Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[0]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[0]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[0]

EntryDate

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1		-2016-10-29 17:33:53.506
	1	+2016-10-29 17:33:53.0

Caselist.CitesClass[0]

Cites

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,27 @@
	1	+Framework
	2	+Morality must start from the non-ideal circumstances we have inherited. We can never achieve the ideal consequences that ethical theories aspire for without a focus on social reality
	3	+Mills 05 Charles W. Mills, “Ideal Theory” as Ideology, 2005
	4	+I suggest that this spontaneous reaction, far from being philosophically naïve or jejune, is in fact the correct one. If we start from what is presumably the uncontroversial premise that the ultimate point of ethics is to guide our actions and make ourselves better people and the world a better place, then the framework above will not only be unhelpful, but will in certain respects be deeply antithetical to the proper goal of theoretical ethics as an enterprise. In modeling humans, human capacities, human interaction, human institutions, and human society on ideal-as-idealized-models, in never exploring how deeply different this is from ideal-as-descriptive-models, we are abstracting away from realities crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice in human interactions and social institutions, and thereby guaranteeing that the ideal-as-idealized-model will never be achieved.
	5	+This approach to ethics justifies focus on resolving material conditions of violence. Morality isn’t just something that we strive for in a vaccum, rather, we resolve it based on the empirical world. Pappas 16
	6	+Gregory Fernando Pappas Texas AandM University “The Pragmatists’ Approach to Injustice”, The Pluralist Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2016,
	7	+In Experience and Nature, Dewey names the empirical way of doing philosophy the “denotative method” (LW 1:371).18 What Dewey means by “denotation” is simply the phase of an empirical inquiry where we are con- cerned with designating, as free from theoretical presuppositions as possible, the concrete problem (subject matter) for which we can provide different and even competing descriptions and theories. Thus an empirical inquiry about an injustice must begin with a rough and tentative designation of where the injustices from within the broader context of our everyday life and activities are. Once we designate the subject matter, we then engage in the inquiry itself, including diagnosis, possibly even constructing theories and developing concepts. Of course, that is not the end of the inquiry. We must then take the results of that inquiry “as a path pointing and leading back to something in primary experience” (LW 1:17). This looping back is essential, and it neverends as long as there are new experiences of injustice that may require a revi- sion of our theories.¶ Injustices are events suffered by concrete people at a particular time and in a situation. We need to start by pointing out and describing these proble-matic experiences instead of starting with a theoretical account or diagnosis of them. Dewey is concerned with the consequences of not following the methodological advice to distinguish designation from diagnosis. Definitions, theoretical criteria, and diagnosis can be useful; they have their proper place and function once inquiry is on its way, but if stressed too much at the start of inquiry, they can blind us to aspects of concrete problems that escape our theoretical lenses. We must attempt to pretheoretically designate the subject matter, that is, to “point” in a certain direction, even with a vague or crude description of the problem. But, for philosophers, this task is not easy because, for instance, we are often too prone to interpret the particular problem in a way that verifies our most cherished theories of injustice. One must be careful to designate the subject matter in such a way as not to slant the question in favor of one’s theory or theoretical preconceptions. A philosopher must make an honest effort to designate the injustices based on what is experienced as such because a concrete social problem (e.g., injustice) is independent and neutral with respect to the different possible competing diagnoses or theories about its causes. Otherwise, there is no way to test or adjudicate between competing accounts.¶ That designation precedes diagnosis is true of any inquiry that claims to be empirical. To start with the diagnosis is to not start with the problem. The problem is pretheoretical or preinquiry, not in any mysterious sense but in that it is first suffered by someone in a particular context. Otherwise, the diagnosis about the causes of the problem has nothing to be about, and the inquiry cannot even be initiated. In his Logic, Dewey lays out the pattern of all empirical inquiries (LW 12). All inquiries start with what he calls an “indeterminate situation,” prior even to a “problematic situation.” Here is a sketch of the process:¶ Indeterminate situation → problematic situation → diagnosis: What is the problem? What is the solution? (operations of analysis, ideas, observations, clarification, formulating and testing hypothesis, reasoning, etc.) → final judgment (resolution: determinate situation)¶ To make more clear or vivid the difference of the starting point between Anderson and Dewey, we can use the example (or analogy) of medical prac- tice, one that they both use to make their points.19 The doctor’s startingpoint is the experience of a particular illness of a particular patient, that is, the concrete and unique embodied patient experiencing a disruption or prob- lematic change in his life. “The patient having something the matter with him is antecedent; but being ill (having the experience of illness) is not the same as being an object of knowledge.”20 The problem becomes an object of knowledge once the doctor engages in a certain interaction with the patient, analysis, and testing that leads to a diagnosis. For Dewey, “diagnosis” occurs when the doctor is already engaged in operations of experimental observation in which he is already narrowing the field of relevant evidence, concerned with the correlation between the nature of the problem and possible solu- tions. Dewey explains the process: “A physician . . . is called by a patient. His original material of experience is thereby provided. This experienced object sets the problem of inquiry. . . . He calls upon his store of knowledge to sug- gest ideas that may aid him in reaching a judgment as to the nature of the trouble and its proper treatment.”21¶ Just as with the doctor, empirical inquirers about injustice must return to the concrete problem for testing, and should never forget that their con- ceptual abstractions and general knowledge are just means to ameliorate what is particular, context-bound, and unique. In reaching a diagnosis, the doc- tor, of course, relies on all of his background knowledge about diseases and evidence, but a good doctor never forgets the individuality of the particular problem (patient and illness).¶ The physician in diagnosing a case of disease deals with something in- dividualized. He draws upon a store of general principles of physiology, etc., already at his command. Without this store of conceptual material he is helpless. But he does not attempt to reduce the case to an exact specimen of certain laws of physiology and pathology, or do away with its unique individuality. Rather he uses general statements as aids to direct his observation of the particular case, so as to discover what it is like. They function as intellectual tools or instrumentalities. (LW 4:166)¶ Dewey uses the example of the doctor to emphasize the radical contex- tualism and particularism of his view. The good doctor never forgets that this patient and “this ill is just the specific ill that it is. It never is an exact duplicate of anything else.”22 Similarly, the empirical philosopher in her in- quiry about an injustice brings forth general knowledge or expertise to an inquiry into the causes of an injustice. She relies on sociology and history as well as knowledge of different forms of injustice, but it is all in the service of inquiry about the singularity of each injustice suffered in a situation.¶ The correction or refinement that I am making to Anderson’s character- ization of the pragmatists’ approach is not a minor terminological or scholarly point; it has methodological and practical consequences in how we approach an injustice. The distinction between the diagnosis and the problem (the ill- ness, the injustice) is an important functional distinction that must be kept in inquiry because it keeps us alert to the provisional and hypothetical aspect of any diagnosis. To rectify or improve any diagnosis, we must return to the concrete problem; as with the patient, this may require attending as much as possible to the uniqueness of the problem. This is in the same spirit as Aon’s preference for an empirical inquiry that tries to “capture all of the expressive harms” in situations of injustice. But this requires that we begin with and return to concrete experiences of injustice and not by starting with a diagnosis of the causes of injustice provided by studies in the social sciences, as in (5) above. For instance, a diagnosis of causes that are due to systematic, structural features of society or the world disregards aspects of the concrete experiences of injustice that are not systematic and structural.¶ Making problematic situations of injustice our explicit methodological commitment as a starting point rather than a diagnosis of the problem is an important and useful imperative for nonideal theories. It functions as a directive to inquirers toward the problem, to locate it, and designate it before venturing into descriptions, diagnosis, analysis, clarifications, hypotheses, and reasoning about the problem. These operations are instrumental to its ame- lioration and must ultimately return (be tested) by the problem that sparked the inquiry. The directive can make inquirers more attentive to the complex ways in which such differences as race, culture, class, or gender intersect in a problem of injustice. Sensitivity to complexity and difference in matters of injustice is not easy; it is a very demanding methodological prescription because it means that no matter how confident we may feel about applying solutions designed to ameliorate systematic evil, our cures should try to address as much as possible the unique circumstances of each injustice. The analogy with medical inquiry and practice is useful in making this point, since the hope is that someday we will improve our tools of inquiry to prac- tice a much more personalized medicine than we do today, that is, provide a diagnosis and a solution specific to each patient.
	8	+Thus, the standard is resolving material conditions of violence. Prefer additionally:
	9	+First, recognizing and combatting the structures of racism is a pre-condition to making ethical action possible- even if your ethic is true in the abstract, we need the AC framework first. Memmi 2K
	10	+Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism, Translated by Steve Martinot, p. 163-165 2000
	11	+The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animosity to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is ‘the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsels respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall.” says the Bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal—indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.
	12	+Second, the standard outweighs on actor specificity. Government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests
	13	+Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70 It is a fundamental feature of political philosophy to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy belongs to ethics, which is practical, for it both reflects on practical knowledge and aims at action. Therefore, it is not only normative, but must consider the concrete conditions of realization. The rationale of political institutions and action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political philosophy which would abstract from the conditions of realizability would be trying to establish norms for realizing the “idea of the good” or of “the just” (as Plato, in fact, tried to do in his Republic). Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political philosophy must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, historical experiences and the corresponding knowledge of the proper logic of the political. 14 Briefly: political philosophy is not metaphysics, which contemplates the necessary order of being, but practical philosophy, which deals with partly contingent matters and aims at action. Moreover, unlike moral norms in general—natural law included,—which rule the actions of a person—“my acting” and pursuing the good—, the logic of the political is characterized by acts like framing institutions and establishing legal rules by which not only personal actions but the actions of a multitude of persons are regulated by the coercive force of state power, and by which a part of citizens exercises power over others. Political actions are, thus, both actions of the whole of the body politic and referring to the whole of the community of citizens. 15 Unless we wish to espouse a platonic view according to which some persons are by nature rulers while others are by nature subjects, we will stick to the Aristotelian differentiation between the “domestic” and the “political” kind of rule 16 : unlike domestic rule, which is over people with a common interest and harmoniously striving after the same good despotism and, therefore, according to Aristotle is essentially “despotic,” political rule is exercised over free persons who represent a plurality of interests and pursue, in the common context of the polis, different goods. The exercise of such political rule, therefore, needs justification and is continuously in search of consent among those who are ruled, but who potentially at the same time are also the rulers.
	14	+Plan Resolved: The United States should limit the qualified immunity of police officers using the following parameters. Bernick 15 Evan Bernick, https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ Simply put, qualified immunity has to go. It should be replaced with a rule of strict liability for bona fide constitutional violations. There are a variety of possible rules. First, police officers could be held personally liable for any rights violations. They’d need to carry personal malpractice insurance, just like lawyers, doctors, and other professionals. Insurance companies are qualified and motivated judges of risk, and they would provide another reasonable level of scrutiny on police conduct, policies, and training. Second, police departments could be held liable for any rights violations by officers and punitive damages could be assessed against individual officers for particularly outrageous conduct. Third, police departments could be required to insure officers up to a certain amount — officers would have to purchase insurance to cover any costs in excess of that amount. As ambitious as these reforms might seem, never underestimate the power of widespread public outrage. In the case of Kelo, the Court’s cavalier treatment of property rights led to a number of laws protecting citizens from eminent domain abuse in states across the country. Here, too, the public can force legislators to respond. The question of how to ensure that officers exercise the authority delegated to them with the proper vigor, while also keeping them within the limits of that authority, should be left in the first instance to elected officials — subject to constitutional limits and the requirements of valid federal laws (like Section 1983). Qualified immunity enables officers to flout those limits and those laws. We must replace the judicially-invented impunity that police officers currently enjoy with a realistic avenue for the vindication of constitutional rights. Advantage Qualified immunity destroys accountability for police officers-limitations are key. Bernick 15 Evan Bernick, https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/
	15	+The sad fact is that it is often effectively impossible to hold police officers accountable for unconstitutional acts. That fact is attributable in large part to a potent well of unchecked power that many Americans have never heard of. You will not find it in the Constitution. You will not find it in any federal law. It is a judge-made doctrine, invented by the Supreme Court. It is called qualified immunity. And if those charged with enforcing the law are to be kept within the bounds of their rightful authority, it must be abolished. Section 1983, the federal law that allows citizens to sue for constitutional violations, is broad, unequivocal, and unambiguous. It says that “every person” who is acting “under color of” law who causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws” “shall be liable to the party injured.” Section 1983 embodies a foundational principle of justice that resonates with Americans who have never heard of Marbury v. Madison: where there is a right, there is a remedy.But for decades, we have had rights without remedies. In the 1967 case of Pierson v. Ray, the Supreme Court held that police officers sued for constitutional violations can raise “qualified immunity” as a defense, and thereby escape paying out of their own pockets, even if they violated a person’s constitutional rights. This decision was unabashedly policy-oriented: it was thought that government officials would not vigorously fulfill their obligations if they could be held accountable for actions taken in good faith. Under current law, the general rule is that victims of rights violations pay the costs of their own injuries. In practice, qualified immunity provides a near-absolute defense to all but the most outrageous conduct. The Ninth Circuit has held that throwing a flash-bang grenade “blindly” into a house, injuring a toddler, isn’t outrageous enough. Just last year, in Plumhoff v. Rickard, the Supreme Court decided that firing 15 bullets at a motorist is a reasonable method to end the driver’s flight from the police. So much for “every person” “shall be liable.” Qualified immunity shields police misconduct not only from liability but also from meaningful judicial scrutiny. Private lawsuits are an essential tool in uncovering the truth about police misconduct. The discovery process can yield information that makes broader policy changes within police departments possible. At trial, judicial engagement — an impartial, evidence-based determination of the constitutionality of the officer’s actions — can take place. And, the link to impacts is massive- hundreds of deaths occur yearly yet almost 98 percent of police do not face consequences for their actions. Wong 15 Kathleen Wong, 2015, 10 Police Brutality Statistics that are Absolutely Shocking, https://mic.com/articles/129981/10-police-brutality-statistics-that-are-absolutely-shocking#.779kZJJJC
	16	+6. The Guardian's The Counted project, which crowdsources and reports on police deaths, analyzed the first half of 2015 to find that an average of three people were killed daily during that time.  7. Mapping Police Violence found that black people living in Oklahoma were six times more likely to be killed by police than in Georgia. 8. It also found 98 of these events did not end with an officer being charged with a crime.
	17	+Allowing police violence perpetuates systems of racism in the squo. Hadden et al 16 (Bernadette R. Hadden, MSW, PHD, is Assistant professor in the MSW program at Hunter College School of Social Work New York. Willie Tolliver, PhD. Associate Professor at Silberman School of Social Work. Fabienne Snowden PHD. Professor at Hunter College School of Social Work. and Robyn Brown Manning, PHD. Professor at Hunter College School of Social "An authentic discourse: Recentering race and racism as factors that contribute to police violence against unarmed Black or African American men, Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment" http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10911359.2015.1129252#abstract) Police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men are occurring at alarming rates (Wihbey, 2014) and are indicative of a national trend of excessive force used by law enforcement agents on the bodies of people of color (American Civil Liberties Union ACLU, 2014). These incidents are happening inside and outside of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods (Carroll and Gonzalez, 2014), to low-income and middle-class Blacks or African Americans (Jones-Brown, 2009), and are frequently the result of routine encounters (ACLU, 2014). One of several challenges in obtaining an accurate count of the number of the police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men in the United States is that there are no nationally consistent measures of collecting these data (Department of Justice, 2015). This lack of standardized reporting, accompanied by public outrage, civil unrest, and community activism, calls for investigations into, and law enforcement reporting of, fatal police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men. Suggestions of racial profiling in police shootings have been presented as an explanation of the phenomenon of the disproportionate shooting of unarmed Black or African American men by law enforcement agents (Amajor, Sandars, and Pitts, 1999). In 2007 researchers found that in 10 of the United States’s largest cities, Blacks or African Americans were overly represented among victims of police shootings (Lowerstein, 2007). These findings were most visible in New York City, Las Vegas, and San Diego (Lowerstein, 2007). At a 2010 hearing calling for the investigation of police-involved shootings in Oakland, California, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reported that from 2004 and 2008, 37 of the 45 police shootings in that city were at Black or African American suspects (Bulwa, 2010). A report from the New York City Police Department (NYCPD) illustrates that between 2000 and 2013, 97 Blacks or African Americans, 41 Hispanics, and 21 Whites were killed by NYPD police officers (NYCPD, 2014). In other words, from 2000 to 2013, more Blacks or African Americans were killed by NYCPD weapon discharges than Latinos and Whites combined. These reports identify and document the phenomenon of Black or African American men being shot and/ or killed by police officers, despite the limitations in data tracking police shootings (Graham, 2015). However, they do not inform us of the incidence or prevalence of this phenomenon Qualified immunity is structurally violent- it forces deliberation to occur through the interpretation of the oppressor, as opposed to allowing contestation of these views in court. Senkel 99 ( Tara. Attorney in New York. Civilians Often Need Protection From the Police: Let's Handcuff Police Brutality 15 N.Y.L. Sch. J. Hum. Rts. 385 (1998-1999). http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?public=falseandhandle=hein.journals/nylshr15andpage=385andcollection=journals#)
	18	+While victims of police brutality can bring an action under section 1983217 against the police officer and the municipality, the police officer and municipality are each subject to liability under two different theories.218 Police officers are found liable iUnder the statute if, "while acting under color of state law, their actions violate a person's constitutional rights. 219 Municipalities are not liable under the theory of respondeat superior, but may be found liable if the police officer's conduct follows an official policy or practice of the municipality.220 There are differences between an action brought against a police officer and an action brought against a municipality, such as the defenses that can be asserted.2 Once a victim brings an excessive force claim against a police officer under section 1983, the officer may assert a defense of qualified immunity.222 In Graham, the Supreme Court did not address the issue of qualified immunity in Fourth Amendment excessive force claims. 223 However, the Court did discuss the qualified immunity defense in Harlow v. Fitzgerald. 224 In Harlow, A. Ernest Fitzgerald sued Bryce Harlow and Alexander Butterfield, Richard Nixon's White House aides, alleging they had been involved in a conspiracy to violate his constitutional and statutory rights.225 The Court held that the aides were protected by a qualified immunity. 226 The Court stated that: Bare allegations of malice should not suffice to subject governmental officials either to the costs of trial or to the burdens of broad-reaching discovery. We therefore hold that government officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not clearly violate, established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. 227 The Court went on to state that by defining the limits of the qualified immunity doctrine in objective terms, it was not authorizing lawless conduct.228 Rather, the objective reasonableness of an official's acts protects the public interest by discouraging unlawful conduct and compensating victims. 229 If an official could be expected to know that an act would violate statutory or constitutional rights, the officer should not perform the act, and if a person was injured by the act, that person should have a cause of action. 230 However, if the official's duties require action be taken in which clearly established rights are not involved, "the public interest may be better served by action taken 'with independence and without fear of consequences.' 231 The objective reasonableness standard was also used in Anderson v. Creighton.232 In Anderson, FBI agent Russell Anderson was working with other law enforcement officers involved in a warrantless search of Robert Creighton's home.233 The search was performed because the FBI agent believed that a bank robbery suspect might be in the house.2 34 Creighton brought an action in state court against Anderson, asserting a Fourth Amendment violation.235 Anderson removed the suit to federal court and then filed a motion for summary judgment, contending the claim was barred by his qualified immunity.236 However, the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit denied Anderson's motion, finding that Creighton demonstrated that Anderson violated Creighton's right to be protected from warrantless searches of his home. An exception from this constitutional right, the court noted, was if officers have probable cause or in situations where there are exigent circumstances.237 The U.S. Supreme Court reversed, stating that it was concerned about the test of "clearly established law"238 because if the test were applied to cases at this level of generality, it would not have any relationship to the "objective legal reasonableness., 239 The Court also stated that plaintiffs would be able to change the rule of qualified immunity "into a rule of virtually unqualified liability of government agents by alleging a violation of extremely abstract rights." 240 The right must be clear enough that a reasonable governmental official would know that his conduct violates that right. 241 The question that must be asked is an objective, albeit fact specific one, whether a reasonable officer would violate others rights or could find that Anderson's search was lawful, "in light of clearly established law and the information the searching officers possessed.' '242 The court found that Anderson's "subjective belief about the search were irrelevant." 243 Furthermore,. in Owens v. City of Independence,244 the Court held that a municipality cannot allege a qualified immunity defense. The Court stated that "many victims of municipal malfeasance would be left remediless if the city were also allowed to assert a good-faith defense." 245 Therefore, a municipality can only escape liability if it claims that a constitutional violation did not occur or that the police officer was not acting in good faith "pursuant to a policy, practice, or custom of the municipality. 246 Thus, if a police brutality victim brings an action against the police officer and municipality under section 1983, the Court will examine the claim under the Fourth Amendment and its reasonable standard to determine whether the police officer's conduct was excessive or unreasonable. Although police officers may assert a qualified immunity defense to the claim, municipalities are not afforded this defense. Reform is possible and can lead to actual change- this is proven empirically. Bernick 15 Evan Bernick, https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ As ambitious as these reforms might seem, never underestimate the power of widespread public outrage. In the case of Kelo, the Court’s cavalier treatment of property rights led to a number of laws protecting citizens from eminent domain abuse in states across the country. Here, too, the public can force legislators to respond.
	19	+Limiting qualified immunity creates a good form of recourse in the law- also means CP’s don’t solve the aff if their policies cannot specifically allow these voices to be heard. Wright 15
	20	+ (Journalist and PHD in Law. "Want to Fight Police Misconduct? Reform Qualified Immunity." http://abovethelaw.com/2015/11/want-to-fight-police-misconduct-reform-qualified-immunity/) In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly established law, of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a constitutional violation there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid liability — will avoid accountability. To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this needs to change. And change should begin with an act of Congress rolling back qualified immunity. Removing the “clearly established” element of qualified immunity would be a good start — after all, shouldn’t it be enough to deviate from a basic standard of care, to engage in conduct that a reasonable officer would know is illegal, without having to show that that conduct’s illegality has already been clearly established in the courts? That’s just a start. There are plenty of other reforms that could open up civil rights lawsuits and help ensure police accountability for bad conduct. Two posts (one, two) at Balkinization by City University of New York professor Lynda Dodd provide a good overview. Campaign Zero should consider adding civil rights litigation reform to its platform, our policymakers should consider making civil rights litigation more robust, and, if we want to see justice done, we should push to make it happen.
	21	+Police are increasingly militarized in the squo- safety turns have no uniqueness and are empirically denied. ACLU 14
	22	+ (American Civil Liberties Union. "War Comes Home The Excessive Militarization of American Policing." https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/jus14-warcomeshome-report-web-rel1.pdf) American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized.10 For decades, the federal government has equipped state and local law enforcement agencies with military weapons and vehicles, as well as military tactical training, for the (often explicit) purpose of waging the War on Drugs. Not all communities are equally impacted by this phenomenon; the disproportionate impact of the War on Drugs in communities of color has been well documented.11 Police militarization can result in tragedy for both civilians and police officers, escalate the risks of needless violence, cause the destruction of personal property, and undermine civil liberties. The plan is a good middle ground. The answer to any violence is not to remove police officers, but to better regulate them. U.S.D.J 03 ("Principles of Good Policing: Avoiding Violence Between Police and Citizens" Community Relations Service https://www.justice.gov/archive/crs/pubs/principlesofgoodpolicingfinal092003.pdf) The best way to ensure that police officers conduct themselves properly in the performance of their duties is to set reasonable policies and then establish effective procedures for internal review and sanctions. But, as indicated above, the system for handling citizen complaints must be one in which all citizens have confidence. Nor can the principle be ignored that the police department is a public service agency which ultimately must be accountable to the citizens. An increasing number of cities in which citizens have lost confidence in the internal review process have tried various configurations of civilian oversight mechanisms or civilian overview boards with mixed results. Impact Framing C – 1:40 for Impact/Method Framing High magnitude focus precludes debate’s potential to discuss meaningful systematic issues - Assume DA’s have a 1 risk before I answer them, low risk is no risk. Cohn 13 Nate, staff writer for The New Republic , Improving the Norms and Practices of Policy Debate, 2013, http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/topic
	23	+So let me offer another possibility: the problem isn’t the topic, but modern policy debate. The unrealistic scenarios, exclusive focus on policy scholarship, and inability to engage systemic impacts and philosophical questions. And so long as these problems characterize modern policy debate, teams will feel compelled to avoid it. It might be tempting to assign the blame to “USFG should.” But these are bugs, not features of plan-focused, USFG-based, active voice topics. These bugs result from practices and norms that were initially and independently reasonable, but ultimately and collectively problematic. I also believe that these norms can and should be contested. I believe it would be possible for me to have a realistic, accessible, and inclusive discussion about the merits of a federal policy with, say, Amber Kelsie. Or put differently, I’m not sure I agree with Jonah that changing the topic is the only way to avoid being “a bunch of white folks talking about nuke war.” The fact that policy debate is wildly out of touch—the fact that we are “a bunch of white folks talking about nuclear war”—is a damning indictment of nearly every coach in this activity. It’s a serious indictment of the successful policy debate coaches, who have been content to continue a pedagogically unsound game, so long as they keep winning. It’s a serious indictment of policy debate’s discontents who chose to disengage. That’s not to say there hasn’t been any effort to challenge modern policy debate on its own terms—just that they’ve mainly come from the middle of the bracket and weren’t very successful, focusing on morality arguments and various “predictions bad” claims to outweigh. Judges were receptive to the sentiment that disads were unrealistic, but negative claims to specificity always triumphed over generic epistemological questions or arguments about why “predictions fail.” The affirmative rarely introduced substantive responses to the disadvantage, rarely read impact defense. All considered, the negative generally won a significant risk that the plan resulted in nuclear war. Once that was true, it was basically impossible to win that some moral obligation outweighed the (dare I say?) obligation to avoid a meaningful risk of extinction. There were other problems. Many of the small affirmatives were unstrategic—teams rarely had solvency deficits to generic counterplans. It was already basically impossible to win that some morality argument outweighed extinction; it was totally untenable to win that a moral obligation outweighed a meaningful risk of extinction; it made even less sense if the counterplan solved most of the morality argument. The combined effect was devastating: As these debates are currently argued and judged, I suspect that the negative would win my ballot more than 95 percent of the time in a debate between two teams of equal ability.But even if a “soft left” team did better—especially by making solvency deficits and responding to the specifics of the disadvantage—I still think they would struggle. They could compete at the highest levels, but, in most debates, judges would still assess a small, but meaningful risk of a large scale conflict, including nuclear war and extinction. The risk would be small, but the “magnitude” of the impact would often be enough to outweigh a higher probability, smaller impact. Or put differently: policy debate still wouldn’t be doesn’t replicateing areal world policy assessment, teams reading small affirmatives would still be at a real disadvantage with respect to reality. Why? Oddly, this is the unreasonable result of a reasonable part of debate: the burden of refutation or rejoinder, the responsibility of debaters to “beat” arguments. If I introduce an argument, it starts out at 100 percent—you then have to disprove it. That sounds like a pretty good idea in principle, right? Well, I think so too. But it’s really tough to refute something down to “zero” percent—a team would need to completely and totally refute an argument. That’s obviously tough to do, especially since the other team is usually going to have some decent arguments and pretty good cards defending each component of their disadvantage—even the ridiculous parts. So one of the most fundamental assumptions about debate all but ensures a meaningful risk of nearly any argument—even extremely low-probability, high magnitude impacts, sufficient to outweigh systemic impacts. There’s another even more subtle element of debate practice at play. Traditionally, the 2AC might introduce 8 or 9 cards against a disadvantage, like “non-unique, no-link, no-impact,” and then go for one and two. Yet in reality, disadvantages are underpinned by dozens or perhaps hundreds of discrete assumptions each of which could be contested. By the end of the 2AR, only a handful are under scrutiny; the majority of the disadvantage is conceded, and it’s tough to bring the one or two scrutinized components down to “zero.” And then there’s a bad understanding of probability. If the affirmative questions four or five elements of the disadvantage, but the negative was still “clearly ahead” on all five elements, most judges would assess that the negative was “clearly ahead” on the disadvantage. In reality, the risk of the disadvantage has been reduced considerably. If there was, say, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform would pass, an 80 percent chance that political capital was key, an 80 percent chance that the plan drained a sufficient amount of capital, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform was necessary to prevent another recession, and an 80 percent chance that another recession would cause a nuclear war (lol), then there’s a 32 percent chance that the disadvantage caused nuclear war. I think these issues can be overcome. First, I think teams can deal with the “burden of refutation” by focusing on the “burden of proof,” which allows a team to mitigate an argument before directly contradicting its content. Here’s how I’d look at it: modern policy debate has assumed that arguments start out at “100 percent” until directly refuted. But few, if any, arguments are supported by evidence consistent with “100 percent.” Most cards don’t make definitive claims. Even when they do, they’re not supported by definitive evidence—and any reasonable person should assume there’s at least some uncertainty on matters other than few true facts, like 2+2=4. Take Georgetown’s immigration uniqueness evidence from Harvard. It says there “may be a window” for immigration. So, based on the negative’s evidence, what are the odds that immigration reform will pass? are Far less than 50 percent, if you ask me. That’s not always true for every card in the 1NC, but sometimes it’s even worse—like the impact card, which is usually a long string of “coulds.” If you apply this very basic level of analysis to each element of a disadvantage, and correctly explain math results in (.4*.4*.4*.4*.4=.01024), the risk of the disadvantage starts at a very low level, even before the affirmative offers a direct responses. Debaters should also argue that the negative hasn’t introduced any evidence at all to defend a long list of unmentioned elements in the “internal link chain.” The absence of evidence to defend the argument that, say, “recession causes depression,” may not eliminate the disadvantage, but it does raise uncertainty—and it doesn’t take much more too many additional sources of uncertainty to reduce the probability of the disadvantage to effectively zero—sort of the static, background noise of prediction.
	24	+To say that the “aff is a bad idea” because it causes white people to backlash and vote for Trump deflects blame and locks us into the status quo. Politics scenarios just re-entrench anti-blackness and inhibit the struggle for freedom. King 63 (Martin Luther King Jr. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail King, Jr." April 1963 AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA) I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward of freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. "I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured." "In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning of time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: stating "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability;; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity."Method Framing The state is inevitable- policymaking is the only way to create change. Coverstone 05 Alan Coverstone (masters in communication from Wake Forest, longtime debate coach) “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact” Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference November 17th 2005 Powerful personal narratives unconnected to political power are regularly co-opted by those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-called role-playing that public policy contest debates encourage promotes active learning of the vocabulary and levers of power in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation. Simulation of success in the public realm is far more empowering to students than completely abandoning all notions of personal power in the face of governmental hegemony by teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imagining myself starting a socialist revolution in America is no less of a fantasy than imagining myself making a difference on Capitol Hill. Furthermore, both fantasies influenced my personal and political development virtually ensuring a life of active, pro-social, political participation. Neither fantasy reduced the likelihood that I would spend my life trying to make the difference I imagined. One fantasy actually does make a greater difference: the one that speaks the language of political power. The other fantasy disables action by making one a laughingstock to those who wield the language of power. Fantasy motivates and role-playing trains through visualization. Until we can imagine it, we cannot really do it. Role-playing without question teaches students to be comfortable with the language of power, and that language paves the way for genuine and effective political activism. Debates over the relative efficacy of political strategies for pro-social change must confront governmental power at some point.
	25	+Abstract questioning is useless - debate should seek to design concrete alternatives. Bryant 12 (EDITED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE – the author said “she” and it was replaced with the word “to” – Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, “Critique of the Academic Left”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/) The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking. Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded. For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way. This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals. They are abstract thinkers. In their doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To think concretely is to engage in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I call an “onto-cartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities.¶ Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park:¶ The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this:¶ Phase 1: Collect Underpants¶ Phase 2: ?¶ Phase 3: Profit!¶ They even have a catchy song to go with their work:¶ Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows:¶ Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique¶ Phase 2: ?¶ Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation!¶ Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing?¶ But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done!¶ But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc.¶ What are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri and Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle.¶ I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way? How would she provide food for the students? What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation.¶ “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques, we know the problems. We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique. We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we need today, more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that. Racial progress has occurred though legal change ~-~-- pessimism ignores specific reforms that achieved lasting reductions in racial inequality
	26	+Omi and Winant 13 Michael Omi (Sociologist at UC Berkeley, focusing on antiracism scholarship and Asian American studies) and Howard Winant (Professor of Sociology affiliated with the Black Studies and Chicana/o Studies departments of UC Santa Barbara), Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias, Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-973, Special Issue: Symposium - Rethinking Racial Formation Theory. 2013.
	27	+In Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent. There is little sense that the ‘white racial frame’ evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time. They to dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as merely ‘a distraction from more ingrained structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call ‘surface flexibility’ to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase ‘racial democracy’ is an oxymoron – a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to race and racism issues, we agree. If they mean that people of colour have no democratic rights or political power in the USA, we disagree. The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in our view it is also in many respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or less inclusive and redistributive economic policies, social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and racism? Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in different institutional sites – employment, health, education – persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously. It would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has been continuous and unchanging throughout US history. But such a perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era. Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and that we ‘overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation we wrote about ‘racial reaction’ in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial agreement with us. While we argue that the right wing was able to ‘rearticulate’ race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil rights movement, we also believe that there are limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political landscape. So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think that is the whole story. US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World War period, in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have proved irreversible; they have set powerful democratic forces in motion. These racial (trans)formations were the results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led by the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as well as key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like Loving v. Virginia that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. While we have the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his ‘interest convergence hypothesis’ effectively explains all these developments. How does Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 – ‘We have lost the South for a generation’ – count as ‘convergence’? The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues, hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this process; here the US racial regime – under movement pressure – was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms – which he calls ‘passive revolutions’ – cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains in the process. Once again, we are in the realm of politics, not absolute rule. So yes, we think there were important if partial victories that shifted the racial state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think that further victories can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society. Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social. In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially defined ‘others’ and the democratization of structurally racist societies, but also the recognition and validation by both the state and civil society of racially-defined experience and identity. These demands broadened and deepened democracy itself. They facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion accomplished by other ‘new social movements’: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the environmental list and anti-war movements, among others.

EntryDate

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+2016-10-29 17:33:55.216

Judge

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Michael Ortega

Opponent

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Starrs Mill CW

ParentRound

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+0

Round

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+1

Team

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Strake Jesuit Thorburn Aff

Title

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Blue Key 1Ac

Tournament

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Blue Key