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Summary

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3 -====Sustaining the coherence of the American political framework reproduces discourses of progress that result in the further accumulation of injured and murdered black bodies —- black nihilism is the only metaphysical framework capable of addressing this antagonism and unraveling the political ====
4 -Black humanity was rationalized as an imaginary number- purely speculative and never intended to actually translate into something (3/5 of human) don't worry our faith in the political will alleviate us from our oppression and restore that remaining 2/5ths because eventually everything gets better. the American dream is realized through black suffering- MLK warranted freedom through the experience of black suffering- no matter how many times they tried to kil us and beat us we will love them and transform our own situation. black death acts as a signer against the idea of progress and hope, if it is true that we are becoming a better nation why are black people still being murdered by the police? every generation will shift attitudes and become more conscious, supposedly we are a better generation that the generation that murdered Emmet Till. progess and linearity will only reproduce metaphysical strucutres of violence that kill black people
5 -**Warren 15** ~~Calvin K., Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University, "Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope," CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015~~ Kguy
6 -Perverse juxtapositions structure our relation to the Political. This becomes even more apparent and problematic when we consider the position of blacks within this structuring.1 On the one hand, our Declaration of Independence proclaims, "All men are created equal," and yet black captives were fractioned in this political arithmetic as three-fifths of this "man." The remainder, the two-fifths, gets lost within the arithmetic shuffle of commerce and mercenary prerogatives. We, of course, hoped that the Reconstruction Amendments would correct this arithmetical error and finally provide an ontological equation, or an existential variable, that would restore fractured and fractioned ~~End Page 215~~ black being. This did not happen. Black humanity became somewhat of an "imaginary number" in this equation, purely speculative and nice in theory but difficult to actualize or translate into something tangible. Poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and extra-legal and legal violence made a mockery of the 14th Amendment, and the convict leasing system turned the 13th Amendment inside out for blacks. Yet, we approach this political perversity with a certain apodictic certainty and incontrovertible hope that things will (and do) get better. The Political, we are told, provides the material or substance of our hope; it is within the Political that we are to find, if we search with vigilance and work tirelessly, the "answer" to the ontological equation—hard work, suffering, and diligence will restore the fractioned three-fifths with its alienated two-fifths and, finally, create One that we can include in our declaration that "All men are created equal." We are still awaiting this "event."Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. placed great emphasis on the restoration of black being through suffering and diligence in his sermon "The American Dream" (1965): And I would like to say to you this morning what I’ve tried to say all over this nation, what I believe firmly: that in seeking to make the dream a reality we must use and adopt a proper method. I’m more convinced than ever before that violence is impractical and immoral…we need not hate; we need not use violence. We can stand up against our most violent opponent and say: we will match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you…we will go to in those jails and transform them from dungeons of shame to havens of freedom and human dignity. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after night and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half dead, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. … ~~T~~hreaten our children and bomb our churches, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. But be assured that we will ride you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we will win our 3freedom, but we will not only win it for ourselves, we will so appeal to your hearts and conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be double. The American dream, then, is realized through black suffering. It is the humiliated, incarcerated, mutilated, and terrorized black body that serves as the vestibule for the Democracy that is to come. In fact, it almost becomes impossible to think the Political without black suffering. According to this logic, corporeal fracture engenders ontological coherence, in a political arithmetic saturated with violence. Thus, nonviolence is a misnomer, or somewhat of a ruse. Black-sacrifice is necessary to achieve the American dream and its promise of coherence, progress, and equality. We find similar logic in the contemporary moment. Renisha McBride, Jordon Davis, Kody Ingham, Amadou Diallo, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Frederick Jermain Carter, Chavis Carter, Timothy Stansbury, Hadiya Pendleton, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Kendrec McDade, Trayvon Martin, and Mike Brown, among others, constitute a fatal rupture of the Political; these signifiers, stained in blood, refuse the closure that the Political promises. They haunt political discourses of progress, betterment, equality, citizenship, and justice—the metaphysical organization of social existence. We are witnessing a shocking accumulation of injured and mutilated black bodies, particularly young black bodies, which place what seems to be an unanswerable question mark in the political field: if we are truly progressing toward this "society-that-is-to-come (maybe)," why is black suffering increasing at such alarming rates? In response to this inquiry, we are told to keep struggling, keep "hope" alive, and keep the faith. After George Zimmerman was acquitted for murdering Trayvon Martin, President Obama addressed the nation and importuned us to keep fighting for change because "each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes toward race" and, if we work hard enough, we will move closer to "becoming a more perfect union." Despite Martin’s corpse lingering in the minds of young people and Zimmerman’s smile of relief after the verdict, we are told that things are actually getting better. Supposedly, the generation that murdered Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride is much better than the generation that murdered Emmett Till. Black suffering, here, is instrumentalized to accomplish pedagogical, cathartic, and redemptive objectives and, somehow, the growing number of dead black bodies in the twenty-first century is an indication of our progress toward "perfection." Is perfection predicated on black death? How many more ~~End Page 217~~ black bodies must be lynched, mutilated, burned, castrated, raped, dismembered, shot, and disabled before we achieve this "more perfect union"? In many ways, black suffering and death become the premiere vehicles of political perfection and social maturation. This essay argues that the logic of the Political—linear temporality, bio-political futurity, perfection, betterment, and redress—sustains black suffering. Progress and perfection are worked through the pained black body and any recourse to the Political and its discourse of hope will ultimately reproduce the very metaphysical structures of violence that pulverize black being. This piece attempts to rescue black nihilism from discursive and intellectual obliteration; rather than thinking about black nihilism as a set of pathologies in need of treatment, this essay considers black nihilism a necessary philosophical posture capable of unraveling the Political and its devastating logic of political hope. Black nihilism resists emancipatory rhetoric that assumes it is possible to purge the Political of anti-black violence and advances political apostasy as the only "ethical" response to black suffering.
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9 -====Voting negative is to adopt nihilism as the centerpiece to politics – this rupture in the terrain of liberalism's will-to-action finds itself outside the struggle for political representation – In other words, to "hope for the end of political hope". This is the only metaphysically coherent response to the constant slaughter of black bodies ====
10 -**Warren 15** ~~Calvin K., Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University, "Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope," CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015~~ kguy
11 -V. Conclusion
12 -Throughout this essay, I have argued that the Politics of hope preserve metaphysical structures that sustain black suffering. This preservation amounts to an exploitation of hope—when the Political colonizes the spiritual principle of hope and puts it in the service of extending the "will to power" of an anti-black organization of existence. The Politics of hope, then, is bound up with metaphysical violence, and this violence masquerades as a "solution" to the problem of anti-blackness. Temporal linearity, perfection, betterment, struggle, work, and utopian futurity are conceptual instruments of the Political that will never obviate black suffering or anti-black violence; these concepts only serve to reproduce the conditions that render existence unbearable for blacks. Political theologians and black optimists avoid the immediacy of black suffering, the horror of anti-black pulverization, and place relief in a "not-yet-but-is (maybe)-to-come-social order" that, itself, can do little more but admonish blacks to survive to keep struggling. Political hope becomes a vicious and abusive cycle of struggle—it mirrors the Lacanian drive, and we encircle an object (black freedom, justice, relief, redress, equality, etc.) that is inaccessible because it doesn’t really exist. The political theologian and black optimist, then, propose a collective Jouissance as an answer to black suffering—finding the joy in struggle, the victory in toil, and the satisfaction in inefficacious action. We continue to "struggle" and "work" as black youth are slaughtered daily, black bodies are incarcerated as forms of capital, black infant mortality rates are soaring, and hunger is disabling the bodies, minds, and spirits of desperate black youth. In short, these conditions are deep metaphysical problems—the sadistic pleasure of metaphysical domination—and "work" and "struggle" avoid the terrifying fact that the world depends on black death to sustain itself. Black nihilism attempts to break this "drive"—to stop it in its tracks, as it were—and to end the cycle of insanity that political hope perpetuates. The question that remains is a question often put to the black nihilist: what is the point? This compulsory geometrical structuring of thought—all knowledge must submit to, and is reducible to, a point—it is an epistemic flicker of certainty, determination, and, to put it bluntly, life. "The point" exists for life; it enlivens, enables, and sustains knowledge. Thought outside of this mandatory point is illegible and useless. To write outside of the "episteme of life" and its grammar will require a position outside of this point, a position somewhere in the infinite horizon of thought (perhaps this is what Heidegger wanted to do with his reconfiguration of thought). Writing in this way is inherently subversive and refuses the geometry of thought. Nevertheless, the ~~End Page 243~~ nihilist is forced to enunciate his refusal through a "point," a point that is contradictory and paradoxical all at once. To say that the point of this essay is that "the point" is fraudulent—its promise of clarity and life are inadequate—will not satisfy the hunger of disciplining the nihilist and insisting that one undermine the very ground upon which one stands. Black nihilistic hermeneutics resists "the point" but is subjected to it to have one’s voice heard within the marketplace of ideas. The "point" of this essay is that political hope is pointless. Black suffering is an essential part of the world, and placing hope in the very structure that sustains metaphysical violence, the Political, will never resolve anything. This is why the black nihilist speaks of "exploited hope," and the black nihilist attempts to wrest hope from the clutches of the Political. Can we think of hope outside the Political? Must "salvation" translate into a political grammar or a political program? The nihilist, then, hopes for the end of political hope and its metaphysical violence. Nihilism is not antithetical to hope; it does not extinguish hope but reconfigures it. Hope is the foundation of the black nihilistic hermeneutic. In "Blackness and Nothingness," Fred Moten (2013) conceptualizes blackness as a "pathogen" to metaphysics, something that has the ability to unravel, to disable, and to destroy anti-blackness. If we read Vattimo through Moten’s brilliant analysis, we can suggest that blackness is the limit that Heidegger and Nietzsche were really after. It is a "blackened" world that will ultimately end metaphysics, but putting an end to metaphysics will also put an end to the world itself—this is the nihilism that the black nihilist must theorize through. This is a far cry from what we call "anarchy," however. The black nihilist has as little faith in the metaphysical reorganization of society through anarchy than he does in traditional forms of political existence. The black nihilist offers political apostasy as the spiritual practice of denouncing metaphysical violence, black suffering, and the idol of anti-blackness. The act of renouncing will not change political structures or offer a political program; instead, it is the act of retrieving the spiritual concept of hope from the captivity of the Political. Ultimately, it is impossible to end metaphysics without ending blackness, and the black nihilist will never be able to withdraw from the Political completely without a certain death-drive or being-toward-death. This is the essence of black suffering: the lack of reprieve from metaphysics, the tormenting complicity in the reproduction of violence, and the lack of a coherent grammar to articulate these dilemmas.After contemplating these issues for some time in my office, I decided to take a train home. As I awaited my train in the station, an older black woman asked me about the train schedule and when I would expect the next train headed toward Dupont Circle. When I told her the trains were running slowly, she began to talk about the government shutdown. "They don’t care anything about us, you know," she said. "We elect these people into office, we vote for them, and they watch black people suffer and have no intentions of doing anything about it." I shook my head in agreement and listened intently. "I’m going to stop voting, and supporting this process; why should I keep doing this and our people continue to suffer," she said. I looked at her and said, "I don’t know ma’am; I just don’t understand it myself." She then laughed and thanked me for listening to her—as if our conversation were somewhat cathartic. "You know, people think you’re crazy when you say things like this," she said giving me a wink. "Yes they do," I said. "But I am a free woman," she emphasized "and I won’t go back." Shocked, I smiled at her, and she winked at me; at that moment I realized that her wisdom and courage penetrated my mind and demanded answers. I’ve thought about this conversation for some time, and it is for this reason I had to write this essay. To the brave woman at the train station, I must say you are not crazy at all but thinking outside of metaphysical time, space, and violence. Ultimately, we must hope for the end of political hope.
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14 -====The 1AC is constitutive of the politics of hope and in this usage, denaturalizes hope that is directly tied to the spiritual concept of hope that is then exchanged in the political economy as an investment in the spiritual substance in the political which relegates all other forms of hope to the "Outside". This is exposed through blackness and its relation to the political. At the center piece of African American participation is irrational fidelity. Black folks tie to politics and voting is constituted by a historical conscious that makes black folk desire political subjectivity because of those who died for the right to vote, but is anti-ethical rational calculus because black folk get nothing in return through civic engagement. That means the 1AR is too late in its attempt to say that political engagement is good because it only reifies the accumulation of black flesh====
15 -**Warren 15** ~~Calvin K., Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University, "Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope," CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015~~ Kguy
16 -To speak of the "Politics of Hope" is to denaturalize or demystify a certain usage of hope. Here I want to make a distinction between "hope" (the spiritual concept) and "the politics of hope"(political hope). The relationship between the spiritual concept of hope and its use as a political instrument is the focus of the black nihilist critique.2 Following Kant and other postmetaphysical philosophers, the critical field questions (and in some circles completely denounces) a certain spiritual predisposition to the world—that "unknowable" noumenon that limits Reason but provides the condition of possibility for its organization of the world of perception, phenomenon. The problem with the critical questioning of the spiritual is that it often appropriates spiritual concepts and then, insidiously, translates the min to the "scientific" or the knowable, as a way to both capitalize on the mystic power of the spiritual and to preserve the spiritual under the guise of "enlightened understanding." We find this deceptive translation and capitalization of spiritual substance within the sphere of the Political—that organization of social existence through political institutions, mandates, logics, and grammars—as a way to govern and discipline beings. If we think of hope as a spiritual concept—a concept that always escapes confinement within scientific discourse—then we can suggest that hope constitutes a "spiritual currency" that we are given as an inheritance to invest in various aspects of existence. The issue, however, is that there is often a compulsory investment of this spiritual substance in the Political. This is the forced destination of hope—it must end up in the Political and cannot exist outside of it (or any existence of hope "outside" the political subverts, compromises, and destroys hope itself. Like placing a fish out of water. It is as if hope only has intelligibility and efficacy within and through the Political). Put differently, the politics of hope posits that one must have a politics to have hope; politics is the natural habitat of hope itself. To reject hope in a nihilistic way, then, is really to reject the politics of hope, or certain circumscribed and compulsory forms of expressing, practicing, and conceiving of hope. In the essay "A Fidelity to Politics: Shame and the African American Vote in the 2004 Election," Grant Farred (2006) exposes a kernel of irrationality at the center of African American political participation. Traditionally, political participation is motivated by self-interested expectancy; this political calculus assumes that political participation, particularly voting, is an investment with an assurance of a return or political dividend. The structure of the Political—the circular movement between self-interest, action, and reward— is sustained through what Farred calls the "electoral unconscious." It "historicizes the subject in relation to the political in that it determines the horizon of what is possible it maps, through its delimitation or its (relative) lack of limits, what the constituency and its members imagine they can, or, would like to expect from the political" (217). In this way, the electoral unconscious, as the realm of political fantasy, mirrors the Lacanian notion of fantasy; it maps the coordinates of the political subject and teaches it how exactly to desire the Political. For Farred, there is a peculiar logic ("another scene") operating as the motivation for African American participation in the Political. Unlike the traditional political calculus, where action and reward determine civic engagement, African American participation does not follow this rational calculus—because if it did, there would actually be no rational reason for African Americans to vote, given the historicity of voting as an ineffective practice in gaining tangible "objects" for achieving redress, equality, and political subjectivity. African Americans, according to Farred, havean "irrational fidelity" to a practice that, historically, has yielded no concrete transformations of antiblackness. This group is governed not by the "electoral unconscious" but by the "historical conscious," which is the "intense ~~and incessant~~ understanding of how the franchise has been achieved, of its precarious preciseness as well as their (growing) contemporary liminality, their status as marginalized political subjects" (217). African Americans are a faithful voting block not because of voting’s political efficaciousness but as a way to contend with a painful (and shame-full) history of exclusion and disenfranchisement. Political participation becomes an act of historical commemoration and obligation; one votes because someone bled and died for the opportunity to participate, and "duty" and "indebtedness" motivate this partial political subject.Reliance on legality as a metric of progress fuels a violent temporal narrative that materializes the permanency of whiteness – Western common law demands a series of affective attachments to the law, which ensures bodies come to desire the structure that produces violence against them – do you find yourself trapped within the auspices of hope, or do you desire to craft yourself otherwise, affirming the imperceptible politics of refusal. Their arguments about bringing some measure of relief or change constitute cruel optimism —- they rely on a trick of time that retreats to "could be" or "maybe later" —- refusing the blackmail of "doing politics" in a rejection of this trickery
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1 -====The AFFs focus on punishing individual perpetrators of violence obscures the endemic violence of police forces. The use of law only further entrenches a system of violence and allows it to continue going unnoticed under the façade "we curbed qualified immunity" while in reality legalities permissive nature means the AFF can never solve ====
2 -**Feldman 15 **~~(Leonard Feldman, Hunter College, CUNY) "Police Violence and the Legal Temporalities of Immunity"~~ LADI
3 -On the same day the Department of Justice declined to prosecute Ferguson Missouri Officer Darren Wilson for civil rights violations in the shooting death of Michael Brown, it issued a scathing report as part of a "Pattern and Practice" investigation of the entire police force. Concerning the former—the decision not to prosecute—while this paper has focused on the legal grey hole of civil litigation for civil rights violations, it is possible to detect similar forms of legal immunity in the high thresholds for prosecution established by 18 U.S.C. § 242. The legal reasoning overlaps 25 with that in civil litigation because in the criminal cases the courts use the same standard of "objective reasonableness" developed in the civil cases (Graham, Garner, and Scott) to establish that a rights violation occurred. While there is no qualified immunity defense (according to the Supreme Court in Pearson) there is a higher willfulness standard (and "specific intent" requirement) for proving a violation that similarly works to shield police.55 (Campaign Zero, discussed below, recommends eliminating the willfulness standard for Federal Civil Rights prosecutions of police officers.56) Perhaps the Court felt less compelled to erect barriers to criminal prosecutions (as opposed to civil litigation) since it assumed that federal prosecutors’ discretion would accomplish the very same objective. Concerning the latter—the Department of Justice’s report on the entire police force of Ferguson, as well as the complicity of judges and city officials—it offers the promise of constraining police use of force by using the threat of litigation to address broader and deeper policies and practices. As Coates argues, "the focus on the deeds of alleged individual perpetrators, on perceived bad actors, obscures the broad systemic corruption which is really at the root."57 Similarly, Madar writes, "far more useful are the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s root-and-branch interventions into violently dysfunctional police forces, triggered by ‘patterns and practices’ of systematic rights violations rather than any one particular incident."58 Moving beyond both law and sovereignty narrowly construed, enables attention to what Harmon describes as the "problem of regulation" and the role of "other institutions and sources of law in regulating the police."59 As Harmon shows, police use of force is embedded in a dense but also permissive regulatory environment running the gamut from administrative rules to employment and collective 26 bargaining law to state level licensing regulations. Consent decrees, Memoranda of Understanding and Collaborative Agreements all emerge out of or in the shadow of Department of Justice "pattern or practice" investigations, aiming to change policies and practices at the department level. Furthermore, even tools such as quantitative benchmarking can be deployed in the service of structural reform: A DOJ study cited by Rushin of the Washington D.C. police force contrasted what they discovered to be 15 rate of excessive force incidents as compared to a benchmark "‘well-managed and supervised police department’ ~~that~~ should only expect about 1 or 2 percent of all incidents to involve excessive use of force."60 And in Cincinnati, Shatmeier describes successful police department reform in the wake of a Department of Justice "pattern or practice" investigation through consent agreements that relied on "experimentalist regulation."61
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5 -====Legislative solutions just mask social issues and enable victim-blaming====
6 -**Delgado 91** (Richard, Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law, University of Colorado. J.D. 1974, University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall), "Norms and Normal Science: Toward a Critique of Normativity in Legal Thought", University of Pennsylvania Law Review (1991), pp. 933-962, Accessed 7/7/15)//LD
7 -Ordinary life is full of similar examples in which the mere pronouncement of something as normatively good or bad changes our perception of it. The decision in Brown v. Board of Education42 changed the way we thought about minorities. Reagan and Reaganomics changed things back again.43 During war, we demonize our enemies, and thereafter actually see them as grotesque, evil and crafty monsters deserving of their fate on the battlefield.44 Later, during peacetime, they may become our staunch allies once again. Derrick Bell and other Critical Race theorists have been pointing out the way in which standard, liberal-coined civil rights law injures the chances of people of color and solidifies racism.45 According to these writers, one function of our broad system of race-remedies law is to free society of guilt. Although the remedies are ineffective, they enable members of the majority group to point to the array of civil rights statutes and case law which ostensibly assure fair and equal treatment in schools, housing, jobs, and many other areas of life. With all these elaborate antidiscrimination laws on the books, if black people are still poor and unhappy-well, what can be done? The law's condemnation of racism thus enables us to blame the victim, praise ourselves for our liberality, and thereby deepen the dilemma of people of color.46 Repeated assertion has also proved able to change our notions of the proper role of the judiciary. In previous times, courts, such as the Warren Court, undertook to remedy poverty and injustice. This came to be seen as a proper role for judges and lawyers. Recently, conservatives have been asserting the "quieter" virtues of judicial restraint and strict construction. 47 They have prevailed not so much because the argument for judicial quietism is so compelling, but because they have stated it so often, with so much authority and with the power to make it so. Today, most of us see the rare case of an activist judge as quaint, or aberrational, and nod (approvingly?) when we see judicial abstention. Professional societies engage in behavior of this performative sort in an effort to get the public to accept the profession's view of what responsible behavior is, or to see another profession (e.g., lawyers) as responsible for the problems associated with the first profession (e.g., medical malpractice). More instances of this sort are discussed in the next section.
8 -
9 -====Legal reform is a palliative measure that sutures superficial instances of white supremacy while amplifying their underlying causes====
10 -**Spade 13** (Dean, Associate Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law. "Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform" (Summer 2013), Signs vol. 38 no. 4, University of Chicago Press)
11 -Critical race theory brought to legal scholarship a critique of formal legal equality and the discrimination principle, recognizing the failures of civil rights legislation to alleviate the systemic racialized maldistribution of wealth and life chances. The concept of formal legal equality articulates an important disjuncture between the racial neutrality declared by law and the material realities of white supremacy. This disjuncture stems, at least in part, from the inadequacy of the discrimination principle for conceptualizing the conditions of white supremacy. The discrimination principle understands racist harm in such a limited way as to make it exceptionally difficult to prove that a violation of discrimination law has occurred and to make the conditions produced by racism unreachable through discrimination doctrine. Racism is understood through the paradigm of individual discriminators who take race into account when making decisions about activities like hiring, firing, leasing, selling, or serving ðFreeman 1996Þ. In the absence of explicit, intentional exclusion, courts rarely find a violation of discrimination law. Proving that harm was intentional and based on race can be exceptionally dif- ficult, especially when multiple vectors of subjection exist for the affected person or people ðCrenshaw 2008Þ. Moreover, the discrimination principle regards intentional exclusions or preferences based on race as equally harmful whether they harm or benefit people of color. Color blindness is the rationale for this approach. It dehistoricizes racial exclusion and suggests that any individual’s experience of exclusion or preference based on race is equally harmful. It assumes a level playing field in which race consciousness, not white supremacy, is the problem the law must seek to eliminate.1 These features of the discrimination principle have produced troubling results. Programs aimed at remedying racial disparity have been declared illegally discriminatory; meanwhile, antidiscrimination laws have proven to be largely ineffective in addressing even the narrowest version of individual race discrimination. Most people of color who have been denied a job or an apartment cannot produce the required evidence of intent, not to mention that the people for whom such losses will produce the worst consequences likely cannot afford an attorney ðLegal Services Corporation 2009Þ. These people—poor people, people with disabilities, women, queer and trans people, immigrants—are also unlikely to have the kind of single-axis discrimination case that courts and lawyers most easily understand. They are more likely to be facing multiple vectors of exclusion and to be interacting in less formal conditions, such as low-wage contingent labor, which further decreases the chances that there will be a paper trail proving that their experience was the result of discrimination ðRuckelshaus and Goldstein 2002Þ. The most severe conditions produced by white supremacy cannot be addressed or even imagined by antidiscrimination law. Those conditions that do not result from the misdeeds of a perpetrating individual or organization—the broad conditions of maldistribution visible in the United States’s racial wealth divide; extreme racial disparity in access to housing, employment, education, food, and health care; the ongoing occupation and expropriation of native lands; and targeting in criminal punishment, environmental harm, and immigration enforcement—are cast as neutral by the discrimination principle ðGilmore 1998–99; United for a Fair Economy 2006Þ. When racist harm is framed as a problem of aberrant individuals who discriminate and when intention must be proved to find a violation of law, the central conditions of white supremacy are implicitly declared neutral. In the United States, this has been accompanied by a robust discourse that blames people of color for poverty and criminalization, a logical leap required when color blindness has been declared the law of the land and racism has been defined so narrowly as to exclude it from blame in the most widespread adverse conditions facing people of color. Critical race theorists have supplied the concept of "preservation-through-transformation" to describe the neat trick that civil rights law performed in this dynamic ðSiegel 1997, 1119; Harris 2006. In the face of significant resistance to conditions of subjection, law reform tends to provide just enough transformation to stabilize and preserve status quo conditions. In the case of widespread rebellion against white supremacy in the United States, civil rights law and color-blind constitutionalism have operated as formal reforms that mask the perpetuation of the white supremacist status quo. Explicit exclusionary policies and practices became officially forbidden, yet the racialized-gendered maldistribution of life chances in the United States remained the same or worsened with the increasing concentration of wealth and the simultaneous dismantling of social welfare systems ðHarris 2006, 1554–61; United for a Fair Economy 2006).
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14 -====Vote negative to reject reform and to subvert the law – we ought to study the law not to use it, but to free humanity from it====
15 -**De Boever, 2006** (Arne De Boever, Professor of American Studies at the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, Overhearing Bartleby: Agamben, Melville, and Inoperative Power, Parrhesia Number 1, 2006, 142-162)
16 -According to Agamben, we should aim to study the law in order to deactivate it. He refers to this study as a kind of play: "One day," he writes teleiopoetically, "humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but free them from it for good."42 As will be clear, there is no contradiction in the passage I just quoted between messianism and secularism. The perspective is decidedly postsecular: instead, the puppet of historical materialism has the dwarf of theology within; but once the puppet starts moving, and we begin to play the game of chess (which is, after all, a game of sovereignty) this materialist-theological activity is overcome into the messianic or postsecular thought of inoperativity. It is interesting to note that in The Time that Remains, Agamben cites a poem as a "concrete example" of messianic time.43 The poem, a sestina by Arnaut Daniel, is presented by Agamben as "an organism or a temporal machine that, from the very start, strains toward its end."44 Thus, "~~a~~ kind of eschatology occurs within the poem itself." But this is not what Agamben is after. He notes that "for the more or less brief time that the poem lasts, it has a specific and unmistakable temporality"45 that is different from the time of the eschaton. This other time is produced, Agamben argues, by the peculiar formal characteristics of the poem: What is peculiar to the sestina is that the status of the repeated end words changes, in the sense that the homophony of the final syllables that you typically get in rhymed poems, is replaced by the reappearance of the six end words in the six stanzas, in a complex but equally regulated order. At the end, the tornada recapitulates the end words by dispersing them within its three lines ~~translation slightly modified~~.46 This will ultimately lead into a grand hypothesis formulated at the end of the fourth chapter: that rhyme is "the messianic heritage that Paul leaves to modern poetry."47 Whether we agree with this or not, it is important to point out that Agamben’s example of messianic time, which also contains his solution to the problematic link between sovereignty and bare life that he criticizes in Homo Sacer, is a poem. This illustrates the larger argument that I have been making in these pages, namely that Agamben’s thought is crucially a literary-political thought. It is a literary thought that, in its political force, cannot be articulated within the limits of political science. Thus, it oscillates between the literary and the political and demands to be studied comparatively, across the disciplines. Such a comparative study would not realize the destruction of disciplines, but rather their deactivation and inactivity, their inoperativity. As I have argued above, the task of thinking inoperativity is a task that concerns us all. In contemporary situation that is dominated by the conflictual binary oppositions of a Schmittian concept of the political, we have all taken position in between beings-withrights and beings-without-rights, Jews and non-Jews, Muslims and non-Muslims, terrorists and non-terrorists, Benjamin scholars and non-Benjamin scholars, Agamben scholars and non-Agamben scholars – we have all become non-non-Agamben scholars. In a world in which we are all non-non-terrorists (how else to describe myself when my phone-calls may be tape-recorded even though I am not a terrorist?), the thought of inoperativity can present itself as a powerful alternative to power’s abuse of the state of exception. But is this thought of inoperativity also more than a thought? What would a practice of inoperativity look like? Who would be its agents? There is Bartleby, of course, who resists any easy appropriation into the either/or of legal divisions. There is Toshevski, whose Free Territory-project unworks the state of Macedonia by creating zones in which free creative performance activists are invited to think the law as freedom. There is Agamben, also, who in a January 2004 article entitled "No to Bio-Political Tattooing"48 announced (much to my dismay!) that he had cancelled the course he was scheduled to teach at New York University later that same year that required whoever wants to go to the United States with a visa to be fingerprinted and photographed when they enter the country. In February 2006, a letter was published in the New York Review of Books, 49 in which a group of scholars of constitutional law and former government officials (Ronald Dworkin, Kathleen M. Sullivan, and others) expressed their concern about how the Bush administration’s National Security Agency’s domestic spying program violated existing law. Finally, I want to bring to your attention an extremely interesting case, dating from 1990, which shows that inoperativity can also be practiced by the sovereign him/herself. When King Baudouin of Belgium was faced with giving his assent to a bill that would liberalize Belgium’s abortion laws, he explained that he was unwilling to give official endorsement to what he found personally objectionable. (Baudouin was deeply religious; he and his wife Queen Fabiola did not have children.) Instead, he chose to abdicate his throne on the day he was expected to sign the bill. A state of exception was declared; the law was passed. The following day, Baudouin went back to work. These "extraordinary" (as Kalyvas would have it)50 acts of subversion, whether they are committed before, within, or next to the law, show how the thought of inoperativity can also be a political practice.
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1 -2016-11-28 20:48:43.0
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1 -Breann Smith, Jennifer Neely, Dawn Paciotti
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1 -Colleyville Heritage CW
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1 -12
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1 -Semis
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1 -Southlake Carroll Patel Neg
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1 -1- Legalism K
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1 -Hockaday
Caselist.RoundClass[11]
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1 -13
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1 -2016-11-20 19:37:32.0
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1 -Isis Davis-Marks
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1 -Strake Jesuit VL
Round
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1 -6
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1 -1AC Accountability
2 -NC Black Nihilism K Case
3 -NR K
Tournament
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1 -Glenbrooks
Caselist.RoundClass[12]
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1 -14
EntryDate
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1 -2016-11-28 20:48:41.0
Judge
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1 -Breann Smith, Jennifer Neely, Dawn Paciotti
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1 -Colleyville Heritage CW
Round
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1 -Semis
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1 -1AC SV
2 -NC Legalism K Turns
3 -NRK and Turns
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1 -Hockaday
Caselist.RoundClass[13]
EntryDate
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1 -2016-11-28 20:52:59.682
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1 -Aisha Bawany, Dawn Paciotti, Breann Smith
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1 -Cedar Park MT
Round
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1 -Finals
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2 -NC Wynter K Turns
3 -NR Wynter
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1 -Hockaday

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