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-Leroy Duffie AC |
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-The officers were looking for a man who had brandished a handgun in a "'90s style Astro van" parked outside a convenience store. They didn't pull over Duffie's van for any traffic violation, according to court documents. Instead they were looking for the suspicious person from the convenience store. Ordered out at gunpoint, Duffie fell to the ground as one of his prosthetic legs detached, he said. He knocked his teeth out and tore one of his rotator cuffs. Officers handcuffed Duffie as he lay on the ground and searched his car finding only a paintball gun Duffie said he planned to donate to a local charity. After several minutes, the officers seized the paintball gun and released Duffie. Judge Lavenski Smith, who wrote for the appeals court majority, took issue with the reason Duffie's van was pulled over in the first place and that officers continued a high-risk traffic stop with a mismatched suspect description. In June 2015, Senior U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf granted the city's request for summary judgment, ending the case without a trial. Kopf ruled that the officers' actions were protected by legal doctrine called qualified immunity, which shields police and other government officials from liability for mistakes made acting in good faith. |
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+Wilderson The 1AC attempts to use the institution of the state to assist disadvantaged /African American groups. Their focus on empirical conditions obscures the reality that civil society is fundamentally incompatible with the ontology of the black body. |
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+Wilderson, Frank, B; "Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics, Red, White, and Black, Structure of U.S. Antagonisms" (2003) Award winning author of Incognero, Print, pg. 15-16 |
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+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 today’s Blacks in the United States 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 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 ”a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of “work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates 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 position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its 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. |
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+Link: Junior Partners |
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+Wilderson The 1AC’s focus on using the institution of the state satiate the demands of civil society’s junior partners perpetuates the notion that civil society can be inclusive to marginalized groups while ignoring the fact that blacks can never be included within that structure. This obscures the fact that civil society is fundamentally irreconcilable with the black body. |
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+Wilderson, Frank B., ‘The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal’, Social Justice, 30 (2003), 18–27 |
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+Here 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. Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction” (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society’s many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons. In light of this, coalitions and social movements, even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civil society, uItimately accommodate only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil society’s junior partners (i.e., immigrants, white women, and the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison-slave-in-waiting. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical structures and political desire are underwritten by a supplemental anti- Blackness. |
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-Like many other Black, disabled people, Leroy Duffie was subject to police brutality because he looked “suspicious.” “Objective reasonableness” is the standard that lets police officers get away with murder. |
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-Stefan 1 |
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-The public still sees people with psychiatric disabilities as dangerous, rather than as the victims of crime and violence. It is crucially important that the facts~-~-people with psychiatric disabilities are more often victims of violence than perpetrators~-~-be conveyed and repeated, in as many different contexts as possible. This can include testimony before State Legislatures, letters to the editor and editorials, presentations at service clubs, and, of course, trainings. In addition, it would be helpful to organize with the African-American community; many of the victims in Stolen Lives were both psychiatrically disabled and African-American. Police are rarely disciplined in the wake of a shooting, even shooting of an unarmed individual. she continues Interestingly, the First Circuit's most recent substantive jurisprudence on excessive force involves people with psychiatric disabilities, Rennie v. Davis, 264 F.3d 86 (1st Cir.2001)(excessive force in restraining institutionalized person); McCabe v. Life-Line Ambulance Service, 77 F.3d 540 (1st Cir. 1996)(woman died when she had a heart attack after police broke down her door and were trying to pull her down the stairs to bring her in for psychiatric examination). While Rennie was chiefly concerned with failure to protect, it did affirm the "objective reasonableness" standard in excessive force claims, and reject the argum ent that to make out an excessive force claim, a plaintiff must show more than minor injuries. The sheer number of cases involving police shootings of unarmed individuals, Nelson v. County of Wright, 162 F.3d 986 (8th Cir. 1998)(unarmed individual in bed in his bedroom);Braswell v. Wiggs, 1998 U.S.App.LEXIS 3866 (4th Cir. March 5, 1998); Clem v. Corbeau, 284F.3d 543 (4th Cir. 2002) (plaintiff was pepper-sprayed and shot three times "within a short time" after police arrival); Deorle v. Rutherford, 272 F.3d 1272 (9th Cir. 2001)(police fired beanbaground into person's face), or barely armed people, Haddaway v. Ellerbusch, 996 F.2d 1211, 1993WL 238997 (4th Cir. 1993)(denying qualified immunity to police who shot a woman who was "angry" and holding a pair of scissors), is extremely discouraging. In many cases, police appear to have escalated a situation that could have been handled without violence. |
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-Police violence against Black and disabled Americans is centered on the narrative of the “violent other.” This normalizes violence since it becomes reasonable for a cop to view Black Americans with disabilities as violent. |
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+Impact |
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+Wilderson 2 The impact is ontological death. The structural violence against the black body is not contingent, but gratuitous, irrational, and incoherent. The black body is labeled as a scandal, reduced to mere flesh just so that whiteness can continue to sustain itself. |
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+Wilderson, Frank B., ‘The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal’, Social Justice, 30 (2003), 18–27 |
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+Fanon (1968: 37) writes, “decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.” If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history, and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog — a past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for “whoever says ‘rape’ says Black” (Fanon), whoever says “prison” says Black, and whoever says “AIDS” says Black (Sexton) — the “Negro is a phobogenic object” (Fanon). Indeed, it means all those things: the aphobogenic object, a past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal — not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social democratic nor Marxist, in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the “Negro” has been inviting whites, as well as civil society’s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today — even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement — invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism, or community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a “program of complete disorder.” One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one’s politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If |
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+Alternative |
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+Wilderson 5 The alternative is the unflinching refusal to succumb to the demands of civil society – the world must go. |
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+Wilderson, Frank, B; "Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics, Red, White, and Black, Structure of U.S. Antagonisms" (2003) Award winning author of Incognero, Print, pg. 15-16 |
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+The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between two things. On the one hand was the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a “being for the captor,” the drama of value (the stage on which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale). On the other was the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to what does the world attribute the Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us”? Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Give Turtle Island back to the “Savage.” Give life itself back to the Slave. Two simple sentences, fourteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An “ethical modernity” would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of antagonisms, such as class struggle, gender conflict, and immigrants’ rights. One cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is that what can so easily be spoken is now (500 years and 250 million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these fourteen words not only render their speaker “crazy” but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not Should the United States be overthrown? or even Would it be overthrown? but when and how—and, for some, what would come in its wake. |
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- Harris |
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-The new civil rights movement is growing daily in momentum and force. It is consciously gathering up the various strands of racism, oppression and social and economic inequality that disproportionately affect communities of color, indigenous people and other marginalized folks. One common thread that needs deeper exploration among activists regards the acts of police violence against people diagnosed with "mental illness." Racism intersects deeply with "mentalism," defined as discrimination and violence against people of all races who are perceived as unstable or "mentally ill." I do not mean to equate racism and mentalism, but simply to point out the commonalities in these patterns of police violence. A primary intersection is that the public tends to think of people with mental health problems as the violent "other," similarly to the way young men of color are stereotyped as inherently dangerous. This twin bias against psychiatric disability and race runs deeply in our law enforcement agencies. Similarly, the twin bias runs through the mental health system, which, according to a report compiled by the Center for the Human Rights of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry, shares with the criminal justice system "minimal guarantees of due process, legitimizes discrimination based on disability and gives free rein to racial prejudice." The report notes that people of color are more likely to have their behaviors diagnosed as "schizophrenia" than whites. They are also more likely to be subjected to forms of coercive mental health "treatment," which include forced inpatient and outpatient hospitalization, and restraint and seclusion. But one of the most extreme versions of "force," one could argue, is police violence resulting in death. According to The Washington Post, half of the hundreds of people who are killed by police each year are people with psychiatric disabilities. The Portland Press Herald found that 42 percent of those shot by the police in Maine were also "mentally ill." However, a report from the New Mexico Public Defender Department found that 75 percent of police shootings "involved a mental health context." Consider the death of Ezell Ford, who was killed by officers from the Los Angeles Police Department just two days after Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri. Or Kajieme Powell of St. Louis, who was killed by police under questionable circumstances just four miles from where Brown died. Or the killing of Tanisha Anderson of Cleveland, a 37-year-old mother who died when police slammed her down on the pavement. (The cops were "responding" to the family's desperate 911 call to get mental health treatment for her.) Or the 50-year-old Arizona woman, Michelle Cusseaux, who was killed for standing in her own doorway with a claw hammer raised over her head, resisting being dragged away by the police on a "mental health" call. Recent disturbing footage shows Milton Hall, a homeless Black man from Michigan with a psychiatric disability, whom police gunned down in a parking lot in broad daylight. He was wielding a penknife, and was shot over 45 times by six different officers. Two years later, charges have yet to be filed, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to testify before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). These are just a tiny fraction of the disability-related deaths that occur each day. In every one of these cases, police have justified their actions because of the "noncompliance" of the victim. Most "suicide by cop" cases are explained away in this manner. But the fact of the matter is that invoking "suicide by cop" is a flimsy excuse for murder based on psychiatric disability. Disability and "mental illness" are not crimes, any more than being Black or Brown is a crime. |
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+Role of the Ballot |
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+Yancy 05 The role of the judge is to vote for the debater who better offers the best liberation strategy for black bodies. Traditional ethics fail to recognize the problem of anti-Blackness, as it roots in a philosophy that originates in a view from nowhere. The lack of embodied experience in discussions of ethics and philosophy allows the white body to assume the status of normativity by bracketing all others into their universal ethics. |
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+Yancy 05 |
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+I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a profound source of knowledge connected to my "raced" body. Hence, I write from a place of lived embodied experience, a site of exposure. In philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to "expose" is a weak argument, a fallacy, or someone's "inferior" reasoning power. The embodied self is bracketed and deemed irrelevant to theory, superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for truth. It is best, or so we are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white philosopher/author presumes to speak for all of "us" without the slightest mention of his or her "raced" identity. Self-consciously writing as a white male philosopher, Crispin Sartwell observes: Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is the "whiteness" of my authorship. This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. But such an authorship and authority is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting or End Page 215 apparent transcendence of the mundane and the particular, and the pleasure of power expressed in the "comprehension" of a range of materials. (1998, 6) To theorize the Black body one must "turn to the body as the radix for interpreting racial experience" (Johnson 1993, 600).1 It is important to note that this particular strategy also functions as a lens through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body's "racial" experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of the "raced" white body. However, there is no denying that my own "racial" experiences or the social performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper, my objective is to describe and theorize situations where the Black body's subjectivity, its lived reality, is reduced to instantiations of the white imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as "the phenomenological return of the Black body."2 These instantiations are embedded within and evolve out of the complex social and historical interstices of whites' efforts at self-construction through complex acts of erasure vis-à-vis Black people. These acts of self-construction, however, are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has noted, "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of white elevation or Black demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead 1994, 4). How I understand and theorize the body relates to the fact that the body—in this case, the Black body—is capable of undergoing a sociohistorical process of "phenomenological return" vis-à-vis white embodiment. The body's meaning—whether phenotypically white or black—its ontology, its modalities of aesthetic performance, its comportment, its "raciated" reproduction, is in constant contestation. The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is "seen," its "truth," is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction. "The body" is positioned by historical practices and discourses. The body is codified as this or that in terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological interests that are grounded within further power-laden social processes. The historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of its "being" as lived and meant within the interstices of social semiotics. Hence: a) the body is less of a thing/being than a shifting/changing historical meaning that is subject to cultural configuration/reconfiguration. The point here is to interrogate the "Black body" as a "fixed and material truth" that preexists "its relations with the world and with others"3 ; b) the body's meaning is fundamentally symbolic (McDowell 2001, 301), and its meaning is congealed through symbolic repetition and iteration that emits certain signs and presupposes certain norms; and, c) the body is a battlefield, one that is fought over again and again across particular historical moments and within particular social spaces. "In other words, the concept of the body provides only the illusion of self-evidence, facticity, 'thereness' for something End Page 216 fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular social groups" (301). On this score, it is not only the "Black body" that defies the ontic fixity projected upon it through the white gaze, and, hence, through the episteme of whiteness, but the white body is also fundamentally symbolic, requiring demystification of its status as norm, the paragon of beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint, and nobility. |
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-The “objective reasonableness” facet of law is integral to qualified immunity, which erases police accountability, making it a prime factor in police violence against Black and disabled Americans. |
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-Stefan 2 |
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+On Case |
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+Bans on nuclear energy empirically leads to a heavier reliance on coal to meet power needs. |
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-Of course, the most outwardly evident and alarming problem with qualified immunity jurisprudence has been its cumulative erosion of law enforcement accountability. Perhaps Erwin Chemerinsky summarized it best when he noted that “in recent years, the court has made it very difficult, and often impossible, to hold police officers and the governments that employ them accountable for civil rights violations.” Many of the aforementioned procedural and substantive problems with the qualified immunity doctrine have contributed to what might be considered a deleterious byproduct. But recent Court decisions have also demonstrated a willingness to extend immunity in even the most egregious circumstances. For example, in Plumhoff v. Rickard, the Court held that three officers did not use excessive force and were entitled to qualified immunity when they had collectively fired fifteen shots at a fleeing car, causing the deaths of the driver and passenger. The incident ensued after one of the officers stopped the vehicle for having only one working headlight and, rather than exit the vehicle as the officer instructed, the driver instead sped away, prompting the officer and several others to give chase. Overturning both the district court and the court of appeals, the Supreme Court held that the use of deadly force was permissible because the driver “posed a grave public safety risk” and that firing fifteen times was not unreasonable because “the officers need not stop shooting until the threat is over.” Somewhat similarly, in Brosseau v. Haugen, the Court held that an officer was entitled to immunity when she shot an unarmed man in the back through the window of his Jeep—which was not moving—as a means of preventing his escape. The Court explained that the officer’s actions “fell in the ‘hazy border between excessive and acceptable force,’” but that previous Court decisions “by no means ‘clearly establish’ that Brosseau’s conduct violated the Fourth Amendment.” |
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+Follett 16 http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/13/the-end-of-nuclear-power-in-japan-is-bringing-back-coal/ |
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+An analysis published Monday by Bloomberg states that coal power will become the largest source of electricity in Japan due to an effective ban on nuclear power. Nuclear power provided 29 percent of Japan’s total power output before 2011, but will decline to 13.6 percent by 2023 and 1.2 percent by 2040, according to the report. Japan got 24 percent of its electricity from coal in 2010 and the country plans to get more than a third of its power from coal by 2040. Japan previously shut down all of its nuclear reactors in the aftermath of the 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake, which triggered the Fukushima disaster. The country has since transitioned away from nuclear power. Prior to the disaster, Japan operated 54 nuclear power plants and the government planned to build enough reactors to provide 50 percent of the country’s electricity power. After the disaster, Japan pledged to effectively abandon nuclear power by the 2030s, replacing it mostly with wind or solar power, causing the price of electricity to rise by 20 percent. The transition to green energy hasn’t gone well and the country likely won’t meet its goals, according to the report. Japan remains a top importer of oil, coal and natural gas and the government estimated that importing fuel costs the country more than $40 billion annually. Japan’s current government sees a revival of nuclear power as critical to supporting economic growth and slowing an exodus of Japanese manufacturing to lower-cost countries, but has faced incredible pushback. |
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-Advocacy: The US will limit qualified immunity through civil remedies to hold police officers accountable. |
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+Empirical evidence is not limited to just japan. Australia and Germany both experienced resurgences of coal power following nuclear phase-outs. Similarly, nuclear power plants in the U.S. that have closed due to environmental pressure are being replaced by coal- not renewable alternatives. This trend is predicted to increase. |
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+Conca 16: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/05/16/natural-gas-is-replacing-nuclear-power-not-renewables/#4d451ba84abb |
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-Limiting qualified immunity through civil remedies is the best way to hold police accountable. Additionally, this does not rely on the corrupt lower courts, but rather change starting at the Supreme court. |
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+Across some parts of the country, nuclear power plants have been closing amid political pressure and warped financial markets, even though they contribute the overwhelming majority of their region’s clean power, and are the economic strength of their local economies. As an example, the sad and unnecessary closing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station at the end of 2014 led to an increase in fossil fuel use, specifically natural gas, that completely filled the gap (see figure). The potential closing of a few more nuclear plants in the region will increase gas use even more. As all energy experts know, renewables will never replace any of nuclear’s clean power lost by the closing of nuclear plants. Renewables are having enough trouble replacing significant amounts of coal or keeping pace with demand, and require taxpayer subsidies to get built. So natural gas is the obvious choice for new electricity generation in all regions of the country. This trend is unlikely to change. Electricity demand in New England is growing 1 annually. Total generating capacity for the region is 31 GW, but over 4 GW is retiring in the next few years, and another 6 GW is at risk of retirement by the early 2020s. As a result, 13 GW of new natural gas is proposed to cover all expected increases in electricity demand for the next decade. America is at a 27-year low in its carbon emissions almost solely because natural gas has been replacing coal. Gains in efficiency and conservation have also helped. But the loss of several nuclear power plants has effectively wiped out the recent progress of renewables on addressing carbon reductions by increasing gas emissions. New York is struggling with this conundrum as it attempts to force the shutdown of some nuclear plants even as it desperately tries to keep others open. |
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-Altering the qualified immunity doctrine is an excellent way to begin the path to restoring trust by establishing a much-needed sense of accountability. Civil remedies are a good jumping off point because, as repeated failures to indict officers—even in the face of video footage—have demonstrated, accountability via the criminal law is a far-off possibility, if it is possible at all. Prosecutors are generally disinclined to bring charges against law enforcement officers, and grand juries are equally as hesitant to indict them. Independent investigations, as suggested by the Task Force, are an excellent idea, but establishing a feasible system nationwide would take time. On the other hand, Supreme Court amendment of the stringent immunity afforded to police officers could take effect relatively quickly. Of course, this is easier said than done. The Court has increasingly enlarged the immunity afforded to police officers in its recent decisions, and any 180-degree turnaround would likely require a change in Court composition. But the current Court can nevertheless begin to firm up qualified immunity doctrine by simply providing more guidance and clarification, thereby enhancing accountability and reaffirming trust between law enforcement and their respective communities. The concept of a clearly established right is, in many ways, a problem that requires solving. A substantial number of cases are disposed of on the premise that a right was not “clearly established”—yet lower courts have struggled for years with what those words actually mean. Arguably, then, at least some officers are escaping liability simply because of the Court’s repeated failures to establish consistency in its qualified immunity jurisprudence. But if the Court used qualified immunity opinions to demonstrate what qualifies as a clearly established right by meticulously outlining its reasoning in answering whether a set of facts implicates such a right, the Court could alleviate some confusion. In other words, rather than taking cases simply to overturn the lower courts’ denial of immunity, it could take cases to affirm those denials or, alternatively, to reverse lower courts’ grant of immunity. By so doing, the Court can give examples of what constitutes a right that is “sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right,” and can give lower courts somewhat of a guide to follow. By elucidating the contours of the clearly established right, the Court would alleviate some of the confusion of lower courts and ensure that they are in fact applying that part of the test properly. Proper application of this prong directly promotes accountability, as the public can rest assured that, at least in that regard, cases are not being disposed of based merely on perplexity and uncertainty. Moreover, increased confidence about the clearly established prong could foster a willingness to take on the second part of the test and, in so doing, advance the development of constitutional law and clarify further constitutional rights. The Court could also accept that its attempts at a general standard for all classes of officials that are not otherwise entitled to absolute immunity has been problematic and hugely unsuccessful. Though the Court apparently fears “complicating” qualified immunity, the doctrine is quite complicated as is, and adopting more particularized classes of officials with different standards of immunity would not only assist lower courts in properly analyzing immunity, but would promote justice in constitutional tort litigation. For example, the Court could classify officials based on the approximate number of people with whom they come in contact, so to speak, and that might therefore bring civil suits against them. A governor, for example, could theoretically face a lawsuit from any resident of the state, and would thus be afforded more stringent protection—much like the standard afforded to all officials now. But law enforcement officers, who come in contact with only the residents of one town, city, or perhaps county, risk possible suits from a much smaller pool of people. The threat of litigation would therefore be much less crippling on governmental function, and immunity protection need not be so rigorous. In the case of allegations of Fourth Amendment violations, in light of the already-existing reasonableness standard, immunity may be inappropriate altogether. In addition, the Court could do its proverbial homework and take notice of the widespread indemnification of officers that often results in a complete absence of financial or employment- related consequences for law enforcement. If the Court stopped relying on its own intuition, and instead came to grip with the facts, it would likely realize that it has been overzealous in protecting low-level officers, and be inclined to alter course somewhat. By beginning to mend the qualified immunity doctrine in these ways, the Court will allow more civil suits for the vindication of constitutional rights to succeed. This will help to reduce the public mentality—strengthened by recent events—that cops get away with everything, in every regard. Civil suits avoid subjecting law enforcement to any criminal liability that, because of recent events, many laypersons believe is warranted. While this may be true in select circumstances, reality demonstrates that criminal charges are highly unlikely to stick against a police officer. But allowing more civil suits to go forward will serve as an important reminder to both civilians and law enforcement that the police are not above the law, and that they are held accountable for their wrongdoings. In turn, this accountability will begin to heal the relationship between law enforcement and communities by serving as the first step on what will surely be a long path to rebuilding the trust that is so crucial. |
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+Prefer this evidence. (1) It provides a predictive analysis based on the most recent patterns of electricity investment and consumption. (2) It examines nuclear phase-outs on small scales which have high predictive value. |
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-Only rolling back qualified immunity opens up the space for true accountability. This is a way of showing that violence against Black disabled bodies won’t go unpunished. |
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-Wright 15’ |
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-Sam Wright is a public interest lawyer who also contributes to above the law legal magazine. (November 2015). Want to Fight Police Misconduct? Reform Qualified Immunity. Above the Law. http://abovethelaw.com/2015/11/want-to-fight-police-misconduct-reform-qualified-immunity/?rf=1 |
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-In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. |
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-Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly established law of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a constitutional violation, there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid liability — will avoidaccountability. |
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-To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this needs to change. And change should begin with an act of Congress rolling back qualified immunity. Removing the “clearly established” element of qualified immunity would be a good start — after all, shouldn’t it be enough to deviate from a basic standard of care, to engage in conduct that a reasonable officer would know is illegal, without having to show that that conduct’s illegality has already been clearly established in the courts? |
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-The role of the ballot is to vote for the better debater who methodologically combats intersectional/ anti-Black, ableism, oppression in the context of the resolution. |
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+AND, reliance on coal energy accelerates global warming. |
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-Analysis of disability and race cannot be separated, and when they are often legitimizes the other. Understanding these interactions is necessary in combatting oppression. |
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-Jarman |
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-These examples, while only touching the surface of the various ways scientific and medical research have participated in racialized, oppressive practices, gesture toward the power of disability designations – especially psychiatric diagnoses – to discredit individuals and groups. Historian Douglas Baynton has documented how attributes of physical and mental disability were used against immigrants, African Americans, and women in early twentieth-century citizen- ship debates. As he explains, “not only has it been considered justifiable to treat disabled people unequally, but the concept of disability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by attributing disability to them” (33). The most common methods of resisting such strategies of social disqualification, Baynton goes on to point out, has been to claim soundness of mind and physical competence – rather than to disavow prejudice based upon medicalized designations. In other words, while racialized biomedical or psychiatric diagnoses are rightly rejected and exposed, arguments resisting misapplied diagnoses writ large – in this case those of “brain dysfunction” and “mental illness” – often have the effect of solidifying the stigma already attached to disability. This pas- sage from Baynton is useful in elucidating this dilemma: This common strategy for attaining equal rights, which seeks to distance one’s own group from imputations of disability and therefore tacitly accepts the idea that disability is a legitimate reason for inequality, is per haps one of the factors responsible for making discrimination against people with disabilities so persistent and the struggle for disability rights so difficult. (51) With the long history of those benefiting by a power structure based upon white privilege using medical and psychiatric diagnoses to manufacture “truths” of racial inferiorities, vehement resistance to such reasoning has been essential. However, a longstanding disconnection between the critiques of racial and disability prejudice tends to reinforce the idea that medical designations, unless false, are individual “problems,” not social or political issues in need of analysis. Deborah Marks suggests a useful way to consider the interaction of disability and race ais processes of constructing otherness. Drawing from Stuart Hall, she argues that his most cited questions addressed to seeming outsiders – “Why are you here?” and “When are you going to go home?” – are is analogous to questions constantly addressed to disabled people, which she frames as, “How did you get like that?” and “Can you be cured?” (47). While Hall frames these questions to migrants, they are worth considering as underlying mechanisms at work in per- petuating ideas of racial separateness and distance. Marks’ related questions, in their insistence upon explaining and erasing difference, provide a productive way of thinking about racism and ableism as intersecting processes of exclusion. As Marks explains further, “Both sets of questions interpolate an ‘outsider,’ someone not like me, whose existence presents a problem to me” (47). This layered interplay of racial and disability stigma informs contemporary responses to mental distress, and, as Campbell represents in her novel, compounds and complicates the struggles experienced by African Americans with psychiatric diagnoses. |
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+Keating 01: |
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-Specifically integrating disability is good for liberation. |
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-Bell |
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-In her essay “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that “integrating disability does not obscure our critical focus on the registers of race, sexuality, ethnicity, or gender, nor is it additive.” Rather, “considering disability shifts the conceptual framework to strengthen our understanding of how these multiple systems intertwine, redefine, and mutually constitute one another.” As she explains further, “Integrating disability clarifies how this aggregate of systems Operates together. yet distinctly, to support an imaginary norm and structure the relations that grant power, privilege, and status to that norm” (4). Garland-Thomson specifically addresses. here, the need to start using disability as a category of analysis in feminist studies, but her statement serves at the same time to point out the benefits that arise from a consideration of the interrelationships between disability and race, ethnicity, or sexuality in literary and cultural studies. While in the last decade, disability studies theories and methodologies have become popular in the humanities, starting to inform feminist, but also, more recently, queer theory (see 2002 GLQ special issue), there is little work that considers intersections between disability and race. An exception is the 2006 Pre-Conference on Race, Ethnicity, and Disability coordinated by the Society for Disability Studies, which convened in Bethesda, Maryland, and the MELUS special issue “Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Literature: Intersections and Interventions” which appeared in 2006. Without other sustained efforts to investigate similar encounters, it is hard not to agree with Chris Bell that “we are still positioned in the realm of ‘White Disability Studies‘” (281). |
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+Coal-fired power plants are among our largest sources of CO2 emissions, which have been linked to climate change. Atmospheric CO2 admits incoming sunlight, but traps the heat radiating from Earth’s surface (the way heat is trapped in a greenhouse, hence the “greenhouse effect”).22 The greenhouse effect is predicted to result in higher temperatures that may affect the global distribution of rainfall and subsequent land use (including agriculture) as well as ecological effects on forests, lowering of lake levels and waterways from increased evaporation rates and rising ocean levels due to melting ice caps.23 An increased reliance on conventional coal technology in electricity production will ensures that CO2 emissions continue to increase.24 |
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-The next step in scholarship, in both race and disability studies, is to analyze the intersections of the two. |
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-Newman |
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-But recognizing the limitations of current DS scholarship can only ever serve as a first step towards truly rectifying these shortcomings. The next step is to begin producing scholarship that is fully engaged with the intersectional identities of race and disability. Yet again, Bell has led the way. Compiling essays from a wide variety of disciplines (ranging from literary and visual studies to social and cultural history), in the anthology Blackness and Disability, Bell attempts to engender a bold revision in our previous and often critically un-interrogated understanding of blackness and disability. Ultimately, however, the dual intervention into both current conceptions of blackness and disability proves to be a difficult task for many of the volume's contributors, and one that is not achieved consistently throughout the anthology. In particular, a number of the essays speak solely to the scholarship of African American Studies, making little use of the critical insights of DS, and as such, missing numerous opportunities to trouble both fields and speak to both audiences on their own terms. In the past decade, scholarship such as that in Bell's volume has emerged in fits and starts, with some of the most insightful individual essays coming from Susan Schweik, Ellen Samuels and Nirmala Erevelles, among others. 1 But aside from Jennifer C. James's and Cynthia Wu's guest-edited issue of MELUS on "Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Literature," and Pushpa Naidu Parekh's under-acknowledged guest-edited issue of Wagadu on "Intersecting Gender and Disability Perspectives in Rethinking Postcolonial Identities," there has yet to be a truly comprehensive collection of scholarship about the intersections and parallels of race and disability. Thus, Chris Bell's posthumously published Blackness and Disability serves as an important landmark for any further studies in the area of race and disability, regardless of its shortcomings, as it is one of the first book-length works on the topic and the first anthology whatsoever solely on this topic. Bell's choice to focus on black, and more precisely, African American, experiences of disability in this volume highlights the ways in which blackness and disability have been historically conjoined in the American imagination. Leonard Kriegel refers to this fact in "Uncle Tom and Tiny Tim: Some Reflections On The Cripple as Negro," one of the earliest works of DS to deal with both disability and race, albeit quite problematically, when he directly places the experiences of African Americans in parallel with those of Americans with disabilities by suggesting that in light of the success of the Civil Rights Movement for African Americans, "No one can teach the cripple … or serve as so authoritative a model in the quest for identity, as can the black man" (417). But in spite of these previously recognized parallels and convergences between blackness and disability, as Bell points out in his introduction to the volume, "too much critical work in African American studies posits the African American body politic in an ableist (read non-disabled) fashion … and too much critical work in Disability Studies is concerned with white bodies" (3). Thus, Bell offers his volume as a dual intervention, into both the "structuralist body politics underpinning African American studies and the whiteness at the heart of Disability Studies" (3). |
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-Approaches to oppression must be grounded in material reality, not abstractions. |
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-Curry |
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-This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. As Mills states: “What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual,” so what we are seeking to resolve on the basis of “thought” is in fact incomplete, incorrect, or ultimately irrelevant to the actual problems which our “theories” seek to address. Our attempts to situate social disparity cannot simply appeal to the ontologization of social phenomenon—meaning we cannot suggest that the various complexities of social problems (which are constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are totalizable by any one set of theories within an ideological frame be it our most cherished notions of Afro-pessimism, feminism, Marxism, or the like. At best, theoretical endorsements make us aware of sets of actions to address ever developing problems in our empirical world, but even this awareness does not command us to only do X, but rather do X and the other ideas which compliment the material conditions addressed by the action X. As a whole, debate (policy and LD) neglects the need to do X in order to remedy our cast-away-ness among our ideological tendencies and politics. How then do we pull ourselves from this seeming ir-recoverability of thought in general and in our endorsement of socially actualizable values like that of the living wage? It is my position that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking about the need for a living wage was a unique, and remains an underappreciated, resource in our attempts to impose value reorientation (be it through critique or normative gestures) upon the actual world. In other words, King aims to reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters. |
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-Narratives are the only way minority voices can enter oppressive systems – this makes my performance uniquely key. |
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-Richard |
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-Delgado and Jean Stefancic, 2001. |
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- (“Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.” NYU. Teaches civil rights and critical race theory at the University of Alabama School of Law. Professor. 43-44) ML |
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-Stories give also serve a powerful psychic function for minoritiesy communities. Many victims of racial discrimination suffer in silence, or blame themselves for their predicament. Stories can give them voices and reveal that others have similar experiences. Stories can name a type of discrimination; once named, it which can be combated. If race is not real or objective, but constructed, racism and prejudice should be capable of deconstruction; the pernicious beliefs and categories are, after all, our own. Powerfully written stories and narratives may begin a process of adjustment in our system of beliefs and categories by calling attention to neglected evidence and reminding readers of our common humanity. Even the conservative judge Richard Posner has conceded that major reforms in law often come through a conversion process or paradigm shift similar to the one Thomas Kuhn describes and minority storytellers advocate (Richard Posner, The Problems of Jurisprudence 459 1990). The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the differend helps explain the value of narratives for marginalized persons. The differend occurs when a concept such as justice acquires conflicting meanings for two groups. A prime example would be a case where a judge seeks to hold responsible an individual who does not subscribe to the foundational views of the regime that is sitting in judgment of him or her. In situations like this, the subordinate person lacks language to express how they have he or she has been injured or wronged. For example, when contemporary Euro-Ameri- cans resist even discussing reparations for blacks on the grounds that no black living today has been a slave and so lacks standing, nor has any white person alive today been a slaveholder, the black who wishes to discuss the question, and is shunted aside, suffers the differend. The prevailing conception of justice deprives them him or her of the chances to express a grievance in terms the system will understands. Until very recently, women who suffered childhood incest or battered wife syndrome were victims of the differend. Narratives provide a language to bridge the gaps in imagination and conception that give rise to the differend. They reduce alienation for members of excluded groups, while offering opportunities for members of the majority group to meet them halfway. Attorneys and teachers of clinical law have been applying storytelling and narrative analysis to understand how the dynamics of persuasion operate in the courtroom. They also use them to understand the interplay of power and interpretive authority between lawyer and client. Suppose, for ex- ample, the lawyer favors strategy A because it is 60 percent likely to win. The client, however, favors strategy B because it is “truer to his experience” or world. Writers such as Lucy White and Anthony Alfieri show that attention to the narratives side of lawyering can enable us lawyers representing the poor and disenfranchised to achieve a better brand of justice. This has prompted some critics to charge that CRT teaches unmitigated manipulation of emotions and playing the race card. For example, when the O. J. Simpson verdict was announced, Jeffrey Rosen, legal affairs writer for the New Re- public, charged that Johnny Cochrane’s successful defense of his famous client was an outrage and a case of “applied critical race theory.” Despite this and other criticisms, law has been slowly moving in the direction of recognizing the legitimacy and power of narrative. Children and certain other witnesses are permitted to testify in the form of a narrative, rather than through question-and-answer examination. With sexual offense victims, shield laws and evidentiary statutes protect them against certain types of examination, even though the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause would otherwise permit the other side to attack their narrative forcefully. |
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-AT Narratives Bad |
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-And even if i am losing the substance deb8 u vote aff since narratives are relevant in all contexts; my performance uniquely allows us to examine existing oppressive ideologies and change them. Performances turn debate into a collective space where we can specifically make gender norms visible and rupture them – i o/w on specificity and magnitude. |
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-Jale Karabekir, 2004. (“Performance as a Strategy for Women’s Liberation: The Practices of the Theatre of the Oppressed in Okmeydami Social Center.” Bogazici University. Master of Arts in Sociology. 128-134.) ML |
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-It is important to investigate womxn’s narratives to see how the ‘education for women’ discourse is opened up for criticism. Although in chapter four, women articulate the importance and the significance of education in defining the social center’s mission, they begin to criticize the educational programs when they compare them with the theatre of the oppressed practices. The interviewees all declare that on the contrary to the dominant idea, they do not like to attend handicraft courses, which are boring and requiring great patience. Another reason for the dislike is the individuality that these courses force upon them. Although they assert the advantages of the formal trainings they receive in KİHEP and AÇEV, they emphasize that they are mostly ‘school type (okul tarzı)’ studies. Arsen thinks that many participants find these courses boring “maybe that’s why people are avoiding them. Nevertheless, there are functional similarities between the theatre of the oppressed and the practices that concern personal development. They both focus on the development of “awareness”, “expression”, “empathy” and “observation”. For instance, the “sharing hours” of AÇEV, the communication courses and the theatre of the oppressed all create a discussion space for women where they can talk and can be listened. The other seminars such as effective communication and social personality also resemble the aims of the theatre of the oppressed workshops, but in structure they are too theoretical. Arsen defines them as follows: It seems to me as if the writing just stays there. It seems too hard, too technical to take the writing from there and put it into your mind and think it thoroughly, to put it into life. I am still reading, but I am not as hopeful as I was about it in the past. The interactive theatre has thought me that there would be better things and solutions via living and doing (it). “Living through” and “experiencing” are the terms that they use when they are defining the theatre of the oppressed workshops. Beyond the development of individuality, the theatre of the oppressed provides them a collective space. They become a group, like a theatre ensemble that creates its own plays. They discover different ways of talking and sharing within the other courses, but most importantly they find and the opportunity to practice what they gained in ‘real life’ situations: There are so many things in theatre, I mean, the mother child education should be of secondary importance, even third, education comes along not with reading, it comes along with living with people. Recognizing Oppression Through Shared Experience Besides the fact that the theatre of the oppressed is seen by women to be closer to ‘real life’, it is also a means through which womxn are reconstituted as a community and through which women learn to create and occupy new subject position. The theatre of the oppressed enables womxn’s oppression to become debatable. The main difference between conventional theatre and the theatre of the oppressed is the concept of ‘interactivity’. Within the theatre of the oppressed workshops, women collectively decide on a topic that will dramatize the shared oppression and perform it to the audience. Through the interactivity, collectivity is also created among the audience. In other words, the process of the theatre of the oppressed reconstitutes women as a collectivity both at the stage of preparation and performance. For example, Arsen defines her experience of conventional theatre in the past through the following words: I mean, the stage would be like, with the text in your hand, like the preparation of a play where you study it from the text and you act it. (...) Later on, after the university, they said that there is a group like that in Fikirtepe. One time, I went there. (...) But here, it changed all my things about the theatre, my ideas. (...) It changed, because it was interactive. I mean it was a theatre where the audience participated. Through the participation of the audience, a collective space to discuss oppression is created. Instead of presenting a script to the audience or memorizing a written script, the theatre of the oppressed points at the collective work in the creation and re-creation process of forum plays. As Arsen states: I hate being dependent on something. You are independent, and because we were prepared beforehand, also because we know each other, even though you pull it (the performance) to a different direction, in some way we could be in harmony together, for we shared so many things. The theatre of the oppressed is differentiated from conventional theatre by interactivity. The spectator’s intervention creates a powerful situation in the struggle against oppression. As Tevfika states: If we were to perform just like that and go, people wouldn’t be impressed as such. For after the play, they congratulate, I don’t know, they criticize, they say: what is it that you do. People participate.What you have to say is pre-determined, it is limited. But theirs are not, they can say whatever they want, the participants Similar to the experience of creating plays, responding to these strategies are important experiences both for the performers and the spectators. The aim of this interactivity is to open a space for this community in finding solutions to the common/shared experiences of oppression. This is a dual experience and a conscious-raising method for both sides. In the interventions the performers change their own scripts according to the strategies of the spect-actors. This enables the change in the initial oppression that is shown on stage. The spect-actor not only struggles with the initial oppression, but also with the ones that are created through the interaction of the performer and the spect-actor. This shows how the spect-actor faces with the patriarchal relations within this interaction. In sum, this method operates for the benefits of the community in which all the people in that space become actors. Tevfika illustrates this in practice: It seems easyto find solution by saying it from the place that they sit in, and when it comes to the point of getting up and practicing it, they understand that it is not so, they think more, it is easy to speak from there, come and do it then. Then they see that they’re wrong. We also say, well if it’s that easy, why don’t you do it? (...) When they participate, it seems to them as if it’s easy from the place that they sit, when they get up there. They see that it’s not the case, when they come up. Through the interventions, performing area becomes a rehearsal space for the community in which they can fight against the possible oppressions of their lives. Not only the performers and the spect-actors, but also the spectators who examine this struggle, also move into a different kind of experiences. Both the performing and examining area turn into a collective space: Yes, people used to think very different. I mean, this is how I think but this is the only way I know. To speak to someone else and another way out, other things. As Gizem says, the performance on stage reveals the oppression, it also encourages and activates the spectator to perform against the oppression/oppressor. Aysu explains her experience and benefit out of the theatre of the oppressed as follows: I saw that there is no single solution. I mean how can we solve. How is the best way, how can it be realized in you life. Different comments came from different people. You tried to find the best among these choices, yourself, for perhaps you did not have your creative power, you did not have an idea about the solution. You stand on that one single point and you can’t solve it. You became happy when such solutions came from other people. (...) Actually, they are problems that can be solved. I mean (those) that have to be solved here and can be solved also in reality... but one has to have self-confidence and belief. I mean to do that in real life. By experiencing and performing different solutions, strategies and approaches, the probability of choices and alternative methods can emerge. In this space, we are looking for the plurality, not an absolute solution. This performing area creates a space where women can search for strategies against oppression. At the first sight the regulatory norms and constituted gender are made visible by displaying the performance, and then by the intervention of the spect-actor, they are disrupted and resisted in the way of by searching the possible ways and strategies. However, this happens within a collective space where everything is created through collectivity and shared experience. The spect-actor presents her own solution to the community, the performer responds to her strategy, it can be successful or not. There isn’t a single solution when you display a problem. You see that there isn’t a single way out. (...) Everyone used to find the realistic solution from their point of view. (...) (they) used to produce a solution according to their reality. I mean, the reality and the standard and the life of the bearer of that solution was accordingly, the solution from within had to be like that. In that sense it provided me with a lot of flexibility. (...) well, I knew it, I have read about them, but I have experienced them while I was doing the interactive theatre, better said, they became strengthened in me, they came on one another and they became stronger.(Arsen) |
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-My intersectional approach is key to real change, aff is try or die |
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-Sara Salem, 2014. (“Decolonial Intersectionality and a Transnational Feminist Movement.” PhD researcher at the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands. The Feminist Wire. http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/04/decolonial-intersectionality/. Accessed 8/18/16.) ML |
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-Transnational solidarity among feminists has often been a difficult goal to achieve because of the continued dominance of Western feminism, the lack of self-reflexivity on the part of feminists, and the lack of an approach that addresses both the complexities and nuances of lived gender experiences as well as the ways in which imperialism continues to structure the lives of millions around the world. In this article I want to address the points of convergence between intersectionality and decolonial theory and suggest that combining these two approaches can help in develops a non-exclusionary transnational solidarity. Angela Davis’ essay on her trip to Egypt in 19851 is a seminal work on the subject of transnational feminist solidarity. The essay contains reflections on the different visits and experiences she had on the short trip, and includes a wealth of emotional responses to the feminists she met. Two things are notable about this text: 1) the ways that Davis approached the question of feminism in Egypt, and the multiple moments during her trip where she forced herself to question her own assumptions rather than rely on stereotypical narratives (prevalent especially in American media and academia) about the realities of the women and men she was meeting, is of utmost importance. This humbleness and self-reflexivity suggests that a transnational feminist solidarity is possible, albeit not easy. The second thing that is notable is the location of Davis as a Western woman in Egypt, despite her being African-American. This brought to light the complexity of subjectivities within the global feminist movement, as well as questions of solidarity and understanding. While within the U.S. she was clearly part of a marginal group, in Egypt this positionality was a privileged one, as she represented the U.S., a country implicated in Egypt’s “underdevelopment.” Thus, her positionality changed from one location to another, emphasizing the importance of positioning oneself within structures of power in specific locations. Her experience allows us to unpack the question of positionality, particularly in relation to the question of feminist solidarity. As a movement, Western feminism continues to largely exist in a tense power relationship with other forms of feminism, largely because the movement continues to be based on liberal assumptions that simply cannot be used in feminist praxis in other contexts. In the words of Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house.” For womxn outside of privileged locations in the West where neoliberal imperialism continues to play a large role in producing and reproducing patriarchy, concepts that have their history in imperial centres are seen as unlikely to can’t act as tools for meaningful change. This is why an intersectionality approach needs to be combined with a decolonial framework. The question, then, is: how can a strong transnational feminist movement be created, and how can it avoid the mistakes made by Western feminists in articulating what feminism is and how patriarchy can be dismantled? What would a decolonial and intersectionality-based transnational feminism look like? While it is true that one can speak of a global feminist movement, it becomes clear upon close examination that this is largely an institutionalized movement comprised of members of civil society. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a detailed critique of civil society and the institutionalization of gender by civil society organizations, suffice it to say that in many postcolonial settings civil society tends to be elitist, detached from grassroots activism, and merely functions as a vessel of neoliberalism.3 A transnational feminist movement that is separate from civil society and based on grassroots activism is therefore still to be realized, although there are many regional networks. How to overcome this? Intersectionality is certainly one solution: applied as both theory and praxis, intersectionality could prove useful in bringing to light power dynamics, even if unable to transform them in the short term. It is useful to question, however, whether intersectionality goes deep enough in challenging the Western bias of many feminists across the postcolonial world today. It is not a coincidence that in many postcolonial settings it is feminists who hold liberal and Western conceptions of gender relations that receive the most publicity and funding. This is a way of maintaining hegemony in a ‘post-colonial’ world and thus ensuring that the ‘post’ never materializes. While intersectionality may convince feminists of the need to de-centre their assumptions and look at multiple structures and experiences, I believe it needs to be coupled with a decolonial approach to truly transform the liberal Western underpinnings of much feminism activism today. A decolonial approach would necessitate moving past the individualistic liberal ontology underpinning much of feminism today, including some strands of intersectionality. This entails problematizing the assumption that the subject is always erased from the analysis, thus producing a myth about universal and objective knowledge. Instead, “critical border thinking” can be employed, which is a form of subaltern epistemology that does not hide the epistemic positionality of the subject speaking.5 This allows for decolonial interpretative communities to be produced that challenge Western notions of universality, neutrality and linear evolution. By critically deconstructing Western concepts and structures that have been normalized, the first step towards dismantling them has been taken. One example of such an approach would be to conceptualize feminism as a project that views patriarchy as a system that constructs both women and men in harmful ways. Rather than view gender justice as an individualistic goal to be attained by every woman – a view that sometimes views men as “the enemy” –alternative visions in which patriarchy is conceptualized as a system that oppresses everyone can be more useful. This is not to say that men do not benefit from patriarchy – all men do. Rather it is to complicate ideas of masculinity by showing that not all men benefit equally. Work on masculinities has shown that men who fit the ideal type are in a power relation not only with women but also with men who are outside of what is considered “masculine.” Pushing this conceptualization further, it is also more applicable to societies in which individualism is not the norm. For many women in postcolonial societies, the aim is not to challenge men, but rather to challenge the system and structures that allow men to become dominant. There can be no feminism without anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and so on, because patriarchy does not exist in isolation from imperialism, capitalism and other structures. Another way to employ an intersectional decolonial approach is by deeply interrogating the categories and notions of oppression we use. Rather than assume that we know what harms women, we should let the intersectional categories emerge from the cases and contexts themselves, bearing in mind global structures of inequality. To think of an obvious example, in the case of Arab women it is almost always assumed that “culture” (already a problematic homogenous designation) is somehow implicated in the oppression of women. Not only does this essentialize “culture,” it also isolates it as something problematic that needs to be fixed. This ignores the possibility of Arab women using cultured notions as a means of fighting oppression. It also fixates on culture at the expense of other relations or structures such as class. Constructing “culture” as a barrier to women’s personal freedom reveals a liberal conception of the human subject, where liberty – at a personal, individual level – is framed as especially important and as the direct result of the elimination of cultural practices, without taking into account the political, economic and social factors that are affected by both local and global factors. A final example relates to praxis. Allowing the context to determine the categories7 we use in gender analysis through an employment of critical border thinking will also impact the ways in which we practice feminism. Once the ‘problems’ are framed differently, it becomes clear that forms of feminist praxis are needed. For example, moving away from an individualistic liberal framing will show that taken-for-granted solutions to gender inequality such as education or employment at the micro-level are not value-free. A decolonial approach would press us to question what we mean by education, which types of knowledges this understanding privileges, and how providing education and employment to women in the Global South also has multiple structural effects that often remain understudied, most notably that it ties them into a global capitalist economy of production and consumption in which they face a new set of oppressive relations. As Lila Abu Lughod has cautioned, not all employment is “good for women.”8 Intersectionality as an approach may help us understand that employment does not necessarily ensure a woman’s well-being, but a decolonial approach would explain why that is and how specific structures are implicated in the production of particular ways of knowing and surviving in the global economy today. Returning to Angela Davis – her reflections on her trip to Egypt serve as a reminder of how difficult any kind of transnational solidarity is. Her discussions also show, however, that self-reflexivity is essential to solidarity, and that engaging in a constant process of self-questioning as well as positioning oneself within structures is necessary if one is to bridge contexts without imposing one’s own location and subjectivity. For feminism to undergo the process Davis underwent, adopting a decolonial approach that de-centres Eurocentric ideas about feminism and favors multiple processes of knowledge production seems to be the most promising way forward at this juncture. Until intersectionality as an approach employs decolonial assumptions, the risk of the continued privileging of western assumptions is high. This is particularly the case when intersectionality becomes a means of reifying identity politics rather than a tool that destabilizes categories. This in turn means that feminist activism and praxis will continue to be fraught with contradictions between a western universal project and the complex nature of contextual particularities. A decolonial approach that is intersectional and unapologetically subaltern will allow use to approach the intersections of categories that emerge from the given context and that are defined by those who experience the realities of those intersections. This may mean that categories such as class, race, sexuality, and even gender don’t mean what intersectionality theorists think they mean, or don’t intersect in the ways previously assumed, and this is precisely where self-reflexivity comes in. In other words, we should all, as feminists committed to knowledge production, have our Angela Davis moments and ask whether we have really decolonized our own knowledge and whether our interventions are impositions rather than attempts to create transnational solidarity. |
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-Alternative styles of debate have been especially forgone in the LD community. In round practices create a culture of exclusion that locks minority students out of the debate space by elevating the value of abstraction in the face of real conversation. Smith |
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-At every tournament you attend this year look around the cafeteria and take note of which students are not sitting amongst you and your peers. Despite being some of the best and the brightest in the nation, many students are alienated from and choose to not participate in an activity I like to think of as homeplace. In addition to the heavy financial burden associated with national competition, the exclusionary atmosphere of a debate tournament discourages black students from participating. Widespread awareness of the same lack of participation in policy debate has led to a growing movement towards alternative styles and methods of engaging the gatekeepers of the policy community, (Reid-Brinkley 08) while little work has been done to address or even acknowledge the same concern in Lincoln Douglas debate. Unfortunately students of color are not only forced to cope with a reality of structural violence outside of debate, but within an activity they may have joined to escape it in the first place. We are facing more than a simple trend towards marginalization occurring in Lincoln Douglas, but a culture of exclusion that locks minority participants out of the ranks of competition. It will be uncomfortable, it will be hard, and it will require continued effort but the necessary step in fixing this problem, like all problems, is the community as a whole admitting that such a problem with many “socially acceptable” choices exists in the first place. Like all systems of social control, the reality of racism in debate is constituted by the singular choices that institutions, coaches, and students make on a weekly basis. I have watched countless rounds where competitors attempt to win by rushing to abstractions to distance the conversation from the material reality that black debaters are forced to deal with every day. One of the students I coached, who has since graduated after leaving debate, had an adult judge write out a ballot that concluded by “hypothetically” defending my student being lynched at the tournament. Another debate concluded with a young man defending that we can kill animals humanely, “just like we did that guy Troy Davis”. Community norms would have competitors do intellectual gymnastics or make up rules to accuse black debaters of breaking to escape hard conversations but as someone who understands that experience, the only constructive strategy is to acknowledge the reality of the oppressed, engage the discussion from the perspective of authors who are black and brown, and then find strategies to deal with the issues at hand. It hurts to see competitive seasons come and go and have high school students and judges spew the same hateful things you expect to hear at a Klan rally. A student should not, when presenting an advocacy that aligns them with the oppressed, have to justify why oppression is bad. Debate is not just a game, but a learning environment with liberatory potential. Even if the form debate gives to a conversation is not the same you would use to discuss race in general conversation with Bayard Rustin or Fannie Lou Hamer, that is not a reason we have to strip that conversation of its connection to a reality that black students cannot escape. |
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-If we force debaters to adhere to a strict interpretation of what debate is then the interpretation will be decided by the majority group excluding minority debaters. Warner : |
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-More often than not, talk about privilege in debate is relegated mostly to economic and occasionally gender- or race-based discussions. Refocused recruiting efforts and accomplishments like Urban Debate Leagues and Women’s Caucuses at tournaments are addressing more overt concerns in an effort to create more equal playing fields, yet tremendous inequities remain that require explanation. Over twenty years of various diversity efforts, especially in CEDA, have failed to substantially change the racial, gender, social and economic composition of interscholastic policy debate at its highest levels. The reason is simple: privilege extends much further than just acknowledging overt and obvious disparities. Privilege creeps into more subtle, covert spaces, like the essence of why and how people “play the game,” recognizing that the rules and procedures are created by those carrying that privilege. Snider argues that the greatness of debate as a game is in his belief that it is short on inflexible rules and long on debatable procedures. However, if procedures are functionally not debatable and begin to look more like participation requirements than starting points of discussion, the quality of the game, is “not as successful and well-designed” (Snider, 1987, p. 123). Privilege envelopes both substantive and stylistic procedures, increasing the likelihood that supposedly debatable conventions become rigid norms, preventing achievement of a “more thoughtful” game and creating entrance barriersto successful participation. Here’s how. Snider (1987) says that evaluation of a “winning” procedurals argument occurs through the lenses of determining which procedures best facilitate achieving the goals of the debate activity. Snider offers three such goals: 1) education of the participants; 2) discussion of important issues in the resolution; and 3) creation of a fair contest. He concedes that some may be missing. Of course, interested participants with lesser privilege might select different goals as more important, such as having a voice to discuss the topic through the perspective of their social concerns, even if this perspective doesn’t fit nicely with some of the other goals. More often than not, the creation of a “fair contest” is given an absolute priority relative to other goals and justifies ignoring attempts to achieve other game objectives. At least one implicit goal deserves mention: incorporation of the cultural and social values of the participants. It makes sense that the like-minded values of the largest participating class will dominant procedural and rule development of a game simulation. Cultural and social values may appear to have little or no relationship to the first three goals of debate. But in fact, the cultural and social values will in many ways dictate the meaning of Snider’s goals. What types of education do the participants’ value? Who decides what the important issues are—the participants? The communities most directly related to the topic? Do cultural and social values privilege any notions of “fairness”? Cultural and social background surely impacts each of these areas tremendously. If there are cultural or social disagreements over what constitutes “education,” what “issues” are important, or what is “fair,” then privilege plays a much larger role in game development than has been acknowledged to date. |
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-You should ignore their seemingly objective arguments concerning fairness in the debate space. Fairness is tangential on an individual’s interpretation of what debate is and this interpretation is always subjective and thus affected by social and cultural backgrounds as we are given very little confines to what we can be. Instead you should view it as a weapon for the majority to stomp on the interest of people not like them. Olson : |
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- (3) That is, whoever is attempting to define "fairness" or "mutual respect" or any other such principle will necessarily be doing so from a particular context, which includes one's personal system of values. It is impossible to rise above one's context in order to fill in the content of so-called neutral principles. Fairness, for example, will be defined differently by different people, and this abstraction will not be intelligible unless and until it is anchored in a specific standpoint. One person may feel that fairness means admitting someone to college solely of the basis of test scores, whereas another may feel that fairness means also taking into account the fact that a student comes from a context of poverty and disadvantage. No definition of fairness exists independent of the kind of conditions or substance that must be supplied by necessarily interested parties (since all parties are necessarily interested). Once some kind of substance is supplied, however, neutral principles by definition lose their neutrality. That is, the oft-touted virtue of neutral principles is that they are supposedly devoid of substantive commitments; they purportedly afford a space within which "substantive agendas can make their case without prior advantage or disadvantage" (3). Yet, some substance must be supplied in order to make the principle—fairness, in this example—intelligible. Hence, there really is no such thing as a neutral principle; there is no such thing as a principle not already informed by the substantive content of the person appealing to the principle. While questions of fairness are central to intractable policy debates, invoking the principle of fairness will not advance these debates because at a certain level such debates are about "what fairness (or neutrality or impartiality) really is" (3). In effect, a contest over the content of a particular issue is also a contest over two or more contending notions of fairness (or impartiality or whatever principle is being invoked). Even if it were possible to produce a general principle devoid of specific content—a notion of fairness, say, untethered to any specific perspective or ideological orientation—it would be of no use, says Fish, because it would by empty. That is, appealing to it would not point you in any specific direction in relation to other possible directions. Its very emptiness renders it useless as a moral compass. In effect, a neutral principle is a floating signifier, an "unoccupied vessel waiting to be filled by whoever gets to it first or with the most persuasive force" (7). In fact, it is exactly this condition of emptiness, its status as a floating signifier available for people to invest with substance, that makes neutral principles so politically useful—and even potentially dangerous, since they can be employed to further evil (as defined by you) ends just as easily as more positive (as defined by you) goals: It is because they don't have the constraining power claimed for them (they neither rule out nor mandate anything) and yet have the name of constraints (people think that when you invoke fairness you call for something determinate and determinable) that neutral principles can make an argument look as though it has a support higher or deeper than the support provided by its own substantive thrust. Indeed, the vocabulary of neutral principle can be used to disguise substance so that it appears to be the inevitable and nonengineered product of an impersonal logic. (4) In other words, a general principle such as fairness is deployed as a weapon in political, legal, and ethical struggles precisely because it masks the interestedness of those appealing to it and cloaks the fact that the actual policy, law, or proposal being advanced in the name of the principle is embedded in specific historical circumstances and furthers the interests and objectives of one set of individuals over and against the interests and objectives of others. |
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+Climate change disproportionately affects minority communities in poverty. This will only worsen and perpretuate the forms of structural violence these marginalized groups face. |
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+Tinuoye |
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+Other studies also highlight the problem. More than 72 percent of African-Americans live in counties that violate federal air pollution standards, compared to 58 percent of white, according to a 2011 Center for American Progress report. A 2008 study by The Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative also found heat-related deaths among Blacks occur at a 150 to 200 percent greater rate than for non-Hispanic Whites. Dr. Cassandra Johnson, a U.S. Forest Service social scientist, echoes this sentiment. “African-Americans residing in central cities with large amounts of impervious surface areas are more vulnerable to heat-related manifestations of climate change resulting from urban heat islands,” says Johnson. ““Heat islands” concentrate solar energy and “waste heat” from sources like automobile exhaust, cheap heat retaining building materials, fewer trees, to heat downtown areas in particular.” Black Americans and lower income populations are also more socially vulnerable to adapting and adjusting to natural disasters, says Shepherd. They suffer more distress, increased injuries and death and lasting effects like the loss of jobs and infrastructure. In the South, low income African-Americans and Hispanics work directly or indirectly in the agricultural industry, which is particularly sensitive to extreme weather, especially droughts, says Shepherd. |