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  • Caselist.RoundClass[84]
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	1	+The endpoint of the 1AC is the antiblack status quo – blackness is defined in terms of an ontological structural antagonism with white civil society that is reproduced by any attempt to use existing legal structures or philosophies. Warren 13
	2	+
	3	+Calvin Warren, Onticide: Toward an Afro-pessimistic Queer Theory" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2013. NS
	4	+
	5	+We could suggest that the term “black queer” dramatizes the fundamental tension in humanism itself, especially contemporary iterations of it: how to eradicate the violence that limits human potential, and expand the category of the human, when the violence rejected is absolutely necessary for the human to exist as such. In other words, humanism is caught in an ethical dilemma, or double-bind. The “emancipatory meditations” against the violence that produces contingent experiences of unfreedom for humans also provides the grounding for the category of the human around which these meditations mobilize. The “human” is a repository of violent practices and technologies that has crystalized over time. The ethical impulse is to resolve the tension within humanism, to wrest the “human” from the historical violence upon which it is founded. This ethical enterprise inevitably fails, for in the end, the human is nothing more than this very violence, rendering violence and the human mutually constitutive and coterminous. The experience of unfreedom (suffering) is the outcome of this violence. Making this suffering legible is the ethical drive of humanist thinking and the objective of a politics invested in “freedom.” Violence, humanity, unfreedom, and freedom constitute an unending cycle of desire, deferral, and despair. This cycle of violence captures the tension in humanism that much of contemporary theory either attempts to resolve (Ethics) or wishes to abandon (divesture). The violence that constitutes the human and produces suffering is sustained through an ontological antagonism. The boundaries of the human are shored-up by this antagonism and without it, the human, and the world within which it lives, would cease to exist. The non-ontology of blackness secures the boundaries of the human; it delimits the coordinates of the human. Blackness is an exclusion that enables ontology. In its exclusion from the realm of ontology, blackness is un-thinkable, innominate, and paradoxical. In essence, blackness exists to not exist—it embodies the most perplexing paradox that sustains ontology (or in psychoanalytic terms it is the Real of ontology). The field of Ethics, then, conceals a dirty secret: the ontological ground upon which it is situated is unethical. Ethics subverts itself, but it can only exist through this very subversion. All ethical discourses organized around the elimination of suffering or the experiences of freedom are imbricated in this unethicality. Blackness is both the life and death of humanism and its ethics, and for this reason, it lacks a legible grammar to articulate this dread. It is an incomprehensible suffering, or an unending injury not understood as legitimate injury. To take matters further, there would be no human suffering without the prior exclusion of blackness, but there would also be no world or human without this exclusion either. It is an unresolvable antagonism. 2 The term “black queer” is a philosophical conundrum, or problem space, precisely because it carries this antagonism, the ethical dilem- ma of humanism, within its discursive structure. 3 It brings two crises into juxtaposition creating somewhat of a theoretical fatality, a devas- tating crime scene. At the site of this fatality lies a mutilated, supine black body we cannot quite place within the symbolics of identity, politics, history, sociology, or law. In cases like these, we put “theory” and “philosophy” into service to figure out who did “it,” what was the murder weapon, and what was the injury—if we can even call it an injury. This situation frustrates the researcher (researcher as detective, philosopher, and medical examiner all at once) in that he lacks a coherent grammar to make this suffering legible, the assaulting party is more like a structural phenomenon, and the fatality is a precondition of the world itself. In this sense, the fatality is rendered banal, diurnal, and quotidian, as it sustains the very field of existence.
	6	+
	7	+In its ontological absence the black is a fungible object open to gratuitous violence and void of relational capacity. R.L. 13
	8	+
	9	+R.L., WANDERINGS OF THE SLAVE: BLACK LIFE AND SOCIAL DEATH, 2013,
	10	+Mute Magazine NS
	11	+
	12	+For the Afro-pessimists, the black subject is exiled from the human relation, which is predicated on social recognition, volition, subjecthood, and the valuation of life itself. Thus black existence is marked as an ontological absence, posited as sentient object and devoid of any positive relationality, in contradistinction to the human subject’s presence. How does this negative relationality originate and maintain itself? Through a structural violence, which is the formative relation that positions the slave, making it the central ontological foundation of black existence: Structural vulnerability to appropriation, perpetual and involuntary openness, including all the wanton uses of the body … should be understood as the paradigmatic conditions of black existence in the Americas, the defining characteristics of New World anti-blackness. In short, the black, whether slave or ‘free,’ lives under the commandment of whites.10 Contrary to contingent applications of violence in accordance with legitimate cause (transgression of law, as repressive strategy, as reaction, etc.), violence against blacks is gratuitous, without any prior reason or justification. It is the direct relation of force as the basis of the slave relation, which essentially structures the disposession of black existence, an ontological disposession of being. This gratuitous violence, on the one hand, subjugates black existence to an irrational accumulation of bodies, and subsequently produces a condensed delimitation of blackness in space. Whether it was the owning and trading of slaves or the contemporary phenomena of the ghetto and mass incarceration, black existence is excluded and stockpiled as so many objects within a spatial boundary. In this condition, life is reduced to a statistical quantity, black existence is made exchangeable with any other. Therefore, on the other hand, black existence is also a fungible object, infinitely malleable in its content due to the abstraction of its quality and open for use for anyone who can claim subjecthood.11 These structural features come to their fullest expression in the contemporary scenario of police shootings. The endless stream of young black men shot by police borders on excess, demonstrating the pure interchangeability of such names as equivalents, meaning that such seemingly particular empirical cases are in actuality a general condition. Blackness is as devalued as it is susceptible to all aspects of material and social containment, control and debility. Yet, in these instances, even morally indignant liberals are complicit with anti-blackness by focusing on police shootings as a contingent rather than structural feature of black existence.
	13	+
	14	+Their conception of “safety” or “freedom” for racial dialogue is colorblind because it assumes equal access to discourse. Racial dialogue is only consistent with white racial frames and reinscribes the human/slave dichotomy – their reformism puts faith white people that comes back to bite us. Leonardo and Porter 10
	15	+Leonardo, Zeus and Porter, Ronald K.(2010) 'Pedagogy of fear: toward a Fanonian theory of 'safety' in race dialogue', Race Ethnicity and Education, 13: 2, 139 — 157 EE
	16	+
	17	+Teaching race literacy is necessary but difficult. In addition, authentic race dialogue is elusive because over and beyond its emotional register for many educators and students, race dialogue runs into the formidable force of ideology. In mixed racial company, race dialogue is almost never for the benefit of people of color and raceconscious whites. In fact, as Nishitani Osamu (2006) observes, race dialogue in mixed-race company works to maintain the Western distinction between ‘anthropos’ (the inhuman) and ‘humanitas’ (the human). Osamu points out, ‘“anthropos” cannot escape the status of being the object of anthropological knowledge, while “humanitas” is never defined from without but rather expresses itself as the subject of all knowledge’ (260). Put another way, race dialogue often maintains the status of whiteness as being both natural and unchanging in the white imaginary. In other words, whiteness remains ubiquitous even if it is not named, and noticing whiteness is itself regarded as a form of transgression (hooks 1992). Whiteness is the immovable mover, unmarked marker, and unspoken speaker. Although it would be interesting to focus on race discussions within a homogeneous group, or same-race dialogues, the imagined situation we put forth is a mixed company because it projects the ideal of public integration and the educational challenges to it. Given that integration is the goal, many students of color who seek ‘safe’ race discussions in public rarely find them, having to settle for the reality that most pedagogical situations involving race are violent to them. They realize quite quickly that public race talk is not for them but for whites, or at least a white mindset. In other words, it caters to a white racial frame, a white imaginary (Leonardo 2009), which is a collective unconscious that tolerates race dialogue in small amounts. Often, as Fanon’s (1967a) critique of Sartre (1948) indicates, whites turn racism into an intellectualist problem, rather than a lived one (132–5).4 Following a Fanonian dialectic, at root racism is a material problem, which suggests displacing an idealist framework with a concrete one. Public race discussions are examples of white racial hegemony insofar as they represent whites’ accommodation to demands of color as long as white common sense is observed and kept intact. As a result, most race discussions benefit whites and patronize people of color; they project a white audience, both real and imagined. In this interaction, the otherwise deep and intimate understanding that people of color have to offer is forsaken in exchange for an epiphenomenal, intellectualist interpretation of race. There are genuine fears that must be confronted when educators publicly discuss race in the classroom. Both whites and people of color face certain dangers that prevent an authentic exchange. Not only do whites fear that they will be exposed as racist; they also fear being found out as racial beings. People of color already know that whites comprise a racial group, therefore white raciality would not represent a shocking discovery for them. However, whites’ discovery of their own raciality is precisely what is at stake. Hiding behind the veil of color-blindness means that lifting it would force whites to confront their self-image, with people of color acting as the mirror. This act is not frightening for people of color but for whites. In the light of day, this fact of whiteness would have led Fanon to declare, ‘Look a white person!’ Although this pale façade is becoming more difficult to sustain, whites cultivate a color-blind mask that even Fanon would not have predicted. To be clear, color-blindness in a color-obsessed nation appears oxymoronic and whites would have to work hard to maintain the mask. In a race-saturated society, such as the United States, colorblind racism is accurately described as a mode of feigning an oblivion to race. In short, color-blind perspectives are attempts to observe – indeed to see – race in a way that maintains whites’ equilibrium. It is not literally a form of blindness but its precise opposite: seeing race in a selective way that makes whites acceptable, not to people of color per se, but to themselves. It would be a mistake to regard color-blindness as a non-racial move and more accurate to construct it as a particular deployment of race. Authentic race discussions are violent to whites for the very reason that such discussions would expose their investment in race, their full endorsement of, rather than, flippant regard for it. It speaks to the inauthentic education that whites experience. This does not suggest that their fear has no basis. In fact, it has a material basis for it represents one of the many walls that people of color have to scale as they attempt to convince whites that race matters in a manner different from whites’ understanding of it. Some whites who are open minded enough, often feel enlightened and enlivened by discussions that confront racism, vowing their commitment to the cause. That established, whites often conceive of race talks as intellectually stimulating – as in a discovery or another topic in which they can excel – rather than a lived experience that students of color in good faith share with their white colleagues. Meanwhile, students of color walk away from the same discussions barely advancing their understanding of race and racism, sometimes satisfied departing with their legitimacy and mindset intact. After all, these confrontations were not for their benefit; they were not meant to advance people of color. A Fanon-inspired race dialogue is not antiintellectual, but precisely anti-intellectualist. Said another way, it is materialist. Minority fears are quite different from white apprehensions concerning public race talk. Despite the countless occasions where people of color expose their intimate thoughts and hurts about racism, then followed by white dismissal (not always overt), their desire for authentic race dialogue represents their hope not only in themselves but a hope projected onto whites. It is, on one hand, naïve and a sign of wishful thinking on the part of minorities to expect more out of whites than whites expect out of themselves. On the other hand, it is a humanizing desire and commitment to the other that prevents people of color from disengaging from whites. People of color may suspend their memory of white aggressions in order to start anew, of renewing their hope that this time it will be different. Then they are reminded of the pattern they know so well and their disappointment haunts them. They may even strike back against empire and voice their disapprobation at whites. Too often, whites interpret minority anger as a distancing move, or the confirmation of the ‘angry’ person of color archetype, rather than its opposite: an attempt to engage the other, to be vulnerable to the other, to be recognized by the other, to be the other for the other. As Freire (1993) once remarked, protestation from the oppressed is an act of love insofar as it represents an act of engagement. When the oppressed open their wounds through communication, they express the violence in their dehumanization that they want the oppressor to recognize. People of color do not only fear overt violence from whites (although this would be enough) but rather their wantonness, their lack of recognition of people of color, a certain violence of the heart rather than the fist. This is what Fanon (2004) describes as ‘violence rippling under the skin’ (31). This secondary form of violence confirms a daily assault that often goes unnoticed. It is a double violence that fails to acknowledge the other on whom one imposes an unwelcome will. It may sound like a slave’s maneuver to desire recognition from the master but such is the relationship of bondage within a colonial relationship. It would be enough to suggest that people of color fear overt white violence in the form of physical aggression. People of color have other fundamental fears in becoming invisible to whites, of becoming merely an idea to them. Some minority students willingly participate in otherwise problematic race conversations because they refuse to surrender to absolute cynicism, where racism would have succeeded. They realize that participation maintains their sense of humanity and disengagement subverts the kind of person they want to cultivate, the kind of self or student they want to be. In other words, disengagement is one of the symptoms of structural racism, which succeeds at isolating us from one another, of subverting our ability to live through the other. Still some people of color give into despair, tired as they are of educating whites from ground zero … every time, again and again. Who can blame them? It is a survival mechanism that people of color have practiced over the years in order to prevent their anger and frustration from consuming them, of turning to self-destructive forms of violence in the form of rage. Or, it is a defense against white violence – in the form of microaggressions – which strikes at the academic legitimacy of scholars and students of color when they violate the color-blind codes of conduct that regulate the classroom. People of color sometimes overlook white violence so they can get through their daily life. Like a child who has been abused, people of color avoid white violence by strategically playing along, a practice that whites, whose racial development stunts their growth, underestimate when they mistake consensus as the absence of coercion. Like abused children who do not possess the ability to consent and defend themselves against the verbal and physical power of a parent, people of color have become masters at deflection. This is how they secure safety in violent circumstances. It is apparent that both whites and people of color want to avoid violence from being enacted against them. They enter race dialogue from radically different locations – intellectual for the former, lived for the latter – and an unevenness that the critical race pedagogue must accept and becomes the constitutive condition of any progressive dialogue on race. It is the risk that comes with violence but one worth taking if educators plan to shift the standards of humanity. In an apparently common quest for mutual racial understanding, whites and people of color participate in a violence that becomes an integral part of the process and seeking a ‘safe space’ is itself a form of violence insofar as it fails to recognize the myth of such geography in interracial exchange. As it concerns people of color within the current regime, safe space in racial dialogue is a projection rather than a reality. This is the myth that majoritarian stories in education replay and retell in order to perpetuate an understanding of race that maintains white supremacy. Safe spaces are violent to people of color and only by enacting a different form of violence, of shifting the discourse, will race dialogue ultimately become a space of mutual recognition between whites and people of color. If people of color observe the current call for safety, this process defaults to white understandings and comfort zones, which have a well-documented history of violence against people of color. It is a point of entry that is characterized by denials, evasions, and falsehoods (Frankenberg 1993; Mills 1997). Its shell is non-violent for in public most whites prize self-control. Race dialogue within a white framework is rational, if by that we mean a situation that preserves, as Angela Davis (1998) mentioned, peace and order. This procedural arrangement has much to recommend it if we want to avoid uprisings and outright violence. But its kernel is already violent to people of color because a certain irrational rationality is at work. Both parties leave the interaction relatively ‘intact’, which should not be equated with the absence of violence. Whites depart the situation with their worldview and value systems unchallenged and affirmed, and people of color remain fractured in theirs. Whites would need to experience violence if they expect to change. But this is different from a hegemonic understanding that violence is always a form of dehumanization. In our appropriation of Fanon’s dialectics of violence, we find transformative possibilities in violence depending on the political project to which it is attached. Moreover, in this framework violence is not so much a description of this or that act qualifying as a form of violence, but a theoretical prescription of a different state of affairs, a response to oppression that equals its intensity. Thus, we do not describe what violence looks like, but assess its consequences.
	18	+
	19	+The alternative is an embrace of revolutionary violence – reject their conceptions of “protected dialogue” and affirm a telos of radical struggle. The alternative is the only ethical action – Education is key. Leonardo and Porter 10
	20	+Leonardo, Zeus and Porter, Ronald K.(2010) 'Pedagogy of fear: toward a Fanonian theory of 'safety' in race dialogue', Race Ethnicity and Education, 13: 2, 139 — 157 EE
	21	+Two dominant discourses exist within debates concerning critical studies of race and education, one focusing on critical race theory (Gillborn 2008; Yosso 2006; Dixson and Rousseau 2005; Parker and Stovall 2005; Brayboy 2005; Bernal and Villalpando 2005; Ladson-Billings 2004; Taylor 1998; Solorzano 1998; Tate 1997; Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995) and the other a resurgent interest in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois (Alridge 1999, 2008; Provenzo 2002: Leonardo 2002). We support this development (Leonardo 2009). However, scant literature exists relating the work of Frantz Fanon to the study of education. This intervention is necessary considering the arguable relationship between education and colonialism, nationally and abroad (Macedo 2000; Ladson-Billings 1998; Altbach and Kelly 1978; Memmi 1965), as well as the recent turn to the decolonial imaginary in social theory (Maldonado-Torres 2006; Grosfoguel 2007; Wynter 1995) and the reassertion of a continuing coloniality in social life even after the fall of official administrative colonialism (Quijano 2000; Maldonado-Torres 2007). Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting, and White (1996) have argued that inquiries into Fanonian thought consist of five progressive stages, which include reactions to his work, biographies, analyses of his contribution to political theory, his role in the development of postcolonial theory, and finally his possible contribution to the generation of original work across the human sciences. We seek to extend this fifth stage in Fanonian thought by applying his theory to the study of education. Fanon wrote at a time when the grim scenario of colonialism decreased through a moment of possibility when the process of decolonization could have led to the selfdetermined futures of the former colonies. Fanon (2004) recognized this critical moment and addressed the possibilities inherent in this political situation in his book, The wretched of the earth (see also, Fanon 1965, 1967a, 1967b). While Fanon’s focus may have been more internationalist in scope, the thin line that he posited to exist between the possibility of liberation and the risk of intensifying repressive violence, is significant for current discussions that seek to dismantle racism within the United States. We suggest that Fanon’s theorization of the process of decolonization, both in terms of the violence necessary for its existence and the violent activity required for its undoing, is applicable to a criticism of safe space dialogue concerning race. There is much to learn from Fanon’s argument that ‘decolonization is always a violent event’, be it at the level of the nation or the individual, because it requires ‘the substitution of one “species” of mankind by another’ (1). What follows is an exploration that seeks to clarify Fanon’s position regarding the violence of colonialism as applied to the study of race and education. The colonial situation of the 1950s and 1960s that Frantz Fanon writes of in The wretched of the earth presents us with an incredibly violent situation. According to Fanon, colonialism is a system that works, primarily by force, to permeate the entire lifeworld of the colonized. Those at the very bottom of the colonial hierarchy experience the brunt of physical violence. Yet, a form of educative-psychic violence in the form of racial discourses is also developed by the colonizer in order to keep the very consciousness of the colonized under control. For instance, the colonizer creates a narrative which posits that he is the creator of history, thus justifying conquest as well as racial and cultural supremacy. The colonizer ‘makes history and he knows it’, according to Fanon, and ‘because he refers constantly to the history of his metropolis, he plainly indicates that at the site of colonization he is the extension of this metropolis’ (15). This form of psychic violence leads to abjection and feelings of inferiority on the part of the colonized (see also Fuss 1994). The colonized thus learn to stay in their place, and participate in a complex process of consent where they enact violence upon each other, are constantly anxious due to the violence they experience, and establish myths and religious systems that relegate their fate to the will of the gods (16–19). Sartre (2004) writes, ‘The status of “native” is a neurosis introduced and maintained by the colonist in the colonized with their consent’ (liv). Through this combination of physical and psychic violence, Fanon argues that the colonizer ‘brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subject’ (4). Fanon was clear that education – far from being neutral or enlightening in and of itself – is at the core of colonial domination. He emphasizes: In capitalist societies, education, whether secular or religious, the teaching of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary integrity of workers decorated after fifty years of loyal and faithful service, the fostering of love for harmony and wisdom, those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of the agents of law and order. (3–4; italics added) A hegemonic system of violence – one that necessitates a relationship of both active force and consent – functions so that the colonized either are forced into or acquiesce to their declared inferiority (Gramsci 1971; Hall 1996). This unraveling of physical and psychic violence would occur through the liberating violence of the colonized. In this sense, both domination and liberation are, in part, an educative question.2 For Fanon, violence is a necessary part of the process of decolonization due to the inherent brutality of the colonial situation. He argues firmly that the violence of colonialism can only be undone through the ‘cleansing force’ of violence (51). However, we must be clear what Fanon means when he uses the term ‘violence’ as well as his criticism of ‘nonviolence’. According to common sense, violence is defined as involving the exertion of force in order to injure, abuse, or destroy another human being. This kind of violence shifts downward our standards of humanity, a regime under which no human thrives. This is violence in both its negative and uncivilized senses, or the active and willful destruction of property and life, as opposed to a Fanonian conception of violence that is liberatory insofar as it frees humans from an oppressive regime by shifting upward the standards of humanity. The problem with the hegemonic definition of violence is that it acts as a regulatory power and renders violence as unacceptable on both sides of the colonial situation (Foucault 1990). As Angela Davis (1998) pointed out: The conservative, who does not dispute the validity of revolutions deeply buried in history, invokes visions of impending anarchy in order to legitimate his demand for absolute obedience. Law and order, with the major emphasis on order, is his watchword. The liberal articulates his sensitivity to certain of society’s intolerable details, but will almost never prescribe methods of resistance that exceed the limits of legality – redress through electoral channels is the liberal’s panacea. (39) This limited understanding of violence is dangerous because it stifles any type of dialogue seeking to unpack the complexity of violence and its multifarious use in social movements. However, non-violent tactics that have been praised include electoral politics, protests, the legal system, or dialogue where everyone is made to feel safe and included in the public sphere. The ultimate exemplars of the beneficial qualities of non-violence can be found in the personages of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. We will have more to say about Gandhi and King below. For now, we want to propose that both Fanon (internationally) and King (United States specifically) give us new understandings of the pitfalls and possibilities of violence, thereby transcending its traditional definition as simply repressive. Like King Jr., Fanon spoke of dreams (2004, 15) but Fanon’s projections were the natives’ liberation predicated on violence. It is clear that Fanon was not advocating for the non-violent overthrow of colonial systems. In fact, in his theorization of violence, Fanon was only concerned with political strategy when he focused his attention on the shift that occurs after the moment of decolonization, which involves the construction of the new nation. Fanon was not interested in glorifying violence for the purposes of starting mass upheavals; in fact, he was critical of nationalist movements of this strain. He was skeptical of simplistic nationalist movements, those that were not ‘explained, enriched, and deepened … into a social and political consciousness, into humanism’. Such movements, according to Fanon, would only lead ‘to a dead end’ (2004, 144). Nevertheless, he did accept the fact that violence is a necessary element of decolonization, political struggle, and human liberation (1).3 Thus, he stated, ‘Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence’ (23). This passage is key. Fanon was well aware of the liberatory possibilities of violence, its potential to lead to both a plurality of action and the creation of a new politics. His thoughts on the liberatory properties of violence are worth quoting: At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence … Enlightened by violence, the people’s consciousness rebels against any pacification. (51–2) Thus, Fanon leaves us with a dialectical definition of violence, one that accounts for its potential for brutality, but also its power to destroy, create, and unify. Naturalizing violence as only repressive comes with two consequences. One, it constructs legitimate violence as the sole possession of the oppressor enforced on the oppressed. It does not conceive of the oppressed, such as racial minorities, as capable of violence as a revolutionary right. Two, it fails to consider violence in the multitude, or the possibility that it may be used to humanize an oppressive relationship. Fanon was critical of doctrines of passive non-violence because they created a situation of compromise wherein creative forms of tension and struggle were avoided and left untapped. He argued: In its raw state this nonviolence conveys to the colonized intellectual and business elite that their interests are identical to those of the colonialist bourgeoisie and it is therefore indispensable, a matter of urgency, to reach an agreement for the common good. Nonviolence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around the negotiating table before the irreparable is done, before any bloodshed or regrettable act is committed. (2004, 23) Here we note that there are more similarities between Fanon’s theory of violence and Martin Luther King’s doctrine of non-violence than meets the eye. King adopted a non-violent platform, but this did not involve coming to the negotiating table to seek a compromise. To the contrary, the tactics of agitation deployed during the 1960s’ Civil Rights movement were intended to establish a necessary crisis and willingly performed violence against both whites and a system of white domination. Dr. King (1996) asserted, ‘Nonviolent direct action seeks to create … a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored’ (741–2). As Lewis Gordon (2008) emphasized, ‘Martin Luther King, Jr. is today recognized as an apostle of nonviolence. But when he was waging his nonviolent protest, it was perceived by most white Americans and the U.S. government as violent. That is because Dr. King was, in Fanon’s formulation, actional’. In order to be perceived as being legitimately nonviolent in the eyes of white American society, ‘King would have had to cease fighting against U.S. apartheid’ (2008). Thus, King’s tactic of non-violence was, in content but not in form, an act of violence aimed at liberating both the oppressed and the oppressor. In a quote that is remarkably similar to Fanon’s theorization of the creative potential of violence, King (1999) stated: The nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new selfrespect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. Finally it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality. (347) The empty category of violence can now be further theorized, one filled with a political project. When Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. proposed nonviolent protest as a favored strategy against empire, they understood very well that this non-violent expression was a form of violence to whites. As a counter-hegemonic challenge to white supremacy, Gandhi and King’s methodology of the oppressed (Sandoval 2000) – indeed their violence – was an attempt to shift upward the standards of humanity, which whites would interpret as an assault on their way of life. Dr. King (1996) continued: Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. (742) In the US case, whites obliged the world with hegemonic and literal expressions of violence captured by the media and circulated across the globe. Focusing entirely on a definition of violence that is dependent on its appearance – we know it when we see it – would miss the pedagogical lesson of King’s gamble and the depth of Fanon’s theory of violence. Although the civil rights protests were protected by the constitution, and although they were mostly peaceful, they were clearly violent to white sensibilities, and whites exposed their rage when they returned the violence with interest by escalating the tensions. White violence was captured by the media for all the world to see, striking at the legitimacy of US benevolence toward its racial minorities (Bobo and Smith 1998). In a literal sense, white violence was just that: repressive. But theoretically, it was not violent in the sense of altering relations for it maintained the current and false standards of humanity. It was a violence so hegemonic that it became naturalized, one that maintained the world as it was. It became violence as a way of life, a necrophilic one at that. White violence is indicative of a certain death drive whereas the liberating violence of the oppressed possesses a humanizing, life-affirming moment. With Fanon (2004), we ask ‘But how do we get from the atmosphere of violence to setting violence in motion?’ (31). Just as not all expressions of protest achieve the theoretical status of resistance, not all expressions of rage achieve the theoretical status of violence insofar as they fail to introduce change into a social system. For example, the armed protest of the Minutemen at the border of the state of Arizona and Mexico does not merit the title of resistance by virtue of the fact that they appear to be resisting when in fact they are assisting the immigration history between the United States and Mexico, which is violent to Mexicans (see Leonardo 2003). In contrast, not all apparently non-violent aspirations are easily assimilable into the convenient category of peaceful protest. In the United States in particular, it took the non-violent violence of the Civil Rights movement to introduce a different system of violence into civil society. As Fanon insists, challenging repressive systems of power requires going beyond a ‘rational confrontation of viewpoints’ (2004, 6). We suggest that there are pedagogical lessons contained in this history. Violence is always present in a social system because the struggle over power structures participation within the system. This is not necessarily deplorable but constitutes the field of discourses that struggle for our subjectivity (Weedon 1997). The issue hinges on a couple of questions. What political project is attached to this or that system of violence? What consequences and relations are produced? What are the standards of humanity in the system? Unless these questions are posed, we cannot arrive at the practical function of violence. Following Foucault (1980), King’s ‘peaceful’ protest was not an act by the powerless but a resistance that summoned every morsel of power against a repressive State. In other words, it was an expression of power that took the form of resistance, unlike whites’ reactions, which were deployments of power for the sake of maintaining it. This is an important distinction. Using conventional modes of force against a State that monopolizes its legitimate use, as Weber (1978) reminds us, would likely not have succeeded for it would have been overwhelmed by the military, absent of a coup. As Perry Anderson’s (1976) near book-length article on Gramsci makes plain, in modern societies the State becomes an ‘outer ditch’ filled by a complex system of civil institutions. This fact necessitates an equally complex understanding of civil society, which a ‘war of maneuver’ against an all-encompassing State fails to illuminate. Instead, a ‘war of position’ must expose fissures in civil society, exploiting its cultural institutions, such as the media and educational system. We may compare King’s peaceful protest with the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. One may be tempted to suggest that the South African revolution was peaceful, without much bloodshed and ending with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Of course as Fanon might argue, the South African case was violent to the core, particularly to whites, whose entitlements were revoked. The same can be said about the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, which was a massive assault on an entire social system. Likewise, a critical education is radically violent if it expects to shift the racial dialogue. It is a humanizing form of violence that puts people back in their rightful place and restores their dignity, both the oppressor and the oppressed (Freire 1993). A humanizing violence is both necessary and liberatory because the actual system and theoretical backbone of colonialism and systems of domination create unethical situations wherein individuals are relegated to subject positions that make them something below, or other than, human. In Charles Mills’ (1997) understanding, people of color become subpersons within the assumptions of such a system. What it means to be human or what it means to be an actional individual in Fanon’s sense, is defined via the discourse of the colonizer as the embodiment of the western-whiteheterosexual-propertied male (Wynter 2001). Fanon was correct to warn us that nonviolence as compromise, electoral politics, political concessions, and appeal to legality only forestalls the overthrow of a regime of thought that continues to demarcate between the human and the subperson. If dialogue seeks to undo racism, then we must ask if notions of safe dialogue legitimate an oppressive system or if they engage in a process that is creative enough to produce a new social consciousness, a new human subject ‘with a new language and a new humanity’ (Fanon 2004, 2). According to Fanon’s ‘stretched’ materialist dialectic, in order to speak to the issue of colonial classes (see De Lissovoy 2008), liberatory violence is the only way to overcome the system while actively reclaiming one’s humanity
	22	+
	23	+
	24	+Framing issue. Their refusal to engage in discussions of the way that anti-blackness shapes the world will lose them this debate. Sexton 16
	25	+Jared Sexton, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, associate professor of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes issue 19,sections 1-8
	26	+- A shift away from politics of inclusion is the only real ethical move
	27	+- Pessimism is a political position that we need to use to understand the world
	28	+
	29	+1 Afro-Pessimism is a contemporary phenomenon, some may even scoff that it is trendy, but its political and intellectual evolution is considerably longer and its ethical bearings much broader than one might expect, and there is work yet to be done regarding a genealogy of its orientation and sensibility. No individual or collective effort, of course, springs forth whole cloth and yet the controversy that has accompanied the emergence of this discourse over the better part of the past decade has suffered greatly from a refusal—on the part of most critics and too many proponents as well—to follow the old Jamesonian edict to historicize the theoretical aim and object (Herman 2003). I only note the problem here, as the development of proper context would require far more space than available at present. The vacuum-packed controversy has been surprisingly pointed as a result, and it is easy to miss the true significance thereof between the epiphanic tone of recent acquaintance and the acrimony of recurrent denunciation. 2 Some part of the pace and extent of debate about Afro-Pessimism to date is no doubt due to the proliferation of social media platforms in the same moment when the professoriate groans under the intensified administrative command to turn research into output with eventual market value (including the market value of "civic engagement"); the subsequent migration of much previously refereed scholarly commentary to these less (or differently) regulated forums in search of greater and faster measurable impact and, for better or worse, readership beyond the ken of advanced higher education; and the increased if uneven porosity of deliberations among activists, artists, educators, journalists, non-profit workers, researchers, etc. afforded by the digitization of print culture and the growing access to recordings of conference panels, public lectures, radio interviews, and the like. It is no exaggeration to say that, as a result of this convergence of global economic restructuring and technological development, there are thousands of online conversations underway across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, especially among students and young scholars, adjudicating the relative merits of Afro-Pessimism. 3 But this much could be said about any number of topical discussions featured anywhere from chat rooms and microblogs to virtual meetings and TED talks. What accounts for the particular critical purchase and affective resonance of what I called elsewhere "a highly technical dispute in a small corner of the American academy" has more likely to do with a growing understanding of the common (which is not to say shared, much less identical) political conditions of diverse black life-worlds with respect to claims and practices of freedom. That common sense of things is bound to a terrible and terrifying acknowledgement of not only the tragic material and symbolic continuities everywhere revealed by the history of post-emancipation societies throughout the Diaspora, but also, more fundamentally, the uncontainable categorical sprawl of the epochal transformation that names the emergence of racial slavery as such. In this, the postulate of a free black - whether non-slave or former-slave - would appear as oxymoron. None of which should stop anyone from believing its true, that being the crux. If Afro-Pessimism has captured the imagination of certain black radical formations and suggested a critical idiom, provoking a basic rethinking among more than a few of their non-black counterparts by the way, it has also, and maybe for the same reasons, struck a nerve among others, all along the color line, who fear that open-minded engagement involves forsaking some of the most hard-earned lessons of the last generation. 4 The reticence expressed about the force and signification of Afro-Pessimism, which in some quarters has bloomed into open if largely uninformed resistance, has taken on the logic of preemptive strike. Though we have little engagement in print thus far, due in part to the recentness of the published literature, certain discussions are nonetheless afoot on the left "devoted to blaming pessimism for whatever crisis is thought to occupy us at the moment." Afro-Pessimism, in this case and on this count, is thought to be, in no particular order: a negative appraisal of the capabilities of black peoples, associating blackness with lack rather than tracing the machinations through which the association is drawn and enforced, even in the black psyche, across the longue durée; a myopic denial of overlapping and ongoing histories of struggle and a fatal misunderstanding of the operational dynamics of power, its general economy or micro-physics, reifying what should be historicized en route to analysis; a retrograde and isolationist nationalism, a masculinist and heteronormative enterprise, a destructive and sectarian ultra-leftism, and a chauvinist American exceptionalism; a reductive and morbid fixation on the depredations of slavery that superimposes the figure of the slave as an anachronism onto ostensibly post-slavery societies, and so on. 5 The last assertion, which actually links together all of the others, evades the nagging burden of proof of abolition and, moreover, fails to acknowledge that one can account for historically varying instances of anti-blackness while maintaining the claim that slavery is here and now. Most telling though is the leitmotif of offense, and the felt need among critics to defend themselves, their work, their principles and their politics against the perceived threat. In place of thoughtful commentary, we have distancing and disavowal. The grand pronouncement is offered, generally, without the impediment of sustained reading or attempted dialogue, let alone careful study of the relevant literature. The entire undertaking, the movement of thought it pursues, is apprehended instead as its lowest common denominator, indicted by proxy, and tried in absentia as caricature.1 6 Astonishingly, all of this refuses to countenance the rhetorical dimensions of the discourse of Afro-Pessimism (despite the minor detail that its principal author is a noted creative writer and its first major statement is found in an award-winning literary work of memoir) and the productive theoretical effects of the fiction it creates, namely, a meditation on a poetics and politics of abjection wherein racial blackness operates as an asymptotic approximation of that which disturbs every claim or formation of identity and difference as such.2 Afro-Pessimism is thus not against the politics of coalition simply because coalitions tend systematically to render supposed common interests as the concealed particular interests of the most powerful and privileged elements of the alliance. Foremost, Afro-Pessimism it seeks, in Wilderson's parlance, "to shit on the inspiration of the personal pronoun we" (143) because coalitions require a logic of identity and difference, of collective selves modeled on the construct of the modern individual, an entity whose coherence is purchased at the expense of whatever is cast off by definition. The subject of politics is essentially dividual and there is in effect always another intervention to be made on behalf of some aspect of the group excluded in the name of the proper.3 The ever-expansive inclusionary gesture must thus be displaced by another more radical approach: an ethics of the real, a politics of the imperative, engaged in its interminably downward movement. This daunting task entails making necessity out of virtue, as it were, willing the need for the black radical imagination and not just its revisable demand. If certain scholars whose work has been instructive or inspirational for Afro-Pessimism miss this point too, it may have something to do with the search for a method of gaining agency that, while rightly suspending the assumption of an a priori agent, nonetheless rushes past the hidden structure of violence that underwrites so many violent acts, whether spectacular or mundane. 7 Such may provide reassurance for those informed by the basic assumptions and animated by the esprit de corps of the theoretical orientations and conceptual frames in question, but it cannot be mistaken for an adequate defense of a disposition. We would do well, on this score, to heed Joshua Dienstag's rather germane suggestion in Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit that "some thought should be given to why this word functions so well as a gesture of dismissal" and, likewise, to "the routine use of 'pessimist' and its cognates as a casual intellectual put-down" (Dienstag 2006: x). For present purposes, Afro-Pessimism as epithet would be the obverse of the unasked question: Why has this discourse found its articulation now? Rather than simply motivating speculation about the psychological states and political commitments of theorists, commentators, students, advocates or adherents; the intervention and implications of Afro-Pessimism, however they are adjudged, "need to be addressed at the theoretical level at which they arose" (Dienstag 2001: 924). Dienstag writes further: Critics have often mistaken a depiction of the world for a choice about our future, as if scholars had rejoiced at the decline or decay they described. ... Yet, despite the abuse they attract pessimists keep appearing—and this should not be surprising since the world keeps delivering bad news. Instead of blaming pessimism, perhaps, we can learn from it. Rather than hiding from the ugliness of the world, perhaps we can discover how best to withstand it (Dienstag 2006: x).4 8 As if they rejoiced about the wrong things and, by contrast, failed to rejoice about the right ones. Why not turn this (moralistic) accusation into (political-intellectual) opportunity? Indeed, the moniker "Afro-Pessimism" emerges at a certain inaugural moment as the embrace of a critical outlook deemed, upon review, to be disappointing or discouraging to an ostensibly progressive, even modernist anti-racism (Hartman 2003). Détournement. Resignification. A simple enough term for withstanding the ugliness of the world—and learning from it—might be suffering and Afro-Pessimism is, among other things, an attempt to formulate an account of such suffering, to establish the rules of its grammar, "to think again about the position of the ex-slave," as Bryan Wagner puts it in his Disturbing the Peace, "without recourse to the consolation of transcendence" (Wagner 2009: 2). The difficulty has to do with the special force that the consolation of transcendence—be it cultural, economic, geographical, historical, political, psychological, sexual, social or symbolic—brings to bear on the activity of thinking, no less of speaking and writing, about those whose transcendence is foreclosed in and for the modern world.

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	1	+2017-03-08 16:34:21.855

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	1	+PV Peninsula JL

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	1	+84

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Engel Neg

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	1	+JAN-FEB - K - Afropessimism V2

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	1	+USC