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1		-In this debate, we are confronted with an opportunity to investigate our assumptions about race and privilege. While that is a productive end, the 1AC, as well as the discussion of race in the community writ large, is rooted in a bifurcation of black and white that masks the identity of INTERALKE RM. I advocate a disavowal of their binaristic schema.
2		-Linda Alcoff. Alcoff. 2002. “LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY”. 2 The Journal of Ethics 7: 5–27, 2003.¶ © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
3		-The discourse of social justice in regard to issues involving race has¶ been dominated in the U.S. by what many theorists name the “black/white¶ paradigm,” which operates to govern racial classifications and racial¶ politics in the U.S., most clearly in the formulation of civil rights law¶ but also in more informal arenas of discussion. Juan Perea defines this¶ paradigm as¶ the conception that race in America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two¶ constituent racial groups, the Black and White . . . In addition, the paradigm dictates that¶ all other racial identities and groups in the United States are best understood through the¶ Black/White binary paradigm.5¶ He argues that this paradigm operates even in recent anti-racist theory such¶ as that produced by Andrew Hacker, Cornel West, and Toni Morrison,¶ though it is even clearer in works by liberals such as Nathan Glazer. Openly ¶ espousing this view, Mary Francis Berry, former chair of the U.S. Civil¶ Rights Commission, has stated that the U.S. is comprised of “three nations,¶ one Black, one White, and one in which people strive to be something¶ other than Black to avoid the sting of White Supremacy.”6 To understand¶ race in this way is to assume that racial discrimination operates exclusively¶ through anti-black racism. Others can be affected by racism, on this view,¶ but the dominance of the black/white paradigm works to interpret all other¶ effects as “collateral damage” ultimately caused by the same phenomena,¶ in both economic and psychological terms, in which the given other,¶ whether Latino/a, Asian American, or something else, is placed in the¶ category of “black” or “close to black.” In other words, there is basically¶ one form of racism, and one continuum of racial identity, along which all¶ groups will be placed. The black/white paradigm can be understood either¶ descriptively or prescriptively (or both): as making a descriptive claim¶ about the fundamental nature of racializations and racisms in the U.S., or¶ as prescribing how race shall operate and thus enforcing the applicability¶ of the black/white paradigm.7¶ Several Latino/a and Asian American theorists, such as Elaine Kim,¶ Gary Okihiro, Elizabeth Martinez, Juan Perea, Frank Wu, Dana Takagi,¶ and community activists such as Bong Hwan Kim have argued that the¶ black/white paradigm is not adequate, certainly not sufficient, to explain¶ racial realities in the U.S. They have thus contested its claim to descriptive¶ adequacy, and argued that the hegemony of the black/white paradigm in¶ racial thinking has had many deleterious effects for Latino/as and Asian¶ Americans.8 In this paper, I will summarize and discuss what I consider¶ the strongest of these arguments and then develop two further arguments.¶ It is important to stress that the black/white paradigm does have some¶ descriptive reach, as I shall discuss, even though it is inadequate when¶ taken as the whole story of racism. Asian Americans and Latino/as are¶ often categorized and treated in ways that reflect the fact that they have¶ been positioned as either “near black” or “near white,” but this is not nearly¶ adequate to understanding their ideological representation or political¶ treatment in the U.S. One might also argue that, although the black/white¶ paradigm is not descriptively adequate to the complexity and plurality¶ of racialized identities, it yet operates with prescriptive force to organize¶ these complexities into its bipolar schema. Critics, however, have contested¶ both the claim of descriptive adequacy as well as prescriptive efficacy. That¶ is, the paradigm does not operate with effective hegemony as a prescriptive¶ force. I believe these arguments will show that continuing to theorize race¶ in the U.S. as operating exclusively through the black/white paradigm is¶ actually disadvantageous for all people of color in the U.S., and in many¶ respects for whites as well (or at least for white union households and the¶ white poor).
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5		-The South Asian body does not fall neatly into their binaries—and is instead wielded as a model minority—a weapon to mediate and control race
6		-Roksana Badruddoja. Badruddoja is and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Manhattan College. 2006. “WHITE SPACES AND BROWN TRAVELING BODIES: A PROJECT OF RE-WORKING OTHERNESS.” International Review of Modern Sociology, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 1-34. JSTOR VR
7		-Moreover, Kibria (see Bashi, 1998: 962) supports that the addition of pan- ethnic labels in the system of racial categories in the U.S. moves us away from the white /black discourse to one that has more than two levels - "white/Asian/Hispanic/Black." But, Visweswaran (1997) posits that even as we move away from a racially bifurcated system, the centuries- long black and white polarization simply cast the identities of South Asian groups in the U.S. as either symbolically whitened or blackened, or to place Asian groups in a mediating position between blacks and whites. Both, though, speak to the racialization process unique to the U.S. Ronica's words speak to immigrant adaptation to new racial structures in destination countries within old hierarchies, further suggesting racialization: I definitely think that, especially in America, there is a very strong idea of what an NRI Non-Resident Indian17 is supposed to look like. If you are South Asian and you are in your early thirties or late twenties, you should have bought a house, have this much education, preferably in the sciences, and definitely be living out this ideal that is very much a construct of people coming to this country and wanting to have the best and coming here and thinking that they're a failure unless they make lots of money. To me, this is about being caught in this myth of a model, a minority, and also that there is a predestination for where you are supposed to go sin your life based on where you come from and where you are right now. Roñica clearly refers to how modern immigration policies, as a continuation of Orientalist practices, helped to construct a bi-modal distribution of the South Asian population - the post-1965 group consisting of highly educated and financially successful members, and the post-1980 group largely working-class, including undocumented workers (Das Dasgupta and Warrier, 1997; Prashad, 2000; Maira, 2002)-and subsequently the myth of the model minority. While Asian-Americans have overcome the status of "alien citizenship" in different ways like naturalized citizenship and occupational and residential mobility, the model minority stereotype, first, elides the existence of refugees, undocumented workers, and working-class immigrants, and, second, it reproduces the idea of Asian-American's foreignness (Ngai, 2004). Here, then, the Orientalist discourse helped to create the myth of the model- minority and its purpose is to pacify unwanted bodies in "non-violent" and "non-coercive" ways. Hence, like Roñica, Poore (1998) is also suspicious of the term "South Asian": The terms "South Asian," which seemed like a perfect solution to encompass multiplicity of South Asian communities has slowly been co-opted, frequently by Indians who have fallen prey to and reflect Indian hegemony even beyond the subcontinent. As a consequence, South Asians from Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, or Africa are excluded from and in turn exclude themselves from the gatherings, collaborative projects, and political alliances being formed by 5 an increasingly visible and vocal South Asian community in movements for gay rights, women's rights, and college student's rights in the United States. These exclusions further limit the geopolitical perspectives of the South Asian diaspora.
8		-1. Fragmented Coalitions DA – Silence on the binary allows conservative forces to divide and conquer – the myth of the model minority is redeployed as an weapon against justice movements
9		-
10		-Vijay Prashad. Trinity College International Studies professor. 2001. “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity.” Vijay, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History, pg. 40-46VR
11		- The moral and political weight of the civil rights movement forced a recalci- trant U.S. government to offer some rights to disenfranchised sections of the population. There was little hope, in , that the United States government would go beyond its own minimalist definition of ‘‘human rights’’ (as ha- beas corpus) given its refusal to endorse the socioeconomic side of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (). When Martin Luther King Jr. and others turned to the question of poverty (to launch the ‘‘poor peo- ple’s movement’’), they made a claim for a maximalist notion of ‘‘human rights’’—not just the right to civil liberties, but also to a home, to a job, to education, and to dignity (articles – of the  declaration). Instead of taking on this more comprehensive demand, the civil rights movement was offered a modest program for redressal: affirmative action and the fran- chise.11 To deal with the theft of labor of people of certain ‘‘races’’ (in the form of chattel slavery, and also debt peonage in agriculture, industry, and service), the state proposed to make an effort to produce some measure of equality. The state was forced to act on behalf of those for whom it had rarely acted; it had to abjure its formal or ceremonial sense of distance from the inequalities of society. Of course, the state is never neutral, since it either absents itself when the powerful exercise their might or else it acts for them, often seeming to be nothing more than a chamber of commerce. When the Constitution enshrined the right to private property, it made inviolable the basis of social inequality and, in fact, became the protector of the propertied classes. Affirmative action, as an unobtrusive gesture, was the compromise afforded by the propertied to end social unrest. A generation before affirmative action was institutionalized, the United States proposed to rebuild Europe (the Marshall Plan) and Japan (the occu- pation from –) after World War II, yet there was to be no such provi- sion of funds to African and Asian states who crept out of the harrow of colo- nialism. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank did not provide funds to this new ‘‘Third World’’ with the same generosity of spirit as the Marshall Plan had (the reconstruction of Japan was perhaps due to guilt for Hiroshima and Nagasaki).12 The U.S. attitude to Africa, for in- stance, was marked, on the one hand, by the  assassination of the first premier of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, and, on the other hand, by the use of new leader Mobuto Sese Seko for U.S. corpo- rate ends. From  to , for example, U.S. firms invested $ billion in the excavation of raw materials as well as $ million in commercial bank loans toward the creation of infrastructure to facilitate export. Lest one think that this money was for charitable purposes (a kind of international ‘‘affirmative action’’), the U.S. firms expropriated $. billion between  and .13 If African Americans did not receive a domestic program of reparations for the injustices of history, as well as for the production of a democratic citizenry, Africa itself (and much of Asia and Latin America) was to be fur- ther exploited. The denial of the socioeconomic rights of the formerly colo- nized peoples was couched in various arguments about the Third World’s excessive population (neo-Malthusianism), its retrogressive cultures and lack of democracy (neo-Weberianism), and its unfortunate comparative dis- advantage in economic terms (neoclassical economics). These are the cog- nates of the claim that reparations for African Americans are ‘‘handouts’’ or ‘‘charity’’ rather than the overdue bill for centuries of unpaid labor. While domestic affirmative action and international aid became the mild forms of redress offered by the U.S. government, it was not a concession that came easily. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan used their scholarly cre- dentials and political access to question the policy from its inception. ‘‘Noth- ing was more dramatic than the rise of this practice of quotas on the part of the American government in the s, at the very moment it was being declared abhorrent and illegal.’’14 The message here was that if a concept is by fiat made illegal, then it disappears: there is no need to act against it, just ignore its impact on history. ‘‘The nation is by government action increas- ingly divided into racial and ethnic categories with different origins,’’ Glazer argued. ‘‘New lines of conflict are created by government action. New resent- ments are created; new turf is to be protected; new angers arise; and one sees them on both sides of the line.’’15 Rather than seeing these conflicts as the legacy of de jure racism, neo-conservatives like Glazer and Moynihan pro- duced a discourse of de facto racism that blamed the state for inequities just as it tried to mend, perhaps quixotically, racist socioeconomic relations. Within this line of thought, affirmative action, rather than racism, was to bear the burden of social dysfunction. Thomas Sowell provided an early ex- ample of a logic that has become all too familiar now: those who are assisted by affirmative action are stigmatized by it.16 Racism did not stigmatize peo- ple; affirmative action did. If affirmative action and other state social redressal policies came under fire from the neoconservatives, they drew upon race itself to buttress their arsenal.17 ‘‘Let me be blunt,’’ Daniel Moynihan wrote in , ‘‘if ethnic quo- tas are to be imposed on American universities and similarly quasi-public institutions, it is the Jew who will be almost driven out.’’18 The role played by the figure of the Jew in the s was to be farcically adopted by the Asian American from the s onward. And we heard it spectacularly from Ron- ald Reagan, who called Asians ‘‘our exemplars of hope and inspiration’’ (the compliment was returned by an Asian, Dinesh D’Souza, who extolled the rise of Reagan from an ‘‘ordinary man’’ into an ‘‘extraordinary leader’’).19 The ‘‘Jew’’ and the ‘‘Asian American’’ provide a singularly useful way to at- tack the problem of equity. Phrased in terms of ‘‘overrepresentation’’ and ‘‘merit,’’ these minorities, it is argued by some, would be hurt by social engi- neering since they are () already overrepresented in the professions and () they would face quotas that would impinge on their me´ tier. During a Heri- tage Foundation event on affirmative action in the s, Representative Dana Rohrabacker (Rep-CA) had the bad taste to say that he used Asians as ‘‘a vehicle to show that America has made a mistake on affirmative action.’’20 Asians are used in this instance, then, as a weapon against the most modest form of redistribution devised by the state. In the international arena, the proponents of neoliberal economic poli- cies use the sometime success of the so-called East Asian tigers to undermine the African, Latin American, and other Asian states’ claims to reassess the terms of trade and debt policies (much of this enunciated in the now defunct UN Commission on Trade and Development under the guidance of the Ar- gentine economist Rau´ l Prebisch). A global amnesia forgets that the success of the ‘‘tigers’’ was short-lived, produced in relatively small states (South Ko- rea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore), and created not so much by deregu- lation and the ‘‘free market,’’ but by strong state redistribution of land and of price controls.21 Despite this well-documented history, there is a tendency to assess the ‘‘tragedy of Africa’’ through the lens of helplessness (at worst) and charity (at best), especially when compared to the ‘‘miracles of East Asia.’’ The parallels with the domestic ‘‘model minority’’ stereotype are clear. In his Foreign Affairs essay ‘‘Social Capital and the Global Economy,’’ for ex- ample, State Department social theorist Francis Fukuyama offers Asian Americans and Asia as models of civic values. He berates African Americans whose problems he believes are created by ‘‘single-parent families’’ and weak ‘‘larger social groups’’ and Africa for its deficiency of ‘‘voluntary associations outside kinship.’’22 These are standard and inaccurate tropes both of Africa and of African Americans. Fukuyama’s view is not unusual, for the popular press tells us that Asian Americans succeed ‘‘essentially without the benefit of affirmative action.’’23 Most of us are familiar with the idea of the ‘‘model minority,’’ and indeed there are several strong denunciations of the myth. What is not so clear is the means by which this stereotype is used not just to uplift Asians, but pointedly to demean blacks and Latinos.24 ‘‘The black leadership has domi- nated the discussion on civil rights,’’ Ed Koch noted a few years ago. ‘‘The Asian Americans, because all they ask for is to be treated equally, have not played a part in the discussion.’’25 The implication is that blacks want special treatment and believe themselves to be entitled to something more than other Americans. This special and unfair treatment does not go without a victim, we are told; Jerry Reynolds of the Center for Equal Opportunity ar- gues that ‘‘any time racial preferences are used, there’s a victim. And in Cali- fornia, the victim often has an Asian face.’’26 Stephen Nakashima, the Asian community’s Ward Connerly, argued along this grain that ‘‘discrimination in any form inflicts unjust injury upon its victims; the injury is no less be- cause the person who, or the institution which, inflicts it purports to act with good intention.’’27 The argument was made most spectacularly, if rather wantingly, by Bob Dole during his run for the presidency. On March , , Dole gave a speech at the Little Saigon Shopping Mall in Orange County to a mainly Republican Vietnamese audience. ‘‘We ought to do away with preferences,’’ he said in his noncommittal style. ‘‘It ought to be based on merit. This is America and it ought to be based on merit.’’28 Following up on the lines of Dole and others, we then heard from Susan Au Allen (head of the Pan-Asian American Chamber of Commerce, whose most famous act was to help scuttle the nomination of Bill Lam Lee to the Clinton justice department). In a profile of her she claimed that We are not asking for privileges. We don’t ask ourselves what this or that bit of civil rights legislation will do for us. All we want is the chance to work hard for our families, keep more of what we earn, and not have our children kept out of good schools when their grades and test scores show they should get in.29 Essentially the argument is that Asians are good citizens and hardworking; they do not need state assistance. Blacks need state assistance; they must be bad citizens and lazy. This is the chain of reason for the color blind. There are many reasons why the argument of the color blind appeals to some Asians.30 Beyond the idiosyncrasies of national origins, there are class reasons for making common cause with the Right: the ‘‘leaders’’ of the com- munity come from professional and merchant fractions of the elite and not from the working-class segment. Therefore, while most Asian Americans powerful enough to have their voices heard supported the end of affirmative action in California,  percent of Asians voted to save it.31 For Asians who enter the United States under the good graces of the  Immigration Act, few have a sufficient grasp of the civil rights struggle and its legacy. We have eaten the fruits of the struggle, of the educational systems set in place in our socialized societies (India, China, Vietnam, and Japan), and of the scrupu- lous screening of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The process of state-selection endows us with arrogance about ‘‘merit’’ and ability without any historical acknowledgment of the forces that produced us. ‘‘Asian Americans are inconvenienced, perhaps, but not hurt,’’ Emil Guil- lermo puts it nicely. ‘‘If anything Asian Americans should be proud that the system works, and that we more often than not can compete on merit. We shouldn’t be dragged into the racially charged political debate as ‘victim- ized overachievers.’ ’’32 In order to combat the idea of the color-blind state policy, itself a divi- sive instrument cloaked as unifying one, it’s important to offer an account of the affirmative privilege obscured by the current arguments. Asian Ameri- cans are in the spotlight in the battle over state-funded public schools. The mission of public education is to alleviate gross inequities by the production of skills in the general population. The Asian American is used as an instru- ment to show how these schools discriminate against Asian Americans in favor of blacks and Latinos, that Asian American merit is squandered on be- half of the process of equity. In private schools, however, where Asian Ameri- cans are discriminated against in favor of whites, there is no talk of the Asian American. In fact, there is silence on the problem of affirmative privilege and the disregard to merit when it comes to children of alumni (or legacy admissions) and other such markers of privilege. If the merit argument is to have any credence, then we should take it all the way and raze the edifice of privilege. Instead, the Asian American is used to tear down public institu- tions, while the discrimination of the private sector keeps affirmative privi- lege intact. This is part of the overall attempt to dismantle state institutions and shift state funds from mass education to private education (vouchers, and so forth). Consistent struggle has raised the problem of discrimination on to the U.S. agenda. In the s, for example, the problem of quotas in private schools did make a brief appearance. At Harvard University, for instance, Asian Americans applicants had to get forty points more on the SATs than white applicants got. Of those Asians who applied to Harvard, the college accepted . percent; of white applicants, the college welcomed  percent.33 Some of this is because of the legacy system, by which  percent of Harvard’s incoming class are children of alumni. Legacy, a system set up in the s to stem Jewish admissions into Ivy League colleges, allows colleges to affirm privilege and to maintain the status quo. In , Harvard admitted more legacy students than black, Chicano, Native American, and Puerto Rican stu- dents combined.34 When the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld Hopwood v. State of Texas in  to end affirmative action in Texas, Representative Lon Burham put forward a quixotic bill in the Texas legislature to outlaw legacy admissions. ‘‘There has been racially and class- based discrimination that benefits upper-income white kids,’’ he said. ‘‘It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out this is what the schools are doing.’’35 If racism secured certain preferences for whites in the past, then these unjustly acquired benefits are preserved into the present through such programs as legacy admissions (and then held in trust as these children se- cure admission for their children, regardless of merit).36 Education is only one avenue to gauge affirmative privilege. J. Morgan Kousser’s comprehensive book shows us how the arena of voting rights is also encumbered by privileges of the past.37 The theft of the  elections in Florida confirms Kousser’s analysis, and should give us pause on the ques- tion of a just franchise. George Lipsitz’s summary on the ‘‘possessive invest- ment in whiteness’’ traces how housing discrimination (and the creation of equity), transportation subsidies, corporate welfare, and other such parts of the system of affirmative privilege act against people of color.38 When the U.S. House Progressive Caucus put forward HR : Corporate Welfare Re- duction Act in , it called for the elimination of $ billion in tax subsi- dies to corporations.39 ‘‘At a time when the poor, the children, the elderly and veterans are being asked to make sacrifices to help balance the federal budget,’’ Representative Bernie Sanders (Ind-Vermont) argued, ‘‘those who are most able to be self-sufficient should be the first in line. Americans can no longer afford to provide tens of billions of dollars in wealthfare to aug- ment the quite adequate resources of corporations and wealthy individuals.’’ The bill failed. The rollback of social services within the United States is the domestic variant of ‘‘neoliberalism,’’ the recomposition of capital to the interests of large transnational firms and to those elites who live their lives by the logic of the Dow Jones. There is little discussion of the expropriation of immense values during the period of direct colonial rule nor is there any concern for the sustained impoverishment of most of the world through the policy of indebtedness. The collapse of so many national economies is not the result of an inevitable process now known as globalization. Rather, it is partially caused by a project that seeks to maintain certain regions of the world as producers of less-valorized goods and services while others retain control over advanced technology and financial markets.40 Public institutions that seek to redress inequality are to be downsized in favor of private institutions committed to the extraction of profit. The logical chain runs from the attack on public education in the United States to the provision of agricultural sub- sidies in India. However, the attack on the ‘‘public’’ is not consistent, since the U.S. and German governments remain pledged to the provision of do- mestic agrarian subsidies, just as they fight to end the same subsidies in the Third World. If there is no policy consistency, there is a remarkable coher- ence of interest—what enables the dollar and euro to maintain their fiscal prominence seems to become ‘‘international’’ policy; the rupee and the bhat are irrelevant.41 Color blindness as an international ideology neglects, in bad faith, the production of inequality in our world by the manipulation of the finance markets to benefit those who already have wealth. After all, it is an axiom that those with wealth want to, at least, maintain, at best, enlarge, their holdings: given this conservative approach to the world’s assets it should be apparent why those with a large hold on the pie commit them- selves to the political philosophy of the color blind. We are perhaps further from King’s ‘‘content of their character’’ message than we suspect.
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13		-2. Diversity Management DA - To understand race as founded in absolute difference plays right into the hands of a civil society smoothing away structural antagonisms through the management of diversity
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15		-Vijay Prashad. Trinity College International Studies professor. 2001. “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity.” Vijay, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History, pg. 40-46VR
16		-These states implicitly recognized the contradictions of social iden- tity foisted upon the democratic nation-state, which on the one hand pro- claimed the horizontal equality of its citizens and yet realized that each ab- stract individual was also the ensemble of extant social relations (based on a variety of social fractures). Karl Marx in an early essay entitled ‘‘On the Jewish Question’’ argues that the democratic state does not deal with, or emancipate itself from, religion (and, consequentially other social identi- ties), but instead it stands apart from the mess of civil society and cultivates its own narrow domain of the universal. Far from abolishing these real distinctions of civil society, such as pov- erty, religious differentiation, race, and so forth, the State only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these elements of its being.93 Since the state deems the differences within civil society as ‘‘nonpoliti- cal distinctions,’’ it is able to arrogate for itself the role of being above those very distinctions. The formal democratic state can then manage difference with such strategies as ‘‘unity in diversity,’’ or, much later, in the United States, as multiculturalism. The state does not emancipate people from dis- tinctions (or undermine the power embedded in certain social locations), but it emancipates itself from them. In addition, the state draws on cultural traditions that form part of the terrain of those distinctions among its peo- ples. After all, the cultural form of the German state under critique by Marx came from, among others, a Christian heritage and the ‘‘so-called Christian State has a political attitude to religion and a religious attitude to politics.’’94 The overall cultural framework of the state privileges certain social elites whose location is not disrupted by the management strategies such as ‘‘unity in diversity,’’ given as it is to protect the cultural heritage of each social group (all of which are treated equally despite the fact of a socio-economic hier- archy of distinction). What, then, begins as part of an anticolonial project devolves into the state logic of management of difference. From its birth as a republic, the United States adopted a slightly different strategy to manage difference. The state’s motto is e pluribus unum (out of many, one). Its general attitude toward difference has been that it must be melted and remolded into the identity of the mythic universal American, one who is forged in the smithy of certain constitutional values and a prod- uct of the vast geographical spaces open to settlement by sturdy pioneers. In the ports, and later on Ellis Island, the state’s managers expected that all ‘‘Old World’’ social identities perforce must be confiscated so that the immigrants could then and still today reinvent themselves as Americans. This story belies the massacre of the Amerindians, whose stolen lands became the wide-open spaces of the yeomen and pioneer women, as well of those enslaved Africans, who by the eighteenth century found their bodies reduced to a fraction of humanity. Yet the icon of the assimilable immigrant persists, held up as a model for all residents—new, old, or enslaved—and to all peoples of the world who are to marvel at this unique experiment in social relations. The fact, however, is that the United States is not exceptional in any regard, be- cause people have always been on the move, emigrating and immigrating in search of better circumstances. The world is made up of people, ideas, flora and fauna that have traveled remarkable distances. The history of the coun- tries in South America mirrors that of the United States, since they too com- prised European colonies whose new residents massacred most of the earlier populations, fought wars of national independence against Europe (Jose´ San Mart´ın and Simon Bol´ıvar stand in for George Washington), and have since created various means to manage their cultural and political differences.95 The former USSR and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as well as most socialist and social-democratic states, adopted the Marxist theory of nationalities to produce tangible ways to both create platforms for unity (a federation) and institutions to protect less powerful nationalities from those that are more integrated into federal power. India’s theory of ‘‘unity in diver- sity,’’ for example, allowed for the establishment of linguistic states. Such measures meant Bengali speakers could continue to develop their cultural heritage without being swamped by the power of a state wedded to Hindi and English (although this framework to deal with difference itself does not protect cultural forms, for it requires vigilant social movements and the dis- ruption of social institutions). Finally, there are many states, such as Switzer- land, that ideologically claim to be homogeneous (a assertion belied by a casual glance at their history) in order to create a racist barrier against immi- gration. The United States, then, is hardly an exception in terms of diversity and its theory of multiculturalism is not unusual in a world that produces similar resolutions to cultural matters. Slavery codes and later Jim Crow legislation allowed the United States to delay its engagement with the problem of social diversity. The institutions of slavery and of segregation meant that people of color remained outside the ken of white ‘‘society,’’ and entered only as labor or as spectacle. The civil rights movement destroyed the negative peace of Jim Crow America and forced the state to come to terms with its segregated society. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement, students of color fought against the assump- tion that American culture can be entirely grasped by a study of European- ized high cultural artifacts. For many there was an active discomfort with the notion that U.S. history was the tale of various presidents and their cote- rie. As colonial structures fell around the world such demands came to the fore in the famous student rebellions from Mexico City to Paris, from Berke- ley to Lahore, all in .96 In that year students in San Francisco went on strike and demanded a new look at what was called culture in the United States. This wide-ranging directive led to the formation of the first ethnic studies program at San Francisco State College, which today includes the programs of black studies, La Raza studies, American Indian studies and Asian American studies.97 Notwithstanding that ethnic studies is today still quite marginal, the program was to be the irritant in the side of a complacent academy and a society pledged to avoid the challenges of historical difference for the shibboleths of assimilation. The opening afforded by the U.S. state’s slow acceptance of diversity allowed immigrants and oppressed peoples to not only hold on to cultural elements from their homeland (and bred into their bones) but to express and even exaggerate those cultural traits hitherto denigrated as being inferior. This desire to confront the cultural injury of white supremacy with the salve of a plural heritage is the very best of multi- culturalism. Critics of this cultural nationalism in the United States very early saw the failure of its strategy as well as its links to a state-centered management of difference. Linda Harrison, a member of the Black Panther Party in east Oakland, noted in  that ‘‘the power structure, after the mandatory strug- gle, condones and even welcomes the new-found pride which it uses to sell every product under the sun. It worships and condones anything that is harmless and presents no challenge to the existing order. Even its top repre- sentatives welcome it and turn it into ‘Black Capitalism’ and related phe- nomenon.’’ The idea of ‘‘Black Capitalism’’ evokes, for Harrison, the figure of a consumer buying black goods at overcharged prices, ‘‘on the way to and from the shopping and spending they are still observing the oppression and exploitation of their people—in different clothes.’’98 Indeed, U.S. capital, under pressure from the oil shock of –, of the militant rank-and-file worker struggle, and of a crisis of overproduction, sought to open up mar- kets hitherto ignored, particularly among consumers of color.99 When the U.S. post office created its Zone Improvement Plan and introduced the zip code in , advertisers and other firms had a way to identify and utilize segregated space to target social groups and to cultivate tastes.100 Blacks, Asians, Amerindians, Latinos, and others came to find capital interested in them (or at least a small fraction of those among them with disposable in- come), as African American consumers, Asian consumers, Amerindian con- sumers, Latino consumers, as ‘‘image tribes.’’101 Always alert to the prospects of profit before anything else, major capi- talist firms developed a strategy in the late s to bend the Group of  nations from their attempts to garner cartels over oil, bauxite, tin, and other raw materials (as well as agricultural commodities): the African Develop- ment Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Asian Develop- ment Bank, all were created in Filipino sociologist Walden Bello’s studied words, to guarantee ‘‘northern hegemony by allocating influence according to the size of capital subscriptions, not membership.’’ So, the United States, with its junior partner western Europe, was able to leverage control over the economies of the Third World (that in the s had attempted to create the Special United Nations Fund for Development SUNFED, an alterna- tive, social-democratic development agency).102 Multicultural development proffered loans to capital-starved nations with the provision that they then hire U.S. and European firms to do the tasks once done by domestic firms, via import-substitution schemes.103 Here we see the operation of multicul- turalism as a business strategy on a global scale. Angela Davis is right, there- fore, to argue that multiculturalism ‘‘can easily become a way to guarantee that these differences and diversities are retained superficially while becom- ing homogenized and harmonized politically, especially along the axes of class, gender, and sexuality.’’104 The calculated Republican convention of  and the cabinet of George W. Bush offer a window into multicultural reaction, where the diversity of faces is used as a cover for an essentially racist project. The party of Lincoln (Continentals), as critic Michael Eric Dyson put it, places blacks in symbolic positions and ‘‘that symbolism will more than likely be used to cover policies that harm the overwhelming majority of black Americans.’’105 Multicultural imperialism offers an allowance for so- called local cultures to remain intact as long as the cultural forms are those that facilitate consumerism. Just as the state’s discourse of democracy and citizenship fails to grasp its implication in extant social differentiation (as pointed out by Marx), so too does the multinational corporation’s discourse on consumerism fail to grasp its role in the affirmation of ‘‘persisting, un- equal power relations’’ which it represents (via the idea of an abstract con- sumer) as ‘‘equal differences.’’106 In its crudest rendition then, multiculturalism adopts an idea of culture wherein culture is bounded into authentic zones with pure histories that need to be accorded a grudging dignity by policies of diversity. In his work The Ticklish Subject, critic Slavoj Zizek calls this attitude ‘‘racism with a dis- tance,’’ since the benevolent multiculturalist treats the concept of culture as a homogeneous and ahistorical thing that can be appreciated, but that re- mains far outside the enclosed ambit of one’s own cultural box.107 To retain this distance and this sense of a self-enclosed culture is to pretend that our histories are not already overlapping, that the borders of our cultures are not porous. This ‘‘racism with a distance’’ forgets our mulatto history, the long waves of linkage that tie people together in ways we tend to forget. Can we, for example, think of ‘‘Indian’’ food (that imputed essence of the Indian sub- continent) without the tomato, that first fruit harvested by the Mayans, and a base for most curries? Are not the Maya, then, part of contemporary ‘‘In- dian’’ culture? Is this desire for cultural discreteness part of the bourgeois nationalist and diasporic nostalgia for authenticity? Literary critic R. Radha- krishnan asks if the search for authenticity is a spontaneous self-affirming act, or if authenticity is nothing but a para- noid reaction to the ‘‘naturalness’’ of dominant groups. Why should ‘‘black’’ be authentic when ‘‘white’’ is hardly ever seen as a color, let alone pressured to demonstrate its authenticity.108 Is the desire for authenticity a mangled response to the triumphantalism of a corporate and racist culture thinly disguised as American culture? While all cultural forms are under pressure from capitalism, those ‘‘of color’’ feel a special lack of worth, given the national, and racist, origins of the capitalist core. Certainly, those ‘‘of color’’ who sense a loss of culture to the onrush of capitalism create means to hold on to that culture (as an artifact) while little is done to challenge the basis of the sense of cultural erosion. What, Radha- krishnan questions, is the loss felt by those who are not ‘‘of color’’ to the problem of ‘‘culture’’ in this latest phase of capitalism? ‘‘White culture’’ also changes, but, of course, the equation of power means that whiteness is nei- ther under scrutiny nor is it seen to be threatened by such cultural invasions except by a strand of avid cultural chauvinists.109 Multicultural imperial- ism is challenged by two principle foes: those bourgeois nationalist, well- meaning anthropologists, primordialists, indigenistas, and fundamentalists who claim to represent people of color and stand against the loss of culture; and those unreconstructed cultural racists who fear that their ‘‘European’’ cultural hegemony will be displaced (the polite ones among them take stra- tegic refuge in the idea of the color blind). Often these two groups engage in what postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak calls an ‘‘ignorant clash,’’ mainly because they are both on the same side of the argument. Both believe that culture is a thing that requires protection from history and adaptation, and both tend to worry about certain phenomenal social forms (such as dress, language, diet) rather than about the general corporate reconstitution of so- cial norms in which our individual autonomy is inhibited by the choices made for us by corporate institutions.110 After decades of debate over the problem of authenticity, it is by now clear that to posit an authentic core for culture creates serious sociopoliti- cal problems. In a recent exchange, political scientist Susan Moller Okin and her interlocutors debated whether or not ‘‘multiculturalism is bad for women.’’ One camp was of the view that ‘‘minority groups—immigrants as well as indigenous people’’ (in other words, those ‘‘of color’’)— demand ‘‘group rights’’ that undermine democratic principles, while the other camp argues that to champion those very principles at the expense of cultural au- tonomy is much the same as the colonization of the mind.111 The figure of woman is rightly central to this debate because a hidebound, and unself- conscious, multiculturalism can fall prey to a notion of cultural difference (even cultural relativism, in its strong sense) that legitimates gender oppres- sion. Where the debate fails is that, once again, it is lodged at the level of the law (the state’s emissary) and focused on how to manage the problem of diversity rather than how to undermine the structures that engender the illusion of absolute difference and then the zoological maintenance of cul- ture out of fear of survival (for primordialists and indigenistas) or out of fear of contamination (for racist cultural chauvinists). Here we have two prob- lems, one over whether multiculturalism should be seen and practiced as the management of diversity, and the second over whether the idea of culture requires the notion of authenticity. The idea of difference management (diversity) seems to have largely usurped those agencies that deal with multiculturalism. In my estimation, multiculturalism emerged as the liberal doctrine to undercut the radicalism of antiracism.112 Instead of antiracism, we are now fed with a diet of cultural pluralism and ethnic diversity. The history of oppression and the fact of ex- ploitation are shunted aside in favor of a celebration of difference and the experience of individuals who can narrate their ethnicity for the consump- tion of others. That the U.S. state adopted the liberal patina of multicultur- alism to fend off an important challenge from the progressive and demo- cratic forces is not reason enough to discount the power of cultural plurality, for multiculturalism opened the space for struggle against the conceit of cul- tural homogeneity (at the same time as the logic of diversity management quickly tried to close that space off, since it claimed to solve the problem by mutual respect rather than by the struggle to dismantle privilege). ‘‘A Multi- culturalism that does not acknowledge the political character of culture will not, I am sure,’’ argues Angela Davis, ‘‘lead toward the dismantling of racist, sexist, homophobic, economically exploitative institutions.’’113 The differ- ence between antiracism and diversity management, then, is that the former is militantly against frozen privilege and the latter is in favor of the status quo. Do the cultures in multiculturalism need to be granted an authentic core, one that is inviolable and chaste? There is little sense that, under the cover of authentic culture, there lies a long history of dissent, some of it on the fault lines of gender against certain cultural norms that work in the in- terest of some sections of society (whether men, or else of the elite).114 Fur- thermore, most of those who indulge in this debate assume that liberalism or democracy is a finished project, that what threatens it are those ‘‘of color’’ who ‘‘are too frequently imagined as the abject ‘subjects’ of their cultures of origin huddled in the gazebo of group rights, preserving the orthodoxy of their distinctive cultures in the midst of the great storm of Western prog- ress.’’115 The limitations and failures of liberalism do not enter the agenda so that the champion of liberalism stands outside the process as the colonial critic of misbegotten cultures. If we uncouple authenticity from culture, we might see the multiple coeval engagements between ‘‘liberalism’’ and that which is seen to require its ministrations, for the history of the colonial en- counter shows us how the two begot each other.116 The notion of the ‘‘hy- brid’’ was deployed to work against authenticity, and despite the best efforts of its theorists, it has come to indicate the fusion of two previously formed cultural traditions.117 Authenticity may be a useful strategic way to frame fights to gain resources, but the trap of authenticity is set against the antirac- ist struggle. For culture to have an authentic core undermines our ability to articulate the intertwined cultural histories and struggles that will provide the sort of political will necessary for demands upon resources (rather than pleas for them on authenticity grounds alone).
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18		-3. Foreignness DA- The Orient is always seen as the romanticized- oversexualized other that justifies the desire for taming otherness which can’t be explained by Antiblackness
19		-Roksana Badruddoja. Badruddoja is and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Manhattan College. 2006. “WHITE SPACES AND BROWN TRAVELING BODIES: A PROJECT OF RE-WORKING OTHERNESS.” International Review of Modern Sociology, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 1-34. JSTOR VR
20		-I begin this paper with a discussion of the persistent discourse of American Orientalism prevalent in American media, academy, and government¶ This content downloaded from 12.91.95.214 on Mon, 18 Nov 2013 18:33:18 PM¶ All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions¶ WHITE SPACES AND BROWN TRAVELING BODIES: 3 policy, in order to clarify the link between the normative power of discourse and the history of marginalized groups in America. My goal here is to embed the U.S.-South Asian migration within a historical framework and for developing a context in which to understand how the women in this study view themselves in comparison to broader American society within racial and ethnic projects. The brief and partial historical portrait reveals that racism has been and remains an important mechanism of cultural production and reproduction in the U.S. (see Weber, 1978: 385-393). The ways in which U.S. immigration laws have been designed, resulting in particular histories of arrival, entry, and exclusion of South Asian- Americans, are linked to the ways in which India (a class-based proxy for South Asia) first entered the imagination of the American people. India first appeared in the popular imagination of the U.S. through P.T. Barnum, Christian missionaries, and traveling Indian gurus. In these domains, Prashad (2000) articulates, "India was presented in the context of a generalized Orient" characterized by "images of opulent and effeminate sultans surrounded by oversexed women, animals, jewelry, and the scent of the unknown" (27). 8 Here, India was constructed as the domain of passive spirituality juxtaposed against superior and practical Christianity. Such constructions still carry on today through the minarets in Disney's 1992 production of Aladdin to the movie about the turban-clad Indian in The Guru (2003). India, clearly, did not emerge in this discourse-a purely white gaze9-as just romantic and beautiful, but it also came across as foreign and barbaric. Such conceptions are indicative of Orientalist historiography (Said, 1979). Orientalism refers to a world view that incorporates a socially- constructed division of the world into two distinct and mutually exclusive categories - everything east of the coast is the "East" or the Orient, notably India and China, and all that is west of it is the "West" or the Occident - with particular hierarchical features attached to each side - one that empowers whiteness and marginalizes non-whites. The language of Orientalism establishes the dualities in which both the colonial and post- colonial spaces are traditionally divided: backward /developed, traditional/modern East/ West, dominated /domina tor, colonized/ colonizer, us/them or "Other," feminine /masculine, and non-white/ white. The bulk of U.S. intellectuals saw the Orient as poor, unfree, and ahistorical, marking the Asian as undynamic and placing Asia under a Eurocentric rule and gaze. The Occident is also frequently configured as masculine - aggressive, rational, and modern. In contrast, the Orient is imagined as feminine - passive, spiritual, and traditional (see Yoshihara, 2003). Yet, within this gender divide in Orientalist traditions, the sexual norms of the Orient,¶ This content downloaded from 12.91.95.214 on Mon, 18 Nov 2013 18:33:18 PM¶ All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions¶ 4 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MODERN SOCIOLOGY such as the "Middle East/' are interpreted as paradoxically repressed and perverse-the Orient is "the site of carefully suppressed animalistic sexual instincts'7 (Puar, 2004: 526). 10 Bhabha (1994) writes, "The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, denims an articulation of forms of difference-racial and sexual" (96). We can see this
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22		-4. If there is any value to debate to begin with, it must start from the presupposition of non-exclusion only through polycultural recognition can we overcome racism and oppression
23		-Vijay Prashad. Trinity College International Studies professor. 2001. “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity.” Vijay, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History, pg. 40-46VR
24		-Disenfranchised by white supremacy, many people of color lean on nar- row nationalist frameworks to make claims upon the state. The most obvi- ous strategy is to ask for resources based on authenticity (‘‘we need to be represented by our own, or else we need money for our community’’). The demand is unimpeachable, principally because it calls for a redress of past history. When the  U.S. census allowed people to tick one or more boxes for race, the NAACP and other civil rights organizations took umbrage. Hil- ary Shelton of the NAACP noted, ‘‘Census statistics are used for the alloca- tion of programmatic dollars— everything from education and health care to transportation’’ and that the tabulation of race numbers allows for civil rights groups to ‘‘most fully and consistently enforce our existing civil rights laws.’’118 Without the numbers of people of color it is hard to argue against job discrimination or other such acts of affirmative disenfranchisement. On college campuses, progressive faculty adopt the language of authenticity to argue for more faculty of color and for a further diversification of the curric- ulum. The Asian American students need Asian American faculty members and Asian American studies. Race is used here in light of historically consid- ered categories that have been the basis of racism in the past, and therefore that have functioned to exclude certain people from political, economic, and social power. To gain redress, race has to be quite central, since it was on the basis of race that disenfranchisement took place. The strategy of redress, however, is limited by its entrapment in the framework of bourgeois law. A person (or institution) has to prove that an- other person (or institution) has done substantial harm to himself or herself for the case to be taken seriously both before the court of law and bourgeois public opinion. Harm to a community in the past provokes the problem of remedy: Who should pay for which crimes, and who must collect the re- demption? Angry white students sometimes say that they are tired of the implication that they are culpable for the acts of their ancestors or of their race. The onus is placed on those who have been historically oppressed to settle the problem of a remedy, and the experience of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and of interned Japanese Americans shows us that the standard for redress is posed rather high (an apparently insurmountable problem for the reparations claim of descendants of enslaved Africans). To counter the injudiciously high standards, many of us turn to questions of cultural au- thenticity and of demography to make our case. On college campuses, for instance, we ask for representation based on our numbers and on the need to have cultural presence of certain groups based on these numbers. The lim- its of multiculturalism—notably the assumption that culture is definable and discrete—badger this strategy. The call for amends on the multicultur- alist platform leads, in many cases, to a Hobbesian war of one against all among the oppressed: the divide-and-rule strategy comes to pass. Besides, demographically insignificant groups, such as Amerindians, do not have ac- cess to this political strategy, and furthermore, the appeal often transforms the student into a customer who makes a market-based demand that is quite opposed to the moral struggle for social justice. The cry for cultural authen- ticity is a defensive gesture against a recalcitrant, white supremacist set of institutions: we must recognize it for what it is and seek more creative ways to transform the structures from whom we seem to be simply asking for some spoils. This brings me, finally, to the idea of the polycultural.119 In an article for ColorLines Magazine in , historian and cultural critic Robin Kelley dismissed the idea of the purity of our bloodlines, finding the world of cul- tural purity and authenticity equally unpleasant too. Kelley argued that ‘‘so- called ‘mixed-race’ children are not the only ones with a claim to multiple heritages. All of us, and I mean ALL of us, are the inheritors of European, African, Native American, and even Asian pasts, even if we can’t exactly trace our bloodlines to all of these continents.’’120 Rejecting the posture of a ‘‘rac- ism with a distance,’’ Kelley argued that our various cultures ‘‘have never been easily identifiable, secure in their boundaries, or clear to all people who live in or outside our skin. We were multi-ethnic and polycultural from the get-go.’’ The theory of the polycultural does not mean that we reinvent hu- manism without ethnicity, but that we acknowledge that our notion of cul- tural community should not be built inside the high walls of parochialism and ethno-nationalism. The framework of polyculturalism uncouples the notions of origins and authenticity from that of culture. Culture is a process (that may sometimes be seen as an object) with no identifiable origin. There- fore, no cultural actor can, in good faith, claim proprietary interest in what is claimed to be his or her authentic culture. ‘‘All the culture to be had is culture in the making,’’ notes anthropologist Gerd Baumann. ‘‘All cultural differences are acts of differentiation, and all cultural identities are acts of cultural identification.’’121 Kelley’s idea of polyculturalism draws from the idea of polyrhythms— many different rhythms operating together to produce a whole song, rather than different drummers doing their own thing. People and cultures, from the outset, then, are seen to be at the confluence of multiple heritages and ‘‘living cultures, not dead ones . . . that live in and through us every- day, with almost no self-consciousness about hierarchy or meaning.’’ Even though people form what appear to be relatively discrete groups (South Asians, African Americans, Latino Americans), most of us live with the knowledge that the boundaries of our communities are fairly porous and that we do not think of all those within our ‘‘group’’ as of a cohesive piece. We forge group solidarity even, or especially, when we are thrown together by imputed solidarities. Furthermore, multiculturalism tends toward a static view of history, with cultures already forged and with people enjoined to respect and tolerate each cultural world. Polyculturalism, on the other hand, offers a dynamic view of history, mainly because it argues for cul- tural complexity. The history of Garveyism is, in fact, illustrative of polyculturalism. The Garvey movement has been the largest mobilizer of black people in the world. Despite the fact that the Universal Negro Improvement Association restricted membership to those who claimed African descent, Garvey was close to the Indian nationalist exile Lajpat Rai (who again also courted Booker T. Washington), and he hired as the editor of Negro World the Indian writer Hucheshwar G. Mugdal. The Negro World, under Mugdal, opened it- self to the international struggles against white supremacy. In early , the paper published a letter from an Indian man, Ganesh Rao: I am one of those millions that are being oppressed by the imperialistic English government. My interest, my responsibility, my duty, has thus impelled me to study the tragic tales of other oppressed peoples, e.g. the Negro, and his future. From my humble study so far I have confidently felt that the UNIA is doing the real work for the uplift of the Negro, and the U stands for, in word as in action—Universal . . . India is in her birth-throes; she soon shall be free. Ethiopia, self conscious, is working for her indepen- dent and unhindered progress. Peace shall not dawn on this world until Asia and Africa and their ancient peoples are free and enjoy all human rights. Oppressed people of the world unite. Lose no time!122 Mugdal simply continued an internationalist strain long evident in Garvey’s biography. In New York Garvey took the counsel of the Indian liberal Hari- das T. Muzumdar and his strong anticolonial rhetoric attracted a young Ho Chi Minh to his Harlem meetings.123 This interchange, at a late stage, is a continuation of the history of interaction between Africans and Asians across the Indian Ocean. There can be no history of Gujarati peoples, as we saw in the previous chapter, without consideration of Zanzibar, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Muscat. A polyculturalist sees the world constituted by the interchange of cultural forms, while multiculturalism (in most incarna- tions) sees the world as already constituted by different (and discrete) cul- tures that we can place into categories and study with respect (and thereby retain s relativism and pluralism in a new guise). What would history look like from a polycultural perspective? Well, rather than see Hong Kong business exclusively as a hybrid of an ancient Confucianism and a modern capitalism, as in the work of Tu Wei-Ming, we might take heed of the Jesuit role in the making of early modern ‘‘Confucianism,’’ as in the fine work of Lionel Jensen.124 Rather than evince surprise at English education in India, we might recognize, along with Gauri Viswanathan and Kumkum Sangari, that ‘‘English’’ as a discipline emerges in the East India Company colony of lower Bengal.125 Rather than treat Indian students at Yale as aliens, we might consider that the university received seed money from Elihu Yale, onetime governor of Madras, whose wealth came from the expropriated labor of In- dian peasants.126 These examples are not random, for they enable us to indulge in one of the traits of the polycultural approach—to snub the pretensions of Europe and the United States, which arrogates certain parts of world knowledge to itself, thereby placing its ideas at the top of a cultural hierarchy leaving the rest of us to fend off both the legacy of colonial knowledge and violence with our meager economic and cultural resources. Several historians of Europe these days recognize the interlocking heritage of the Eurasian landmass, as well as the substantial links between Africa and Europe.127 The interchange between the continents produced what is today so cavalierly called ‘‘Western rationality,’’ ‘‘Western science,’’ and ‘‘Western liberalism’’: this erases the in- fluence of those Arab and Jewish scholars who extended Aristotle’s insights, those Indian wizards who made mathematics possible with their discovery of the zero, those Iroquois whose experiments with federalism helped frame some of the concepts for the U.S. Constitution.128 Instead of laying claim to the complex heritage of these modern phenomena, chauvinists of color ar- gue for such traditions as ‘‘Hindu Economics’’ and ‘‘Islamic Science,’’ as well as cede the terrain of democracy to Europe.129 Polyculturalism refuses to allow the ‘‘West’’ to arrogate these combined and uneven developments of so many sociocultural formations, since it scrupulously investigates the con- nections that dynamically generate them. The polyculturalist outlook says to the proponents of the color blind that their position is in a bad faith, since it acts to perpetuate the racist status quo. To the primordialists it says that to deny internal differentiation and intermixture of cultural forms may allow it to leverage power over those whom it treats as part of its group, but it does not provide an adequate agenda to dismantle the status quo kept in place by the color blind. Instead, the posture of authenticity occludes its privilege. Antiracists sometimes ar- gue that authenticity is one of the few avenues to make claims on institu- tions. Polyculturalism offers some solace but implicit within it is the under- standing that this defensiveness is a trap that is able only to garner crumbs from the racist table—and these days few of them. Should the antiracists accept the idea of authenticity to build a black studies or Asian American studies department (staffed respectively by blacks and Asian Americans) or should we make wide claims on the resources of the entire educational en- semble, to train people of color to be mathematicians, geographers, philoso- phers, historians of France?130 In , David Hilliard, speaking to the stu- dents at San Francisco State College, enunciated the Black Panther Party position against ‘‘an autonomous Black studies program that excludes other individuals.’’ Hilliard understood the need to claim resources, but he was wary of the claim for it being made on the grounds of exclusions and of a hidebound notion of cultural autonomy. He said, We recognize nationalism because we know that our struggle is one of national salvation. But this doesn’t hinder our struggle, to make alliance with other people that’s moving in a common direction, but rather it strengthens our struggle. Because it gives us more energy, it gives us a more powerful force to move and to withstand the repression that’s being meted out against us.131 Within this framework, concern for the obliteration of cultural forms is met not by an encirclement of the false cultural wagons, but by the generous em- brace of all the energy that is ready for a genuine antiracist struggle. Hilliard did not argue against cultural nationalism simply on the expedient ground that the black liberation struggle required allies for demographic strength. On the contrary, talk of ‘‘energy’’ seemed to indicate that the entry of all manner of antiracists would qualitatively strengthen the movement, give it a kind of dynamism. Difference may yet be valued, for, as legal scholar Leti Volpp holds, to retain an idea of cultural difference (notably of forms of so- cial life) is not the same as to abdicate the right to adjudicate between differ- ent practices in struggle.132 A broad antiracist platform would not (like liberal multiculturalism) invest itself in the management of difference, but it would (like a socialist polyculturalism) struggle to dismantle and redistribute unequal resources and racist structures. Furthermore, polyculturalism, as a political philoso- phy, does not see difference ‘‘as evidence of some cognitive confusion or as a moral anomaly’’ (as liberal multiculturalism is wont to do), but it sees those features of difference with which it disagrees as ‘‘the expression of a morality you despise, that is, as what your enemy (not the universal enemy) says.’’133 The advantage of this reaction is that it explores the politics of various posi- tions which are then measured on the basis of the ethico-political agenda forged in struggle (not as some universal, ahistorical verities). For example, the liberal chauvinist may argue that immigrants should assimilate into the U.S. core culture, taking for granted that there is such a thing as a core in the first place. The word assimilate is used as a universal value, so that few of us can reply that we don’t want to assimilate, we want to remain separate (‘‘Then why did you come here?’’ is the response). If we reframe the problem not as assimilation but as conformity, we have a political leg to stand upon (‘‘my being here is already assimilation, but I refuse to conform to some of your mores’’).134 The answer to American ideology, then, comes against a language of ‘‘skin,’’ but not in a color-blind fashion. Polyculturalism does not posit an undifferentiated ‘‘human’’ who is inherently equal as the ground for its cri- tique of the world, one that says something like ‘‘we are all human after all,’’ but seems to offer only the smallest palliatives against racist structures. In- stead it concentrates on the project of creating our humanity. ‘‘Human’’ is an ‘‘unfinished product,’’ one divided by social forces that must be overcome for ‘‘human’’ to be made manifest.135 In the nineteenth century near Delhi, Akbar Illahabadi intoned that we are born people, but with great difficulty we become human (aadmi tha, bari muskil se insan hua). A polycultural hu- manism, for this tradition, is a ‘‘practical index’’ that sets in motion the pro- cesses that might in time produce a humanity that is indeed in some way equal.136

EntryDate

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1		-2016-09-18 00:50:59.0

Judge

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1		-Dino De La O

Opponent

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1		-Earl Warren NO

ParentRound

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1		-3

Round

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1		-4

Team

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1		-Interlake Ma Neg

Title

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1		-Binary DA

Tournament

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1		-Greenhill Round 4