A2: CRT K (Afro-Pessimism, Anti-Blackness

Anti-blackness is structured politically, not ontologically. This means that their understanding
results in bad faith which serves only to sustain anti-black power structures. Addressing and
changing the structures that empower racist ideologies must be a part of the equation, which is
why the perm is the best approach.
Gordon 17, Lewis professor of philosophy at UCONN-Storr, professor of philosophy at the University of the West Indies at Mona, “The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race”
*French was translated by google
Should the analysis remain at white and black, the world would appear more closed than it in fact is. For one, simply being born black would bar the possibility of any legitimate

Missing from this view is; however,

appearance. This is a position that has been taken by a growing group of theorists known as “Afro-pessimists” (Wilderson 2010; Sexton 2011). Black for them is absolute “social death:’ li is outside of relations . is at least what I argued in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, which

is that no human being is “really” any of these things; the claim itself is a manifestation of mauvaise foi [bad faith]. The
project of making people into such is one thing. People actually becoming such is another. This is an
observation Fanon also makes in his formulation of the tone of nonbeing and his critique of Self —Other discourses in Peau noir, masques blancs (Black Skin,
White Masks). Fanon distinguishes between the zone of nonbeing (nonappearance as human beings) and those of being. ‘The latter presumes a self-justified reality, which means it does not call itself into question. The former faces the problem of illegitimate appearance (Fanon 1952, chapters; Gordon 1999; AIcoir 2006; Yancy 2008). Thus, even the effort “to be” is in conflict as the system in question presumes legitimate absence of certain

the human being comes to the fore through emerging from being in the first place. Thus, the assertion of being is also an effort to push the
groups. Yet, paradoxically,

human being out of existence, so to speak. The racial conflict is thus changed to an existential one in which an existential ontology is posed

against an ontology of being. Existential ontology pertains to human being, whereas ontological being pertains to gods. This is why Fanon concludes that racism is also an attack against human being, as it creates a world in which one set stands above others as gods and the rest as below human. Where, in this formulation, stand human beings? The argument
itself gains some clarity with the etymology of “existence” which is from the Latin expression exsístere (to stand out, to emerge -that is, to appear). Blacks thus face the paradox of existing (standing out) as nonexistence (not standing out). The system of racism renders black appearance illicit . This conundrum of racialized existence affects ethics and morals. Ethical relations are premised on selves relating to another or others. The others

Thus,
must, however, appear as such, and they too, manifest themselves as selves. Implicit in such others as other selves is the formalization of ethical relations as equal. as found in the thought of Immanuel Kant and shifted in deference to the other in that of Emmanuel Levinas, Racism, however, excludes certain groups from being others and selves (if interpreted as being of a kind similar to the presumed legitimate selves).

the schema of racism is one in which the hegemonic group relates to its members as selves and others, whereas
the nonhegemonic groups are neither selves nor others. They, in effect, could only be such in relation to each other. It is, in other words, a form of ontological segregation as a condition of ethics and morals. The fight against racism, then, does not work as a fight against being others
or The Other. It is a fight against being nonothers. Fanon’s insight demands an additional clarification. Racists should be distinguished from racism . Racists are people who hold beliefs about the superiority and inferiority of certain groups of racially designated people. Racism is the system of institutions and social norms that empower individuals with such beliefs . Without that system, a racist would simply be an obnoxious, whether
overtly deprecating or patronizing, individual. With that system, racist points of view affect the social world as reality. Without that system, racists ultimately become inconsequential and, in a word, irrelevant beyond personal concerns of saving their souls from unethical and immoral beliefs and choices. Fanon was concerned with racists in his capacity as a psychiatrist (therapy, if necessary), but he was also concerned with racism as a

philosopher, social thinker, and revolutionary (Fanon 1959/1975). The latter, in other words, is a system, from an antiracism perspective, in need of eradication. An objection to the Afro-pessimistic assertion of blackness as social death could thus be raised from a Fanonian phenomenological perspective: Why must the social world be
premised on the attitudes and perspectives of antiblack racists? if the question Why don’t blacks among each other and other communities of color count as a social perspective? And

of racism is a function of power, why not offer a study of power, how it is gained and lost, instead of an assertion of its
manifestations as ontological? An additional problem with the Afro-pessimistic model is that its proponents
treat “blackness” as though it could exist independent of other categories. A quick examination of double consciousness (Du Bois 1903)—a phenomenological concept if there
ever were one by virtue of the focus on forms of consciousness and, better, that of which one is conscious, that is, intentionality would reveal why this would not work. Double consciousness involves seeing oneself from the perspective of another that deems one as negative (for example, the Afro-pessimistic conception of blackness).
That there is already another perspective makes the subject who lives through double consciousness relational. Added is what Paget Henry (2005) calls polemic, ted double consciousness and Nahum Chandler (2014, 6o—6i) calls the redoubled gesture, which is the realization that the condemnation of negative meaning means that
one must not do what the Afro pessimist does. Seeing that that position is false moves one dialectically forward into asking about the system that attempts to force one into such an identity: This relational matter requires looking beyond blackness ironically in order to understand blackness. This means moving from the conception of
meaning as singular, substance-based, fixed, and semantical into the grammar of how meaning is produced. Such grammars, such as that of gender, emerge in interesting ways (Gordon 1999, 124—129; 1997,73—74). However, as all human beings are manifestations of different dimensions of meaning, the question of identity requires
more than an intersecting model; otherwise there will simply be one (a priori) normative outcome in every moment of inquiry: whoever manifests the maximum manifestation of predetermined negative intersecting terms. That would in effect be an essence before an existence indeed, before an actual event of harm. This observation

Human existence is
emerges as well with the Afro-pessimist model when one thinks of pessimism as the guiding attitude. The existential phenomenological critique would be that optimism and pessimism are symptomatic of the same attitude: a priori assertions on reality.

contingent but not accidental, which means that the social world at hand is a manifestation of choices and
relationships in other words, human actions. Because human beings can only build the future instead of it
determining us, the task at hand, as phenomenology—oriented existentialists from Beauvoir and Sartre to Fanon, William R. Jones, and this author
have argued, depends on commitment. This concern also pertains to the initial concerns about authenticity discourses with which I began. One could only be pessimistic about an outcome, an activity. It is an act of forecasting what could only be meaningful once actually performed. Similarly, one
could only be optimistic about the same. What however, if there were no way to know either? Here we come to the foi [faith] element in mauvaise foi [bad faith]. Some actions are deontological, and if not that, they are at least reflections of our commitments, our projects. Thus, the point of some actions is not about their success or

Taking responsibility for such actions—bringing value to them— is opposed to another manifestation of mauvaise foi [bad faith]: the spirit of seriousness. The
failure but whether we deem them worth doing.

spirit of seriousness involves attributing a form of materiality to human values that elides the human role
in the construction of those values. Detailed analyses of this form of mauvaise foi [bad faith] in Africana phenomenology emerges in the thought of George Yancy (2008) and this author (Gordon 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000). The importance of this concept
pertains to the understanding of racism as a social phenomenon but also as a value. It addresses what Abdul JanMohamed (2011) calls our social investments in such phenomena. Returning to the distinction between racists and racism, the former are what existentialists such as Sartre and Beauvoir call “serious” people and the latter is
the system that supports such values as supposedly objective features of reality. In other words, the formers’ values are preserved in the latter as ontological. The turn to social reality raises an important theme of Africana phenomenology, and, indeed, all phenomenological treatments of oppression: Discussions of race and gender make
no sense without a philosophical anthropology. In Africana philosophy, the answer is straightforward: Euro-modernity denied the humanity of whole groups of people, which means the question of what it is to be human was crucial. These considerations emerged not only in colonial and racist terms but also at reflective levels of method
as hegemonic models of "science" began to dominate concerns for legitimacy. Many such models were premised, however, on ideological frameworks in which greater value was placed on "purity" in which mixture is supposedly "impure." The result is a philosophical anthropology in search of so- called purity as a standard of not only
human value but also identity. Kimberly Crenshaw (1991) offers a critique through her work on intersectionality in legal theory. Examples in Africana phenomenology include Michael Monahan's The Creolizing Subject (2011), Jane Anna Gordon's Creolizing Political Theory (2014), and writings by this author (Gordon 1997, 2006,
2010). The arguments they advanced reject any philosophical anthropology of converging "purities," where separate, pure "races" meet. Instead, the notion of racial purity is rejected from the outset. The authors, however, go further, as with the discussion of intersectionality, to propose questions of mixture at methodological levels .

It is the appeal to methodological purity that obscures lived realities of mixture. In other words, the actual human
world is not one of purity (being-in-and-by-itself) but instead relations of living negations of purity (existence, being-and-negations-of-and-for-being, and more). Monahan and J. Gordon prefer the term creolizing for this reason
because it is, they contend, a radical kind of mixture-one that in effect manifests not only new forms of being but also challenges the stasis of being. Their use of the present participle is to illustrate that mixing-especially of the licit and the illicit-is not a closed

argument, purity, like normativity, is an effort of imposing closure on the

achievement but instead an ongoing activity of reality. From their

openness or, as Fryer contends (2008), queer dimensions of reality. Put differently, ascribing ontological status to purity and straightness does not
work. It requires, in effect, denying the elements of reality that do not match up and involves attempting to
force reality into a preferred or pleasing falsehood instead of a (for the purist) displeasing truth. In effect, creolizing militates against disciplinary decadence or, in other words, mauvaise foi [bad faith]. As the context is human reality,
the conclusion of Africana phenomenology presenting an open anthropology comes to the fore. This openness raises one of the final ingredients, if we will, for this discussion: the relationships between humanity and freedom. The freedom question is paradoxical: to be free means also to possess the ability to evade it. This is what
critics of this approach, premised on a phenomenological treatment of mauvaise foi miss. Existential phenomenology collapses into an essentialism, they protest, because of the assertion of human reality as freedom. Others also read discussions of mauvaise foi as appealing to an essential unavoidability collapsed into futility. What they
fail to ask, however, is what human reality would be if human beings were incapable of acting in mauvaise foi. Could a being incapable of attempting to evade its freedom truly be free? Would not the absence of that capability mean human beings must essentially act in good faith? What, then, would happen to freedom? And if there
were no freedom, wouldn't human beings simply have a nature that poses none of the recognizable human problems because human behavior would already be determined? These considerations occasion what could be called an indirect proof: Human freedom exists by virtue of our efforts to evade it. This kind of argument is also, by
the way, a form of transcendental argument as it points to a condition for the possibility of what is being studied. This kind of transcendentalism, where existence and conditions of possibility meet, could also be called ironic as it is premised on what "is" by virtue of what it is not. Peter Caws (1992), in his discussion of Sartre's
structuralism in his debate with Levi-Strauss, reminds us that the aim of bringing human responsibility to human relations is a plea for the realization of the human role in a human world. It is structure in human terms, which means it requires a philosophical anthropology premised on metaevaluation, metacritique, metatheory, and
incompleteness. I regard all this as a way of saying that Euro-modernity posed challenges to what it means to be human, free, and responsible for the conditions by which any practice as such is justified. Race, gender, class, and sexuality, from this perspective, can be illuminated through these three considerations, but we should
remember that, as illumination, we receive only part of the story as these categories and their relationship to each other are, from this approach, still in the making. There could, in other words, be more categories to come as the relationship across the extant human identities continue to shift and disorient what it means to be
human.
And…
You should refuse a priori orientations towards pessimism or optimism which place essence before lived
existence—judge actions based on their contingent ethical benefits, not their ultimate ethical efficacy.
Antiblackness is not a closed system; reading it as such ignores the inherent relationality of the world and
is the same bad faith that antiblack racism requires to establish itself as legitimate and organize
populations in the first place—shifting the orientation of critique to final ethical judgments on the system
uniquely elides analysis of this
Gordon 18—Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, University of Connecticut (Lewis, “Thoughts on two recent decades of studying race and racism,” Social Identities, 24:1, 29-38, dml)
The problem with addressing a problem in terms of bad faith is that its exemplars would immediately seek to defend themselves. Bad faith, as many who have studied the phenomenon
know, is ashamed of itself and thus attempts to hide from itself often through shifting the orientation of critique
(Gordon, 1995/1999; Sartre, 1943). Thus, the defense is on the alert for analyses of bad faith to be in bad faith. Much of this has to do with the negative associations of the word ‘bad’ and the legalistic meaning of ‘bad faith’ in the English language. Thus, I prefer simply to use the French term mauvaise-foi. Mauvaise-foi has its negative connotations in French, but its range is broader in usage than in English, just as Geist in German doesn’t exactly mean ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ as it is often translated into English.
The aforementioned list of hegemonic theorists of the study of race and gender in the mid-1990s reflects the domination of three approaches: (1) poststructuralism, (2) Marxism, and (3) liberal political theory primarily in the form of analytical political philosophy. Existentialism and phenomenology were not only being treated as passé but also as incompatible with each other. There was also the problem of ‘compartmentalism’ and ‘disciplinary decadence’, two tendencies that continue to be features of not only much race theory but also most disciplinary practices in the academy. The former offered disciplines under a separate but equal rule, which, if history has
taught us anything about such formulations, is never actually so. The latter sought methodological conquest. These constrained what one could talk about when it came to human matters and how one is supposed to do it. I eventually developed a formulation of the second: ‘methodological fetishism’ (Gordon, 2016). Poststructuralism, Marxism, and analytical philosophy in the form of liberal political philosophy exemplified this tendency. One could add continental philosophy to this, which was in fact another way of saying ‘Euro-continental philosophy’. It, however, became, and for the most part continues to be, dominated by poststructualism and, relatedly,

A form of cart before the horse was the result, where fetishized methods were being imposed on
hermeneutics or theories of interpretation.

reality instead of constructing relationships with it. the fallacy of As should be apparent at this point, disciplinary decadence is a form of mauvaise-foi (Gordon, 2006, 2012, 2016). The similarity to Sartre’s famous formulation of

placing essence before existence in the study of human reality also comes to the fore
patently anti-essentialist (Caws, 1992; Gordon, 2012).
(Sartre, 1943, 1946). This is particularly ironic with regard to poststructuralism since its approach is

the compartmentalist approach of separating race away from other

Mauvaise-foi emerged not only at the level of human phenomena in action but also at the ways in which they are studied. For instance,

dimensions of human reality distorts the subject at hand. It could only be done, ultimately, in mauvaise-foi [BAD
FAITH] because of the imposition of non-relationality on a relational subject (Gordon, 2010, 2016). The old debate
of race versus gender, or race versus class, or gender versus class, and any of these versus sexual orientation is a
fine intellectual exercise under laboratory conditions in which the domain of inquiry is staked out and
constrained. That, however, is not human reality. Typically, we (human beings) don’t ‘see’ race, gender,
class, or sexual orientation walking around; we exemplify, coextensively, all of these, all the time, in
different ways. Imagine the hyphenated version class-gender-race-sexuality (and more) with emphasis on different words at different times. Focus is not identical with elimination. Race for me, then, was and continues to be studied in relation to what made it, among other related phenomena, emerge as a reality of human life over the past several hundred years (Gordon, 1995/1999, 1995, 2006, 2010).

There is a simple version of my argument from those years: Racism requires denying the humanity of other groups of human beings through the organization of them, through regimes of power, under the category of a race and then denying the ascription of human being to them . The performative contradiction is that they would first have to be identified as human beings in order to deny their being such. It is thus a form of mauvaise-foi. Since racism is a form of mauvaise-foi, antiblack racism, as a species of racism, must also be a form of mauvaise-foi.
My seemingly simple argument had complicated theoretical consequences. How did such performative contradictions historically emerge? People were not always categorized under races. Gender and linguistic membership predated many racial concepts (Gordon, 1997). Many other examples, such as religious membership, location in an economy, and even specialized skills could be added to the mix.
One approach is to look at the concepts informing dehumanization. They depend on a particular idea of human beings at work in racist practices. An obvious feature of racism is the rejection of having relationships with members of certain races. Non-relationality has many implications. For one, the notion that one could exist without relations with others (a slippery slope leading to being without relations) requires a model of the self as self-sustaining ‘substance’. That model has dominated much of market-oriented Euromodern thought, especially those in the Anglophone world. My writings could be read as a critique of this notion. Consider any act of
studying a phenomenon. Such an effort cannot be done without establishing at least a relationship with something as a focus of study. This doesn’t involve eliminating one’s relationship to reality but instead reorienting oneself to relevant acts of knowing, learning, and understanding (Gordon, 1995, 2010, 2012, 2016). Commitment to the elimination of relations leads to contradictions. Try, for instance, eliminating relations to oneself. Mauvaise foi returns in many forms as each displeasing truth about relations is denied for the sake of pleasing falsehoods. In the chain of efforts, other important elements of study such as communicability, evidence,
and sociality come to the fore, each of which raises concerns of the self as other.
As I focused primarily on antiblack racism, the question of whether all other forms of racism are the same emerged. Blackness functions, after all, in peculiar ways in societies that have produced antiblack racism. A response to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, for instance, is often that ‘all lives matter’. That is true the extent to which each group lives under conditions of equal respect for life. What advocates of #BlackLivesMatter are doing, however, is responding to a world in which some lives matter a lot more than others, whose lives evidentially matter a lot less. The history of antiblack racism amounts to the conviction that black people are only valuable the

that such society

extent to which there is use for their labor or, worse, profiting from their misfortune as we see with the heavily racialized prison industrial complexes in the United States and similar countries (Alexander, 2010; Davis, 1983, 2005). It collapses into the expectation of justified existence in a context in which the justification for whoever stands as most valued is intrinsic. Members of the dominant group could thus seek their justification – if they wish – personally, through mechanisms of love, professional recognition, athletic achievement, etc. Moreover ,

renders some groups as positive and others as negative leads to notions of legitimate presence ( and illegitimate absence)

absence ( Should the analysis remain at white and black, the world would, however, appear more
illegitimate presence).

closed than it in fact is. simply being born black would bar the possibility of any legitimate appearance. For one,
This is a position that has been taken by a growing group of theorists known as ‘Afropessimists’, for whom ‘black’ signifies absolute ‘social death’ (Sexton, 2010, 2011; Wilderson, 2007, 2008, 2009). It is, in other words, outside of relations. My objections to this view are many. For one, no human being is ‘really ’ any of these things. Do blacks , for instance, suffer social death in relation to each other? The project of making people into
such is one thing. The achievement of such is another. This is an observation Fanon also makes in his formulation of the zone of nonbeing and his critique of otherness in the study of race in Black Skin, White Masks, which I discuss at length my (Gordon, 2015) study, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought.
Fanon (1952) is critical of how otherness is interpreted in race theories and the study of race. The rejection of otherness ignores the fact that others are human beings. Racism emerges in attempts to deny that. Instead, it offers the zone of nonbeing, non-appearance as human beings. The racially dominant group presumes self-justified reality (license), which means it doesn’t call itself into question. And the designated racially inferior group?

Lacking justification, their access to being is illegitimate . This means their absence is a mark of the system’s legitimacy. Such groups face the Catch 22 of illegitimate appearance: To appear is to violate appearance. Put differently, the violation is one of appearing without a license to do such. To all this, a

consideration that should be added is this: The human being comes to the fore through emerging from being in the first place. Thus, the assertion of Being, as in the thought of Heidegger and his followers is also an effort to push the human being out of existence, so to speak. Heidegger, fair enough in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1947/1971), saw no problem in this. Fanon (1952), and many others in Africana philosophy, including the South African philosopher and psychologist Noël Chabani Manganyi (1973, 1977), disagreed through showing how racial conflict is also an existential one in which an existential ontology is posed against an ontology of being. The latter,
we submit, is best suited for gods. When such becomes the model of being human, humanity dies. Blacks thus face the paradox of existing (standing out, living – as ex sistere means such) as non-existence (not standing out). Antiblack racism makes black appearance illicit.
Licit appearance would mean appearing as selves and others. It would mean the right to appear. Antiracist struggles will not work, then, as a struggle against otherness. It is, instead, against being non-selves and non-others.
Returning to the Afropessmistic notion of blackness as social death, I’m compelled to ask: Why must the social world be premised on the attitudes and perspectives of antiblack racists? Why don’t blacks among each other and other communities of color count as social perspectives? If the question of racism is a function of unequal power , which it clearly is, why not offer a study of power, how it is gained and lost, instead of an assertion of its manifestations as ontological?

Afropessimism treats ‘blackness’ as an ontological, which makes it a self-sustaining (non-

I’m reminded here of Victor Anderson’s (1995) Beyond Ontological Blackness. Anderson would no doubt object that

relational) concept. The historical emergence of blackness refutes that. But more, there is a logical paradox
that emerges from ontological blackness. To identify blackness, one must be in a relation to it. This relational
matter requires looking beyond blackness ironically in order to understand blackness. This means moving
from the conception of meaning as singular, substance-based, and fixed into the grammar of how meaning
is produced.
Consider the grammar of gender. Women historically occupy the role of absence (de Beauvoir, 1949; Butler, 2011; Gordon, 1995/1999, 1997). Blackness and womanness are thus intimate (Gordon, 1995/1999, 1997). The grammar of presence and absence is peculiarly theodicean (Gordon, 2010, 2013). This is the form of mauvaise-foi in which presence takes on the hubris of the desire to be a (often the) god. Theodicy defends the integrity of the god (systemic maintenance) through placing its contradictions (for example, evil) outside of it. The result is Being as a form of systemic purity (Monahan, 2011, 2017). This grammar is also psychoanalytical, in the sense of
existential psychoanalysis. Manichean ‘qualities’ (such as ‘hard’ masculinity and ‘soft’ femininity) are evident in these modes of being. This pertains as well to sexual orientation: A white man’s relation to a black man is not only one of race-to-race but also of race-to-gender where the meaning of being black (as ‘feminine’ and ‘sexual’) could collapse into gendered absence. And extended to the sexualization of absence – think of the plethora of literature on the feminine as soft, cold, dark, and absence. The relation among males in which one group manifests such qualities immediately collapses into a homoerotic one (Fanon, 1952; Gordon, 1995/1999, 1997, 2000).
We see here a conception of dealing with racial and gender qualities that are today called ‘intersectional’, though that metaphor doesn’t at first quite work for their existential phenomenological psychoanalytical manifestations in mauvaise-foi (because purity seeks singularity). The major proponent of intersectionality – Kimberlé Crenshaw – is pretty clear that she is referring to identity collisions as they appear in law (especially tort and discrimination law); in other words, she is referring to harms that, because of how they are interpreted, don’t appear (supposedly don’t exist) despite their lived-reality. She often illustrates her point through her famous example of a
collision at a four-way intersection (Crenshaw, 1991, 2014). If the fundamental site of harm is property, the concern will be about the cars, and if their status of property depends on being owned by, say, white men, then harm would pertain to them. If the location of harm expands simply to ‘whites’, then a white woman or man in one of the cars would be sufficient for harm having occurred. If, however, there were no whites in the cars, then the conclusion would be that no one was harmed. If harm extends to blacks and other people of color, and even further, to non-human animals, then any of them being in the car or cars would initiate a cause for redress. Notice that
Crenshaw’s argument doesn’t deny the possibility of white men being harmed. Her point is that people such as black women were not historically acknowledged in the legal frameworks of harmed subjects because of a failure to see that human beings do not manifest a single category of identity on which to build a legal response. Simply referring to ‘man’ as the exemplar of human being fails to acknowledge that human beings are not only men but also women, and simply as ‘women’ fails to address what kind of women such as those of color and different sexual orientations.
At an existential level, what is also missed is the lived-reality of the convergence of these and their social and legal implications. A black woman in an automobile collision is, for example, not just harmed but also harmed in ways linked to the wider legal framework of the society. The criminalization of black women and men, for instance, could mean that though harmed in the collision, such people may face the possibility of entanglement in a legal system that treats them as the cause of harm, which could lead to other dangers such as ensnarement in the criminal justice system. This is one of the reasons why, even when harmed, many people of color don’t seek the
aid of law enforcement and other representatives of that system. Crenshaw’s theory therefore has an existential and phenomenological significance in that it is an argument for the appearance of what is otherwise treated as either non-existent or not worthy of appearing, of, that is, illicit appearance. Her theory is also about the radicalization of appearance in that the identified subjects emerge, so to speak, not only in terms of being seen but also through an effort to see what they see or experience – in short, to see or at least understand their point of view in terms of the conditions they face. It is thus not a subjective theory or a narrowly objective one but instead an
intersubjective theory because it requires understanding how different human beings relate to and encounter legal structures – products of the human world – as simultaneously alienating and enabling.
Crenshaw’s concept of an intersection could, however, be interpreted in problematic ways. The first is the geometric model of an intersection. That version presupposes well-formed or complete lines converging. A response would be that there was never a complete ‘whole’ or, as the feminist phenomenological communicologist Sara Ahmed (2006) would put it, ‘straight line’ with regard to human subjects in the first place. The queer phenomenological theorist David Ross Fryer (2008), in stream with Ahmed, offers the logical conclusion of this critique – namely, a fundamental queerness at the heart of race theory and related areas of study such as gender studies and
queer theory. My recent work in philosophy of culture extends such a concern to the human condition as well – that is, the upsurge from being makes human reality a queer one. This is pretty much the argument articulated earlier with regard to questions raised by Fanon’s analysis of ontology, existential ontology, and the dialectics of selves and others.

as all human beings are manifestations of different dimensions of meaning, the question of identity
The second critical consideration is that

requires more than an intersecting model, otherwise there will simply be one (a priori) normative outcome in every moment
of inquiry: Whoever manifests the maximum manifestation of predetermined negative intersecting terms. That would in effect be an essence before an existence – indeed, before an actual event of harm. Some race theorists’ tendency to build
their arguments on a particular group as ‘most oppressed’ without offering evidence for the continued truth of such a claim is an example of this fallacy. This observation emerges as well where pessimism is the guiding attitude. An existential critique would be

optimism and pessimism are symptomatic of the same attitude: a priori assertions on reality. Human
that

existence is contingent but not accidental, which means that the social world at hand is a manifestation of
choices and relationships – in other words, human actions. As human beings can only build the future instead of
it determining us, the task at hand depends on commitment – what is to be done without guarantees of
outcome. This concern also pertains to the initial concerns about authenticity. One could only be pessimistic about an outcome, an
activity. It’s an act of forecasting what could only be meaningful once actually performed. Similarly, one could
only be optimistic about the same. What, however, if there were no way to know either? Here we come to the foi element in
mauvaise foi. Some actions are deontological, and if not that, they are at least reflections of our commitments, our
projects. Thus, the point of some actions isn’t about their success or failure but whether we deem them worth
doing (Fanon, 1961/ 1991; Gordon, 2015). Taking responsibility for such actions – bringing value to them – is opposed to another manifestation of mauvaise-foi: the spirit of seriousness.
And…
You should err affirmative—human systems are inherently malleable and metrics of social
death used to describe other groups have been reversed through state engagement.
Gordon 15 --- Lewis, Afro-Jewish philosopher, political thinker, educator, and musician, Professor at the University of Connecticut in Philosophy and Africana
Studies, European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy; Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor of Politics and International Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa; and
Chairman of the Frantz Fanon awards committees of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, transcribed from https://youtu.be/UABksVE5BTQ, presenting and
discussing his book “What Fanon Said”
***Theonaturalism – religion based difference
The first thing to bear in mind you may wonder why in the beginning of the talk I talked about philosophical anthropology. And many people when they are trying to talk about social change they never think about what a human being is and this is something Fanon
pays attention to. Many people want to have closed conceptions of human beings because then human beings can be predicable . In fact, in fanons writing he gave an example. One of the problems is that when he would walk in reason seems to walk out. One
problem we have to bear in mind when we try to look at the question of human beings in terms of rigid closed systems is that we often are trying to get as a model of how we work as theorists on issues of social change that are actually based on what we can call law
like generalizations . Now what is a law like generalization? It is when you make sure that whatever you say has no contradiction down the line. So if you are to say this much [gestures with hand] the next stage must be consistent with that, and the next stage until you
are maximally consistent. Do you get that? But here is the problem – and I can just put it in a nut shell- nobody, nobody in this room would like to date, be married to, or be a best friend with a maximally consistent person. You know what that is. Its hell. And this tells
you something, because if somebody where maximally consistent, you know what you would say that person is not reasonable. And we have a person here who does work on Hegel that can point out this insight, that a human being has the ability to evaluate rationality.
Now why is that important? Because you see the mistake many of us make is many of us want to push the human being into that maximized law like generalization model . So when we think about our philosophical anthropology, some people, our question about
intersectionality for instance, what some people don’t understand is nowhere is there ever a human being who is one identity. People talk about race – do you ever really see a race walking? You see a racialized man or woman, or transman or transwoman. Do you ever
see a class walking? Class is embodied in flesh and blood people. And we can go on and on. So if we enrich our philosophical anthropology we begin to notice certain other things. And one of the other things we begin to realize is that we commit a serious problem
when we do political work. And the problem is this. The question about Wilderson for instance. There is this discussion going on (and allot of people build it out of my earlier books). I have a category I call, as a metaphor, an antiblack world. You notice an

indefinite article – an anti-black world . The reason I say that is because the world is different from an anti-black world . The project of racism is to create a world that would be
completely anti-black or anti-woman. Although that is a project, it is not a fait accompli . People don’t seem to understand how recent this phenomenon
we are talking about is. A lot of people talk about race they don’t even know the history of how race is connected into theonaturalism. How, for instance, Andalucia and the pushing out of the Moors. The history of how race connected to Christianity was formed. A

lot of people don’t understand – from the standpoint of a species whose history is 220,000 years old, what the
hell is 500 years? But the one thing that we don’t understand is we create a false model for how we study those last 500 years . We
study the 500 years as if the people who have been dominated have not been fighting and resisting. Had they
not been fighting and resisting we wouldn’t be here. And then we come into this next point because you see the problem in the formulation of pessimism and optimism is they are both based on
forecasted knowledge, a prior knowledge. But human beings don’t have prior knowledge. And in fact – what in the world are we if we need to have guarantees for us to act. You know what you call such people? Cowards. The fact of the matter is our ancestors –
let’s start with enslaved ancestors. The enslaved ancestors who were burning down those plantations, who were finding clever ways to poison their masters, who were organizing meetings for rebellions, none of them had any clue what the future would be 100 years
later. Some had good reason to believe that it may take 1000 years. But you know why they fought? Because they knew it wasn’t for them. One of the problems we have in the way we think about political issues is we commit what Fanon and others in the existential
tradition would call a form of political immaturity. Political immaturity is saying it is not worth it unless I, me, individually get the payoff. When you are thinking what it is to relate to other generations – remember Fanon said the problem with people in the transition,
the pseudo postcolonial bourgeois – is that they miss the point, you fight for liberation for other generations. And that is why Fanon said other generations they must have their mission. But you see some people fought and said no I want my piece of the pie. And that
means the biggest enemy becomes the other generations. And that is why the postcolonial pseudo-bourgeoisie they are not a bourgeoisie proper because they do not link to the infrastructural development of the future, it is about themselves. And that’s why, for instance,
as they live higher up the hog, as they get their mediating, service oriented, racial mediated wealth, the rest of the populations are in misery. The very fact that in many African countries there are people whose futures have been mortgaged, the fact that in this country
the very example of mortgaging the future of all of you is there. What happens to people when they have no future? It now collapses the concept of maturation and places people into perpetual childhood. So one of the political things – and this is where a psychiatrist

in all political action it’s not about you . It is what you

philosopher is crucial – is to ask ourselves what does it mean to take on adult responsibility. And that means to understand that

are doing for a world you may not even be able to understand . Now that becomes tricky, because how do we know this? People have done it before . There were people,
for instance, who fought anti-colonial struggles, there are people (and now I am not talking about like thirty or forty years ago, I am talking about the people from day one 17 th 18th century all the way through) and we have no idea what we are doing for the 22nd century.

we commit the error of forgetting the systems we are talking about are
And this is where developing political insight comes in. Because

human systems. They are not systems in the way we talk about the laws of physics. A human system can only
exist by human actions maintaining them. Which means every human system is incomplete. Every human
being is by definition incomplete . Which means you can go this way or you can go another way. The system
isn’t actually closed.
And…
The alternative cedes the political by failing to engage the state. Only our methodology utilizes
the state as a heuristic, allowing us to better understand our ontology in the face of
governmentality. Affirming the resolution solves the harms of the kritik better than the
alternative
Zanotti 14
Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching include critical political theory as well as
international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict governance.“Governmentality, Ontology,
Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if
this is late 2013 or early 2014 – The Stated “Version of Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30 th, 2013.
Obtained via Sage Database.
By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of

Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine
agonic relations.

‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the

scripts ofgovernmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This
approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and
nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political
problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed,
hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful

differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the
local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for

reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up

through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of
fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine
‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are

available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude
with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads

not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84

And…
The alternative is a project that will not happen overnight. Timeframe is everything for the
affirmative impacts. So, PERM – DO THE AFF THEN THE NEG. Framing your ballot based
on immediate steps to end ongoing violence and oppression in the status quo should come
before the long-term project of the alt.
Richard Delgado 9, Richard, self-appointed Minority scholar, Chair of Law at the University of Alabama Law School, J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, his
books have won eight national book prizes, including six Gustavus Myers awards for outstanding book on human rights in North America, the American Library Association’s
Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Professor Delgado’s teaching and writing focus on race, the legal profession, and social change, 2009, “Does
Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want, Arguing about Law”, p. 588-590
The CLS critique of piecemeal reform¶ Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform. Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society. Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using
piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize oppression. Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and¶ just. In fact, Crits
believe that teaching the¶ common law or using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure.“ To avoid this, CLS scholars¶ urge law professors to abandon the case method, give

The CLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar,

up the effort to find rationality and order¶ in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion.¶

imperialistic and wrong. Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand. The critique is imperialistic in
that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events affecting them.
A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not. In the meantime, the order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable

It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs

academic working in a warm office.

certainty now,¶
the of heat incremental changes may bring
unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some

revolutionary changes closer, not push them further away. Not all small reforms induce
complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a tenants‘ union meeting in their heated living room . CLS

critique of piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of
scholars‘

whether total change, when it comes, will be what we want.