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+Reforming the university with speech is not possible – the present day academy is built on colonial violence that either assimilates dissent within an existing power structure or eradicate the dissenter through other means. The problem is not a lack of free speech, but the academic life is structured by colonial violence. Chatterjee and Maira 14 |
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+Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira. "The imperial university: Race, war, and the nation-state." The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent (2014): 1-50. |
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+State warfare and militarism have shored up deeply powerful notions of patriotism, intertwined with a politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion, through the culture wars that have embroiled the U.S. academy. The fronts of “hot” and “cold” wars—military, cultural, and academic—have rested on an ideological framework that has defined the “enemy” as a threat to U.S. freedom and democracy. This enemy produced and propped up in the shifting culture wars—earlier the Communist, now the (Muslim) terrorist— has always been both external and internal. The overt policing of knowledge production, exemplified by right-wing groups such as ACTA, reveals an ideo- logical battle cry in the “culture wars” that have burgeoned in the wake of the civil rights movement—and the containment and policing demanded within the academy. Defending the civilizational integrity of the nation requires producing a national subject and citizen by regulating the boundaries of what is permissible and desirable to express in national culture—and in the university. As Readings observed, “In modernity, the University becomes the model of the social bond that ties individuals in a common relation to the idea of the nation-state.”46 Belonging is figured through the metaphor of patriotic citizenship, in the nation and in the academy, through displays of what Henry Giroux has also called “patriotic correctness”: “an ideology that privileges conformity over critical learning and that represents dissent as something akin to a terrorist act.”47¶ This is where the recent culture wars have shaped the politics of what we call academic containment. For right-wing activists, the nation must be fortified by an educational foundation that upholds, at its core, the singular superiority of Western civilization. A nation-state construed as being under attack is in a state of cultural crisis where any sign of disloyalty to the nation is an act of treachery, including acts perceived as intellectual betrayal. The culture wars have worked to uphold a powerful mythology about American democracy and the American Dream and a potent fiction about freedom of expression that in actuality contains academic dissent. This exceptionalist mythology has historically represented the U.S. nation as a beacon of indi- vidual liberty and a bulwark against the Evil Empire or Communist bloc; Third Worldist and left insurgent movements, including uprisings within the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and in Central America in the 1980s; Islamist militancy and anti-imperial movements since the 1980s; and the threat posed by all of these to the American “way of life.” The battle against Communism, anti-imperial Third Worldism, and so-called Islamofascism entailed regulating and containing movements sympathetic to these forces at home, including intellectuals with left-leaning tendencies and radical schol- ars or students—all those likely to contaminate young minds and indoctri- nate students in “subversive” or “anti-American” ideologies.¶ What does it mean, then, to contain scholars who “cross the line” in their academic work or public engagement? Academic containment can take on many modalities: stigmatizing an academic as too “political,” devaluing and marginalizing scholarship, unleashing an FBI investigation, blacklist- ing, or not granting scholars the final passport into elite citizenship in the academic nation—that is, tenure. These various modalities of containment, which are discussed by Thomas Abowd, Laura Pulido, and Steven Salaita, among others, narrow the universe of discourse around what is really per- missible, acceptable, and tolerable for scholars in the imperial university. All these modes are at work in the three important moments of ideological policing that we touch on here: World War I and the McCarthy era of the 1940s–1950s, the COINTELPRO era from the late 1950s to early 1970s, and the post-9/11 era or “new Cold War,” which is the major focus of this book.¶ Moments of social stress and open dissent about class politics in the United States during World War I and the first decades of the twentieth cen- tury make clear that containment worked in tandem with emerging defi- nitions of “academic freedom.” As the U.S. professoriate began to build its ranks at the end of the nineteenth century and a few scholars48 challenged the status quo, “academic freedom” emerged as a way to deal with these dis- senters as well as the “relative insecurity” felt by many in this new profes- sion.49 Indeed, the tumult of the turn of the century led to a pattern within the academy that has persisted—the exclusion of ideas as well as behavior that the majority did not like and an increasingly internalized notion that “advocacy for social change” was a professional risk for academics.¶ The AAUP’s Seligman Report of 1915 reveals that the notion of academic freedom was, in fact, “deeply enmeshed” with the “overall status, security, and prestige of the academic profession.”50 Setting up procedural safeguards was important, but its language regarding “appropriate scholarly behavior” and cautiousness about responding to controversial matters in the academy (by ensuring that all sides of the case were presented) suggested the limits of dissent. Academic freedom, then, is a notion that is deeply bound up with academic containment—a paradox suggested in our earlier discussion of protest and inclusion/incorporation in the academy and one that has become increasingly institutionalized since the formation of the AAUP.¶ The academic repression of the McCarthy era received its impetus from President Truman’s March 22, 1947, executive order that “established a new loyalty secrecy program for federal employees.” However, the roots of insti- tutional capitulation—by both administrators and faculty—when the state targeted academics who were communists or viewed as “sympathizers” are much deeper. It is also significant that the notion of “appropriate behavior” for faculty rested on a majoritarian academic “consensus” about “civil” and “collegial” comportment. For example, Ellen Schechter notes cases prior to the Cold War where scholars were fired not necessarily for their political affiliations per se but due to “their outspoken-ness.”51 This repression from within—not just beyond—the academy reveals the cultures of academic con- tainment where, as Pulido, Gumbs, and Rojas remind us, certain kinds of “unruliness” must be managed or excised.¶ The logic of academic containment was dramatically staged during the civil rights and antiwar struggles, when the FBI surveilled and arrested Black Power, anti-imperialist, and radical scholar-activists during the era of COINTELPRO (1956–1971). Angela Davis, most famously, was fired from UCLA by then California governor Ronald Reagan for being a member of the Communist Party. Some of these radical intellectuals went on to develop and establish programs in ethnic studies, critical race studies, and women’s studies, fields that later became embroiled in the conservative attacks that unfolded in the 1980s and 1990s against the specter of an “un-American” and “divisive” multiculturalism. Works such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education, and in some ways also David Hollinger’s Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism generated anxieties about the presumed failure of university education to transmit an essential set of knowledges and a contentious debate about the divisiveness of multicultur- alism and movements for group rights.52¶ Right-wing hysteria and neoconservative moral panics in the culture wars were accompanied by liberal concerns that ethnic studies, and to some extent women’s studies and queer studies, were devolving into “identity politics.” Liberal-left intellectuals, such as Todd Gitlin, worried that ethnic and racial studies asserted an identitarianism that was an abandonment of a “proper” left politics. Salaita points out that Gitlin also criticized as irrespon- sible scholars who challenged the policies of the Israeli state, as have other progressive scholars open to critiques of militarism or colonialism—except in the case of Israel. In other words, the culture wars were fought not just between the right and left but within the liberal-progressive left as well.¶ In her painful—and politically revealing—experience with Chicana/o studies in California public institutions over the past twenty years, Rojas offers a glimpse “of the ways imperial projects order gender/sexual/racial politics at the public university” and the “resulting devastating violence deployed on subjects deemed dangerous to the colonial imaginary of a colo- nial, heteropatriarchal Chicano studies.” The difficult question that Rojas’s “testimonio” addresses is how to connect this hetero-masculinist logic and violence—what she calls heteropatriracialities—to the “incorporation” of ostensibly liberatory, decolonizing projects such as Chicano/a studies that were birthed through the antiwar and antiracist movements of the 1960s. We view this perverse “incorporation” of ethnic studies as the result of a dangerous “internalization” of the imperial project of the university and also as meshing well with the hetero-masculinist and classed cultures that shape the dominant, everyday practices of the imperial academy. Contain- ment is not abstract at all—it is marked decisively, and often violently, on specific kinds of bodies whose presence is definitively marked as “Other,” as evident in Abowd’s and Godrej’s chapters. If one speaks from already dan- gerous embodiments, structured historically, then that speech risks always being seen as a threat. The “natives” within the academy must be most care- ful and most civilized in their speech, as Rojas and Abowd suggest. Their queer/sexed/raced bodies mark always-possible threats. There are enough natives who perform the terms of civilization and capitulation and con- tain themselves: that is how empires have always ruled—through tokenism, exceptionalism, and divide-and-rule. When it comes from “within,” contain- ment and silencing—as Rojas shows us—can be the most devastating of all.¶ These stories of academic containment must be situated within the cul- ture wars and also within the context of what Christopher Newfield, among other critics, calls a “long counterrevolution” against the gains of the civil rights and left movements of previous decades.53 Newfield argues that right- wing movements waged a cultural offensive that targeted “progressive trends in the public universities” as an important front of “roundabout wars” on the middle class, waged through the “culture wars on higher education”: “The culture wars were economic wars” against the new, increasingly racially integrated middle class, “discrediting the cultural framework that had been empowering that group.”54 In other words, the culture wars were also class wars staged on a racial battlefield, for the corporatization and privatization of the public university, as in California, occurred as it was becoming more racially integrated.55¶ Several chapters illustrate the ways in which academic containment emerges with and though the containment of economic, racial, and cultural struggles. In Gumbs’s chapter, the class wars are situated in the racial man- agement of student of color and immigrant populations in the CUNY sys- tem in the post–civil rights era of open admissions and campus occupations by students; violent policing to enforce “law and order” accompanied rising incarceration rates of people of color. Similarly, Godrej’s chapter illuminates the ways in which protests of university privatization and nonviolent civil disobedience by students and faculty during the current budget crisis in the University of California have been met with police brutality by increas- ingly militarized campuses; casting these movements as a threat evades the structural violence of tuition hikes, exclusion, impoverishment, home fore- closures, and the “neoliberal disinvestment in the concept of education as a public good.”¶ In effect, the neoliberal structuring of the university is also a racial strat- egy of management of an increasingly diverse student population, as increas- ing numbers of minority and immigrant students have entered public higher education. Well-funded, neoconservative organizations and partisan groups, such as ACTA, David Horowitz’s Freedom Center, and Campus Watch, have placed ethnic studies, feminist and queer studies, and critical cultural studies in their bull’s-eye as the political project of leftist professors running amok in the academy and teaching biased curricula. In addition, campaigns such as Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights and Student Bill of Rights constructed the figure of a new victim in the culture wars: the “American student” whose freedom to challenge these partisan faculty had been suppressed.56 Accord- ing to these right-wing campaigns, “radical” scholars were force-feeding U.S. college students with anti-American views, and right-wing students were being marginalized and “discriminated” against due to their political ideol- ogy and affirmative action programs. Thus the language of marginalization and exclusion was turned on its head, as the discourse of right-wing vic- timhood and ideological discrimination was unleashed against the political movements and intellectual projects that opposed racial and class inequality.¶ In addition, the right appropriated the language of “diversity,” a key point of contradiction in the academic culture wars. For example, the “Students for Academic Freedom” campaign launched by Horowitz used the notion of “intellectual pluralism” to mask its well-orchestrated attack on the left.57 The cultural right manufactured a portrait of itself as the true advocate of intel- lectual pluralism and freedom, remaking diversity through a “free market” model based on the right to choice in the marketplace of ideas.58 The notion of choice, central to models of flexible accumulation and global economic competitiveness for proponents of neoliberal capitalism, underlies the tenet of intellectual choice. A “weak” multiculturalism and liberal notion of toler- ance thus served the right well, for they used it to argue that the problem was not simply that of “diversity,” which they apparently embraced, but that there wasn’t enough “intellectual diversity” on college campuses. Teaching, and also research, was becoming one-sided, to the detriment of those upholding “true” American values, who were increasingly marginalized in hotbeds of left indoctrination into anti-Americanism on college campuses. In addition, as Pulido’s case study demonstrates, as faculty and administrators of color— not to mention women—have made their way into the ranks of university management, academic institutions can hide behind the language of racial (and gender) representativeness and tokenist inclusion to deflect critiques of systemic problems with faculty governance.¶ The strategic co-optation of the language of pluralism for academic con- tainment is nowhere more evident than in the assault on progressive schol- arship in Middle East studies and postcolonial studies and in the intense culture wars over Islam, the War on Terror, and Israel-Palestine. The 9/11 attacks and the heightened Islamophobia they generated allowed Zionist and neoconservative groups to intensify accusations that progressive Middle East studies scholars and scholars critical of U.S. foreign policy were guilty of bias and “one-sided” partisanship, as observed in accounts of censure, suspicion, and vilification by Abowd, De Genova, and Salaita. The post-9/11 culture wars conjured up new and not-so-new phantoms of enemies—in particular, the racialized specter of the “terrorist.” This figure, and the racial panic associated with it, has been sedimented in the national imaginary as synonymous with the “Muslim” and the “Arab” since the Iranian Revo- lution of 1978–1979 and the First Intifada against Israeli occupation in the late 1980s. The War on Terror consolidated Orientalist caricatures of Mus- lim fanatics and Arab militants, but it is important to note that these also dredged up avatars of a historical logic of containment and annihilation of indigenous others.59 The native, the barbarian, and the foreigner converge in this cultural imaginary that legitimizes violence against anti-Western, unciv- ilized regions incapable of democratic self-governance and that is produced by expert knowledge of other peoples and regions. The wars in Iraq and “Af- Pak” and the global hunt for terrorists entailed an intensified suspicion and scrutiny of ideologies that supported militant resistance or “anti-American” sentiments and necessitated academic research on communities that were supposedly “breeding grounds” for terrorism. |
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+Liberation is not possible without recognizing the structure of anti-blackness. It lays the ground work for social exclusion. Heitzeg 15 |
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+Heitzeg, Nancy A a Professor of Sociology and Director of the¶ interdisciplinary Critical Studies of Race/Ethnicity Program at St. Catherine¶ University, St. Paul, MN.. "On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964: Persistent White Supremacy, Relentless Anti-Blackness, And The Limits Of The Law." Hamline J. Pub. L. and Pol'y 36 (2015): 54. |
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+While all communities of color suffer from racism in general¶ and its manifestation in criminal justice in particular, “Black” has¶ been the literal and figurative counterpart of “white”. Anti-black¶ racism is arguably at the very foundation of white supremacy; the¶ two constitute the foundational book-ends for the legal, political and¶ every day constructions of race in the United States.12¶ For this¶ reason, in combination with the excessive over-representation of¶ African Americans in the criminal justice system and the prison¶ industrial complex, this analysis will largely focus on the ways in¶ which the law has been a tool for the oppression of African¶ Americans via the furtherance of white supremacy and antiblackness¶ in both law and practice.¶ While race has never reflected any biological reality, it is¶ indeed a powerful social and political construct. In the U.S. and¶ elsewhere, it has served to delineate “whiteness” as the “unraced”¶ norm – the “unmarked marker” – while hierarchically devaluing¶ “other” racial/ethnic categories with Blackness always as the antithesis.13¶ The socio-political construction of race coincides with the¶ age of exploration, the rise of “scientific” classification schemes, and¶ perhaps most significantly capitalism. In the United States, the¶ solidification of racial hierarchies cannot be disentangled from the capitalist demands for “unfree” labor and expanded private property.¶ By the late 1600s, race had been a marker for either free citizens or¶ slave property, and colonial laws had reified this decades before the¶ Revolutionary War.14 The question of slavery was at the center of¶ debates in the creation of the United States and is referenced no less¶ than ten times.15 By the time of the Constitutional Convention of¶ 1787, the racial lines defining slave and free had already been rigidly¶ drawn – white was “free” and black was “slave” – and the result¶ according to Douglass was this: “assume the Constitution to be what¶ we have briefly attempted to prove it to be, radically and essentially¶ pro-slavery”.¶ 16 The Three-Fifths Clause, the restriction on future¶ bans of the slave trade and limits on the possibility of emancipation¶ through escape were all clear indications of the significance of¶ slavery to the Founders. The legal enouncement of slavery in the¶ Constitution is one of the first of many “racial sacrifice covenants”¶ to come, where the interests of Blacks were sacrificed for the nation.¶ 17¶ The social and constitutional construction of white as free and¶ Black as slave has on-going political and economic ramifications.¶ According to Harris, whiteness not only allows access to property,¶ may be conceived of per se as “whiteness as property”.¶ 18 These¶ property rights produce both tangible and intangible value to those¶ who possess it; whiteness as property includes the right to profit and¶ to exclude, even the perceived right to kill in defense of the borders¶ of whiteness.19 As Harris notes:¶ The concept of whiteness was premised on white¶ supremacy rather than mere difference. “White” was¶ defined and constructed in ways that increased its¶ value by reinforcing its exclusivity. Indeed, just as whiteness as property embraced the right to exclude,¶ whiteness as a theoretical construct evolved for the¶ very purpose of racial exclusion. Thus, the concept¶ of whiteness is built on both exclusion and racial¶ subjugation. This fact was particularly evident¶ during the period of the most rigid racial exclusion,¶ as whiteness signified racial privilege and took the¶ form of status property.20¶ Conversely, Blackness is defined as outside of the margins of¶ humanity as chattel rather than persons, and defined outside of the¶ margins of civil society. Frank Wilderson, in “The Prison Slave as¶ Hegemonys (Silent) Scandal,” describes it like this: “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.”¶ 21 Directly¶ condemned by the Constitution in ways that other once excluded¶ groups (American Indians, women, immigrants, LGBTQ) were not,¶ Blackness as marked by slavery– as property not person - creates an¶ outsider status that makes future inclusion a daunting challenge.22 |
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+Treating speech rights as unqualified good perpetuates a lack of access to those rights – the nazi’s academic freedom is the same as the queer activism. This ignores material disparities and perpetuates hierarchies. Chatterjee and Maira 14 |
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+Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira. "The imperial university: Race, war, and the nation-state." The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent (2014): 1-50. |
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+The answers lie, to a large extent, in the definition and utilization of aca- demic freedom as a liberal principle and in the paradoxes that this liberal politics generates in the academy and beyond. Prashad argues that the lib- eral precept of academic freedom draws on John Stuart Mills’s conception of the necessity of “contrary opinions” for providing checks and balances for social norms but not for enabling a “transformative political agenda.” A Eurocentric genealogy of academic freedom would trace it to notions of critical pedagogy in German universities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, intertwined with notions of economic and political liberalism embedded in Enlightenment modernity.¶ Cary Nelson, the renowned president of the American Association for University Professors (AAUP), who for many U.S. academics represents the face of institutionalized academic freedom, writes, “Academic freedom thus embodies Enlightenment commitments to the pursuit of knowledge and their adaption to different political and social realities.”78 The AAUP issued the Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Ten- ure in 1915,79 and for some scholars, such as Robert Post, this declaration is the “greatest articulation of the logic and structure of academic freedom.”80 According to Post, this is because it conceptualizes academic freedom as based on “compliance with professional norms” specific to academic labor and on the safeguarding of scholarly expertise that produces “professional self-regulation” and “professional autonomy” for faculty.81 Yet even Post acknowledges that there is a paradox inherent in this conceptualization based on academic labor, for these professional norms are not so easily defined and so academic freedom is “simultaneously limited by, and independent of, pro- fessional norms.”82 A critic of the AAUP’s unwillingness to protect scholars targeted by McCarthyism suggests the AAUP upholds procedural freedom without an understanding of the importance of expanding its understanding of political freedom: “Stripped of its rhetoric, academic freedom thus turns out to be an essentially corporate protection. And as we trace its develop- ment during the Cold War, we should not be surprised to find that it was involved more often to defend the well-being of an institution rather than the political rights of an individual.”83¶ Other scholars, such as Judith Butler, also point out that the AAUP’s formulation of academic freedom intended to “institutionalize a set of employer-employee relationships in an academic setting,” not to guarantee academic freedom as an individual right.84 While she agrees with Post that academic freedom should not be rooted in “individual freedom” or simply in First Amendment rights of freedom of expression, she goes further to point to the collusion between the university and the state in defining pro- fessional norms and professional freedom in scholarship and to emphasize that expectations of what is permissible for academics are always historically evolving and often politically motivated. So these professional constraints are contingent and contested, not fixed; Butler argues, “As faculty members, we are constrained to be free, and in the exercise of our freedom, we con- tinue to operate within the constraints that made our freedom possible in the first place.”85¶ We take these critiques of an individually based, constrained, and “weak” notion of academic freedom further, arguing that academic freedom is per- haps not tenable as a basis for a just struggle for “freedom,” if that struggle needs to be defined by affirmative principles rooted in progressive or left conceptions of freedom, justice, and equality, as suggested by Prashad. In other words, academic freedom is not, and should not be, the holy grail of dissent. Academic freedom is generally understood—and operationalized in the U.S. academy today—as an ideologically neutral principle of freedom of expression and First Amendment rights. It is thus a libertarian, not just liberal, notion of individual freedom, and it is framed as a core principle of Western modernity and democracy, serving both the liberal-left and the conservative-right. In this model, neo-Nazis or antiabortion advocates have the same rights to academic freedom in the university as do queer activists or antiwar proponents. There is no progressive ethos built into the principle of academic freedom, and this is what makes it easily available for recupera- tion and resort by the right as much as the left. Prashad makes the important observation that even the academic left often tends to take refuge in the “safe harbor” of academic freedom rather than engaging in a struggle for “genuine campus democracy” and labor rights for workers on campuses and for the right to education as a public good and for a “culture of solidarity,” as evoked by Dominguez.¶ Perhaps one of the most ironic examples of what could be described as the use of academic freedom as a smoke screen for larger struggles over other kinds of freedoms was the cancellation of the AAUP’s own conference on academic boycotts, slated to be held in 2006 at the Rockefeller Confer- ence Center in Bellagio, Italy. The conference featured a diverse group of scholars with a range of views on the strategy of academic boycott—some in favor, some opposed—within the context of the emerging, global debate about the Palestinian call for an academic boycott of Israeli academic institu- tions, inspired by the boycott of South African institutions in the apartheid era. However, under mounting pressure from Israeli and pro-Israel academ- ics, the meeting was cancelled.¶ The AAUP, instead, published online many of the papers intended for presentation at the conference, but it also issued a report strongly condemn- ing the academic boycott. Joan Scott and Harold Linder, who had helped organize the conference and later edited the online publication, expressed dismay that the conference was canceled, but they also concluded that the AAUP’s “principled opposition to academic boycott” was an expression of its commitment to academic freedom.86 While Joan Scott later revised her position in an eloquent essay,87 this seemingly contradictory position is an argument that is often used in opposition to the academic boycott, in the case of Israel, and it expresses a deeper paradox that illuminates the fault line at the core of academic freedom—as does the entire saga of the failed con- ference. Is it possible that closing off the possibility of a boycott of academic institutions—in the context of their complicity with military occupation and apartheid policies—is an expression of academic freedom, or is it a denial of that academic freedom? And whose academic freedom is being upheld?¶ Lisa Taraki, a sociologist at Birzeit University in the West Bank who was scheduled to present at Bellagio, noted in her paper, “I think that the abstract ideas of academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas cannot be the only norms influencing the political engagement of academics. Often, when oppression characterizes all social and political relations and structures, as in the case of apartheid South Africa or indeed Palestine, there are equally important and sometimes more important freedoms that must be fought for, even—or I would say especially—by academics and intellectuals.”88 Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian intellectual who is, like Tarakai, a cofounder of the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), argued that the AAUP was “privileging academic freedom as above all other freedoms.” Citing Judith Butler, he argued that this position excluded the freedom of “academics in contexts of colonialism, military occupation, and other forms of national oppression where ‘material and institutional foreclosures . . . make it impossible for certain historical subjects to lay claim to the discourse of rights itself ’. . . . Academic freedom, from this angle, becomes the exclu- sive privilege of some academics but not others.”89 |
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+Free speech gives racists a free pass – it directly tradesoff with issues of material violence and props up white supremacy. We should act against the law, not ask for its permission. Delgado and Stefancic ‘92 |
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+Richard Delgado - Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law, University of Colorado. J.D., U. California-Berkeley, 1974. and Jean Stefancic - Technical Services Librarian, University of San Francisco School of Law. M.L.S., Simmons College, 1963; M.A., University of San Francisco, 1989. “IMAGES OF THE OUTSIDER IN AMERICAN LAW AND CULTURE: CAN FREE EXPRESSION REMEDY SYSTEMIC SOCIAL ILLS?” Cornell Law Review. September 1992. http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3571andcontext=clr JJN |
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+III. How THE SYSTEM OF FREE EXPRESSION SOMETIMES MAKES MATTERS WORSE Speech and free expression are not only poorly adapted to remedy racism, they often make matters worse-far from being stalwart friends, they can impede the cause of racial reform. First, they encourage writers, filmmakers, and other creative people to feel amoral, nonresponsible in what they do. 18 8 Because there is a marketplace of ideas, the rationalization goes, another film-maker is free to make an antiracist movie that will cancel out any minor stereotyping in the one I am making. My movie may have other redeeming qualities; besides, it is good entertainment and everyone in the industry uses stock characters like the black maid or the bumbling Asian tourist. How can one create film without stock characters? 18 9 Second, when insurgent groups attempt to use speech as an instrument of reform, courts almost invariably construe First Amendment doctrine against them.1 90 As Charles Lawrence pointed out, civil rights activists in the sixties made the greatest strides when they acted in defiance of the First Amendment as then understood. 191 They marched, were arrested and convicted; sat in, were arrested and convicted; distributed leaflets, were arrested and convicted. Many years later, after much gallant lawyering and the expenditure of untold hours of effort, the conviction might be reversed on appeal if the original action had been sufficiently prayerful, mannerly, and not too interlaced with an action component. This history of the civil rights movement does not bear out the usual assumption that the First Amendment is of great value for racial reformers. 19 2 Current First Amendment law is similarly skewed. Examination of the many "exceptions" to First Amendment protection discloses that the large majority favor the interests of the powerful. 19 3 If one says something disparaging of a wealthy and well-regarded individual, one discovers that one's words were not free after all; the wealthy individual has a type of property interest in his or her community image, damage to which is compensable even though words were the sole instrument of the harm. 194 Similarly, if one infringes the copyright or trademark of a well-known writer or industrialist, again it turns out that one's action is punishable. 19 5 Further, if one disseminates an official secret valuable to a powerful branch of the military or defense contractor, that speech is punishable. 19 If one speaks disrespectfully to a judge, police officer, teacher, military official, or other powerful authority figure, again one discovers that one's words were not free;1 9 7 and so with words used to defraud, 198 form a conspiracy, 1 99 breach the peace, 200 or untruthful words given under oath during a civil or criminal proceeding.20 1 Yet the suggestion that we create new exception to protect lowly and vulnerable members of our society, such as isolated, young black undergraduates attending dominantly white campuses, is often met with consternation: the First Amendment must be a seamless web; minorities, if they knew their own self-interest, should appreciate this even more than others. 20 2 This one-sidedness of free-speech doctrine makes the First Amendment much more valuable to the majority than to the minority. The system of free expression also has a powerful after-the-fact apologetic function. Elite groups use the supposed existence of a marketplace of ideas to justify their own superior position. 203 Imagine a society in which all As were rich and happy, all Bs were moderately comfortable, and all Cs were poor, stigmatized, and reviled. Imagine also that this society scrupulously believes in a free marketplace of ideas. Might not the As benefit greatly from such a system? On looking about them and observing the inequality in the distribution of wealth, longevity, happiness, and safety between themselves and the others, they might feel guilt. Perhaps their own superior position is undeserved, or at least requires explanation. But the existence of an ostensibly free marketplace of ideas renders that effort unnecessary. Rationalization is easy: our ideas, our culture competed with their more easygoing ones and won. 20 4 It was a fair fight. Our position must be deserved; the distribution of social goods must be roughly what fairness, merit, and equity call for.20 5 It is up to them to change, not us. A free market of racial depiction resists change for two final reasons. First, the dominant pictures, images, narratives, plots, roles, and stories ascribed to, and constituting the public perception of minorities, are always dominantly negative. 20 6 Through an unfortunate psychological mechanism, incessant bombardment by images of the sort described in Part I (as well as today's versions) inscribe those negative images on the souls and minds of minority persons. 20 7 Minorities internalize the stories they read, see, and hear every day. Persons of color can easily become demoralized, blame themselves, and not speak up vigorously.208 The expense of speech also precludes the stigmatized from participating effectively in the marketplace of ideas. 20 9 They are often poor-indeed, one theory of racism holds that maintenance of economic inequality is its prime function2 0 -and hence unlikely to command the means to bring countervailing messages to the eyes and ears of others. Second, even when minorities do speak they have little credibility. Who would listen to, who would credit, a speaker or writer one associates with watermelon-eating, buffoonery, menial work, intellectual inadequacy, laziness, lasciviousness, and demanding resources beyond his or her deserved share? Our very imagery of the outsider shows that, contrary to the usual view, society does not really want them to speak out effectively in their own behalf and, in fact, cannot visualize them doing so. Ask yourself: How do outsiders speak in the dominant narratives? Poorly, inarticulately, with broken syntax, short sentences, grunts, and unsophisticated ideas.21' Try to recall a single popular narrative of an eloquent, self-assured black (for example) orator or speaker. In the real world, of course, they exist in profusion. But when we stumble upon them, we are surprised: "What a welcome 'exception'!" Words, then, can wound. But the fine thing about the current situation is that one gets to enjoy a superior position and feel virtuous at the same time. By supporting the system of free expression no matter what the cost, one is upholding principle. One can belong to impeccably liberal organizations and believe one is doing the right thing, even while taking actions that are demonstrably injurious to the least privileged, most defenseless segments of our society.21 2 In time, one's actions will seem wrong and will be condemned as such, but paradigms change slowly.2 1 3 The world one helps to create-a world in which denigrating depiction is good or at least acceptable, in which minorities are buffoons, clowns, maids, or Willie Hortons, and only rarely fully individuated human beings with sensitivities, talents, personalities, and frailties-will survive into the future. One gets to create culture at outsiders' expense. And, one gets to sleep well at night, too. Racism is not a mistake, not a matter of episodic, irrational behavior carried out by vicious-willed individuals, not a throwback to a long-gone era. It is ritual assertion of supremacy, 214 like animals sneering and posturing to maintain their places in the hierarchy of the colony. It is performed largely unconsciously, just as the animals' behavior is. 2 15 Racism seems right, customary, and inoffensive to those engaged in it, while bringing psychic and pecuniary advantages.21 6 The notion that more speech, more talking, more preaching, and more lecturing can counter this system of oppression is appealing, lofty, romantic-and wrong. |
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+The alternative is to recognize the university as a site of imperial violence and embrace the demand of abolitionism - we must recognize that whiteness operates subtly through hands-off policies that preserve the status quo. We choose to challenge the university system at the grassroots intersection with other liberation movements. Oparah 14 |
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+Oparah, Julia. Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College and a founding member of Black Women Birthing Justice "Challenging Complicity: The Neoliberal University and the Prison–Industrial Complex." The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (2014). |
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+¶ In my earlier work on the academic-prison-industrial complex, I suggested that activist scholars were producing and disseminating countercarceral knowledge by bringing academic research into alignment with the needs of social movements and interrogating and reorganizing relationships between prisoners and researchers in the free world.50 Given the history of epistemic and physical violence and exploitation of research subjects by the academy, such a reorganizing of relationships and accountabilities is clearly urgently needed. Yet no matter how radical and participatory our scholarship is, we ultimately fail to dismantle the academic-military-prison-industrial com- plex (academic-MPIC) if we address it only through the production of more knowledge. Since knowledge is a commodity, marketed through books, arti- cles, and conferences as well as patents and government contracts, the pro- duction of “better,” more progressive or countercarceral knowledge can also be co-opted and put to work by the academic-MPIC.¶ An abolitionist lens provides a helpful framework here. Antiprison schol- ars and activists have embraced the concept of abolition in order to draw attention to the unfinished liberation legislated by the Thirteenth Amend- ment, which abolished slavery “except as a punishment for a crime.”51 Aboli- tionists do not seek primarily to reform prisons or to improve conditions for prisoners; instead they argue that only by abolishing imprisonment will we free up the resources and imagine the possibility of more effective and less violent strategies to deal with the social problems signaled by harmful acts. While early abolitionists referred to themselves as prison abolitionists, more recently there has been a shift to prison-industrial complex abolitionism to expand the analysis of the movement to incorporate other carceral spaces— from immigrant detention centers to psychiatric hospitals—and to empha- size the role of other actors, including the police and courts, politicians, corporations, the media, and the military, in sustaining mass incarceration.52¶ How does an abolitionist lens assist us in assessing responses to the academic-MPIC? First, it draws our attention to the economic basis of the academic-MPIC and pushes us to attack the materiality of the militari- zation and prisonization of academia rather than limiting our interventions to the realm of ideas. This means that we must challenge the corporatization of our universities and colleges and question what influences and account- abilities are being introduced by our increasing collaboration with neoliberal global capital. It also means that we must dismantle those complicities and liberate the academy from its role as handmaiden to neoliberal globaliza- tion, militarism, and empire. In practice, this means interrogating our uni- versities’ and colleges’ investment decisions, demanding they divest from the military, security, and prison industries; distance themselves from military occupations in Southwest Asia and the Middle East; and invest instead in community-led sustainable economic development. It means facing allega- tions of disloyalty to our employers or alma maters as we blow the whistle on unethical investments and the creeping encroachment of corporate fund- ing, practices, and priorities. It means standing up for a vision of the liberal arts that neither slavishly serves the interests of the new global order nor returns to its elitist origins but instead is deeply embedded in progressive movements and richly informed by collaborations with insurgent and activ- ist spaces. And it means facing the challenges that arise when our divest- ment from empire has real impact on the bottom line of our university and college budgets. Andrea Smith, in her discussion of native studies, has argued that politi- cally progressive educators often adopt normative, colonial practices in the classroom, using pedagogical strategies and grading practices that rein- scribe the racialized and gendered regulation, policing, and disciplining that PIC abolitionists seek to end.53 In this sense, there could be no “postcarceral” academy. Certainly, sanctions for undergraduate and graduate students and faculty who challenge the university’s regular practices—from failing grades and expulsions to tenure denials and deportation—are systemically distrib- uted, along with rewards for those who can be usefully incorporated. Yet uni- versities and colleges also hold the seeds of a very different possible future, evoked, for example, by the universal admissions movement or by student strikes in Britain and Canada that demand higher education as a right, not a privilege of the wealthy. Rather than seeking to eradicate or replace higher educational institutions altogether, I suggest that we demand the popular and antiracist democratization of higher education.¶ The first step toward this radical transformation is the liberation of aca- demia from the machinery of empire: prisons, militarism, and corporations. Speaking of abolishing the white race, Noel Ignatiev argues that it is neces- sary for white people to make whiteness impossible by refusing the invisible benefits of membership in the “white club.”54 Progressive academics are also members of a privileged “club,” one that confers benefits in the form of a pay- check, health care, and other fringe benefits; social status; and the freedom to pursue intellectual work that we are passionate about. But we can also put our privilege to work by unmasking and then unsettling the invisible, symbi- otic, and toxic relationships that constitute the academic-MPIC.¶ Decoupling academia from its velvet-gloved master would begin the pro- cess of fundamental transformation. Without unfettered streams of income from corporations, wealthy philanthropists, and the military, universities and colleges would be forced to develop alternative fund-raising strategies, relationships, and accountabilities. Can we imagine a college administration aligned with local Occupy organizers to protest the state’s massive spend- ing on prisons and policing and demand more tax money for housing, edu- cation, and health care? Can we imagine a massive investment of time and resources by university personnel to solve the problem of how to decarcerate the nation’s prisons or end the detention of undocumented immigrants in order to fund universal access to higher education? Can we imagine a uni- versity run by and for its constituents, including students, kitchen and gar- den staff, and tenure-track and adjunct faculty? These are the possibilities opened up by academic-MPIC abolition. |
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+The demand for concrete political action serves white-supremacy and perpetuates symbolic violence. Lopez 03 |
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+López, Gerardo R. University of Utah, Salt Lake City "The (racially neutral) politics of education: A critical race theory perspective." Educational Administration Quarterly 39.1 (2003): 68-94. |
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+Unfortunately, the vast majority of tactics and mechanisms privileged in¶ the field emerge from a strong belief in the democratic process—providing a¶ somewhat optimistic take on the efficacy of political and civic participation.¶ Such strategies not only ignore the political fact that power and influence¶ largely remain the dominion of White, middle-class men (Marshall, 1997a),¶ but they also disregard the fact that the vast majority of underrepresented¶ groups do not largely participate in these kinds of political activity (Arax,¶ 1986; Bush, 1984; Flores and Benmayor, 1997; Gaventa, 1980; Preston,¶ Henderson, and Puryear, 1987). In other words, although these theories support¶ and strengthen our collective beliefs in democracy, political action, representational politics, influence, accountability, and the importance of a¶ whole host of input factors in the decision-making process, they nevertheless¶ fail to address why certain individuals fail to participate in the political process¶ altogether and/or how and why the “democratic” process itself¶ marginalizes and silences diverse peoples, their actions, and their perspectives¶ (Marshall, 1993a; Marshall et al., 1989).¶ Willis Hawley (1977) recognized the limitations of the field almost three¶ decades ago when he stated:¶ Whether one accepts Lasswell’s definition of “who gets what when and how”¶ or other such widely held and related conceptions that politics involves the authoritative¶ allocation of resources and values, my point is the same—political¶ scientists have been more interested in studying the political processes than¶ they have been in studying who receives what benefits from the political process.¶ (p. 319)¶ As Hawley suggested, scholars in the field are more concerned with “input”¶ and “process” factors, and not necessarily with the outcomes and effects of¶ the political process. The focus on one aspect, to the detriment of the other,¶ certainly has been a shortcoming in the field.¶ This is a critically important point, because the outcome of policy can be¶ tangible and identifiable (such as the effects of a public policy on a particular¶ group) or intangible and anomalous (such as people’s perceptions of the¶ political system). As Schram (1995) contended, the field disproportionately¶ suffers from an “overly instrumental view of rationality that masks its latent¶ biases” (p. 375). Certainly, the relentless belief in the effectiveness of political¶ and civic participation is itself a type of bias that is often taken for granted¶ by most scholars in the field.¶ Within the politics of education, we assume that all (legal) citizens of this¶ society have certain inalienable rights—including the right to vote to ensure¶ that government and policies work in their best interest. The field also¶ assumes that all individuals act in politically rational ways and, when necessary,¶ will assert their rights as citizens—through influence, power, conflict,¶ political pressure, voting, or some other mechanism—to minimize real and¶ opportunity costs.¶ Unfortunately, for the vast majority of people of color, the working poor,¶ women, gays/lesbians/bisexuals, and other marginalized groups—who are¶ constantly reminded on a daily basis that they are second-class citizens in this¶ country—the concept of rights is elusive. Their treatment, in historical and¶ contemporary times, attests to the fact that they have never been afforded¶ their full rights as citizens of this country (Delgado, 1997; Flores and¶ Benmayor, 1997; Guinier, 1991; Preston et al., 1987; Spann, 1995; Williams, 1995b). For people of color, their subordination has not only been socially¶ sanctioned but legally sanctioned as well:¶ As the “Other,” racial minorities have often been neither thought of nor treated¶ as Americans. Historically they have by a number of legal and informal means¶ been excluded from buying property in certain areas, prohibited from voting,¶ and restricted as to whom they could marry. In practice, full American citizenship¶ has been restricted to Whites. Over many years of struggle, rights have¶ been extended and the concept of who belongs to America has expanded. Even¶ so, racial and gender discrimination continue to create real differences in opportunities¶ and in people’s perception of their treatment. (Rosaldo and Flores,¶ 1997, p. 58)¶ If having rights is part of being an American citizen (Flores, 1997), then¶ clearly, racial minorities in the United States are far from full incorporation in¶ this regard. They may be equal members of society under the law—but socially,¶ politically, and economically, they are rendered one down by a racist¶ political and legal system that marginalizes them on an everyday basis. As¶ Slater and Boyd (1999) suggested, individuals can be members of the larger¶ polity but may not necessarily be afforded equal status in the larger polity.¶ Therefore, to suggest that all individuals have equal rights under the law¶ and have equal ability and potential to exercise those rights via political¶ action and/or influence—in other words, to suggest that all individuals, irrespective¶ of race or power, act in politically rational ways—is not only shortsighted¶ but disingenuous. It suggests the public space is racially neutral and¶ that contextual factors do not matter in the larger social and political arena. |
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+Role-playing assumes a level of detachment that is oppressive. Reid Brinkley 08 |
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+- psychic violence to black who can’t defend usfg even if contingent |
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+- serial policy failure – detachment = objectivity justifies imperialist policies where u make others conform to your values |
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+Reid-Brinkley ‘8 (Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, University of Pittsburgh Department of Communications, “THE HARSH REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE” 2008,) |
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+And participation does not result in the majority of the debate community engaging in activism around the issues they research. Mitchell observes that the stance of the policymaker in debate comes with a “sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture.”115 In other words, its participants are able to engage in debates where they are able to distance themselves from the events that are the subjects of debates. Debaters can throw around terms like torture, terrorism, genocide and nuclear war without blinking. Debate simulations can only serve to distance the debaters from real world participation in the political contexts they debate about. As William Shanahan remarks: …the topic established a relationship through interpellation that inhered irrespective of what the particular political affinities of the debaters were. The relationship was both political and ethical, and needed to be debated as such. When we blithely call for United States Federal Government policymaking, we are not immune to the colonialist legacy that establishes our place on this continent. We cannot wish away the horrific atrocities perpetrated everyday in our name simply by refusing to acknowledge these implications” (emphasis in original). The “objective” stance of the policymaker is an impersonal or imperialist persona. The policymaker relies upon “acceptable” forms of evidence, engaging in logical discussion, producing rational thoughts. As Shanahan, and the Louisville debaters’ note, such a stance is integrally linked to the normative, historical and contemporary practices of power that produce and maintain varying networks of oppression. In other words, the discursive practices of policy oriented debate are developed within, through and from systems of power and privilege. Thus, these practices are critically implicated in the maintenance of hegemony. So, rather than seeing themselves as government or state actors, Jones and Green choose to perform themselves in debate, violating the more “objective” stance of the “policymaker” and require their opponents to do the same. |