel slavery changes its name to Jim Crow then to the PIC and policing. 56 +Wilderson 20 Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III, University of California, Irvine “Afropessimism” Originally published: April 7, 2020 B1ACK ZD 57 +There’s something organic to Blackness that makes it essential to the construction of civil society. But there’s also something organic to Blackness that portends the destruction of civil society. There’s noth- ing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: there’s something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction,” abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot be liberated or be made legible through counter-hegemonic interventions. Black suffering is not a function of the performance(s) of civil society, but of the existence of civil society. For the Pakistani driver, the White professor, and his White wife, civil society is an ensemble of con- straints and opportunities. But for the Black, civil society is a murderous projection. In light of this, coalitions and social movements—even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement—bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the inter- locutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and legible conflicts of civil society’s junior partners (such as immigrants, White women, the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and illegible antagonisms of Blacks. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of anti-Blackness, their rhetorical structures, political desire, and their emancipatory horizon are bolstered by a life- affirming anti-Blackness; the death of Black desire. 58 + 59 +And our root cause claim is also reverse casual 60 +Bledsoe 19, Adam, and Willie Jamaal Wright (Professors, department of geography, Florida State University. "The anti-Blackness of global capital." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37.1 (2019): 8-26. B1ACK ZD 61 +Nonetheless, we must push further to explicate the ways in which capitalism is actually dependent on anti-Blackness to realize itself, instead of understanding anti-Black racism as a secondary effect of the economy or a phenomenon that emerges periodically. That is to say, reflections on the interlinked nature of race and capitalism must move beyond an assumption of economic causality and grapple with the ways in which anti-Blackness is actually an always-present precondition for capital accumulation. In explicating anti-Blackness, we draw on an Afro-Pessimist framework, as Afro-Pessimism makes distinct claims about the nature of Blackness in the modern world. An Afro-Pessimist analysis of anti- Blackness does not treat anti-Black racism as a contingent phenomenon (Wilderson, 2011: 3–4) but rather as a global, ever-present factor that exists as the basis “for expansion and unending space within the symbolic economy of settlement” (King, 2014). Such an approach forces us to recognize how anti-Blackness punctuates the modern epoch by identifying the underlying logics that inform concrete manifestations of anti-Black racism around the world. In this way, Afro-Pessimism adds new dimensions to already-existing work on the connections between anti-Blackness and political economy by recognizing that, while capitalism exploits all of the world’s populations, it does not dominate all of them in the same way. With regard to the question of space, anti-Blackness helps us understand how the afterlife of slavery (Hartman, 2007: 6) leads to Black populations being conceptually unable to legitimately create space, thereby leaving locations associated with Blackness open to the presumably “rational” agendas of dominant spatial actors. Black populations, then, serve as the guarantor of capitalism’s need to constantly find new spaces of accumulation. In this section, we offer an explanation of how capitalism relies on anti-Blackness by foregrounding anti-Blackness as a phenomena with its own internal logics and concrete expressions. Capitalism is rooted in violent forms of captivity and murder unleashed on indigenous and Afro-descendant populations the world over (Ferreira da Silva, 2004; James, 1989; Rodney, 1972; Williams, 2014; Wynter, 1995). At its origin and in its contemporary manifestations, then, capitalism is systemically related to slavery and its various global permutations (Robinson, 2000: 313–314). The assumption that Black populations lack both humanity and “space, that is ethno- or politico-geography,” defines the treatment of enslaved Black peoples. Today, the assumed a-spatiality that defined conditions of chattel slavery continues to imprint the socio-spatial relations that reproduce global capital (Robinson, 2000: 81, 200). Black populations are deemed a-spatial as a result of the fact that modern notions of space and practices of spatial production are rooted in specific relations of power (Massey, 2005: 64, 100–101). These power relations are themselves organized around logics that have particular historical roots (Santos, 2008: 21). In the colonial epoch, chattel slavery—the social, legal, and political reduction of Africans to the status of nonhumans—produced the figure of the Black, which had a nullified spatial capacity (Wilderson, 2010: 279), was disavowed as a human being (Ferreira da Silva, 2015: 91), and was a priori structurally prevented from enacting “rational” spatial expressions (Santos, 2009: 24). Locations associated with Black populations became wholly “unhallowed” spaces, which would never receive recognition as legitimately occupied (Wynter, 1976: 81). This is not to suggest that Black peoples were or are understood as not physically present. Black bodies are certainly recognized as existing in exteriority (Raffestin, 2012: 129). Still, this recognition of physical presence does not signify that Black populations’ are understood as establishing legible space. Despite physical presence, Black populations nonetheless remain rendered “ungeographic” in dominant understandings of space (McKittrick, 2006: x). Hence, the geographic locations in which Black populations reside are treated as open to the varied agendas espoused by dominant spatial actors. - Tournament
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,62 @@ 1 +Debate is structured to exclude black bodies – communication is not a level playing field but rather geared toward productivity and futurity. Because the logic of communication presumes a sense of community, black communication is always seen as an instrument to serve the future. 2 +Reid-Brinkley 19 (Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, University of Pittsburgh, “Voice Dipped in Black: The Louisville project and the Birth of Black Radical Argument in College Policy Debate”, https://books.google.com/books?id=dLOYDwAAQBAJandpg=PA219andlpg=PA219anddq=voice+dipped+in+black+the+louisville+projectandsource=blandots=Pe2U-sCaUxandsig=ACfU3U2PZ9YK0~-~-6z8FspFEdHUhG0V53Qwandhl=enandsa=Xandved=2ahUKEwjOjpLojtbmAhUnVt8KHUv6BGcQ6AEwA3oECAoQAQ#v=onepageandqandf=false, 2019) CJun 3 +Racially different bodies must perform that difference according to the cultural norms of the debate community. For Black students it can often mean changing their appearance, standardizing language practices, and eschewing their cultural practices. In essence, in order to have an opportunity for achieving in debate competitions Black students must performatively whiten. “Acting Black” is problematic because those performative identities are not recognizable in the normative frame of debate practice. In fact, Blackness signifies a difference, an opposite; a negative differential. It is not that the debate community explicitly operates to exclude people based on race; rather it competitively rejects Black presence, or non-normative nonwhite performance. It is the combination of cultural values, behavioral practices, and the significance of Black flesh that produce barriers to meaningful inclusion. For Afro-pessimists, the group of Black scholars who have popularized the study of anti-Blackness, the Black is juxtaposed against what it means to be master, human, citizen, and subject in a manner that is constitutive of US civil society. The United States is built upon a notion of freedom and liberty that necessitated the negative dialectic of the Slave to define the parameters of the nation-state. This foundational relationship has sutured together US civil society and continues to do so. For theorist Frank Wilderson, the grammar of Black/Slave suffering is marked by accumulation and fungibility (Wilderson 2010, 55-57), a relation “of being owned and traded” (Kelsie 2014, 6). The human’s (white) grammar of suffering is marked by alienation and exploitation. The grammar of Black (Slave) suffering is not recognizable within the frame of human (white) suffering, it can only be misrecognized as alienation and exploitation. For the study of rhetoric, and understanding of the political ontology of the Black as one that is necessarily defined by its status as Slave/object requires that we engage the question of whether or not the Black has the capacity for recognition in the construction of the moment of voice. Watts would agree that the Black does not have speech; that is why the production of voice is only a momentary process, a happening, by which Blacks can seek recognition. For the Black, the body announces itself prior to speech. So it follows that the Black lacks capacity for speech because they approach the speaking moment as a nonrecognizable subject and “positioned as incapacity” by the “modalities” of accumulation and fungibility. For the Afro-pessimists, capacity is made coherent in civil society by a necessary relationship to Black incapacity. Wilderson notes that “white(Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity: without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best” (Wilderson 2010, 45). Not only does the Black lack the same capacity as the white in first approaching the speaking situation, she or he enters the situation as incapacity. The Black must battle with its political ontological condition as a precursor to the process of speaking and let alone the production of voice. If the "happening" of voice depends on a relationality that produces "a public acknowledgment of the ethics of speaking and the emotions of others; the Black is always already relegated to the position of the unethical speaker that must defend and prove itself by seeking recognition from the Human/Subject in civil society (Watts 2001, 185). Further, it necessitates that the Black performatively and argumentatively approach the moment of voice with only the pretense of subjecthood and capacity. That the Black must construct the pretense of being an ethical speaker, while having no subject positioning to do so, requires an inauthentic performance of the Black object as white subject. If rhetorical situations require pretense and inauthenticity then they make unethical speaking the sine qua non of public speech. The Black must mimic the performance of human (white) capacity and becomes bound by the grammar of alienation and exploitation to achieve recognition. In other words, the Black must justify its Blackness or perform itself in a manner consistent with white civil society to even engage in a relational negotiation to produce the moment of voice. Such a practice supersedes and constitutes the ability of the white audience to recognize the Black as an ethical speaker. As rhetoric theorist Amber Kelsie notes, "From an Afro-Pessimist perspective, the problem is not that the Black is 'voiceless: so much as it is that the voice/speech/body of the Black does not resonate. The Slave is always already being attended to by the white Other, but such recognition itself obliterates any possibility of social life for the Slave' (Kelsie 2014, is). Full recognition of the Black is not really possible in the rhetorical situation, for the Black is the incoherence that constitutes the coherence of the Human/ Subject. In other words, the Black cannot speak about Black suffering without their appeals being read through the frame of alienation and exploitation. The grammar of Black suffering remains unrecognizable and thus unacknowledgeable even in the moments where the Black has produced the voiced moment. Given these considerable obstacles, how did the Louisville Project become successful and produce moments of recognition? Considering the team's transformation from one with a persistent losing record to one of the most successful Black debate teams in the history of national policy debate, it is dear this achievement could not have been possible without a communal recognition of Louisville's ethics and affect. Yet in the moments where those negotiations waver or break down, anti-Blackness as a structural antagonism produces insurmountable obstacles for engaging racialized conflict through discussion and deliberation. Amidst concern about the future of Black participation in college policy debate, the Louisville team began asking hard questions about the argumentative and performative choices Black students would need to make in order to be competitively successful. Warner became increasingly and publicly critical of the Urban Debate League (a nonprofit institution designed to increase the race, class, and gender diversity of competitive high school debate practice in the US) as a diversity model for debate. He argued that the Urban Debate League (UDL) project was a farce, that it was not designed to give poor Black students a shot at the highest levels of competition. The lack of successful UDL debaters in national competition at both the high school and college level demonstrated that access to debate alone would not resolve policy debate's diversity problem. "Why? Not because of anything they do, but because the game is rigged against them, who they are, and what the community asks them to become to achieve 'success" (Warner 2005). Warner moved away from his previous support for and work with UDLs, taking a different path of engaging structural racism in competitive debate. In addition to an aggressive mass recruitment of UDL students and Black students from within the university, the debate team was reconstructed with a redefined purpose for continued participation in competitive policy debate. Louisville questioned competitive debate's exclusive focus on government policy and its limited solutions to sociopolitical problems, developing alternative forms or styles through which to make argument. Debate is generally an oral, heavily evidence-based contest (in terms of number of average quotations from academic sources used in a debate), where people speak quickly in order to make as many arguments as possible. Moving beyond the conventional form by engaging in storytelling, the use of poetry, video footage, video games, music, hip-hop, and theater, Louisville began experimenting with the performative elements of debate speechmaking to supplement the traditional use of speed and hyper-technical argumentation. They introduced new ways of making arguments about public policy and public deliberation around the central political and social issues of our times. As the project developed, the debate community was largely unsupportive of Louisville's experimentation with debate norms. Louisville's teams found it difficult to persuade many judges to vote for them, resulting in persistent losses at national tournaments. Their attempts at innovation resulted in angry verbal confrontations, broken friendships, and group segregations within the policy debate community. Accusations including "Klan member; "Plantation owner; and "Uncle Toms" on one side and "anti-intellectuals; "playing the race card; and "irrational" on the other seem to indicate that the controversy surrounding the Louisville Project reached a boiling point (Hoe 2005). For many in the policy debate community, Louisville's confrontational rhetoric and the dialectical nature of debate competition hurt attempts to build coalitions between the Louisville Project and others in the debate community (Blair 2004). As former director of forensics at Illinois State University, Joseph Zompetti, notes, the Louisville style of debating has resulted in "frustrations, anxiety, resistance, and backlash" (2004a). Allan Louden, former Director of Debate at Wake Forest University, refers to the conflict as a "schism" (2004). Jeff Parcher, former debate coach at Georgetown University, argues that this "schism" makes the future of debate "pessimistic." Parcher notes further that while "alliances" in debate have always existed, they have reached a new level of "intensity" one that he has never seen before in the debate community (Parcher 2004, 89-91). In the summer of 2003, after three years of facing public censure and competitive failure, with the addition of Assistant Coach Darryl Burch, the Louisville team developed a foundational theme to encompass their criticism of traditional debate practice: "you can't change the state, but you can change the state of debate" (interview, July 4, 2012). The team began to work in earnest to develop the parameters of what would later be called the Louisville Project, and one team unit—comprised of members Elizabeth "Liz" Jones and LaTonia "Tonia" Green—were poised for what would become an unexpectedly successful year. They determined that debate participation should have a purpose and theirs would be to increase meaningful Black participation in debate. Rather than taking on white debate norms, the Louisville debaters resist attempts to capture and purify their colored bodies, instead choosing to (re)mark their visibility. For the Black body in the speech situation, it need not necessarily be doing anything for it to signify. The Black body is already marked, made visible and meaningful in public spaces. Yet simultaneously, the Louisville debaters perform Blackness doing something to draw attention to the body. It is in the doing of Blackness that the reading of the Black body as threatening and criminal is exacerbated from potential to probable threat. In con-temporary America, the Blacks who overtly perform Blackness are the "uppity niggers" that must be feared because they neither kowtow fearfully in the face of whiteness nor are they willing to limit the performance of their Blackness for white people/audiences' comfort. Louisville performs Blackness in white spaces, rejecting integrationist or assimilationist performances, as a necessary means of renegotiating the ethical space of tournament competition dominated by anti-Blackness and white privilege. During their speeches, Jones and Green often turn to speak accusatorily at their opponents, which involved neck rolling, a pushing forward of the body in the direction of the opponent, using staccato hand gestures, and eye-rolling—all behaviors that are often identified as "Black women's attitude." It is important to note that nationally competitive debaters often display aggressive personality traits in verbal competition as a marker of success. Such aggressiveness can be delivered in speeches through choices in vocabulary, tone, emphasis on words, speech volume, body movement, and ad hominem attacks. However, as noted, when debating with a non-normative body, norms are applied differently. Even if aggressive speech is normative in debate, when Jones and Green exhibit such typical debating style, they are stereotyped as loud and aggressive. Green provides an excellent example of this performative "attitude" in an elimination round against Wake Forest University at the 2004 CEDA Nationals championship tournament. During the cross-examination period following Green's speech, the opponent attempted to concisely define a particular argument Green made during the speech in order to ask a question. He interrupted Green's explanation, although she pushed past his attempt to stop her from speaking. Her opponent succeeded in stemming the flow of words, wanting to move on to some other question. Green conceded, but note the following exchange as captured on video: Green: "Well, I'm trying to explain to you so that you can ... " Opponent indicates with a statement that he has a different question that he would like to ask.' Green: "Okay, well, go ahead. Cuz it seems like you not getting it anyway. So, ask me something..." Opponent concedes that he may not understand, but his tone implies that this is more Green's fault than his own. Green: "You're not, so ask me something else" Unintelligible response from the opponent as Green continues to interrupt him. Green: "Ask me something else (Green 2004b) Green is standing at a podium. The podium is table length and above waist high. She leans on one elbow tilting her body away from her opponent, slightly facing him, mindful of the judges and the audience seated in front of them. Green's hands move in a dismissive manner, indicated by quick shakes of the hand, simultaneous with a twisting of the wrist and periodic dropping of her hand on the table in frustration or irritation. She is exasperated with her opponent's mischaracterization of her arguments. She is giving him attitude, without being rude, although clearly bordering on it. Her dismissal of him is comedic to the large representation of people of color in the audience who were watching this historic debate. Her clipped, brusque tone clearly indicates frustration, but also the sense arises that she finds him somehow unworthy. Green looks away from him during most of the interaction, occasionally giving him the side-eye, sometimes accompanied by eye-rolling and sighs of disapproval. She willingly allows him to mischaracterize her argument without correcting it, and her tone indicates that he is deserving of such inconsideration. Green revises the normative debate practice of rhetorically dominating one's opponent with Black girl style, a rhetorical and bodily performance designed to turn hostile white places into Black girl spaces. Such overt presenting of Black femininity in the cold and austere spaces of competition in college classrooms is an act of disrupting the sonorous normality of both policy debate and civil society. That this interchange is occurring between a young Black woman and a young white man (from a prominent, private university), adds to the comedic strength of Green's rhetorical strategy in the cross-examination. Because it contrasts the stereotypical dynamic, Green's dismissiveness of a debater whose privilege normally protected him from such interaction is read as amusing, as evidenced by the laughter from the audience. Cross-examination, one of the few times debaters directly address each other, provides an opportunity to clarify and gain information that can be used to strengthen one's position during the following speeches. After each of the constructive speeches the opposing team is given three minutes to question the last speaker. It is particularly within these periods that debaters can be most aggressive. Cross-examination can often be a hostile process, with each participant attempting to gain as much important information as possible while avoiding disclosures that might hurt their argument. Hostility in cross-examination can be a strategic tool of intimidation and dismissal. In each of the Louisville debates that I analyzed for this chapter, cross-examination became a unique space through which the Louisville debaters signified on common performative practices in debate. Cross-examination, one of the few times debaters directly address each other, provides an opportunity to clarify and gain information that can be used to strengthen one's position during the following speeches. After each of the constructive speeches the opposing team is given three minutes to question the last speaker. It is particularly within these periods that debaters can be most aggressive. Cross-examination can often be a hostile process, with each participant attempting to gain as much important information as possible while avoiding disclosures that might hurt their argument. Hostility in cross-examination can be a strategic tool of intimidation and dismissal. In each of the Louisville debates that I analyzed for this chapter, cross-examination became a unique space through which the Louisville debaters signified on common performative practices in debate. Jones's and Green's behavior, while disconcerting to majority white audiences out-side of debate, is still representative of the aggressive behavior the community has engaged in for years. A speaker's aggression and assertiveness, in traditional debate, are effective appeals to white authority. Yet the performance of such behavior, by Black women, is often stereotyped as inappropriate. Their behavior, as defined by the common practices of the policy debate community, should be recognizable and thus acceptable to the majority white and male audience. Yet it is clear that those who encountered this team often seemed to exhibit a level of fear or discomfort with Jones's and Green's performance as opposed to admiration and respect, had they presented as a normative white male. Despite Jones's and Green's repetition of some traditional styles of competition, their Blackened version of normative debate style is often read as disruptive. In as much as Jones and Green perform Black girl attitude, as read by their majority white audience, the more difficult it becomes to build an ethical relationship to the politics of recognition. The problem for Louisville is appeal to Black authority in a space built on appeals to white authority. Using performative Black femininity is a tactic that can elevate anxiety and become an obstacle in building ethical relations. These are forced interactions through competition, Louisville's tactic of making structural racism a part of the dis-course of competition rather than appealing to formal, institutional channels produces a demand for recognition. Indeed, as the following sections detail, the Louisville Project disrupted normative debate practice in an effort to expose anti-Blackness as constitutive of the tradition of debate itself. 4 + 5 + 6 +Civil society requires gratuitous violence to blackness to function – civil society is preconditioned to destroy the slave. The fact that whiteness could not enslave their own grafts dirty, slave, and criminal onto black bodies. 7 +Wilderson 10, Frank, Professor at UC Irvine, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and Structure of US Antagonisms”, P. 22-8 8 +- brackets in original 9 +David Eltis is emphatic in his assertion that European civil society’s decision not to hunt for slaves along the banks of the Thames or other rivers in the lands of White people or in prisons or poor houses was a bad business decision that slowed the pace of economic development in both Europe and the “New World.” Eltis writes: No Western European power after the Middle Ages crosses the basic divide separating European workers from full chattel slavery. And while serfdom fell and rose in different parts of early modern Europe and shared characteristics with slavery, serfs were not outsiders either before or after enserfment. The phrase “long distance serf trade” is an oxymoron. (1404) He goes on to show how population growth patterns in Europe during the 1300s, 1400s, and 1500s far outpaced population growth patterns in Africa. He makes this point not only to demonstrate how devastating the effect of chattel slavery was on African population growth patterns—in other words, to highlight its genocidal impact—but also to make an equally profound but commonly overlooked point. Europe was so heavily populated that had the Europeans been more invested in the economic value of chattel slavery than they were in the symbolic value of Black slavery and hence had instituted “a properly exploited system drawing on convicts, prisoners and vagrants...they could easily have provided 50,000 White slaves a year to the New World without serious disruption to either international peace or the existing social institutions that generated and supervised these potential European victims” (1407). I raise Eltis’s counterposing of the symbolic value of slavery to the economic value of slavery in order to debunk two gross misunderstandings: One is that work—or alienation and exploitation—is a constituent element of slavery. Slavery, writes Orlando Patterson, “is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”ix Patterson goes to great lengths to delink his three “constituent elements of slavery” from the labor that one is typically forced to perform when one is enslaved. The forced labor is not constitutive of enslavement because whereas it explains a common practice, it does not define the structure of the power relation between those who are slaves and those who are not. In pursuit of his “constituent elements” of slavery, a line of inquiry that helps us separate experience (events) from ontology (the capacities of power—or lack thereof—lodged within distinct and irreconcilable subject positions, e.g., Humans and Slaves), Patterson helps us denaturalize the link between force and labor, and theorize the former as a phenomena that positions a body, ontologically (paradigmatically), and the latter as a possible but not inevitable experience of someone who is socially dead.x The other misunderstanding I am attempting to correct is the notion that the profit motive is the consideration within the slaveocracy that trumps all others. David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe have gone to considerable lengths to show that, in point of fact, slavery is and connotes an ontological status for Blackness; and that the constituent elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation but accumulation and fungibility (Hartman): the condition of being owned and traded. As these Black writers have debunked conventional wisdom pertaining to the grammar of slave suffering, so too has David Eltis provided a major corrective on the commonsense wisdom that profit was the primary motive driving the African slave trade. Eltis meticulously explains how the costs of enslavement would have been driven exponentially down had White slaves been taken en masse from European countries. Shipping costs from Europe to America were considerably lower than shipping costs from Europe to Africa and then on to America. He notes that “shipping costs...comprised by far the greater part of the price of any form of imported bonded labor in the Americas. If we take into account the time spent collecting a slave cargo on the African coast as well, then the case for sailing directly from Europe with a cargo of Whites appears stronger again” (1405). Eltis sums up his data by concluding that if European merchants, planters, and statesmen imposed chattel slavery on some members of their own society— say, only 50,000 White slaves per year—then not only would European civil society have been able to absorb the social consequences of these losses, in other words class warfare would have been unlikely even at this rate of enslavement, but civil society “would also have enjoyed lower labor costs, a faster development of the Americas, and higher exports and income levels on both sides of the Atlantic” (1422). But what Whites would have gained in economic value, they would have lost in symbolic value; and it is the latter which structures the libidinal economy of civil society. White chattel slavery would have meant that the aura of the social contract had been completely stripped from the body of the convict, vagrant, beggar, indentured servant, or child. This is a subtle point but one vital to our understanding of the relationship between the world of Blacks and the world of Humans. Even under the most extreme forms of coercion in the late Middle Ages and in the early modern period—for example, the provisional and selective enslavement of English vagrants from the early to mid-1500s to the mid-1700s—“the power of the state over convicts in the Old World and the power of the master over convicts in the New World was more circumscribed than that of the slave owner over the slave” (Eltis 1410). Marx himself takes note of the preconscious political—and, by implication, unconscious libidinal—costs to civil society, had European elites been willing to enslave Whites (Capital Vol. 1, 896-905). In fact, though widespread anti-vagabond laws of King Edward VI (1547), Queen Elizabeth (1572), King James I, and France’s Louis XVI (1777) all passed ordinances similar to Edward VI’s which proclaimed that: If anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler. The master shall feed his slave on bread and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has the right to force him to do any work, no matter how disgusting, with whip and chains. If the slave is absent for a fortnight, he is condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded on the forehead or back with the letter S...The master can sell him, bequeath him, let him out on hire as a slave, just as he can any other personal chattel or cattle...All persons have the right to take away the children of the vagabonds and keep them as apprentices, the young men until they are 24, the girls until they are 20. (897) These laws were so controversial, even among elites, that they could never take hold as widespread social and economic phenomena. But I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness’s value), gleaned from a close reading of the laws themselves, than I am in a historical account of the lived experience of the White poor’s resistance to, or the White elite’s ambivalence toward, such ordinances. The actual ordinance(s) manifests the symptoms of its own internal resistance long before either parliament or the poor themselves mount external challenges to it. Symptomatic of civil society’s libidinal safety net is the above ordinance’s repeated use of the word “if.” If anyone refuses to work...if the slave is absent for a fortnight... The violence of slavery is repeatedly checked, subdued into becoming a contingent violence for that entity which is beginning to call itself “White;” at the very same moment that it is being ratcheted up to a gratuitous violence for that entity which is being called (by Whites) “Black.” All the ordinances of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries which Marx either quotes at length or discusses are ordinances which seem, on their face, to debunk my claim that slavery for Whites was/is experiential and that for Blacks it was/is ontological. And yet all of these ordinances are riddled with contingencies, of which frequent and unfettered deployment of the conjunction “if” is emblematic. Both Spillers and Eltis remind us that the archive of African slavery shows no internal recognition of the libidinal costs of turning human bodies into sentient flesh. From Marx’s reports on proposed vagabond-into-slave legislation, it becomes clear that the libidinal economy of such European legislation is far too unconsciously invested in “saving” the symbolic value of the very vagabonds such laws consciously seek to enslave. In other words, the law would rather shoot itself (that is, sacrifice the economic development of the New World) in the foot than step into a subjective void where idlers and vagabonds might find themselves without contemporaries, with no relational status to save. In this way, White-on-White violence is put in check (a) before it becomes gratuitous, or structural, before it can shred the fabric of civil society beyond mending; and (b) before conscious, predictable, and sometimes costly challenges are mounted against the legislation despite its dissembling lack of resolve. This is accomplished by the imposition of the numerous “on condition that...” and “supposing that...” clauses bound up in the word “if” and also by claims bound up in the language around the enslavement of European children: a White child may be enslaved on condition that s/he is the child of a vagabond, and then, only until the age of 20 or 24. Hortense Spillers searched the archives for a similar kind of stop-gap language with respect to the African—some indication of the African’s human value in the libidinal economy of Little Baby Civil Society. She came up as empty handed: Expecting to find direct and amplified reference to African women during the opening years of the Trade, the observer is disappointed time and again that this cultural subject is concealed beneath the overwhelming debris of the itemized account, between the lines of the massive logs of commercial enterprise e.g., a ship’s cargo record that overrun the sense of clarity we believed we had gained concerning this collective humiliation. (Spillers 210) It would be reassuring to say that Europeans rigorously debated the ethical implications of forcing the social death of slavery upon Africans before they went ahead with it; but, as Marx, Eltis, and Spillers make abundantly clear, it would be more accurate simply to say that African slavery did not present an ethical dilemma for global civil society. The ethical dilemmas were unthought. 10 + 11 + 12 +Whiteness necessitate living in a hyperreal in order to make Blackness coherent and legible – which opens blackness to gratuitous violence in civil society. 13 +Gillespie 17 – Jon Gillespie is a graduate student for the University of California, Irvine, Comparative Literature, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, Fall 2017, https://www.academia.edu/34839874/On_the_Prospect_of_Weaponized_Death 14 +- brackets in original 15 +Black life is lived in a white hyper-reality. By this I mean, black life is lived inside a constituted white fiction which concretizes itself as fact. Black life is a life lived in non-existence; blackness “exists” as a symbol of death that is, but is not. Blackness “exists” only insofar as White Being structures it onto a map of anti-black violence.4 Achille Mbembe corroborates this in his Critique of Black Reason, stating: Racism consists, most of all, in substituting what is with something else, with another reality. It has the power to distort the real and to fix affect, but it is also a form of psychic derangement, the mechanism through which the repressed suddenly surfaces. When the racist sees the Black person, he does not see that the Black person is not there, does not exist, and is just a sign of a pathological fixation on the absence of a relationship. We must therefore consider race as being both beside and beyond being.5 The reality that replaces that which is a white hyper-reality. This white hyperrealism fixes blackness as “a sign of a pathological fixation.” White hyper-realism is the paradigm whereby consciousness is unable to distinguish between the fictions created by White Being and the Real. It is this fact that permits black death to be subsumed in simulations by each and every (analytic) encounter with Whiteness and the World. Questions like, “Can the Black suffer?” and “Is it capable for the Black to be wronged?” arise due to the inability to access a grammar of suffering to communicate a harm that has never ended, a harm that can never end without ending the World itself. It is for this reason that viral videos of black death, more than opening the possibility for liberal notions of justice, seem to suture the relationship between the mythical and the real that perpetuates itself through the reification of black trauma. Black death, more than deconstructing the ontics of the Human, seems to extend its hyper-reality. Black death makes it harder to distinguish white fictions from any sense of real harm being done to human flesh. The Black is meant to experience its death over and over and over again; and the World itself recycles all its fictions-as-the-Real. Put differently, the White World subjects the Black to perpetual, gratuitous violence, and then uses that violence as evidence to further suggest that the Black is not Human. For how can a Human endure such a thing? The experience of gratuitous violence secures the semiotics of the white hyper-reality. White Disneyland stays intact. Blackness exists at the nexus of fact and fiction, possibility and (non)value, inclusion and exclusion. Blackness is trapped even in saying it’s trapped because the “trapped-ness” of the Black extends to locations where the diction and syntax of White “words don’t go.”6 The Black does not have the grammar to speak against where and how it is trapped since Blackness can only articulate itself through the semiotics of Whiteness. That White Being continues to center black death as the matrix of possibility for its hyper-realist structure indexes the promise of death insofar that White Being is promised futurity. The Black was rendered fungible through the conjunction of the political and the libidinal economy of the anti-Black world. Blackness gave birth to the commodity and the economy of signification that structures the cartography of the Human’s coordinates. This could be said to be a still birth, insofar as the nature of Black life in a white hyper-reality is conducted on a plane that guarantees natal alienation, social, and ontological death. The Black body lives to die; the specter of death shadows it everywhere. What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our orderspecific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)…”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity. 11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? 16 +Thus, I take this round hostage! Embrace a symbolic extinction, We must engage in undercommon communication that weaponizes our deaths to disrupts the semiotics of the anti-black world. To blacken the debate space it is important to note that no black liberation happens through the methods they will talk about, but only by being parasitic on the spaces of optimism to end the world. 17 +Gillespie 2 (John Gillespie, Undergraduate Researcher and Debater at Towson University, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death,” Propter Nos, Volume 2: Issue 1, Insurgency / Exhaustion, Fall 2017) B1ACK ZD 18 + 19 +- brackets in original 20 +What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what “structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the representational process” that structures “the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact, in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our order- specific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “I am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)...”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 7 If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates the entire World. White Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity.11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator. The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If black death centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being? Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory that prescribes solutions to the analysis in the conclusion of their work. However, one finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a prophetic vision, a pulsing pessimist hope for the “end of the World.” For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way out is an end to the White World. White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only through black vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the spectacle of Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 8 gratuitous freedom is made visible. It is somewhere in this structural antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility of the World, and on the other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its disorientation, that we found the language to say the unsayable and do the undoable. As Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular present non-Black academics with more than an intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism that we don’t talk about...which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s calling for the end of the world...it wants the death of everyone else in the same way that we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through Afro- Pessimism and be who one was on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-Pessimism. If we are engaging in a war in which the symbolic value, the semiotics of this World itself, positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of diversity, of life itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a space where “words don’t go”—a form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the conversation is blackened, and the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to excavate insurgent dictions still lost in the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is death personified, then what might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we recognized the inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness of that death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard writes, “When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer?”19 Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics used by those who are facing globalized White Being with asymmetrical technologies of terror, violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to rupture the system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one to the “desert of the Black Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon the semiotic system.20 Black terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates the death embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable the possibility of a radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized onto- epistemic deployment of violence, and if violent insurgency is necessary, then the decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to counter the terror of White Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood as counter-terror terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life. We Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 9 only have the power to end the World through death. As Baudrillard writes, “The radical difference is that the terrorist, while they have at their disposal weapons that are the system’s own, possess a further lethal weapon: their own deaths.”21 The United States has an international military force, a storehouse of nuclear arms, and the capacity, within their police state alone, to “terrorize” not just one block in Baltimore, but the whole entire world. Black terrorism is what happens when we heed the Afro-Pessimist call that “A living death is as much a death as it is a living,”22 it is what happens when we take seriously the unsayable in Afro-Pessimism. Black Terrorism is (non)ontological fugitivity that disavows any need to focus on social life—black terrorism steals black death itself from White Being. It is for this reason that Baudrillard speaks to his own White Being and the specter of terror when he says: When Western culture sees all of its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very worst way. Our death is an extinction, an annihilation. Herein lies our poverty. When a singularity throws its own death into the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, its dies its own natural death. This is an immense game of double or quits. In committing suicide, the singularity suicides the other at the same time— we might say that the terrorist acts literally ‘suicided’ the West. A death for a death, then, but transfigured by the symbolic stakes. ‘We have already devastated our world, what more do you want?’ says Muray. But precisely, we have devastated this world, it still has to be destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not at all the same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going to be able to do the second.23 We are the others. Tasked with the (un)fortunate task of ending White hyper-realism, the White World, and White Being. Well aware that if White Fascism continues the project of black annihilation, the only choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to. But, ultimately, we must remember the words of Huey Newton: “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”24 In the age of Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon.25 The disavowal of the lives of refugees is White Being attempting to reconcile the “Nation- State” simulation with the free track and flow of bodies it’s been attempting to murder; the deportation of undocumented immigrants in conjunction with the materialization of borders is White Being attempting to secure its linguistic and economic integrity; the rise of the private prison and the militarization of the police force is White Being attempting to innovate the system of enslavement and necropolitics for the 21st Century; the plundering of indigenous land and bodies is White Being attempting to finish off the project of genocide; the disregard for the Earth is White Being ensuring the Anthropocene will also be the Apocalypse. Trump is a reinvigoration, a call to arms, for White Being, and White Being can only be “destroyed symbolically.” Black terrorism transfigures the symbolic stakes because it Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017) 10 steals away that condition of White Being’s possibility in a kind of fugitivity that is a zero-transformation into Blackness. This being said, we all know that the only thing that follows the absolute loss of hope is this Black Spring, this Neo-Fanonian violence, this blackened terroristic situational transfer. In Baudrillard’s words, in the Age of Trump, let us remember the gift of immorality, “Terrorism is immoral. The World Trade Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself immoral. So, let us be immoral...”26l/ 21 +The role of the ballot is to refuse spaces like debate to deconstruct structures of antiblackness. Refusal is not just a “no,” but a generative process that challenges sanctioned modes of protocol and decorum in civil society. 22 +- offense links back by explaining how you refuse antiblackness and whiteness 23 +- prefiat offense outweighs, post fiat is white shit 24 +- weigh by who most effectively refuses antiblackness 25 +- aff comes before nonblack theory 26 +King 17 Tiffany Lethabo King, Spring 2017, “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight. Source: Critical Ethnic Studies, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162. Recut B1ACK ZD 27 +Within Native feminist theorizing, ethnographic refusal can be traced to Audra Simpson’s 2007 article, “On Ethnographic Refusal.” In this seminal work, Simpson reflects on and gains inspiration from the tradition of refusal practiced by the people of Kahnawake.14 Simpson shares that Kahnawake refusals are at the core and spirit of her own ethnographic and ethical practices of refusal. I was interested in the larger picture, in the discursive, material and moral territory that was simultaneously historical and contemporary (this “national” space) and the ways in which Kahnawakero:non, the “people of Kahnawake,” had refused the authority of the state at almost every turn. The ways in which their formation of the initial membership code (now replaced by a lineage code and board of elders to implement the code and determine cases) was refused; the ways in which their interactions with border guards at the international boundary line were predicated upon a refusal; how refusal worked in everyday encounters to enunciate repeatedly to ourselves and to outsiders that “this is who we are, this is who you are, these are my rights.”15 Because Simpson was concerned with applying the political and everyday modes of Kahnawake refusal, she attended to the “collective limit” established by her and her Kahnawake participants.16 The collective limit was relationally and ethically determined by what was shared but more importantly by what was not shared. Simpson’s ability to discern the collective limit could only be achieved through a form of relational knowledge production that regards and cares for the other. Simpson recounts how one of her participants forced her to recognize a collective limit. Approaching and then arriving at the limit, Simpson experiences the following: And although I pushed him, hoping that there might be something explicit said from the space of his exclusion— or more explicit than he gave me— it was enough that he said what he said. “Enough” is certainly enough. “Enough,” I realised, was when I reached the limit of my own return and our collective arrival. Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why? And “enough” was when they shut down (or told me to turn off the recorder), or told me outright funny things like “nobody seems to know”— when everybody does know and talks about it all the time. Dominion then has to be exercised over these representations, and that was determined when enough was said. The ethnographic limit then, was reached not just when it would cause harm (or extreme discomfort)— the limit was arrived at when the representation would bite all of us and compromise the representational territory that we have gained for ourselves in the past 100 years.17 Extending her discussion of ethnographic refusal beyond the bounds of ethnographic concerns, Simpson also ponders whether this enactment of refusal can be applied to theoretical work. Simpson outright poses a question: “What is theoretically generative about these refusals?”18 The question that Simpson asks in 2007 is clarified by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in the 2014 essay “R- Words: Refusing Research.” Arguing that modes of refusal extended into the theoretical and methodological terrains of knowledge production are productive and necessary, Tuck and Yang state: For the purposes of our discussion, the most important insight to draw from Simpson’s article is her emphasis that refusals are not subtractive, but are theoretically generative, expansive. Refusal is not just a “no,” but a redirection to ideas otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned. Unlike a settler colonial configuration of knowledge that is petulantly exasperated and resentful of limits, a methodology of refusal regards limits on knowledge as productive, as indeed a good thing.19 In line with Simpson’s intervention, Tuck and Yang posit that “refusal itself could be developed into both method and theory.”20 For Tuck and Yang, a generative practice of refusal and a decolonial and abolitionist tradition is making Western thought “turn back upon itself as settler colonial knowledge, as opposed to universal, liberal, or neutral knowledge without horizon.”21 In fact, the coauthors suggest “making the settler colonial metanarrative the object of . . . research.”22 What this move effectively does is question the uninterrogated assumptions and exposes the violent particularities of the metanarrative. Scrutiny as a practice of refusal also slows down or perhaps halts the momentum of the machinery that allows, as Tuck and Yang argue, “knowledge to facilitate interdictions on Indigenous and Black life.”23erday Louisville felt the love and it was a beautiful thing, so thank you guys for having me and let’s keep fighting for justice. 28 + 29 +NIGGA TIME 30 +And, it is your job to guarantee me a win, this is not vote for me because I'm black but rather an aff ballot is key to confront antiblackness 31 +1 Reparations: Debate has been hard and violent to navigate for Black people such as police being called on Black debaters in numerous occasions, judges and opponents saying nigger, white girls calling us slaves the list goes on 32 +2 Black Inspiration- Black success is key to inspiring young debaters and kids to speak out against anti-blackness. Seeing black success will increase black participation which means more black kids can gain skills for an anti-black world 33 +3 Regardless of the flow vote for niggas with to surrender to blackness. 34 +a Nonblacks should not be rewarded for their relationship to blackness 35 +Brady and Murillo 14 2014 Nicholas and John, “Black Imperative: A Forum on Solidarity in the Age of Coalition,” January 26, 2014, http://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/black-imperative-a-forum-on-solidarity-in-the-age-of-coalition/, John Murillo III is a PhD student in the English department at Brown University, and a graduate of the University of California, Irvine, with bachelor’s degrees in Cognitive Science and English. His research interests are broad, and include extensive engagements with and within: Black Studies–particularly Afro-Pessimism–Narrative Theory; Theoretical Physics; Astrophysics; Cosmology; and Neuroscience. Nicholas Brady is an activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He was also a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine Culture and Theory program. 36 +“Surrender to blackness.” A grammatical imperative. Grammatical because syntactically it marks a command to or demand of a generalized addressee: “(Everyone) surrender to blackness.” Grammatical because the black flesh scarred and tattooed by these illegible hieroglyphics enunciates at the level of symbolic and ontological world orders: “Surrender to blackness” is a command at the level of the foundations of thought and being themselves; grammatical. Imperative because if there is any hope for a revolutionary praxis along any lines—race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability—it must centralize, which is to say look in the face of, which is to say begin to the work of real love for, the blackness preposition which “an authentic upheaval might be born.” #BlackPowerYellowPeril failed to recognize this imperative as legible, let alone heed and meet its command/demand. Created by Suey Park (@suey_park), the hashtag sought to draw from and build upon the accomplishments of Black womyn activists on twitter and tumblr who have long mobilized to generate productive and revolutionary interjections into the world’s violently antiblack discourses (see, for example, #solidarityisforwhitewomen, and #blackmaleprivilege) through extended, communal commentary, usually in direct opposition to the censoring strictures of any kind of respectability politics. Discussions about and within the hashtag can be found here, here, here, here(though this is very hasty, a bit shortsighted, and still not doing much more than glancing at, as opposed to engaging blackness), and here. But broadly, the intentions of the hashtag are founded upon a belief in the possibility of solidarity/coalition politics between Blacks and Asians, seeking to challenge persistent “tensions” between the communities for the sake of a common struggle against ‘white supremacy.’ For those nonblack participants, the drive toward solidarity represents a purely innocent and unquestioned, unquestionable, desire. All critiques of Asian antiblackness are rendered as derailing the move toward solidarity, for they are to bring up the obvious – clearly we are all human, we make mistakes, but to continuously bring up the “mistakes” and never “move on” is to foreclose the possibility of solidarity. And what a wonderful thing the blacks of the conversation were foreclosing – this solidarity thing. What a wonderful thing others were offering to us and we simply would not take. And yet, the unthought question remains: have you truly earned the right to act in solidarity, to form solidarity, to even believe in solidarity? And what is this solidarity thing we all hold near and dear to our hearts? Have we ever experienced it or do we simply have images we have transformed into memories of a solidarity that never existed? I know Black people and Asian people have worked together in the past, but have we ever formed a solid whole? And who is to blame for the fact that we have never had solidarity? The hashtag implies that both “sides” play an equal part in the failure to form solidarity. In the face of this, confessing our sins to each other forms the moment where we can form emotional bonds: “see, you were as racist as I, and how unfortunate it is that we let old whitey come between us. Never again will whitey make us part.” This is the logic behind much of the Asian confessing – white supremacy duped us into being antiblack racists – and also fed into the backlash aimed at blacks – “stop playing oppression olympics, that’s what whitey wants.” It must be foregrounded here that antiblackness cannot be simplified as “anti-black racism” and it is a singularity with no equivalent force – “anti-Asian” racism is not the flipside of antiblackness nor is orientalism or islamophobia. Antiblackness predates white supremacy by at least 300 years (and much more than that depending on how we trace our history) and we can understand antiblackness as the general tethering of the very concept of life to the ontological and unspeakable, unthinkable force of black death. That statement is a place to begin to define antiblackness, it is not the end for this force weaves itself in infinite variety throughout all corners of the globe, forming globe into world. This is not simply about the little racist microaggressions that people listed in their tweets, this is about a global force that the world – not simply whites – bond over and form their lives inside of and through. What #BlackPowerYellowPeril revealed, however, is that the underside of coalition politics remains a violent and virulent antiblackness. As blacks— John Murillo III (@writedarkmatter), New Black School (@newblackschool), Nicholas Brady (@nubluez_nick), and others—raised questions and comments in the spirit of that singular imperative—“Surrender to blackness”—antiblackness emerged in the violence of the response levied against it; one need only visit the hashtag to bear witness. From outright refusals to engage the antiblackness central to the histories and politics of nonblack communities of color, to denials of the foundational, global, and singular nature of antiblackness, and to the repeated calls to police and remove this disruptive blackness and its imperative from the conversation, antiblackness exploded onto the scene. All of this in the name of “coalition.” This is because “coalition” politics and possibilities are fetishized, not loved. The fetish denies the necessary recognition of antiblackness at coalition’s heart, and that antiblackness left unattended renders the imperative illegible. It is a fetishization, then, of antiblackness. The fetish object at the heart of the coalition has always been black flesh – a fetishization where pleasure and terror meet to create the bonds of solidarity people so desire. Here, we open a forum on how the hashtag embodies this fetish, the distinction between fetish and love that must be made in excess of the hashtag and ones like it, and the absolute imperativeness of the imperative. Instead of fetishizing the object, you must surrender to blackness. 37 +b our intensification of pessimism and negativity allows niggas to create language for themselves to communicate the seemingly uncommunicable response to anti-black liberalism. 38 +Nicholas Brady et al, September 1st 2017, “Wishing Against Hope: The Radical Prospects of Afro-pessimism,” Vitamin Decolonial podcast, https://www.mixcloud.com/Vitamin_D/wishing-against-hope-the-radical-prospects-of-afro-pessimism/, transcribed from audio 6:20 - 33:33) Taja1h 39 +Nicholas Brady: Laughter Yeah, yeah. So, I’m originally from Baltimore. I kind of came to Afropessimism in kind of two different things that were happening to me. One, I was a participant in high school debate, and debate is a kind of weird space. It’s a white-controlled space, as everything was. It was “formally segregated.” It is formally—as in formal, formally though—or informally still segregated. And I kind of came up through these organizations called Urban Debate Leagues which were created as white philanthropist organizations to supposedly take the tools of debate and bring them into the cities so that you can teach the quote-unquote…or not quote-unquote but like what they kind of think of us as kind of urban monkeys, you know, to kind of teach us and to civilize us, in the process. So often times in their grant-writing processes, like, they’ll talk about, you know, the fact that Black people can’t read and write and debate as being a kind of tool to kind of bring them up to speed and kind of take them away from crime or recidivism and other issues. But what they didn’t predict was going to happen was that, by introducing us to debate, that not only would we enjoy the activity, but we would actually excel at it and eventually, become better at it than they are. So, once a lot of people from, in particular, our Urban Debate League—the Baltimore Urban Debate League—moved on to college debate, they—and I say they, because I didn’t really participate that much in college debate, but I just kept my finger on the pulse and we all were friends and I kind of kept in touch with them in that way—as they progressed into college debate, they kind of, I know they eventually came into contact with Wilderson and Sexton’s work because they kind of helped us to give a language for what is the relationship between Black people and these kind of white-controlled institutions. There was a kind of liberal movement at one point in time in debate about saying that you need to make space for Black people, like you need to make space for the way that we talk, you need to make space for our culture, blah blah blah, but even that became kind of not good enough, right? So Black people started exploring kind of the radicalism of their antagonism. Like, why is it that even in a world where Black people can win championships or Black people can become competitively successful, why is it that the institution itself not only remains as antiblack as it started, but why did it actually get worse? Like why did it weaponize itself against Black people as they got better and better at debate, and became better at pushing these white and nonblack debaters better? So I think Wilderson and Sexton’s work kind of helps to clarify that problem, i.e., debate is fundamentally and ontologically antiblack so it cannot integrate Black people into it no matter how many Black people win championships, no matter how good Black people become at it. It can’t actually bring them in. And I think it kind of spoke to, you know what I’m saying, it spoke to…it spoke to our voices. And for myself in college, as I was kind of keeping abreast of what was happening in, kind of, college and high school debate, and coaching, and still staying active, in my own, like, activism on campus, like I went to John’s Hopkins University and that’s an incredibly antiblack institution. I’m from Baltimore, so I have a very, very particular relationship to that institutions because John’s Hopkins owns a lot of property in the city and is generally an oppressive entity for all people who live in Baltimore. They regularly experiment on folks. When I was a kid, my mom…like when she wanted me to not go outside or to run away, like she would tell me, “if you run away, like, the white coats will come and get you”—the white coats being, like, the doctors from John’s Hopkins. You know what I’m saying? So like, you know, parents like kind of almost would like use Hopkins as like a fear tool, because like we know the different things they’ve done to Black people in the city, to their bodies or whatever. So…but I went there because they had this program called the Baltimore scholars program which is essentially a white guilt scholarship program where, if you’re from Baltimore, you get tuition for free, and their tuition is like $50,000 a year and my parents told me, very specifically like “yo, we can’t afford to put you through college, so you better…you have to find a scholarship somehow, someway. So, once I was accepted, I went there and we’re like 2 of the population at the school, so you know, Black people, as we always do, like you kind of create your own internal community given the antagonism and how bad it becomes. But the weird thing that happened my junior year as we were organizing through the Black student union was that the Office for Multicultural Affairs—the organization that houses all of the “cultural organizations”—the Office of Multicultural Affairs became our enemy, right? We had a room in the basement of a dormitory. That was our BSU room. I could go into more detail, I’m just trying to be quick about it. But basically, a long time ago, Black students actually broke into that room and made it their own. Like they stole it, they cultivated it, they made it their own. The walls are painted with murals, like we made it ours. So jumping fifty years into our time, the university decided that they wanted to make that room into a game room. It’s kind of almost like a mini version of gentrification, like Black people made it a hot spot and now the university was like “yo, we want that, we want that, like it’s beautiful. Give it to us. It’s ours.” And the Office of Multicultural Affairs threatened us. Like they were like “you know what, you need to get in line with the university. They want the room. They are going to take the room no matter what you do. So you need to get in line.” And they literally like bought alumni to guilt us to giving the room to the university and they did all of these different things to try to…to try to get us to give it up. And I think in that time, I didn’t have a language to understand like why is there…why is it that the organization that’s supposed to represent us to the university, why is it actually the direct opposite thing, i.e., they actually are the wing or the arm of the university in this situation. And reading Afropessimism was the thing that finally allowed me to understand like, “no, I’m not crazy. No matter how much you say you’re my ally, you are not my ally. No matter how much you say that we are in a coalition together, we are not in a coalition together, right? You are actually my enemy in this situation.” And it allowed for me to name multiculturalism as the problem, multiculturalism as being fundamentally antiblack. So at least in that situation, it made me feel not as crazy. And long story short, you know what I’m saying, Black people, the Black students, we organized, and the room is still ours to this day, because in that moment we decided like no, we are not going to let the Office for Multicultural Affairs play us at all. So we just strong-armed them and we just refused to move. We occupied the room, you know, for a good period of time, and eventually the university just gave up because it was a protracted struggle and they didn’t really want it like that. But that was just, for me, was just like an example of like the different ways that Afropessimism kind of gave me a language to name why liberalism, multiculturalism, diversity were problems for Black people instead of solutions. 40 + 41 + 42 + 43 + 44 + 45 +Method 46 +Ontology Materialism a Ontology determines the material world: For example, if someone punched you every day materialism focuses on the individual instance but what is needed is an analysis on why the person is continuously punching you and only ontology explains this. b ontology controls the internal link to materialism. Ontology explains why material black death and antiblackness occurs, c humanism assumes the Black has access to humanity but also is a tactic of cruel optimism that recreates cyclical violence 47 +Warren 18 Warren Calvin L Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University “Ontological Terror Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation” Duke University Press Durham and London 2018. B1ACK ZD 48 +A deep abyss, or a terrifying question, engenders the declaration “Black Lives Matter.” The declaration, in fact, conceals this question even as it purports to have answered it resolutely. “Black Lives Matter,” then, carries a certain terror in its dissemination, a terror we dare to approach with un- certainty, urgency, and exhaustion. This question pertains to the “meta- physical infrastructure,” as Nahum Chandler might call it, that conditions our world and our thinking about the world. “Black Lives Matter” is an important declaration, not just because it foregrounds the question of unbearable brutality, but also because it performs philosophical labor—it compels us to face the terrifying question, despite our desire to look away. The declaration presents a difficult syntax or an accretion of tensions and ambiguities within its organization: can blacks have life? What would such life mean within an antiblack world? What axiological measurement determines the mattering of the life in question? Does the assembly of these terms shatter philosophical coherence or what metaphysical infra- structure provides stability, coherence, and intelligibility for the declaration? These questions of value, meaning, stability, and intelligibility lead us to the terror of the declaration, the question it conceals but engages: what ontological ground provides the occasion for the declaration? Can such ground be assumed, and if not, is the declaration even possible with- out it? “Black Lives Matter” assumes ontological ground, which propels the deployment of its terms and sustains them throughout the treacheries of antiblack epistemologies. Put differently, the human being provides an anchor for the declaration, and since the being of the human is invaluable, then black life must also matter, if the black is a human (the declaration anchors mattering in the human’s Being). But we reach a point of terror with this syllogistic reasoning. One must take a step backward and ask the fundamental question: is the black, in fact, a human being? Or can black(ness) ground itself in the being of the human? If it cannot, then on what bases can we assert the mattering of black existence? If it can, then why would the phrase need to be repeated and recited incessantly? Do the affirmative declaration and its insistence undermine this very ontological ground? The statement declares, then, too soon—a declaration that is re- ally an unanswered (or unanswerable) question. We must trace this question and declaration back to its philosophical roots: the Negro Question. This question reemerges within a world of antiblack brutality, a world in which black torture, dismemberment, fatality, and fracturing are routinized and ritualized—a global, sadistic pleasure principle. I was invited to meditate on this globalized sadism in the context of Michael Brown’s murder and the police state. The invitation filled me with dread as I anticipated a festival of humanism in which presenters would share solutions to the problem of antiblackness (if they even acknowledged antiblackness) and inundate the audience with “yes we can!” rhetoric and unbounded optimism. I decided to participate, despite this dread, once students began asking me deep questions, questions that also filled them with dread and confusion. I, of course, was correct about my misgivings. I listened to one speaker after the next describe a bright future, where black life is valued and blacks are respected as humans—if we just keep fighting, they said, “we’re almost there!” A political scientist introduced statistics and graphs laying out voting patterns and districts; he argued that blacks just did not realize how much power they had (an unfortunate ignorance, I guess). If they just collectively voted they could change antiblack police practices and make this world a better place. The audience clapped enthusiastically; I remained silent. Next, a professor of law implored the audience to keep fighting for legal change because the law is a powerful weapon for ending discrimination and restoring justice. We just needed to return to the universal principles that founded our Constitution, “liberty, equal- ity, and justice!” (I thought about the exception clause in the Thirteenth Amendment, the Three-Fifths Compromise, and the way the sharecrop- ping system exploited the Fourteenth Amendment in order to reenslave through contract. I continued to sit in silence.) The audience shouted and applauded. . I felt a pit in my stomach because I knew what I had to do; it was my time to step up to the podium—it was my nihilistic responsibility. I told the audience there was no solution to the problem of antiblackness; it will continue without end, as long as the world exists. Furthermore, all the solutions presented rely on antiblack instruments to address antiblackness, a vicious and tortuous cycle that will only produce more pain and disappointment. I also said that humanist affect (the good feeling we get from hopeful solutions) will not translate into freedom, justice, recognition, or resolution. It merely provides temporary reprieve from the fact that blacks are not safe in an antiblack world, a fact that can become overwhelming. The form of antiblackness might alter, but antiblackness itself will remain a constant—despite the power of our imagination and political yearnings. I continued this nihilistic analysis of the situation until I heard complete silence. A woman stood up after my presentation and shouted, “How dare you tell this to our youth! That is so very negative! Of course we can change things; we have power, and we are free.” Her voice began to increase in intensity. I waited for her to finish and asked her, “Then tell us how to end police brutality and the slaughter of the youth you want to protect from my nihilism.” “If these solutions are so credible, why have they consistently failed? Are we awaiting for some novel, extraordinary solution— one no one had ever imagined—to end antiblack violence and misery?” Silence. “In what manner will this ‘power’ deliver us from antiblackness?” How long must we insist on a humanity that is not recognized—an insistence that humiliates in its inefficacy? “If we are progressing, why are black youth being slaughtered at staggering rates in the twenty-first century— if we are, indeed, humans just like everyone else?” People began to respond that things are getting better, despite the increasing death toll, the unchecked power of the police state, the lack of conviction rates for police murdering blacks, the prison industrial complex and the modern reenslavement of an entire generation, the unbelievable black infant mortality rate, the lack of jobs for black youth and debilitating poverty. “This is better?” I asked. “At least we are not slaves!” someone shouted. I asked them to read the Thirteenth Amendment closely. But the intensity of the dialogic exchange taught me that affect runs both ways: it is not just that solutions make us feel good because we feel powerful/hopeful, but that pressing the ontological question presents terror—the terror that ontological security is gone, the terror that ethical claims no longer have an anchor, and the terror of inhabiting existence outside the precincts of humanity and its humanism. Ontological Terror engages this question and the forms of terror it produces. 49 +“IP rights” entails an investment towards gratuitous antiblackness 50 +Johnson 16 Shontavia Johnson Drake University Law School 2016. “BRANDED: Trademark Tattoos, Slave Owner Brands, And The Right To Have "Free" Skin”, Volume 22| Issue 2. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216andcontext=mttlr B1ack ZD 51 +This Part outlines the basic historical, legal and policy issues associated with the practice of placing identifying indicia on human bodies. This practice predates modern American trademark law and can be traced to the days of African and African-American enslavement in the United States. The permanent, forced body modification of slaves was an early precursor to contemporary American use of trademarks as tattoos. As more Americans voluntarily tattoo their bodies today, a growing segment of this tattooed population encompasses brand enthusiasts who choose to permanently ink their bodies with the trademarks of their favorite companies and brands and copyright-protected images. Coupled with this trend, disputes based on tattoos encompassing the intellectual property of third parties have also grown in recent years.26 In perhaps one of the most famous lawsuits based on tattoos and intellectual property, Whitmill v. Warner Bros., Professor David Nimmer posited that the rights of intellectual property owners should not extend to human flesh, because to do so would create “almost literally, a badge of involuntary servitude.”27 Otherwise, he argued, the law would “set at naught the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of badges of slavery.”28 Though tenuous, it is understandable why Professor Nimmer would draw connections between contemporary trademark-based tattoos and the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of slavery. His suggestion, however, provides scant historical or factual foundation. This Part will lay the groundwork implicit in such claims before ultimately explaining why the connection is inappropriate in the modern context of trademark-based tattoos. Though tattooing words and symbols on human bodies has become increasingly popular in recent decades, it is not a new practice. African and African-American slaves routinely had the initials or other identifying indicia of their slave masters permanently branded on their skin.29 These involuntary “trademarks” were placed on slaves both for purposes of punishment and identification.30 Prior to the passage of state and federal trademark law, slave owners used trademarks as a way to distinguish their human property from the property of other slave masters. Branding as a mechanism for distinguishing human property began in 2000-1800 B.C. with Babylonian slaves.31 Within the Transatlantic slave trade, the practice dates back to at least as early as the 1440s, when the Portuguese branded African slaves’ upper bodies to indicate that the slaves belonged to the king of Portugal or another slave owner.32 During the time period of African slave trafficking, each European nation had its own trademark used to mark African slaves.33 Discussing the early history of slave branding, one scholar outlined the many ways in which slave branding took place: Slaves landed at S˜ao Tome were branded with a cross on the right arm in the early sixteenth century; but, later, this design was changed to a ‘G,’ the marca de Guin´e. Slaves exported from Luanda were often branded not once but twice, for they had to receive the mark of the Luso-Brazilian merchants who owned them as well as the royal arms—on the right breast—to signify their relation to the Crown. Sometimes, baptism led to the further branding of a cross 52 + 53 +I MEAN IT WHEN I SAY THEIR FAIRNESS, MATERIALISM, AND HUMANISM BULLSHIT WILL BE TERMINALLY ANTIBLACK, ORIENTATION TOWARDS THIS WORLD IS AN ANTIBLACK ORIENTATION 54 +Wilderson 20 Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III, University of California, Irvine “Afropessimism” Originally published: April 7, 2020 B1ACK ZD 55 +There’s something organic to Blackness that makes it essential to the construction of civil society. But there’s also something organic to Blackness that portends the destruction of civil society. There’s noth- ing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: there’s something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction,” abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot be liberated or be made legible through counter-hegemonic interventions. Black suffering is not a function of the performance(s) of civil society, but of the existence of civil society. For the Pakistani driver, the White professor, and his White wife, civil society is an ensemble of con- straints and opportunities. But for the Black, civil society is a murderous projection. In light of this, coalitions and social movements—even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement—bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the inter- locutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and legible conflicts of civil society’s junior partners (such as immigrants, White women, the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and illegible antagonisms of Blacks. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of anti-Blackness, their rhetorical structures, political desire, and their emancipatory horizon are bolstered by a life- affirming anti-Blackness; the death of Black desire. 56 + 57 +Gordon Identifies instances of black social life but that doesn’t disprove the structural disposition of civil society to black death – their frame essentializes blackness because in a world of black death, pessimism is the only possible optimism. 58 +Sexton 11 (Jared. 2011. “ANTE-ANTI-BLACKNESS: AFTERTHOUGHTS” http://csalateral.org/issue1/content/sexton.html) KR RC/JCH-PF 59 +Fanon and his interlocutors, or what appear rather as his fateful adherents, would seem to have a problem embracing black social life because they never really come to believe in it, because they cannot acknowledge the social life from which they speak and of which they speak – as negation and impossibility – as their own (Moten 2008: 192). Another way of putting this might be to say that they are caught in a performative contradiction enabled by disavowal. I wonder, however, whether things are even this clear in Fanon and the readings his writing might facilitate. Lewis Gordon's sustained engagement with Fanon finds him situated in an ethical stance grounded in the affirmation of blackness in the historic anti-black world. In a response to the discourse of multiracialism emergent in the late twentieth-century United States, for instance, Gordon writes, following Fanon, that "there is no way to reject the thesis that there is something wrong with being black beyond the willingness to 'be' black – not in terms of convenient fads of playing blackness, but in paying the costs of anti-blackness on a global scale. Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity experiences a blackened world" (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to 'be' black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? Elsewhere, in a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the anti-black world developed across his first several books: "Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies – they become them. In our anti-black world, blacks are pathology" (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support to Moten's contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counter-intuitive, or rather because it is counter-intuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the anti-black world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks: "A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment" (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative – "above all, don’t be black" (Gordon 1997: 63) – in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that "resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human'" (Nyong'o 2002: 389). 22 In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos. To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death – all of this is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by vitalizing it. A living death is a much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor – the modern world system. 23 Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro-pessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That's the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed. Wilderson's is an analysis of the law in its operation as "police power and racial prerogative both under and after slavery" (Wagner 2009: 243). So too is Moten's analysis, at least that just-less-than-half of the intellectual labor committed to the object of black studies as critique of (the anti-blackness of) Western civilization. But Moten is just that much more interested in how black social life steals away or escapes from the law, how it frustrates the police power and, in so doing, calls that very policing into being in the first place. The policing of black freedom, then, is aimed less at its dreaded prospect, apocalyptic rhetoric notwithstanding, than at its irreducible precedence. The logical and ontological priority of the unorthodox self-predicating activity of blackness, the "improvisatory exteriority" or "improvisational immanence" that blackness is, renders the law dependent upon what it polices. This is not the noble agency of resistance. It is a reticence or reluctance that we might not know if it were not pushing back, so long as we know that this pushing back is really a pushing forward. So, in this perverse sense, black social death is black social life. The object of black studies is the aim of black studies. The most radical negation of the anti-black world is the most radical affirmation of a blackened world. Afro-pessimism is "not but nothing other than" black optimism. 24 60 +NEUROSCIENCE OF RACISM proves libidinal economy and fear of blackness is immaterially and materially true 61 +Bobby Azarian Ph.D. 18, 9/24/18, "Understanding the Racist Brain," Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201809/understanding-the-racist-brain, accessed 10-4-2019, SJCP//JP 62 +The Neuroscience of Racial Bias First of all, how do we know that racial biases actually exist? While some may claim that they have no biases, a clever psychological experiment provides objective evidence supporting the notion that the vast majority of us do. In the implicit bias task, participants are shown words on a computer screen like “happy” and “fear,” which they must categorize as positive or negative. What results have consistently shown is that if a black face is quickly flashed before the words, individuals will be faster to correctly categorize negative words, while the same people will be quicker to correctly categorize positive words when they follow white faces. These troubling findings suggest that over 75 percent of Whites and Asians have an implicit racial bias, which affects how they process information and perceive the social world around them. However, this bias is subconscious and implicit. Whether or not it leads to overtly racist attitudes and behavior depends on an interplay between different brain areas—specifically those that create feelings of fear and promote tribalism, and those that help us regulate and suppress those bad instincts. Neural Pathways Underlying Racism Brain imaging studies have shown that people who display an implicit bias have a stronger electrical response to black or other-race faces in an area of the brain known as the amygdala—a structure responsible for processing emotional stimuli and eliciting a fearful or anxious mental state. An exaggerated amygdala response is part of what creates the sudden visceral or “gut feeling” of being scared. And that feeling of fear has additional psychological effects that promote prejudice. It is well-established that when one feels their welfare is being threatened, they tend to become more tribal in their behavior, and additionally bolster their cultural or national worldviews, since it is those worldviews that make them feel safe. In essence, nationalism and prejudice are knee-jerk responses to anxiety. - Tournament
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