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	1	+The 1ac’s celebration of participatory democracy is grossly inadequate to theorize the singularity of antiblackness. Civil society is founded upon the murder of Black and Red bodies. The affirmative’s leftist rhetoric is nothing more than a guise for the same liberal democratic politics that allows anti-blackness to flourish.
	2	+Wilderson 2010
	3	+Frank, Associate Professor at UC Irvine’s Department of Drama and African American Studies, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, 3-12, 23-4
	4	+
	5	+What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically— unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Give Turtle Island back to the “Savage.” Give life itself back to the Slave. Two simple sen-tences, fourteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An “ethical modernity” would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of antagonisms, such as class struggle, gender conflict, and immigrants’ rights. One cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of left-wing broadsides are anything to go by— is that what can so easily be spoken is now (500 years and 50 million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these fourteen words not only render their speaker “crazy” but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable. 2 In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not should the United States be overthrown? or even should it be overthrown? but when and how— and, for some, what would come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the United States writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of Students for Democratic Society, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to Bobby Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of “success,” but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing case— by way of a paradigmatic analysis—that the United States was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (as a U.S. attorney general) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks. 3 One could (and many did) acknowledge America’s strength and power. This seldom rose to the level of an ethical assessment, however, remaining instead an assessment of the “balance of forces.” The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to wed the United States and ethics credibly. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the question— and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all—retreated as did White radicals and progressives who “retired” from the struggle. The question lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, or thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the “crazies” shout at passersby. Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices that effected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the Slave estate’s 4 destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse when this dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets or of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is “no” in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed on in screenplays and in scholarly prose, but “yes” in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments, such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptoms— it registers in both cinema and scholarship as a symptom of awareness of the structural antagonisms. The election of President Barack Obama does not mitigate the claim that this is a taciturn historical moment. Neoliberalism with a Black face is neither the index of a revolutionary advance nor the end of anti-Blackness as a constituent element of U.S. antagonisms. If anything, the election of Obama enables a plethora of shaming discourses in response to revolutionary politics and “legitimates” widespread disavowal of any notion that the United States itself, and not merely its policies and practices, is unethical. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. From 1980 to the present, however, Blackness and Redness manifest only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (i.e., a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of “family values”), the nonnarrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontology— or nonontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible. 5 Likewise, the grammar of political ethics— the grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering— which underwrites film theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and which underwrites cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is also unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a structure of suffering. And this structure of suffering crowds out others, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in question. To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological position from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows. The difficulty of writing a book which seeks to uncover Red, Black, and White socially engaged feature films as aesthetic accompaniments to grammars of suffering, predicated on the subject positions of the “Savage” and the Slave, is that today’s intellectual protocols are not informed by Fanon’s insistence that “ontology— once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside— does not permit us to understand the being of the black man.” 6 In sharp contrast to the late 1960s and early 1970s, we now live in a political, academic, and cinematic milieu which stresses “diversity,” “unity,” “civic participation,” “hybridity,” “access,” and “contribution.” The radical fringe of political discourse amounts to little more than a passionate dream of civic reform and social stability. The distance between the protester and the police has narrowed considerably. The effect of this on the academy is that intellectual protocols tend to privilege two of the three domains of subjectivity, namely preconscious interests (as evidenced in the work of social science around “political unity,” “social attitudes,” “civic participation,” and “diversity,”) and unconscious identification (as evidenced in the humanities’ postmodern regimes of “diversity,” “hybridity,” and “relative rather than “master” narratives”). Since the 1980s, intellectual protocols aligned with structural positionality (except in the work of die-hard Marxists) have been kicked to the curb. That is to say, it is hardly fashionable anymore to think the vagaries of power through the generic positions within a structure of power relations—such as man/woman, worker/boss. Instead, the academy’s ensembles of questions are fixated on specific and “unique” experiences of the myriad identities that make up those structural positions. This would be fine if the work led us back to a critique of the paradigm; but most of it does not. Again, the upshot of this is that the intellectual protocols now in play, and the composite effect of cinematic and political discourse since the 1980s, tend to hide rather than make explicit the grammar of suffering which underwrites the United States and its foundational antagonisms. This state of affairs exacerbates— or, more precisely, mystifies and veils— the ontological death of the Slave and the “Savage” because (as in the 1950s) the cinematic, political, and intellectual discourse of the current milieu resists being sanctioned and authorized by the irreconcilable demands of Indigenism and Blackness— academic enquiry is thus no more effective in pursuing a revolutionary critique than the legislative antics of the loyal opposition. This is how left-leaning scholars help civil society recuperate and maintain stability. But this stability is a state of emergency for Indians and Blacks. The aim of this book is to embark on a paradigmatic analysis of how dispossession is imagined at the intersection of (a) the most unflinching meditations (metacommentaries) on political economy and libidinal economy, (e.g., Marxism, as in the work of Antonio Negri, and psychoanalysis, as in the work of Kaja Silverman), (b) the discourse of political common sense, and (c) the narrative and formal strategies of socially or politically engaged films. In other words, a paradigmatic analysis asks, What are the constituent elements of, and the assumptive logic regarding, dispossession which underwrite theoretical claims about political and libidinal economy; and how are those elements and assumptions manifest in both political common sense and in political cinema? Charles S. Maier argues that a metacommentary on political economy can be thought of as an “interrogation of economic doctrines to disclose their sociological and political premises. . . . in sum, it regards economic ideas and behavior not as frameworks for analysis, but as beliefs and actions that must themselves be explained.” 7 Jared Sexton describes libidinal economy as “the economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification (their condensation and displacement), and the complex relationship between sexuality and the unconscious.” Needless to say, libidinal economy functions variously across scales and is as “objective” as political economy. It is linked not only to forms of attraction, affection, and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction, and the violence of lethal consumption. Sexton emphasizes that it is “the whole structure of psychic and emotional life,” something more than, but inclusive of or traversed by, what Antonio Gramsci and other Marxists call a “structure of feeling”; it is “a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias capable of both great mobility and tenacious fixation.” 8 This book interrogates the assumptive logic of metacommentaries on political and libidinal economy, and their articulations in film, through a subject whose structure of dispossession (the constituent elements of his or her loss and suffering) they cannot theorize: the Black, a subject who is always already positioned as Slave. The implications of my interrogation reach far beyond film studies, for these metacommentaries not only have the status of paradigmatic analyses, but their reasoning and assumptions permeate the private and quotidian of political common sense and buttress organizing and activism on the left. In leftist metacommentaries on ontology (and in the political common sense and the radical cinema in fee, however unintentionally, to such metacommentaries), subjects’ paradigmatic location, the structure of their relationality, is organized around their capacities: powers subjects have or lack, the constituent elements of subjects’ structural position with which they are imbued or lack prior to the subjects’ performance. Just as prior to a game of chess, the board and the pieces on it live in a network of antagonisms. The spatial and temporal capacities of the queen (where she is located and where she can move, as well as how she can move) articulate an irreconcilable asymmetry of power between her and a rook or a pawn for example. Vest the rook with the powers of the queen (before the game begins, of course) and it is not the outcome of the game that is in jeopardy so much as the integrity of the paradigm itself— it is no longer chess but something else. And it goes without saying that no piece may leave the board if it is to stand in any relation whatsoever to its contemporaries (asymmetry aside); this would be tantamount to leaving the world, to death. Power relations are extant in the sinews of capacity. For Marxists, the revolutionary objective is not to play the game but to destroy it, to end exploitation and alienation. They see the capacity to accumulate surplus value embodied in one piece, the capitalist, and the embodiment of dispossession as being manifest in the worker. But the worker’s essential incapacity (powers which cannot accrue to the worker, suffering as exploitation and alienation) is the essence of capacity, life itself, when looked at through the eyes of the Slave. Socially or politically engaged films pride themselves on their proclivity to embrace what the Left views as the essence of dispossession: the plight of the exploited and alienated worker. Throughout this book, I argue that as radical and iconoclastic as so many socially or politically engaged films are (and they are indeed a breath of fresh air compared to standard Hollywood fare), in their putative embrace of working-class incapacity there is also, from the standpoint of the Slave, a devastating embrace of Human capacity— that which the Slave lacks. In other words, the narrative strategies of films that articulate the suffering of the worker are shot through with obstinate refusals to surrender their cinematic embrace to the structure of the Slave’s domination, something infinitely more severe than exploitation and alienation. I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my argument wedded to the disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established, first, as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of intent, or racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed. If the position of the Black is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by Marxism and psychoanalysis, then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of Black people’s staunchest “allies,” and in some of the most “radical” films. Here— not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative scholarship—is where the Settler/Master’s sinews are most resilient. The polemic animating this research stems from (1) my reading of Native and Black American metacommentaries on Indian and Black subject positions written over the past twenty-three years and (2) a sense of how much that work appears out of joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political praxis and socially engaged popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of abandonment I experience when I read the metacommentaries on Red positionality (by theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria Jr., and Haunani-Kay Trask) and the metacommentaries on Black positionality (by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe) against the deluge of multicultural positivity is overwhelming. One suddenly realizes that, though the semantic field on which subjectivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally through the protocols of multiculturalism and globalization theory, Blackness and an unflinching articulation of Redness are more unimaginable and illegible within this expanded semantic field than they were during the height of the FBI’s repressive Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). On the semantic field on which the new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed become partially legible through a programmatics of structural adjustment (as fits our globalized era). In other words, for the Indians’ subject position to be legible, their positive registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point of fact the antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians “possess” is a position in relation to a socius structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have been subjected to genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which Indians would not, paradoxically, “exist.” 9 Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today’s Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the state has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on “solid” ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to “facts,” the “historical record,” and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science, history, and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of “work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position— disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer. In “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” James Baldwin wrote about “the terrible gap between Norman Mailer’s life and my own.” It is a painful essay in which Baldwin explains how he experienced, through beginning and ending his “friendship” with Mailer, those moments when Blackness inspires White emancipatory dreams and how it feels to suddenly realize the impossibility of the inverse: “The really ghastly thing about trying to convey to a white man the reality of the Negro experience has nothing whatever to do with the fact of color, but has to do with this man’s relationship to his own life. He will face in your life only what he is willing to face in his.” His long Paris nights with Mailer bore fruit only to the extent that Mailer was able to say, “Me, too.” Beyond that was the void which Baldwin carried with him into and, subsequently, out of the “friendship.” Baldwin’s condemnation of discourses that utilize exploitation and alienation’s grammar of suffering is unflinching: “I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives.” 10 He is writing about the encounters between Blacks and Whites in Paris and New York in the 1950s, but he may as well be writing about the eighteenth-century encounters between Slaves and the rhetoric of new republics like revolutionary France and America. 11 Early in the essay, Baldwin puts his finger on the nature of the impasse which allows the Black to catalyze White-to-White thought, without risking a White-to-Black encounter: “There is a difference,” he writes, “between Norman and myself in that I think he still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have never had anything to lose.” 12 It is not a lack of goodwill or the practice of rhetorical discrimination, nor is it essentially the imperatives of the profit motive that prevent the hyperbolic circulation of Blackness from cracking and destabilizing civil society’s ontological structure of empathy—even as it cracks and destabilizes “previously accepted categories of thought about politics.” 13 The key to this structural prohibition barring Blackness from the conceptual framework of Human empathy can be located in the symbolic value of that “something to save” which Baldwin saw in Mailer. It was not until 1967– 68, with such books as Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone— after he had exhausted himself with The Fire Next Time— that Baldwin permitted himself to give up hope and face squarely that the Master/Slave relation itself was the essence of that “something to save.” CONTINUESThroughout this book I use White, Human, Master, Settler, and sometimes non-Black interchangeably to connote a paradigmatic entity that exists ontologically as a position of life in relation to the Black or Slave position, one of death. The Red, Indigenous, or “Savage” position exists liminally as half-death and half-life between the Slave (Black) and the Human (White, or non-Black). I capitalize the words Red, White, Black, Slave, Savage, and Human in order to assert their importance as ontological positions and to stress the value of theorizing power politically rather than culturally. I want to move from a politics of culture to a culture of politics (as I argue in chapter ). Capitalizing these words is consistent with my argument that the array of identities that they contain is important but inessential to an analysis of the paradigm of power in which they are positioned. Readers wedded to cultural diversity and historical specificity may find such shorthand wanting. But those who may be put off by my pressing historical and cultural particularities— culled from history, sociology, and cultural studies, yet neither historical, sociological, nor, oddly enough, cultural— should bear in mind that there are precedents for such methods, two of which make cultural studies and much of social science possible: the methods of Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan. Marx pressed the microcosm of the English manufacturer into the service of a project that sought to explain economic relationality on a global scale. Lacan’s exemplary cartography was even smaller: a tiny room with not much more than a sofa and a chair, the room of the psychoanalytic encounter. As Jonathan Lee reminds us, at stake in Lacan’s account of the psychoanalytic encounter is the realization of subjectivity itself, “the very being of the subject.” 37 I argue that “Savage,” Human, and Slave should be theorized in the way we theorize worker and capitalist as positions first and as identities second, or as we theorize capitalism as a paradigm rather than as an experience— that is, before they take on national origin or gendered specificity. Throughout the course of this book I argue that “Savage,” Human, and Slave are more essential to our understanding of the truth of institutionality than the positions from political or libidinal economy. For in this trio we find the key to our world’s creation as well as to its undoing. This argument, as it relates to political economy, continues in chapter 1, “The Ruse of Analogy.” In chapter 2, “The Narcissistic Slave,” I shift focus from political economy to libidinal economy before undertaking more concrete analyses of films in parts 2, 3, and 4.
	6	+Black protest and free speech doesn’t negate social debate but represents a voiceless scream while endlessly mute because black demands can not exist within civil society. The 1AC gives the illusion of a voice for black demands without providing any way to resolve black death. Black people can vote and stand trial but they are still sent to prison and shot in the streets.
	7	+Sexton ‘11 (Jared, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism” http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jaredsextonarticle.pdf) M Leap
	8	+
	9	+24 To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death—all of this is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by inhabiting it and vitalizing it. A living death is as much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor—the modern world system. Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro-pessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That’s the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed-upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed.
	10	+
	11	+The conversation for free speech on college campuses is structured around white fragility and white supremacy. Free speech is just a flinch away from the horrors of anti-blackness that seeks to give a voice to white supremacy.
	12	+Carpenter 16
	13	+“Free speech, Black lives and white fragility” Bennett Carpenter, Grad student studying free speech, Duke Chronicle, January 19th 2016, http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2016/01/free-speech-black-lives-and-white-fragility)
	14	+As I write my first column, I am thinking a lot about speech. I am thinking about how an urgent and overdue conversation about racism—on our campus and across our country—has been derailed by a diversionary and duplicitous obsession with the First Amendment. I am thinking about how quickly the conversation has shifted from white supremacy to white fragility—and how this shift is itself an expression of white supremacy. White fragility refers to a range of defensive behaviors through which white people (or more accurately, people who believe they are white) deflect conversations about race and racism in order to protect themselves from race-based stress. Because white people tend to live in environments where whiteness is both dominant and invisible, they grow accustomed to racial comfort, as a result of which even a small amount of racial stress becomes intolerable. This helps explain why talking about white supremacy can feel more painful to white people than white supremacy itself, why the ostensible "stifling" of debate can feel more pressing than the literal strangulation of Eric Garner and how "free speech" seems more important than Black lives. Needless to say, it requires an astounding degree of narcissism, ignorance and— yes—fragility to scan headlines detailing the daily, state-sanctioned slaughter of people of color and somehow conclude that speech is the real problem. White fragility weighs the minimal discomfort of being confronted with painful realities about race and racism against the literal death of Black and brown bodies and decides that the latter matter less than white discomfort. Which is how we end up here, talking about speech on campus and reading a dozen iterations of the same editorial in which students describe—with utterly unintentional irony—how being called out by anti-racist activists makes them feel upset and hurts their feelings. This leaves those of us committed to abolishing white supremacy in a double bind. To engage with this debate is to fall for a diversionary tactic in which we again center the conversation on white feelings. To refuse to engage grants the latter a monopoly on the airways, drowning out more vital issues in an ocean of white noise. Still, in the interests of the open, honest debate the free speechers ostensibly advocate, let me try to address the constitutional and philosophical principles at play here. The first point to make is that, despite the hand-wringing, I have yet to see a single example of student activists violating the First Amendment. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how they could do so, given that the latter proscribes government abridgment of speech while student activists are private citizens. Many seem to confuse "free speech" with some banal notion of civility, forgetting that the very freedoms they invoke to defend racist drivel permit anti-racists to respond—whether by calling someone out or calling for their resignation. This would seem to set up a nice equivalence between racists and anti-racists—both exercising free-speech freedoms, which must be equally and indiscriminately defended. What this ignores, however, is the centuries-long history of racialized oppression to which hate speech contributes. Hate speech is thus both violent and an incitement to further violence. The courts already prohibit walking into a crowded theater and shouting "fire." How is this any different from walking into a white supremacist society and shouting racial slurs? It has become almost a truism that there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Historically speaking, this is inaccurate. As M. Alison Kibler details in her "Censoring Racial Ridicule," the U.S. has a long history of regulating forms of speech that expose racialized groups to "contempt, derision or obloquy." Indeed, as recently as 1952, the Supreme Court upheld an Illinois law applying the standards of libel (another free-speech exception) to hate speech. It is only in recent years that the courts have, as the National Center for Human Rights Education puts it, "privileged white racists to express themselves at the expense of the safety of African-Americans and other people of color." Key to this new interpretation is a firm separation between speech and action, a legal variant on the old childhood adage: "sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you." The problem—as anyone who has been the victim of hate speech can tell you—is that this simply isn't true. Words hurt as much as actions; indeed, words are actions. Within the context of white supremacy, any distinction between a defaced poster, a racist pamphlet and legal or extralegal murder can be only of degree. At the same time—and here I'll throw a bone to the civil libertarians—I'm unconvinced that hate speech legislation can resolve this. Not because hate speech isn't violent, but because the state is. As others have noted, we often view the state like some strange sort of Jekyll and Hyde—as if the very government quite literally built on white supremacy could somehow save us from its effects. I've sometimes noticed the same double vision among campus activists, who both call out Duke (quite rightly) for institutional racism yet also call on the administration to fix it. So where does that leave us? With the painful yet empowering realization that no one will save us but ourselves. Rather than relying on the state to censure hate speech, anti-racists can assume that task—calling out and shouting down every expression of white supremacy as we work to build a genuinely free society. In the meantime, we can construct safe spaces for ourselves where hatred is barred at the door. In other words, the exact work that campus activists are already doing. Cowardly racists and homophobes who deface posters or vandalize dormitories are not heroic defenders of free speech. The true heroes are those who have spoken out against injustice, time and again, in the face of both material and psychological retaliation. Everything else is just white noise
	15	+The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best deconstructs anti-blackness
	16	+Our Alternative is to reject the affirmative in order to focus on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis that calls for the END OF AMERICA.
	17	+Wilderson 10
	18	+(Frank “Unspeakable Ethics”, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, ix-x, GLOB)
	19	+Strange as it may seem, this book project began in South Africa. During the last years of apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and above-ground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period, I began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies and points of attention to be displaced onto pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the question - and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile of Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.

EntryDate

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	1	+2017-02-19 18:06:37.65

Judge

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	1	+Olivia Panchal

Opponent

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	1	+Immaculate Heart DD

ParentRound

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	1	+9

Round

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	1	+3

Team

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	1	+Winston Churchill Lugo Neg

Title

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	1	+Wilderson Free Speech

Tournament

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	1	+Berks