Wilderson K JF16 (4:15 cut this

down)
 1NC
America is built on anti-blackness, while other forms of oppression may
exist; the very structure of life in American civil society is predicated on the
slave and its perfection. Africans were taken from Africa and came out in
America as Blacks which is an inherently dead identity defined by slavery.
Pak 12
Yumi Pak (Prof of Phil), "Outside Relationality: Autobiographical Deformations and the Literary Lineage of Afro-Pessimism in 20th
and 21st Century African American Literature.

Because the four authors I examine focus intensively on untangling and retangling the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality in
autobiographical narratives, this project originally relied most heavily on the frameworks provided by queer theory and
performance studies, as the structural organization and methodology behind both disciplines offered the characteristic of being
inter in between intergenric [sic], interdisciplinary, intercultural and therefore inherently unstable (What is Performance
Studies Anyway? 360). My abstract ideation of the dissertation was one which conceptualized the unloosening of the authors
respective texts from the ways in which they have been read in particular genres. Yet the investigative progression of my research
redirected me to question the despondency I found within Toomer, Himes, Baldwin and Jones novels, a despondency and sorrow
that seemed to reach beyond the individual and collective purportedly represented in these works. What does it mean, they seem to
speculate, to suffer beyond the individual, beyond the collective, and into the far reaches of paradigmatic structure? What does it
mean to exist beyond social oppression and veer instead into what Frank B. Wilderson, III calls structural suffering (Red, White
& Black 36)? Briefly, Wilderson utilizes what he calls Frantz Fanons splitting of the hair[s] between social oppression and
structural suffering; in other words, Wilderson refutes the possibility of analogizing blackness with any other positionality in the
world. Others may be oppressed, indeed, may suffer experientially, but only the
black, the paradigmatic slave, suffers structurally . Afro-pessimism, the
theoretical means by which I attempt to answer this query, provides the integral term and parameters
with which I bind together queer theory, performance studies, and autobiography studies in order to propose a re-examination of
these authors and their texts. The structural suffering of blackness seeps into all elements of American history,
culture, and life, and thus I begin my discussion with an analysis of Hortense Spillers concept of an American grammar in
Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book. To theorize blackness is to begin with the slave
ship, in a space that is in actuality no place. 7 In discussing the transportation of human cargo across the Middle
Passage, Spillers writes that this physical theft of bodies was a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this
distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire (Spillers 67). She contends here
that in this mass gathering and transportation, what becomes illuminated is not only the complete and total deracination of
native from soil, but rather the evisceration of subjectivity from blackness , the evacuation of will and desire
from the body; in other words, we see that even before the black body there is flesh, that zero degree of social conceptualization
that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography (67). Black flesh, which arrives in
the United States to be manipulated and utilized as slave bodies, is a primary narrative with its seared, divided, ripped-apartness,
riveted to the ships hole, fallen, or escaped overboard (67). These markings lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars,
openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh are indicative of the sheer scale of the structural violence amassed
American grammar that grounds itself in the
against blackness, and from this beginning Spillers culls an
rupture and a radically different kind of cultural continuation, a grammar that is the
fabric of blackness in the United States (67, 68). As Wilderson observes, Africans went into
the ships and came out as Blacks (Red, White & Black 38). In other words, in the same
moment they are (re)born as blacks, they are doomed to death as slaves . This rupture, I argue,
is evident in the definitions of slavery set forth by Orlando Patterson in his seminal volume, Slavery and Social Death: natal
alienation, general dishonor and openness to gratuitous violence. The captive body, which is constructed with torn flesh, is laid
bare to any and all, and it is critical to note here that Patterson, in line with Afro-pessimists, does not align slavery with labor. The
slave can and did work, but what
defines him/her as such is that as a dishonored and violated object, the masters
whims for him/her to work, or not work, can be carried out without ramifications. Rather, the slaves
powerlessness is heightened to the greatest possible capacity, wherein s/he is marked by social death and the permanent, violent
domination of their selves (Patterson 13). Spillers radically different kind of cultural continuation finds an articulation of the
object status of blackness in the United States, one which impugns the separation of slave and black. As Jared Sexton and Huey
Copeland inquire, [h]ow might it feel to be a scandal to ontology, an outrage to every marker of the human? What, in the final
analysis, does it mean to suffer? (Sexton and Copeland 53). Blackness functions as a scandal to ontology because, as Wilderson
states, black suffering forms the ethical backbone of civil society. He writes, [c]hattel
slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created the Human out of cultural
disparate identities from Europe to the East Put another way, through chattel slavery the world gave birth and coherence to
both its joys of domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent, and with these joys and struggles, the Human was born, but
not before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between the political ontology of
Humanity and the social death of Blacks. (Red, White & Black 20 21) Again, the African is made black, and in
this murder both ontological and physical, humanity gains its coherence. It is not my intention (nor of other Afro-pessimists) to
argue that violence has only ever been committed against black individuals and communities in the United States, or in the world,
but rather that the structural suffering that defines blackness, the violence enacted against blackness to
maintain its positioning outside of civil society, that demarcates the black as slave, has no horizontal equivalent
and, indeed, provides the logical ethos of existence for all othered subjectivities; by this I mean that
all other subjects (and I use this word quite intentionally) retain a body and not the zero degree of
flesh. As Sexton writes, we might say of the colonized: you may lose your motherland, but you will not lose your mother
(Hartman 2007) (The Curtain of the Sky 14). This is precisely why Sexton offers the succinct definition of Afro-pessimism as a
political ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive way (The Social Life of Social Death 23).
Furthermore, Afro-pessimists contest the idea that the modern world is one wherein the price of labor determines the price of being
equally for all people. In this capitalistic reading of the world, we summon blacks back into civil society by utilizing Marxism to
assume a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy (Gramscis Black Marx 1). While it is undeniable, of course,
that black bodies and labor were used to aid in the economic growth of the United States, we return again to the point that
what defines enslavement is accumulation and fungibility, alongside
natal alienation , general dishonor, and openness to gratuitous violence; the slave, then, is not
constituted as part of the class struggle. 8 While it is true that labor power is exploited and that the worker is
alienated in it, it is also true that workers labor on the commodity, they are not the commodity
itself is, their labor power is (Red, White & Black 50). The slave is, then, invisible within this matrix, and, to a more detrimental
effect, invisible within the ontology of lived subjects entirely. The slave cannot be defined as loss as can the postcolonial subject,
the woman, or the immigrant but can only be configured as lack, as there is no potential for synthesis within a rubric of
antagonism. Wilderson sets up the phrase rubric of antagonism in opposition to rubric of conflict to clarify the positionality of
blacks outside relationality. The former is an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not
dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions, whereas the latter is a rubric of problems that can be posed and
conceptually solved (Red, White & Black 5). He continues, [i]f a Black is the very antithesis of a Human
subject then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (9).
Integrating Hegel and Marx, and returning to Spillers, Wilderson argues that within this grammar of suffering, the slave is not a
laborer but what he calls antiHuman, against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal
integrity (11). In contrast to imagining the black other in opposition to whiteness, Wilderson and other Afro-pessimists theorize
blackness as being absent in the dialectic, as anti-Human.

The call for a gun ban gives more power to police who use this as an
opportunity to further their violent occupation of Black existence. They
sadistically use Black deaths as justification for police militarization.
Gourevitch 15
Alex Gourevitch, assistant professor of political science at Brown University. "Gun Controls Racist Reality: The Liberal Argument
against Giving Police More Power." 24 June 2015

Soon after the shootings at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston South Carolina, the first
,

black president of the United States offered some thoughts on Dylan Roofs racist attack. First and foremost, President Obama said,
recent events were about how innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble
getting their hand on a gun. The killings were also about a dark chapter in our history, namely racial slavery and Jim Crow.
Obama only suggested practical action regarding the first issue namely gun control. He did not ,

consider that such measures will make the persistence of the second problem even
worse. It is perhaps counterintuitive to say so but gun control responses to mass killings
whether racially motivated or otherwise are a deep mistake. The standard form of gun control
means writing more criminal laws, creating new crimes, and therefore creating
 more criminals or more reasons for police to suspect people of crimes. More than that, it
means creating yet more pretexts for a militarized police, full of racial and class prejudice, to
overpolice. As multiple police killings of unarmed black men have reminded us, the police
already operate with barely constrained force in poor, minority neighborhoods. From
SWAT to stop-and-frisk to mass incarceration to parole monitoring, the police manage a
panoply of programs that subject these populations to multiple layers of coercion and
control. As a consequence, more than 7 million Americans are subject to some form of
correctional control, an extremely disproportionate number of whom are poor and
minority. While it is commonly assumed that the drug war is to blame for all this, work
by scholars like Benjamin Levin and Jeff Fagan demonstrates that already existing gun
control efforts also play an important role. One of the most notorious areas of policing, the NYPDs
stop-and-frisk program, was justified as a gun control rather than a drug war measure. In
the name of preventing violence, hundreds of thousands of poor minorities are subject to searches without probable cause each year.
Further, a range of Supreme Court-authorized exceptions to standard Fourth
Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure derive from a concern with
gun violence.

Measures against blackness codified in law create the paradox that justifies
black death alongside civil rights laws that bind Blacks to the law. This legal
doublebind sustains white supremacy. The only real attempt to solve anti-
blackness is anarchic logic.
Farley 5:
Anthony Paul Farley (Associate Prof @ Boston College Law school), Perfecting Slavery pg 235-238, January 27 2005.

What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of
necessity, burned everything: They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a
charred desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we cultivate because
a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist. 48 The
slaves burned
everything because everything was against them. Everything was against the slaves, the
entire order that it was their lot to follow, the entire order in which they were positioned
as worse than senseless things, every plantation, everything. 49 Leave nothing white
behind you, said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-overblack. 50 God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No
more water, the fire next time. 51 The slaves burned everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only
burned everything in Haiti. 52 Theirs was the greatest and most successful revolution in
the history of the world but the failure of their fire to cross the waters was the great
tragedy of the nineteenth century. 53 At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, The colorline
belts the world. 54 Du Bois said that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colorline. 55 The problem, now, at
the dawn of the twenty-first century is the problem of the colorline. The colorline continues to belt the world. Indeed, the slave
power that is the United States now threatens an entire world with the death that it has become and so the slaves of yesterday, today,
and tomorrow, those with nothing but their chains to lose, must, if they would be free, if they would escape slavery, win the entire
world. VIII. TRAINING We begin as children. We are called and we become our response to the call. Slaves are not called. What
becomes of them? What becomes of the broken-hearted? The slaves are divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the slaves are split
asunder by what they are called upon to become. The slaves are called upon to become objects but objecthood is not a calling. The
slave, then, during its loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This is schizophrenia. The slaves are not called, or, rather, the slaves
are called to not be. The slaves are called unfree but this the living can never be and so the slaves burst apart and die. The slaves
begin as death, not as children, and death is not a beginning but an end. There is no progress and no exit from the undiscovered
country of the slave, or so it seems. We are trained to think through a progress narrative, a grand narrative, the grandest narrative,
that takes us up from slavery. There is no up from slavery. The progress from slavery to the end of history is the progress from white-
over-black to white-over-black to white-overblack. The progress of slavery runs in the opposite direction of the pastpresent-future
The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the end of the timeline , only under
timeline.
conditions of total juridical freedom. It is only under conditions of freedom, of bourgeois
legality, that the slave can perfect itself as a slave by freely choosing to bow down before
its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer for equal rights. The
system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a plantation. The system
of law is a plantation. These plantations, all part of the same system, hierarchy, produce white-overblack, white-
over-black only, and that continually. The slave perfects itself as a slave through its prayers for equal
rights. The plantation system will not commit suicide and the slave, as stated above, has
knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave finds its way back from the undiscovered country only by burning
down every plantation. When the slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be
dead, and it makes the free choice to not be. Education is the call. We are called to be and then we become
something. We become that which we make of ourselves. We follow the call, we pursue a calling. Freedom is the only callingit
alone contains all possible directions, all of the choices that may later blossom into the fullness of our lives. We can only be free.
Slavery is death. How do slaves die? Slaves are not born, they are made. The slave must be trained to be that which the living cannot
be. The only thing that the living are not free to be is dead. The slave must be trained to follow the call that is not a call. The slave
must be trained to pursue the calling that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to objecthood. The slave must become death.
Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-over-black, death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue its
calling that is not a calling.

If politics is white, the best liberation movement will be anti-political;

therefore the alternative is Black Anarchism. Reclaiming Black social life
seems unlikely but as long as Black folk are dying in the street they may as
well fight back with handguns against racist police. Anarchist movements
are key to Black liberation, ceding authority always risks whiteness
coopting it.

Alston 03
Ashanti Alston (Black Anarchist who was in the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army) Black Anarchism Speech given at
Hunter College. October 24, 2003. http://weblog.liberatormagazine.com/2008/07/black-anarchism.html

So, here I am, in the United States fighting for Black liberation, and wondering: how can we avoid situations like that?
Anarchism [gives] me a way to respond to this question by insisting that we put into
place, as we struggle now, structures of decision-making and doing things that
continually bring more people into the process, and not just let the most
enlightened folks make decisions for everyone else. The people themselves
have to create structures in which they articulate their own voice and make their own
decisions. I didnt get that from other ideologies: I got that from anarchism. I also began to see, in practice, that anarchistic
structures of decision-making are possible. For example, at the protests against the Republican
National Convention in August 2000 I saw normally excluded groupspeople of color,
women, and queersparticipate actively in every aspect of the mobilization. We did not
allow small groups to make decisions for others and although people had differences,
they were seen as good and beneficial. It was new for me, after my experience in the Panthers, to be in a situation
where people are not trying to be on the same page and truly embraced the attempt to work out our sometimes conflicting interests.
This gave me some ideas about how anarchism can be applied. It also made me wonder: if it can be applied to the diverse groups at
Some of our ideas about
the convention protest, could I, as a Black activist, apply these things in the Black community?
who we are as a people hamper our struggles. For example, the Black community is
often considered a monolithic group, but it is actually a community of communities with
many different interests. I think of being Black not so much as an ethnic category but as
an oppositional force or touchstone for looking at situations differently. Black
culture has always been oppositional and is all about finding ways to
 creatively resist oppression here, in the most racist country in the world. So,
when I speak of a Black anarchism, it is not so tied to the color of my skin but who I am
as a person, as someone who can resist, who can see differently when I am stuck, and
thus live differently.

Educational systems have historically excluded Black thought to sustain

White supremacy. Your role as a judge and educator is to reverse that
interjecting Black thought is a prerequisite to ethical debate.
Schnyder 8
Damien Michael Schnyder (PhD, University of Californias Presidents Postdoctoral Fellow) "First Strike,"
https://www.lib.utexas.edu/etd/d/2009/schnyderd25688/schnyderd25688.pdf

At
Ms. Foxs clear disregard for her students belies a racist logic that dehumanizes Blackness while also reifying white supremacy.
the crux of this logic is that Black students are destructive to civil society. As argued by Frank
Wilderson, III, There is something organic to Black positionality that makes it essential to
the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well
state the claim the other way around: There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the
Black body (Wilderson III, 2003, 18). Given that the basis of Western society has been predicated upon particular notions of
work/labor, the construction of civil society is predicated upon forced labor. The function of society as dictated by capitalist interest
is the production of workers. For even as a worker, the threat to the system is merely reformist. For as Wilderson comments, The
worker demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Wilderson III, 2003, 22). Contrast to the position of the worker,
Wilderson argues, The slave demands that production stop, without recourse to its ultimate democratization. Work is not an
organic principle forthe slave (Wilderson III, 2003, 22). Black bodies, through their collective experiences of subjugated Blackness,
Blackness has to be contained and managed in order
become a threat to the very function of civil society.
to protect white supremacy. Crucial to Wildersons argument is that white supremacy needs the
reproduction of social relations of power (i.e. the identification of the worker) in order to maintain
its subjective advantage with respect to Blackness. It is at this moment - when
45

Blackness becomes identified as antithetical to the notions of work that

white supremacy is able to unleash its fury upon the Black body . For it is
within this space that the Black body can have anything and everything done to protect
the order of civil society. Thus in order to contain the threat of Blackness, the Herculean managers of the hydra-like
46

attack upon society are teachers (Linebaugh & Rediker, 2000). 47 Within the development of civil society, the function of teachers is
to both categorize states of being and enclose Blackness. The categorization is clear by the actions of Ms. Fox while processes of
Students are prevented from interjecting alternative
enclosure are exemplified in Mr. Keynes classroom.
versions of economic systems within the framework of the discussion . Students must perform the
perfunctory duty of work (basic memorization and recitation skills) not to only to be awarded with a passing grade, but not to be
penalized.The result is a silencing of Black voices whose life experiences are in direct
contradiction with hegemonic constructions of economy (i.e. supply and demand) that was taught by
Mr. Keynes. There was no space to analyze the racial structure that frames economic modes
of relation, nor was there opportunity to engage in dialogue with regards to the economics of why
many of the students had to work to support their families. Mr. Keynes classroom management and pedagogical style exemplifies
the need of white supremacy to control, define and enclose racialized subjects. The primary objective of Mr. Keynes in addition to
Mr. Davis and Ms. Fox was to socialize the students as productive workers in order to fit within the hierarchal confines of civil
The main thrust behind this socialization effort was to define the students as
society.
subjects and remove the possibility for self-identification that was not located within a
white supremacist conception of being for a self-assertion outside of these parameters
is the greatest threat to white supremacist modes of social (re)production. 48The veil of
nobility and morality that cloaks the teaching profession has to be understood as a tool utilized by the state to maintain its power.
Inside of the walls of SCHS, teachers operated within a genealogy of Black subjugation that seeks to enclose all sites of Black self-
expression and thought/action and as stated by Wilderson ultimately destroy the Black body. In its current
manifestation, the process of Black subjugation functions within the logic of the prison
regime as outlined by Dylan Rodrguez. Within this logic, teachers serve as agents of dissemination, discipline and socialization
in order to preserve the economic, political, racial, sexual and gendered hierarchies established by the United States nation project.
the veil of white privilege is removed
Further, during times of economic crises Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes that
as the logic of white supremacy that frames American nationalism is fully revealed
(Gilmore, 1993). In order to untangle the multifaceted issues within public education, it is
49

incumbent to analyze the root causes of inequality and inequity. In agreement with scholars such as
Erica R. Meiners who advocate that white supremacy is the root cause, even teachers with the best of intentions have to realize that
their role is vital to the maintenance of state domination of Black subjects.
2NC
 AT: State Good

Their reformism cedes there is a deeper issue at hand, this means the state
cannot solve anti-blackness because the discourse the state uses to
understand the Black positionality is produced by white readings of history.
Wilderson 03:
Frank B. Wilderson, (award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold
elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANCs armed wing) Introduction: Unspeakable
Ethics Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Strucure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 15-16. 2003. Accessed 3/2/14.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/155892954/Wilderson-Frank-Red-White-Black-Cinema-Struct

Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully
made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an
operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a
dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we
think of todays Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters ? One could answer these questions by
demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the State has come to pass. In other words, the
election of a Black President aside, police brutality, mass incarceration,
segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of
HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still
constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such empirically based
rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on
solid ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question.
We would be forced to appeal to facts, the historical record, and
empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on
their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into
sociology, political science, history, and/or public policy debates would be the very
rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and
alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived
at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who
acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death,
where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of
slavery. Once the solid plank of work is removed from slavery, then the
conceptually coherent notion of claims against the statethe proposition
that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the
possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black positiondisintegrates
into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the
Middle Passage. Put another way: no slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the
world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the
Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a positionality against which
Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews it coherence , its corporeal integrity; if the
Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that
is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the
rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the
Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy, but on the one who argues there is a distinction
between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University
awaits an answer.
Gift DA Even if your reforms empirically work, the 1AC is feel good
politics for the majority where minorities get help when it makes the
majority look good and is convenient. Legal control over the rights of the
oppressed creates the additional power to withdraw rights when needed.
Arrigo 2k:
Arrigo, Bruce and Williams, Christopher (California School of Professional Psychology), 2000 The (Im) Possibility of Democratic
Justice and the "Gift" of the Majority. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice.

The impediments to establishing democratic justice in contemporary American society have caused a national paralysis; one that has
recklessly spawned an aporetic1 existence for minorities. The
entrenched ideological complexities
afflicting under nonrepresented groups (e.g., poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, crime) at the
hands of political, legal, cultural, and economic power elites have produced
counterfeit, perhaps even fraudulent, efforts at reform: Discrimination and inequality in opportunity prevail (e.g.,
Lynch & Patterson, 1996). The misguided and futile initiatives of the state, in pursuit of transcending this
public affairs crisis, have fostered reification , that is, a reinforcement of divisiveness. This
time, however, minority groups compete with one another for recognition, affirmation, and identity in the national collective psyche
(Rosenfeld, 1993). Whatensues by way of state effort, though, is a contemporaneous
sense of equality for all and a near imperceptible endorsement of
inequality; a silent conviction that the majority still retains power. The gift of
equality, procured through state legislative enactments as an emblem of
democratic justice, embodies true (legitimated) power that remains nervously secure in the

hands of the majority. The ostensible empowerment of minority groups is a

facade; it is the ruse of the majority gift. What exists, in fact, is a simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1981, 1983)
of equality (and by extension, democratic justice): a pseudo-sign image (a hypertext or simulation) of real sociopolitical progress.
For the future relationship between equality and the social to more fully embrace minority sensibilities, calculated legal reform
efforts in the name of equality must be displaced and the rule and authority of the status quo must be decentered. Imaginable ,
calculable equality is self-limiting and self-referential. Ultimately, it is always (at least) one
step removed from true equality and, therefore, true justice. The ruse of the majority gift currently operates under the assumption of
a presumed empowerment, which it confers on minority populations. Yet, the presented power is itself circumscribed by the stifling
horizons of majority rule with their effects. Thus, the gift can only be construed as falsely eudemonic: An avaricious, although
insatiable, pursuit of narcissistic legitimacy supporting majority directives . The commission (bestowal) of power to minority groups
or citizens through prevailing state reformatory efforts underscores a polemic with implications for public affairs and civic life. We
contend that the avenir (i.e., the to come) of equality as an (in)calculable, (un)recognizable destination in search of democratic
justice is needed. However, we argue that this displacement of equality is unattainable if prevailing juridico-ethicopolitical
conditions (and societal consciousness pertaining to them) remain fixed, stagnant, and immutable. In this article, we will
demonstrate how the
gift of the majority is problematic, producing, as it must, a
narcissistic hegemony, that is, a sustained empowering of the privileged, a constant relegitimation of the powerful .
Relying on Derridas postmodern critique of Eurocentric logic and thought, we will show how complicated and fragmented the
question of establishing democratic justice is in Western cultures, especially in American society. We will argue that what
is
needed is a relocation of the debate about justice and difference from the
circumscribed boundaries of legal redistributive discourse on equality to the
more encompassing context of alterity, undecidability, [and] cultural
plurality, and affirmative postmodern thought.
 AT: Spectacles/Police Militarization
Your focus on police militarization and subsequent violence shuts off big
picture discussion, the idea that handgun bans solve racial police violence
appeals to the sensitivities of oppressors. We need to question the
irrationality of their fears first. Nopper and Kaba 14:
Nopper, Tamara K. (sociologist, writer, and editor) Kaba, Mariame (founding director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to
end youth incarceration) Itemizing Atrocity Jacobin, 8/15/14. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/itemizing-atrocity/

According to the Economist, Americas police have become too militarized. Not to be outdone, Business Insider published an
article by Paul Szoldra, a former US marine who professed to be aghast at the scenes of camouflage-wearing, military-weapon-toting
police officers patrolling the streets of an American city in armored vehicles. Szoldra quotes one of his Twitter followers, another
former soldier, who wrote: We rolled lighter than that in an actual warzone. Some may be surprised to see such stories run in
magazines like the Economist and Business Insider, but suddenly discussions about Americas militarized police forces are semi-
mainstream.In the wake of the police killing of African-American
teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the subsequent riots and
protests, social media is littered with images of tear gas, tanks, and police in
military gear with automatic weapons all aimed at black people in the
city. Several publications and writers have rushed to alert us about their stories on the militarization of the police. Commentators
have encouraged us to connect the dots between what is happening overseas and what is happening here. Hashtags referring to
Ferguson and Gaza share the same caption. We are told by some that the war on terror has
come home. Presumably, connecting these dots and making these comparisons will offer more clarity about the current
situation faced by Fergusons beleaguered black residents .But what will we better see and know? And who and what will be (once
again) invisible and unheard in the process? In her book Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman writes: Rather than try to convey
the routinized violence of slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have chosen to look
elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned By defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate
the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle. Hartmans emphasis on the terror of the
mundane and quotidian is her attempt to address the dilemma of black people having their suffering (un)seen and (un)heard by
non-blacks including those who purport to care: At issue here is the precariousness of empathy how does one give expression
to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence to the benumbing spectacle or contend
with the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other or the prurience that too often is the response to such displays? This
was the challenge faced by [Frederick] Douglass and other foes of slavery A
century and a half after Douglass
fought against slavery, the police have become more militarized in terms of weapons, tanks,
training, and gear. SWAT teams have been deployed at an accelerated rate and for an increased number of activities. Reports, like
the one recently published by the ACLU, provide some details about these technologies of war amassed by local police departments.
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Radley Balko, and others have explained that the militarization of US police can be traced back to the
mid-1960s. For example, in 1968, urban police forces were able to buy new equipment and technologies thanks to funding from the
newly passed Safe Streets Act. The social
anxiety and fear engendered by the Vietnam War and
domestic urban rebellions led by black people provided license for the
police to turn these new products on the marginalized populations of inner-
city America. SWAT teams, batterrams, and no-knock warrants (immortalized by Gil Scott Heron and written about
by James Baldwin), all predate contemporary hyper-militarized police forces. Black people have been the overwhelming targets of
these instruments of war. In his 1982 song Batterram, presaging our current uber-militarized police force, Toddy Tee raps: And
the chief of police says he just might/ (Flatten out every house he sees on sight)/ Because he say the rockman is takin him for a fool
For blacks, the war on terror hasnt come home. Its always been here.
How then might we consider the emphasis on the militarization of policing as the problem as another example of the
precariousness of empathy? The
problem with casting militarization as the problem is
that the formulation suggests it is the excess against which we must rally. We
must accept that the ordinary is fair, for an extreme to be the problem. The policing of black people carried out through a variety
of mechanisms and processes is purportedly warranted, as long as it doesnt get too militarized and excessive. Attention
is drawn to the spectacular event rather than to the point of origin or the
mundane.
 AT: Violent Revolution Bad
Patrick, your Whiteness is showing. The condition of social death can only
be solved by a radical reversal. Violence was okay when it allowed white
folk to build a country, but no one can shoot a few racist cops. OK.
Ciccariello-Maher 10
George Ciccariello-Maher, Jan, 2010, is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California, Berkeley, Jumpstarting the
Decolonial Engine

Hence the colonial world is shaken, but not by a bomb blast and not by a
bloody massacre. Rather, this is the shaking of ontological categories of
the walls which separate being from non-beingby the native's refusal to passively accept a
position of inferiority, to refuse to see herself through the eyes of the oppressor. Put differently, the native has discovered all of these
things within herself, "one step" prior to battle. If, as Fanon tells us, "the settler's work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible
for the native," then this affirmation of equality first takes the form of a dream, and it is this dream which makes possible the turning
away from the master and finding liberation in work.36Having unearthed the symbolic and ontological function of Fanon's
decolonial violence, we are now in a better position to consider his controversial discussion of the positive, generative, and cathartic
functions of violence. As he puts it:for the colonized people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their
characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a
violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler's violence
in the beginning. The groups recognize each other and the future nation is already indivisible.37In this crucial passage, three
observations are in order. Firstly, we can see the basis for much of the confusion regarding what Fanon understands as "violence,"
specifically, his reference to the binding function accomplished by the "practice of violence." But once we tie this to Black Skin, we
can see the complexities of such a practice, and its symbolic nature and function. Secondly, while decolonial violence here emerges
"in reaction to" the violence of the colonizer, it is neither merely reactive nor categorically comparable: decolonial
violence, as we have seen, is a breaking down of the ontological walls of
being, constructed to exclude certain persons from full access to the
category "human," and can share little in substantive terms with the force that builds those very walls. To judge all
"violences" as equal would be to fall into a severe formalism which is both useless and erroneous: useless through neglect of the
functional content of different violences and erroneous through neglect of the fact that formal characterization as "violent" is always-
already tainted by symbolic function.38 Thirdly, if we were tempted to deny the relevance of Fanon's early Hegelian framework in
the colonial context, Fanon himself is quick to remind us: inter-group recognition is the first achievement of this Manichean
violence, one which is accomplished long prior to formal liberation through the colonized turning away from the colonizing master
and toward "their only work."39It is here that we see the relationship between violence and the two stages that Fanon identifies in
the decolonization process. For Fanon, the Manichean violence of the first (formal) stagetinged as it is with racialism, intolerance,
and the elimination of heterogeneityis the necessary stepping-stone toward the creation of national identity, just as the black
identity of which he was similarly critical represented a necessary stepping-stone to self-respect and mutual recognition in Black
Skin, White Masks.40 What the "great organism of violence" first accomplishes is its very existence as an organism:
the war
of liberation creates the collective basis for national identity; it creates a
national past and dreams of a national future. And this collective task has a
parallel effect on the individual, for whom "violence is a cleansing force. It
frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and
inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self respect." Crucially, this effect is
present "even if the armed struggle has been symbolic and the nation is demobilized through a rapid movement of
on the basis of this individual and collective identity that
decolonization."41 It is only
the second stage of more substantive decolonization"that of the building
up of the nation," its revolutionary anode socialistic institutional
transformationcan move forward, "helped on by the existence of this cement which has been mixed with
blood and anger."42