Tournament: Damus | Round: Quads | Opponent: xx | Judge: xx
Antiblackness
Seemingly inclusive political movements recreate fungibility. They give the allusion that freedom for the black is the end sought when truly the master’s interests are what is in mind. Black flesh has always been the face of popular revolutions. It is by defining itself as something similar to but not the same as the black that movements like the affirmative have gained traction for their movement. This type of use of the black recreates a state of politics where the black is fungible.
Wilderson’10
(Frank. B. Wilderson, Red White and black, 2010. Pg. 30 Frank B. Wilderson is a tenured professor at the University of California Irvine. He has attended the University of Colombia where he got a degree in psychology.)
Eltis suggests that there was indeed massive debate which ultimately led to Britain taking the lead in the abolition of slavery, but he reminds us that that debate did not have its roots in the late Middle Ages, the post-Columbian period of the 1500s or the Virginia Colony period of the 1600s. It was, he asserts, an outgrowth of the mid- to late18th century emancipatory thrust—intra-Human disputes such as the French and American Revolutions—that swept through Europe. But Eltis does not take his analysis further than this. Therefore, it is important that we not be swayed by his optimism about the Enlightenment and its subsequent abolitionist discourses. It is highly conceivable that the discourse that elaborates the justification for freeing the slave is not the product of the Human being having suddenly and miraculously recognized the slave. Rather, as Saidiya Hartman argues, emancipatory discourses present themselves to us as further evidence of the Slave’s fungibility: “The figurative capacities of blackness enable white flights of fancy while increasing the likelihood of the captive’s disappearance…” (Scenes…22). First, the questions of Humanism were elaborated in contradistinction to the human void, to the African-qua-chattel (the 1200s to the end of the 17th century). Then, as the presence of Black chattel in the midst of exploited and un-exploited Humans (workers and bosses, respectively) became a fact of the world, exploited Humans (in the throes of class conflict with un-exploited Humans) seized the image of the slave as an enabling vehicle that Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms 31 animated the evolving discourses of their emancipation, just as un-exploited Humans had seized the flesh of the Slave to increase their profits. Without this gratuitous violence, a violence that marks everyone experientially until the late Middle Ages when it starts to mark the Black ontologically, the so-called great emancipatory discourses of modernity—marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology movement—political discourses predicated on grammars of suffering and whose constituent elements are exploitation and alienation, might not have developed.xi Chattel slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created the Human out of culturally disparate entities from Europe to the East.
The 1AC’s demand for legal relief re-establishes the master/slave relationship by acknowledging the state’s ability to grant or withhold rights.
Farley 5, (Anthony, professor in Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure and Legal Theory “Perfecting Slavery” Page 221-222)
Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. White-over-black is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with post-modernity or after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is neosegregation. White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is white-over-black, only white-over-black, and that continually. The story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows down before its master of its own free will. That is the moment in which the slave accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself unfree. 3 When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down before its master when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the field of law hoping for an answer.
Blackness is the position of ontological death. The legacy of America and the world at large is not tainted, but predicated on the gratuitous violence enacted onto the black body. Through every era, this violence haunts the structure of politics and every facet of social life, ensuring disenfranchisement, dishonor and discrimination. The plantation is not gone, but only relocated, first as Jim Crow, and now as the Prison Industrial Complex.
ELLIS 11 (Aime J. Ellis 2011 (PhD in Comparative Politics UT-Austin, If We Must Die From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls, Intro)
From recklessly dangerous acts that range from gun and gang violence, rampant drug abuse, addiction, and overdosage to lethal sexual practices among young heterosexual and homosexual black men resulting in the contraction of HIV/AIDS, signs of the death-bound subject are everywhere apparent in contemporary U.S. black male cultures. To be certain, the actions of and lethal attitudes held by death-bound subjects have taken shape against the backdrop of “dying,” deindustrialized cities, and the massive expansion of the prison-industrial complex in the United States, constituting the principal means of exercising racial terror and state violence— of policing, threatening, killing/deadening, disenfranchising black men—in the modern era. (Incidentally, when Holland writes in her introduction to Raising the Dead that “we have left the horror of death and terror to our imaginations,” I cannot help but think that the horror of death and terror haunting the nation’s psyche has for a long time now palpably bled out into view. That is to say, the late twentieth/early twenty first century has witnessed not only shadowy specters of death and racial terror in U.S. culture but also displayed its most tangible and gruesomely perceptible living legacy.) The spectacular reliance of post–civil rights America on incarceration (social and political death) and capital punishment (actual death) to control blacks in general and black men in particular rehearses in quite faithful fashion what Jim Crow society (largely in the South) carried out through lynching. Indeed, while lynching proved an effective apparatus for carrying out racial terror during Jim Crow, the prison and its reliance on capital punishment from the 1960s onward—especially following the reinstatement of the death penalty with the 1976 Gregg v. Georgia ruling— gradually restored the long-standing, coercive mission of the U.S. state.12 Even with the recent shift away from capital punishment in U.S. prisons during the late 1990s (an arguable point of contention given the state’s steadfast commitment to capital punishment), the U.S. criminal justice system with its publicly endorsed emphasis on draconian punishment has ushered in even more rapacious if not veiled forms of racial terror and state violence.13 I do not mean to suggest that the degree of racial terror and state violence during Jim Crow is tantamount to that of post–civil rights America; certainly, blacks have struggled to gain more freedoms, rights, and privileges than former generations were able to secure during Jim Crow. However, just as the intimidating and death-invoking use of racial terror and state violence bonds slavery to Jim Crow, one of the fundamental characteristics that links Jim Crow to post–civil rights America is its dependence on “the persistent threat and deployment of actual-death in the process of coercion” (JanMohamed 5). Stated another way, like the slave and lynching epochs that preceded it, the persistent threat of (social) death vis-.-vis imprisonment and the deployment of actual death vis-.-vis state-sanctioned execution, as well as extralegal policing (such as police brutality and prison guard abuse), marks the contemporary inheritance and historical continuation of the deployment of social and actual death against black people in general and black men in particular.14 Amnesty International reports that the U.S. government has, since 1976, executed over 1,000 condemned prisoners and houses over 3,700 death-row inmates. As of 2001, the United States incarcerates over two million people, most of whom are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately people of color. Over two million people more are “in the system” on probation, on parole, and, increasingly for young blacks, in juvenile detention centers. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2004 “there were 3,218 black male sentenced prison inmates per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared to 1,220 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 463 white male inmates per 100,000 white males.”15 While the emergence of the prison-industrial complex of the late 1980s is a relatively recent phenomenon, the nightmarish impact of penal institutions was being felt in the psyches of black men well before. Capturing the near unavoidability of prisons, prison activist George Jackson remarks from his prison cell in June 1970 what will profoundly resonate with the experiences of urban black men (and women) in the United States throughout the late twentieth/early twenty-first century: Black men born in the U.S. and fortunate enough to live past the age of eighteen are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison. For most of us, it simply looms as the next phase in a sequence of humiliations. Being born a slave in a captive society and never experiencing any objective basis for expectation had the effect of preparing me for the progressively traumatic misfortunes that lead so many black men to the prison gate. I was prepared for prison. It only required minor psychic adjustments. (Soledad Brother 4) A number of recent critical studies have helped to shape my thinking on the impact of prisons on poor urban black men and women throughout the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. Works such as Angela Y. Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) and Abolition Democracy (2005), Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1984), Joy James’s Resisting State Violence (1996) and edited collection States of Confinement (2000), Marc Mauer’s Race to Incarcerate (1999), and Christian Parenti’s Lockdown America (2000) have historically grounded the racial, gendered, and economic structures of disciplinary power directed against black people. Their scholarship has assisted substantially in contextualizing the political and economic forces, particularly since the end of the Great Migration that pushed and pulled black folks to urban cities of the North between 1915 and 1945 and up until the present historical moment, used to justify the state’s reliance on the coercive power of the prison as an instrument of social and actual death. However, the reliance on U.S. penal institutions is not the sole factor for situating the deathly realities black people have faced throughout the twentieth/twenty-first century. The spectacular and emblematic episodes of racial terror and state violence that, for many blacks, both mark and mar twentieth-/twenty-first-century U.S. history, represent a varied array of events constituting the living legacy of racial terror and state violence: the Red Summer Riots of 1919, the Mississippi floods of 1927, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment that ran between 1932 and 1972, Emmett Till’s murder in 1955, assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and numerous other black political leaders throughout the era of black militancy, the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of a Birmingham church in which four black girls were killed, the Watts Uprising of 1965 and those that followed throughout the late 1960s, the Vietnam War and Project 100,000 (1966–72),16 the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992, the Cincinnati (2000) and Benton Harbor (2003) Riots, and most recently Hurricane Katrina (2005). and The global AIDS pandemic, too, which has ravaged Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and U.S. black and gay male communities throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and the early part of the twenty-first century, serves as a reminder that the insidious effects of racial terror and state violence are neither unique to black men and women in the United States nor solely carried out through the overtly visible force of authoritarian subjection but rather exercised through benign neglect, federal withdrawal, and the increased practice of economic privatization.
Natal alienation means the slave never has a starting point in civil society.
Wilderson 10 – (Frank, Professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine. “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms.” Pg. 51-56)
Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become existentially present through some struggle for/of/through recognition, Blacks cannot attain the plane of recognition (West 82). Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain that the violence that has positioned and repetitively re-positions the Black as a void of historical movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of oppression, like the “little family quarrels” which for Fanon exemplify the Jewish Holocaust. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, “wiped out his/her metaphysics…his her customs and sources on which they are based” (BSWM 110). Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmenn) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them. This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black within an infinite and indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject. As such, “the black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110) or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity. How is it that the Black appears to partner with the senior and junior partners of civil society (Whites and colored immigrants, respectively), when in point of fact the Black is not in the world? The answer lies in the ruse of analogy. By acting as if the Black is present, coherent, and above all human, Black film theorists are “allowed” to meditate on cinema only after “consenting” to a structural adjustment.xvii Such an adjustment, required for the “privilege” of participating in the political economy of academe, is not unlike the structural adjustment debtor nations must adhere to for the privilege of securing a loan: signing on the dotted line means feigning ontological capacity regardless of the fact that Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form. It means theorizing Blackness as “borrowed institutionality.”xviii Ronald Judy’s (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular and “On the Question of Nigga Authenticity” critique the Black intelligentsia for building aesthetic canons out of slave narratives and hardcore rap on the belief that Blacks can “write themselves into being” ((Dis)Forming the American Canon: 88, 97). Judy acknowledges that in such projects one finds genuine and rigorous attention to the issue that concerns Blacks as a social formation, namely, resistance. But he is less than sanguine about the power of resistance which so many Black scholars impute to the slave narrative in particular and, by extension, to the “canon” of Black literature, Black music, and Black film: In writing the death of the African body, Equiano‘s 18th century slave narrative gains voice and emerges from the abject muteness of objectivity into productive subjectivity. It should not be forgotten that the abject muteness of the body is not to not exist, to be without effect. The abject body is the very stuff, the material, of experiential effect. Writing the death of the African body is an enforced abstraction. It is an interdiction of the African, a censorship to be inarticulate, to not compel, to have no capacity to move, to be without effect, without agency, without thought. The muted African body is overwritten by the Negro, and the Negro that emerges in the ink flow of Equiano’s pen is that which has overwritten itself and so becomes the representation of the very body it sits on. (Emphasis mine, 89) Judy is an Afro-Pessimist, not an Afro-Centrist. For him the Negro is a symbol that cannot “enable the representation of meaning because it has no referent” (107). Such is the gratuitousness of the violence that made the Negro. But it is precisely to this illusive symbolic resistance (an aspiration to “productive subjectivity”), as opposed to the Negro’s “abject muteness,” and certainly not to the Slave’s gratuitous violence, that many Black scholars in general, and Black film theorists in particular, aspire when interpreting their cultural objects. My claim regarding Black film theory, modeled on Judy’s claim concerning Black Studies more broadly, is that it tries to chart a project of resistance with an ensemble of questions that fortify and extend the interlocutory life of what might be called a Black film canon. But herein lies the rub, a rub in the form of a structural adjustment imposed on the Black film scholar her/himself. “Resistance through canon formation,” Judy writes, must be “legitimated on the grounds of conservation, the conservation of authenticity’s integrity” (19). A tenet that threads through Judy’s work is that throughout modernity and post-modernity (or post-industrial society, as Judy’s echoing of Antonio Negri prefers) “Black authenticity” is an oxymoron, a notion as absurd as “rebellious property” (“On the Question of Nigga Authenticity…” 225), for it requires the kind of ontological integrity which the Slave cannot claim. The structural adjustment imposed upon Black academics is, however, vital to the well-being of civil society. It provides the political economy of academia with a stable “collegial” atmosphere in which the selection of topics, the distribution of concerns, esprit de corps, emphasis, and the bounding of debate within acceptable limits appear to be “shared” by all because all admit to sharing them. But Judy suggests that the mere presence of the Black and his/her project, albeit adjusted structurally, threatens the fabric of this “stable” economy, by threatening its structure of exchange: Not only are the conjunctive operations of discourses of knowledge and power that so define the way in which academic fields get authenticated implicated in the academic instituting of Afro-American studies, but so is the instability entailed in the nature of academic work. That instability is discernable even in the university’s function as conservator. ((Dis)Forming the American Canon Emphasis mine 19) This academy-wide instability, predicated on the mere presence of the Black and his/her object, has three crisis-prone elements which Blackness, should it ever become unadjusted, could unleash. First is a realization that African-American studies cannot delimit “a unique object field” (i.e., a set literary texts, or a Black film canon) which threatens the nature of academic work, for Black Studies itself is indexical of the fact that “the object field—i.e. the texts—has no ontological status, but issues from specific historical discursive practices and aesthetics” (20). Secondly, these “specific historical discursive practices and aesthetics,” heterogeneous as they might be at the level of content, are homogeneous to the extent that their genealogies cannot recognize and incorporate the figure of the Slave. As a result, “interjecting the slave narrative into the privileged site of literary expression achieves, in effect, a (dis)formation of the field of American literary history” (20-21) and, by extension, the field of Black film studies. “The slave narrative as a process by which a textual economy is constituted—as a topography through which the African American achieves an emancipatory subversion of the propriety of slavery—jeopardizes the genealogy of Reason” (97). Once Reason’s very genealogy is jeopardized then its content, for example, the idea of “dominium,” has no ground to stand on. We will see, below, how and why “dominion” is recognized as a constituent element of the Indian’s subjectivity and how this recognition enables partial incorporation. But a third point proves just as much, if not more, unsettling than a crisis in the genealogy of Reason. For if Slave narratives as an object field have “no ontological status” such that the field’s insertion into the field of literary history can disform not just the field of literary studies but the field of knowledge itself (the paradigm of exchange within the political economy of academia), and (dis)form the hegemony of Reason’s genealogy, then what does this tell us about the ontological status of the narrating slave her/himself? This question awaits both the Black filmmaker and the Black film theorist. It is menacing and unbearable. The intensity of its ethicality is terrifying, so terrifying that, as a space to be inhabited and terror to be embraced, it can be seized by a significant number of Black artists and theorists only at those moments when a critical mass of Slaves have embraced this terror in the streets.
The only means by which we can rectify the violent order imposed by civil society is through its entire destruction. As every contour of social relations is marked by anti-blackness, every aspect of society must be destroyed, dismantled and reconfigured.
Farley 05 Anthony Farley Professor or Law @ Boston College. “Perfecting Slavery” Jan 2005
What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of necessity, burned everything: They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist.48 The slaves burned everything because everything was against them. Everything was against the slaves, the entire order that it was their lot to follow, the entire order in which they were positioned as worse than senseless things, every plantation, everything.49 “Leave nothing white behind you,” said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-over- black.50 “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.”51 The slaves burned everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti.52 Theirs was the greatest and most successful revolution in the history of the world but the failure of their fire to cross the waters was the great tragedy of the nineteenth century.53 At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “The colorline belts the world.”54 Du Bois said that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colorline.55 The problem, now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century is the problem of the colorline. The colorline continues to belt the world. Indeed, the slave power that is the United States now threatens an entire world with the death that it has become and so the slaves of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, those with nothing but their chains to lose, must, if they would be free, if they would escape slavery, win the entire world. Education is the call. We are called to be and then we become something. We become that which we make of ourselves. We follow the call, we pursue a calling. Freedom is the only calling—it alone contains all possible directions, all of the choices that may later blossom into the fullness of our lives. We can only be free. Slavery is death. How do slaves die? Slaves are not born, they are made. The slave must be trained to be that which the living cannot be. The only thing that the living are not free to be is dead. The slave must be trained to follow the call that is not a call. The slave must be trained to pursue the calling that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to objecthood. The slave must become death. Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-over-black, death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue its calling that is not a calling.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who better performatively and methodologically offers the best liberation strategy for black bodies.
The culture of exclusion and lack of engagement with important conversations about race in status quo LD locks minority debaters out of the discussion. Smith 13
Elijah Smith (2013 Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) and National Debate Tournament (NDT) champion), A Conversation in Ruins: Race and Black Participation in Lincoln Douglas Debate, Vbriefly, 2013. VL
At every tournament you attend this year look around the cafeteria and take note of which students are not sitting amongst you and your peers. Despite being some of the best and the brightest in the nation, many students are alienated from and choose to not participate in an activity I like to think of as homeplace. In addition to the heavy financial burden associated with national competition, the exclusionary atmosphere of a debate tournament discourages black students from participating. Widespread awareness of the same lack of participation in policy debate has led to a growing movement towards alternative styles and methods of engaging the gatekeepers of the policy community, (Reid-Brinkley 08) while little work has been done to address or even acknowledge the same concern in Lincoln Douglas debate. Unfortunately students of color are not only forced to cope with a reality of structural violence outside of debate, but within an activity they may have joined to escape it in the first place. We are facing more than a simple trend towards marginalization occurring in Lincoln Douglas, but a culture of exclusion that locks minority participants out of the ranks of competition. It will be uncomfortable, it will be hard, and it will require continued effort but the necessary step in fixing this problem, like all problems, is the community as a whole admitting that such a problem with many “socially acceptable” choices exists in the first place. Like all systems of social control, the reality of racism in debate is constituted by the singular choices that institutions, coaches, and students make on a weekly basis. I have watched countless rounds where competitors attempt to win by rushing to abstractions to distance the conversation from the material reality that black debaters are forced to deal with every day. One of the students I coached, who has since graduated after leaving debate, had an adult judge write out a ballot that concluded by “hypothetically” defending my student being lynched at the tournament. Another debate concluded with a young man defending that we can kill animals humanely, “just like we did that guy Troy Davis”. Community norms would have competitors do intellectual gymnastics or make up rules to accuse black debaters of breaking to escape hard conversations but as someone who understands that experience, the only constructive strategy is to acknowledge the reality of the oppressed, engage the discussion from the perspective of authors who are black and brown, and then find strategies to deal with the issues at hand. It hurts to see competitive seasons come and go and have high school students and judges spew the same hateful things you expect to hear at a Klan rally. A student should not, when presenting an advocacy that aligns them with the oppressed, have to justify why oppression is bad. Debate is not just a game, but a learning environment with liberatory potential. Even if the form debate gives to a conversation is not the same you would use to discuss race in general conversation with Bayard Rustin or Fannie Lou Hamer, that is not a reason we have to strip that conversation of its connection to a reality that black students cannot escape. Current coaches and competitors alike dismiss concerns of racism and exclusion, won’t teach other students anything about identity in debate other than how to shut down competitors who engage in alternative styles and discourses, and refuse to engage in those discussions even outside of a tournament setting. A conversation on privilege and identity was held at a debate institute I worked at this summer and just as any theorist of privilege would predict it was the heterosexual, white, male staff members that either failed to make an appearance or stay for the entire discussion. No matter how talented they are, we have to remember that the students we work with are still just high school aged children. If those who are responsible for participants and the creation of accessible norms won’t risk a better future for our community, it becomes harder to explain to students who look up to them why risking such an endeavor is necessary.
Opposing racism is the precondition to moral coherence.
Albert Memmi 2k, Racism, p. 159-161
Evidently, I am a moderate optimist. The struggle against racism will be long and probably never totally successful. Humans Vhomme being what they are, one cannot for the moment hope for a total end to racist behavior. Even mixed marriage is not a remedy; the example of Brazil is hardly encouraging. There, rather than disappear, racism has created a more complex color hierarchy. In the Caribbean, social classes correspond to a scale of colors. It is as if racism can always find, in each case, the tactic or machination that will work.21 / But yet, humans being what they are, the job can and should be undertaken. People are both angels and beasts; the angel must be assisted in prevailing over the beast. Or, more prosaically, reciprocal dependence must be strengthened as the foundation of the social bond. Whatever the importance of a conflict between individuals or groups, the relative stability of social structures confirms a reciprocal need to engender an inclusive common law of life. Racism represents precisely the inverse process, since it is a temptation to exclude and the legitimation of exclusion. / The pessimist will object that this is pure rhetoric designed to repackage the same old conduct. But even rhetorical effort is not wasted. Beyond its perversity, the racist discourse is a defense mechanism plaidoyer and an alibi. But every search for an alibi also contains within it an implicit recognition of the law. Racism is a structure of aggression that claims, and is given, a presupposed rationality. This pretense is the sign of its cunning and its false assertion of its own humanity. That is why no one wishes to own up to being racist; no one wishes to consent, in their heart, to renounce all humanity. The most hardened racists at least have one ear that hears, a port directly connected to that part of themselves that does not totally approve of iniquity and oppression. The mania and the horror of Nazism comes from what it had renounced of all legitimization, that it had made racism a philosophy if not a total conception of humanity. / Is that all there is? The infinite task before us can be discouraging in that it must always be begun again. Up to now, all peace has only been a truce between two wars, yet still we hope and long for peace. Health is fragile, and death is always in the offing, yet still we struggle to keep ourselves in good health. The struggle against racism is the condition of our collective social health. It encompasses the fundamental moral discussions of love or hate of the other, of justice or injustice, equality or oppression, or, in a word, one's very humanity. The essence of morality is respect for the other. Our honor as humans will be to construct a more human world. In the meanwhile, so that even animals may some day find a world of peace and security, let us act so that no one is any longer treated like a beast.
