Tournament: Barkely Forum | Round: 4 | Opponent: Niceville | Judge: Nadia Hussein
The affirmative’s attempt to redress the material through “free speech” is a direct ratcheting down of the scale of abstraction “Free speech” for the black is an oxymoron ---The problem of black suffering cannot be addressed by removing speech codes or providing room for a field of discourse among humans that is no longer policed because the fact of blackness is an ontological captivity that is not caused by the university but the very world itself. Looking at the wrong level of abstraction – not is police brutality bad, but rather should the world exist?
Wilderson 14 “We’re trying to destroy the world” Anti-Blackness and Police Violence After Ferguson An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III. 2014.Interview with Jared Ball, Todd Steven Burroughs and Dr. Hate
That was at Haile Gerima’s bookstore in DC, and it was an allBlack audience, so I didn’t have my guard up. I might have said it differently in a classroom, who knows. What I meant there was, well it was a bit tongue in cheek, but of course I hate police brutality. I haven’t been brutalized in the past ten years, but when I was brutalized I did hate that. I hate the harassment However, I feel that what my critical work is trying to contribute is to say that Black people in the US and worldwide are the only people -- and I say this categorically -- for whom it is not productive to speak in terms of ‘police brutality’. I know that we have to, because we’re forced to speak in these terms, and there is a way in which all Black speech is always coerced speech, in that you’re always in what Saidiya Hartman would call a context of slavery: anything that you say, you always have to think, ‘what are the consequences of me speaking my mind going to be?’ The world -- and this goes for Democracy Now, it goes for our post-colonial comrades, etc. -- is not ready to think about the way in which policing affects Black people. And so what we have to do is ratchet-down the scale of abstraction, so that we don’t present the world with the totality of our relation to the police, which is that we are policed all the time, and everywhere. We have to give the world some kind of discourse, some kind of analysis in bite-size pieces that they are ready to accept, so that they can have some kind of empathy for us, some kind of political or legal adjudication. That is why police brutality becomes the focal point of the problem. Police brutality has never identified our problem. Our problem is one of complete captivity from birth to death, and coercion as the starting point of our interaction with the State and with ordinary white citizens (and with ordinary Latino, Mexican, Asian citizens, Native Americans). And so when I was in that room and I said ‘I don’t hate police brutality, I hate the police’, I think most of the people in that room immediately understood what I was saying, but also understood the problems with going outside and saying that. Here’s one little example of how this conundrum or paradox affects the way we can speak to White people and our so-called ‘allies of color’. In Tulia, TX, in 1999, 45 Black people and about two Latinos were arrested in a one-night drug bust. In other words, roughly 10 percent of the Black population were arrested in one night. All of them were convicted. There is a film about this that people can find online. What is interesting to me is not the celebratory political and emancipatory nature of the the film, which ends by saying ‘ at the end of the day we were able to get most of the convictions overturned, because the undercover agent did not have evidence’. There was one undercover agent who indicted 45 Black people and two Latinos. But he did not come to court with cocaine. He came to court with this word. And what was interesting to me about that was that when jurors were interviewed about that, and people said to them, ‘So you convicted these kids, some 200 to 300 years, on no evidence, but on the word of one police officer. Would you want that to happen to your child?”, one of the jurors said—without any sense of irony ‘if it was my child, we’d need evidence”. So the problem then is not where the film situates the problem or where the media situates it, i.e. in the rogue actions of the police. The problem is in the libidinal economy, which is to say in the collective unconscious of everybody else. And if we were to actually understand that better, we’d understand that Blackness is always-already criminalized in the collective unconscious. The only problem for white supremacy and anti-Blackness when it’s happening to Black people in Mexico for example, is one of logistics, of mechanics, which is to say, ‘how can we make the criminalization stick?’ It’s not a question of something wrong taking place, that these Black people are suffer or exist under police brutality. Policing—policing Blackness—is what keeps everyone else sane. And if we can start to see the policing and the mutilation and the aggressivity towards Blackness not as a form of discrimination, but as being a form of psychic health and well-being for the rest of the world, then we can begin to reformulate the problem and begin to take a much more iconoclastic response to it.
Human subjects communicating their suffering is the clanging of subjectivity which my criticism reveals is an orchestra of death that makes black suffering inaudible but makes the flesh ring loudly and clear.
Brady 12, Nick Brady. 2012. “Louder than dark: Towards an Acoustics of Suffering”. The Feminist Wire.
Can you hear a shadow? The more enlightened, the deeper the shadows, but can the shadow enunciate the depth of its sorrow back to the world it is invariably bound to?∂ A silhouette is wheeled to the corner of a hallway, its face obscured. The nurse has demanded that she leave the hospital. Unbeknownst to the shadow, the police happen to be in the building at the same time and are asked to remove her from the premises. They drag her out of the wheelchair and handcuff her, leaving her slouched on the ground. A few more cops come and they cart her away to literally rot in a jail cell. The shadow’s name is Anna Brown. She has also been named “the homeless lady,” as well as “the crackhead” or “drug sick” individual by the officers that arrested her. She went to the hospital after spraining her ankle, was arrested because she refused to leave due to continued pain, and was found dead on the prison floor because her sprain produced blood clots that lodged into her lungs. Due to medical malpractice and the police officers’ violence, Anna passed away alone on the floor of a prison cell. Yet, that last sentence was entirely too nice, for in truth Anna Brown was murdered. The hesitation to describe this as a “murder” is because that implies an event, a narrative, a “when,” “where,” and “who” (as in “who done it?”). Yet this was not an event with an acting subject; she was instead murdered by subjectivity itself: a series of incidents centered on her body, each reverberating off each other into an orchestra of death. Each proceeding was an echo of the one preceding it: waves of suffering reflecting off each action through time. Her death was caused by the incoherence of her voice, her calls for care, her screams of agony. Put another way, she was murdered by civil society’s inability-–and lack of desire-–to hear her being.∂ Discourse on race normally focuses on the material and the visual, but the video of Anna Brown’s death points us less to the images and more to the centrality of aurality to black suffering. The first part of the video is without audio, but this does not mean sound is absent per se. That the video lacks audio in the beginning says more than perhaps the soundtrack itself could, for it makes explicit the inaudibility of black suffering. We know that Anna Brown had expressed her lasting pain, in spite of the doctor’s opinion that she was fine. The hospital then ordered her to leave and she protested, saying that she was still in pain. She was forcibly wheeled to the hallway and eventually arrested by the police. Her vocal protests, critiques of inadequate service and expression of her persistent pain, fell on deaf ears. She spoke the knowledge of her body, but her voice was muted and over-dubbed by the knowledge of the professionals.∂ How can the black know about itself? How can the shadow speak back?∂ The violence that produces the subject (in this case, the doctor) robs Anna Brown of vocality, not so much literally as ontologically. Insofar as an object (a commodity, a slave) can speak, it cannot be said that it can communicate. At the etymological root of “communicate” is the logic of the commons or community: informing to participate in the world, sharing one’s utterance(s) to join the community. Communication, not even to imply anything as serious as the ethics of dialogue, requires an equal ontological status amongst the communicators. That several titles of the video online have called her the “homeless woman” evidences one singular truth (the desire to insult her notwithstanding): Anna Brown, as the descendent of slaves, has no home while the doctors are in their own dominion.∂ In a public lecture titled “People-of-Color-Blindness,” Jared Sexton describes an experience at a jazz club where the microphones go off, but the band continues to play. Even though the sociality between the band and the audience has been shut down, the band still plays on. Sexton uses this example to dramatize how even though the black is socially dead, that does not signify that black life is non-existent. Instead, our social death signifies that black life is sealed off from the world and happens elsewhere: “underground or in outer space.” In this way Anna speaks, but the microphone that would project her subjectivity to the world has been turned off. Her suffering has been rendered unreal while her voice is heard as incoherent and dangerous.∂ If Anna Brown’s suffering is inaudible, the second half of the video speaks to how her voice and pain are criminalized. When the police arrive, they surround Anna and then drag her out of the wheelchair, handcuff her, and leave her on the hospital floor. She is given two different charges: her protests for better service are charged as “trespassing” and her inability to walk due to her injury is charged as “resisting arrest.” When she is in the police car, the camera in the vehicle has a microphone. When they arrive at the prison, Anna continues to tell them she can’t walk and that she needs to be in a hospital. The police officers ignore her statements and instead oscillate between asking her “are you going to get out” and threatening her; “you have two seconds to swing your legs out…” Each implies that she can move her legs and she is choosing not to. As Saidiya Hartman writes in Scenes of Subjection, “the slave was recognized as a reasoning subject who possessed intent and rationality solely in the context of criminal liability.” Her suffering remains inaudible, but her voice can only be heard by the police as challenging the law, resisting arrest, disrespecting their authority; her voice can only be heard as a legitimizing force for their violence. As they drag her out of the car, she screams out in pain before the door is shut and her voice becomes muffled.∂ They carried Anna Brown to the cell and laid her body on the ground as if she were already a corpse; they even refused her the dignity of lying on the bed. As they stepped around her body and closed the cell door, the only sign she was still alive were her wordless screams. Her screams pierce through my speakers, haunting my mind but they seem to have no effect on the prison workers. She was clearly not the first screaming body they had carried into a cell, for they did not even take time to stop their chatter. There is no passion, intimacy, or perverse enjoyment, just a multicultural group of men doing their job. Anna’s death is not the “primal scene” that the beating of Aunt Hester (Frederick Douglass’s Aunt) was. These two black women’s screams are connected by the paradigm of anti-blackness, yet their screams terrify for different reasons. The beating of Aunt Hester is a spectacular example of the “blood-stained gate” of the slave’s subjection. While the circulation of the Anna Brown video has given me pause, her death is more an example of the “mundane and quotidian” terror that Hartman focuses on in her text. Brown’s death was a (non)event, concealed from the world by the walls of the prison cell. Without this video, only those on the inside would have heard her screams. Anna Brown didn’t simply pass away, she was killed, but who did it? Douglass’s Aunt Hester was beaten by Captain Anthony, a man who wanted her and was jealous of her relationship to another slave. Anna Brown was murdered by a disparate set of (non)events where her body shuttled between a hospital and a prison, doctors and nurses, police officers and prison officials. There is no one person who killed her; instead, a structure of violence murdered her. No intimacy, just cold efficiency. Her scream was less of a sorrow song than the sharp pitch of nu-bluez: an impossible scream to be heard from the depths of incarceration and incapacity.∂ Anna Brown’s death was neither an event nor a spectacle. An event signifies presence, but Anna’s death is an ethereal absence, a spirit’s wail fading away like one’s warm breath on a cold day. If the beating of Aunt Hester demands that one meditate on the spectacle of black suffering, Anna Brown’s screams call for us to think of the aurality of agony, the acoustics of suffering. What are the aural mechanisms that made it impossible for civil society to hear Anna Brown’s pain? What are the technologies that remix the tonalities of black people into criminalized speech? These thoughts on the acoustics of suffering are not to displace the visual for the aural, but instead to theorize how they form and invigorate each other. Put another way, anti-blackness is a structure where (black) skin speaks for itself and the body it encompasses, even when the black’s subjecthood is muted.∂ In the darkness of space, one cannot hear you scream. Focusing on acoustics can offer a different sharpening of the cutting edge, a modality that allows us to tune into the unimaginable frequency of black thought. If it is impossible to hear the black (aurality) and for the black to speak on its own terms (orality), then to be heard in this world, we would have to break the laws of physics–ontologically speaking. This is another way of saying that the acoustics of suffering forces us to think of the impossibilities of harmony and, perhaps, the terrifying beauty of cacophony. In this way, the enlightenment of the ignorant shadows would not be the key to the future, but instead the reverberation of our revolutionary racket that clangs through civil society. From the black hole of our subjectivity and into the screeching noise of this parasitic world, we scream that our lives, black life, matters until the final, paradigmatic quiet comes.
The only ethical option is to call for an end to the world—calling attention to the antagonism that undergirds the US is the only way to address the conflicts within it like the 1AC. We cannot resolve anti-blackness through the state because of the institutions ethics and acting through the state makes anti-blackness worse because it erases the existence of the black body – the state forecloses the possibility of humanity for those in the non-human positionality
Wilderson, ’10 2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, “Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,”
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demands—and, by extension, the grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw our attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world’s capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but to call the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a “being for the captor” (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—and not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to what does the world attribute the Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us”? Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun. 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? Return Turtle Island to the “Savage.” Repair the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, thirteen 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: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights. When pared down to thirteen words and two sentences, 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 (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen words not only render their speaker “crazy” but become themselves impossible to imagine.
CIVIL SOCIETY MAPS ITSELF BY THE RECONFIGURATION OF RIGHTS THROUGH FREEDOM – maintaining its position of ANTI-BLACKNESS. This constructs the benevolent hegemony of coherence. What is needed is the radical injection of society’s incoherence, the ‘wretched of the earth’ the politics of the black body with a gesture towards the disconfiguration of civil society.
Wilderson ‘3, professor of African American Studies at University of California, Irvine, 2003 (Frank, A. B. Dartmouth College (Government/Philosophy); MFA Columbia University (Fiction Writing); Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley (Rhetoric/Film Studies), “The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal”, Social Justice, Vol. 30 Issue 2, p18-27) blh
Without the textual categories of dress, diet, medicine, crafts, physical appearance, and, most important, work, the Khoisan stood in refusal of the invitation to become Anthropological Man. She or he was the void in discourse that could be designated only as idleness. Thus, the Khoisan s status within discourse was not that of an opponent or an interlocutor but, rather, that of an unspeakable scandal. His or her position within the discourse was one of disarticulation, for he or she did little or nothing to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of the discourse. Just as the Khoisan presented the discourse of the Cape with an anthropological scandal, so the black subject in the Western Hemisphere, the slave, presents Marxism and American textual practice with a historical scandal. How is our incoherence in the face of the Historical Axis germane to our experience of being 'a phenomenon without analog"? A sample list of codes mapped out by an American subjects Historical Axis might include rights or entitlements; here, even Native Americans provide categories for the record when one thinks of how the Iroquois constitution, for example, becomes the U.S. Constitution. Sovereignty is also included, whether a state is one the subject left behind or, as in the case of American Indians, one taken by force and by dint of broken treaties. White supremacy has made good use of the Indian subjects positionality, one that fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of America as a coherent (albeit imperial) idea because treaties are forms of articulation: Discussions brokered between two groups are presumed to possess the same category of historical currency sovereignty. The code of sovereignty can have a past and future history, if you will excuse the oxymoron, when one considers that 150 Native American tribes have applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for sovereign recognition so that they might qualify for funds harvested from land stolen from them." Immigration is another code that maps the subject onto the American Historical Axis, with narratives of arrival based on collective volition and premeditated desire. Chicano subject positions can fortify and extend the interlocutory life of America as an idea because racial conflict can be articulated across the various contestations over the legitimacy of arrival, immigration. Both whites and Latinos generate data for this category. Slavery is the great leveler of the black subjects positionality. The black American subject does not generate historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are "off the map" with respect to the cartography that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past but not a heritage. To the data-generating demands of the Historical Axisd, we present a virtual blank, much like that which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological Axis. This places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony. However, it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position because—and this is key—our presence works back on the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject— even-the most massacred among them, Indians—is required to have analogs within the nations structuring narrative, and the experience of one subject on whom the nations order of wealth was built is without analog, then that subjects presence destabilizes all other analogs. Fanon writes, "Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder."12 If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence, through which civil society is possible— namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog—a past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for "whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says black (Sexton), and whoever says "aids" says black—the "Negro is a phobogenic object."13 Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic object, a past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament or, worse, disavowal—not at least, for a true revolutionary or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social-democratic nor Marxist in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today—even in the most antiracist movements, such as the prison abolition movement—invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually antiblack, meaning that it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the United States. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism or community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a "program of complete disorder." One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it if, indeed, ones politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites ones politics, then through what strategy of legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this movements lines of political accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has ever been known to say, "Gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all." Yet few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of blackness—and the state of political movements in the United States today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: "Gee-whiz, if only black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the foy of black than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society—with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If through this stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, the work will fail, for it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e., the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence of the black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises than as crowding y out scenarios of black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage) gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the black subject (whether a prison slave or a prison slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of civil society, the black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims blackness not as a positive value but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of "absolute dereliction." It is a "scandal" that rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but that must, nonetheless, be pursued to the death.
The alternative is to call for the end of the world—burn it done. If it’s unintelligible, impossible to envision so be it. Fear of violence is a conservative political maneuver –the question is not whether or not there will be violence but whether it will be directed at an unjust social order.
Wilderson 10, Frank B. Wilderosn, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, 2010, pages 447-449
It is customary for a book like this to end with a prescriptive gesture, at least the germ of a new beginning if not a new world, a seed to be nurtured and cultivated by Lenin’s question, What is to be done? Even when such seeds were not sown throughout the book, an author might be tempted to harvest a yield, however meager, in the conclusion. Not only have such seeds not been sown in this book, but I have argued that anti-Blackness is the genome of this horticultural template for Human renewal. Given the structural violence that it takes to produce and reproduce a Slave—violence as the structure of Black life, as opposed to violence as one of many lived Black experiences—a concluding consideration of the question, What is to be done? would ring hollow. Fanon came closest to the only image of sowing and harvesting that befits this book. Quoting Cesaire, he urged his readers to start “the end of the world,” the “only thing... worth the effort of starting” (Black Skin, White Masks 96), a shift from horticulture to pyrotechnics. Rather than mime the restoration and/or reorganization dreams which conclusions often fall prey to, however unwittingly, Fanon dreams of an undoing, however implausible, for its own sake. Still, there are moments when Fanon finds his own flames to be too incendiary. So much so that he momentarily backs away from the comprehensive emancipation he calls for. Which is why one can find the Fanon of the Slave on the same page as the Fanon of the postcolonial subject. Nonetheless, I am humbled by his efforts; and though I am freighted with enough hubris to extend his ensemble of questions beyond his unintentional containment strategies, I know better than to underrate their gravitas by deigning to offer—or even hint at—a roadmap to freedom so extensive it would free us from the epistemic air we breathe. To say we must Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms 448 be free of air, while admitting to knowledge of no other source of breath, is what I have tried to do here. In the preceding chapters I have critiqued Marxism, White feminism, and Indigenism by arguing that their approach to the question, What is to be thought? and to its doppelgänger, What is to be done? advances through misrecognition of the Slave, a sentient being that cannot be. The way Marxism, White feminism, and Indigenism approach the problem of the paradigm, in other words, their account of unethical power relations, emerges as a constituent element of those relations. Through their indisputably robust interventions, the world they seek to clarify and deconstruct is the world they ultimately mystify and renew. Furthermore, I have argued that the same codes and conventions that reify the horticultural labor mobilized by Negri’s restoration of the commons, by Indigenism’s restoration of Turtle Island, and by White feminism’s search for alternative or “negative” Oedipus (an Oedipus complex “which is culturally disavowed and organizes subjectivity in fundamentally ‘perverse: and homosexual ways,’” in short, an Oedipus complex endowed with the capacity to be claimed for a revolutionary feminist agenda The Acoustic Mirror...120) are codes and conventions shared by the narrative strategies of some of the most politically motivated films. In the spirit of the metacommentaries on political ontology under review in this book, films like Bush Mama and Skins attempt to raise the bar of political aesthetics by deploying discursive strategies allied more to analysis than to empathy. As an antidote to empathetic mystification, politically motivated films such as Bush Mama and Skins subordinate biographical time to historical time—“the dramatic unfolding of events Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms 449 staged as the product of collective humanity.” In their repudiation of the unified self and the self-made (or self-unmade) individual, such films interpellate spectators through codes and conventions properly suited to the dramatization of “sociohistorical heterogeneity” (Mike Wayne 164). Which is to say, they heighten social and political contradictions, rather than smooth them over or crowd them out. Empathetic aesthetics, on the other hand, which films like Antwone Fisher and Monster’s Ball are underwritten by, dissipate cinema’s critical potential by hailing the spectator to an impoverished ensemble of questions, such as Isn’t it sad? Isn’t tragic? Why do some people behave badly and others don’t? Moral assessments made at the expense of institutional analysis. By way of contrast, analytic film aesthetics strive to repudiate moral assessments by privileging effect over cause (Wayne 211), thereby locating causal agency (the ‘because’ principle of the drama) within institutional relations of power as opposed to interpersonal acts of behavior.
Role of the Judge is to vote for the debater methodologically best breaks down anti-blackness.
Framing issue. Their refusal to engage in discussions of the way that anti-blackness shapes the world will lose them this debate
Modern day intellectual practices stress inclusion and unity without confronting the structural antagonism that shapes the world. This conceals anti-black violence by relegating it to the positon of the unthought.
Wilderson ’10 {Frank; Associate Professor of African-American Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley; “Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,”}/MR
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.
Case
Free speech is for the privileged few – dominant social groups coopt free speech and silence oppressed voices – marginalized groups are stuck in a binary between being heard and being dismissed
Manne and Stanley 15, Kate Manne assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University and Jason Stanley professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author, most recently, of How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press), "When Free Speech Becomes a Political Weapon," Chronicle of Higher Education, 11-13-2015, http://www.chronicle.com/article/When-Free-Speech-Becomes-a/234207, ghsBZ
Students at the University of Missouri recently succeeded in pressuring the institution’s president and chancellor to step down. At other campuses across the country, we are witnessing a wave of similar protests. Frequently, however, the students protesting are being misrepresented and belittled in the news media as childish and coddled. More worryingly still, they are held to be attacking freedom of speech rather than exercising it to call for institutional reform — political action of the very kind this freedom aims at protecting. What explains this apparent paradox? In a word, propaganda. The notion of freedom of speech is being co-opted by dominant social groups, distorted to serve their interests, and used to silence those who are oppressed and marginalized. All too often, when people depict others as threats to freedom of speech, what they really mean is, "Quiet!" Recent events at Yale are an important case in point. In late October, in anticipation of Halloween, Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee sent an email to the student body. While affirming Yale’s strong commitment to freedom of speech, it suggested that students be mindful of the perspectives of minority groups when planning their costumes. "Yale is a community that values free expression as well as inclusivity," it read. "And while students, undergraduate and graduate, definitely have a right to express themselves, we would hope that people would actively avoid those circumstances that threaten our sense of community or disrespects, alienates or ridicules segments of our population based on race, nationality, religious belief or gender expression." Not a decade has passed since the last Yale student reportedly celebrated Halloween in blackface. Some deemed the advice infantilizing and heavy-handed. On October 30, Erika Christakis, associate master of Silliman College at Yale, sent a response to this email to its student residents. She decried the "implied control" and "censure and prohibition from above" which she read into it. Quoting her husband, Nicholas Christakis, master of Silliman, she wrote "if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society." The notion of freedom of speech tends to be ambiguous. It is used to refer to both the political right it enshrines, and the ethical ideal it embodies. The former is guaranteed in this country by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Together with the 14th Amendment, this means that nobody’s right to express himself or herself may be interfered with by the government. (The few exceptions to the rule — unprotected speech — include acts like falsely claiming "fire!" in a crowded theater, "fighting words," and slander.) Of course, in order to have genuine freedom of speech, one must also be free to question, contradict, and even lampoon the assertions of others. Also protected is the right to say that someone else’s choice of words was insensitive or inappropriate, or that she ought not to have spoken up in the first place. Censure is not the same thing as censorship; indeed, it could not be. The right not to be censored by the government extends to the right to censure — that is, morally condemn — the speech acts of other people. This leads to a delicate and controversial question: To affirm the value of freedom of speech, and to keep from silencing others unethically, when may we encourage people to choose their words more carefully, or tell them they ought to have kept silent? When should we say that, although someone had the right to say what he said, his saying it was a problem? Even the most avid proponent of freedom of speech cannot avoid this issue. When people disagree about who should say what to whom — and how — either someone has to keep mum, or someone’s speech act will come in for criticism. Perhaps Erika Christakis did not intend to weigh in on one side or the other of the culture wars. Her remarks nevertheless provoked a strong reaction from some students. This is not surprising, against the current political backdrop. Free speech has become an increasingly politicized issue at Yale and elsewhere. A few months ago, the university’s William F. Buckley Jr. Program hosted the New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In his talk, Haidt invoked notions like freedom of speech and the search for truth to inveigh against "coddled" students. The obvious target was groups who have historically been oppressed and are now increasingly prone to calling attention to microaggressions. Haidt, together with Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has argued recently in The Atlantic that these students are being immature and oversensitive. Following Christakis’s email, protests erupted among students of color and their supporters. Their political activity has since been written off by many commentators as a silly tantrum thrown in response to a one-off email, rather than a reaction to chronic, structural racial injustice — such as the persistent paucity of black faculty members and administrators at Yale, the common experience of being the only black student in some classes, and being disproportionately likely to be stopped and asked for ID — or worse — by campus police officers, as students have movingly testified. An article in the National Review went so far as to call these students of color "defective people from defective families" — an eyebrow-raising choice of language. The Christakises are of course not responsible for the tensions their remarks brought to the surface. Indeed, Nicholas Christakis took to Twitter to make some of the very points in defense of Silliman students which we make in this article. Nevertheless, the protesting Yale undergraduates have become pawns in the culture wars, being demonized as threats to freedom of speech, rather than political agents engaged in its exercise. It is therefore past time to lay this myth to rest, and to expose its ideological function. Consider the structure of the events at Yale. After the Intercultural Affairs Committee sent its original email, Erika Christakis opposed it — not merely its content, but the very act of their issuing it. The students then opposed her opposition — alleging that she ought not to have spoken as she did, given her position as associate master of Silliman College. And many pundits have, in turn, opposed their opposition — holding that the students ought not to be protesting thus. So far, so similar; these speech acts are on a par not only constitutionally, but also insofar as each opposes the one aforementioned. Given these symmetries, why the markedly different reactions? Part of it is that, when people lower down in social and institutional hierarchies criticize the speech acts of those higher up, it often reads as insubordination, defiance, or insolence. When things go the other way, it tends to read as business as usual. Why? In a 1988 paper, the Stanford psychologist Claude Steele proposed the existence of "a self-system that explains ourselves, and the world at large, to ourselves. The purpose of these constant explanations (and rationalizations) is to maintain a phenomenal experience of the self — self-conceptions and images — as adaptively and morally adequate — that is, as competent, good, unitary, stable." Self-affirmation theory predicts that members of groups that have benefited from practices of exclusion, and have sometimes been actively complicit (more or less unwittingly) in sustaining them, will experience a serious disruption of their sense of self when confronted by injustice. The Yale philosopher Christopher Lebron has theorized the ways that privileged whites often subscribe to legitimizing myths in order to maintain their self-conception as good people in a racist society. Presenting oneself as a martyr to the cause of a cherished ideal like freedom of speech is one way to do that. It simultaneously serves to discredit the people calling for change — including, in this case, the resignations of the Christakises from Silliman College. (Not just on the basis of the email, but because of growing discontent with their narrow focus on freedom of speech to the exclusion of actually fostering engagement among Silliman residents. In resigning as masters, the Christakises would remain Yale faculty.) Sounding reasonable can be a luxury. Such speech trusts, even presumes, that one's words will be received by a similarly reasonable, receptive, even sympathetic, audience. But didn’t Erika Christakis, and most though not all of her defenders, express their views in a much more reasonable tone of voice than the students protesting? Yes. But sounding reasonable can be a luxury. Such speech trusts, even presumes, that one’s words will be received by a similarly reasonable, receptive, even sympathetic, audience. Oppressed people are often met with the political analogue of stonewalling. In order to be heard, they need to shout; and when they shout, they are told to lower their voices. They may be able to speak, but have little hope of being listened to. The Michigan State University philosopher Kristie Dotson describes this predicament as "testimonial quieting," as the philosopher Rachel McKinnon has helped us to see. When oppressed people speak out — and up, toward those in power — their right to speak may be granted, yet their capacity to know of what they speak doubted as the result of ingrained prejudice. And the way in which they express themselves is often then made the focus of the discussion. So it is not just that these people have to raise their voices in order to be audible; it’s also that, when their tone becomes the issue, their speech is essentially being heard as mere noise, disruption, commotion. Their freedom of speech is radically undercut by what is aptly known as "tone policing."
Marginalized viewpoints are ignored in the marketplace – the only result is the empowerment of already existing power structures
Bietzke 97, Paul H. Brietzke, “How and Why the Marketplace of Ideas Fail,” Valparaiso Scholar, 1997, http://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1846andcontext=vulr, ghsBZ
Advocates of a broad and absolutist political speech are right: dissenters are protected against the tyranny of the majority, without having to prove the "hard-to-measure worth" of free speech.37 This is an obviously-important protection, during crisis times or when the speech-harm can indeed be cured by more speech, but it should not forestall the search for protections which are more "cost-effective" in terms of having fewer speech-harm side effects. The nature of such protections is suggested by persistent critiques of the political speech/marketplace of ideas nexus. Critics plausibly argue that this nexus operates "to exaggerate the evils of government and as in Areopagitica the goodness of people," to "understate the risks and harms of speech and to overstate its benefits,"" and to understate the physical and psychological dangers, and often the futility, of attempts to counter bad speech with good. Stanley Ingber concludes that the ideas marketplace changes little and has little to do with an informed choice. Rather, this nexus serves to socialize the citizenry into a conformity to some perspectives rather than others. The "marketplace of ideas is as flawed as the economic market ..., and ideas that support an entrenched power structure or ideology are most likely to gain acceptance. " Society is not a debating club like the Oxford Union, not a "town meeting or... a group of scientists interested in figuring out some truth."' Producers often speak to make a profit, and they are usually very different people from the ostensible consumers, who often misunderstand or ignore the message, often lack a viable channel for communicating their response, and are often afraid to make fools of themselves by speaking up. Feeling cut off from an active participation, many people are left with the passivity of an evening in front of the TV that is controlled (even after the advent of cable TV) by oligopolistic networks practicing a very definite viewpoint censorship. Many subjects or perspectives are ignored or relegated to fragmented "market surrogates," like a "counterculture" newspaper or a "public access" TV channel, because they are thought to be "distressing" or "unentertaining" and, thus, unprofitable. Most of effective political speech is really a commercial speech, and it would receive less ("low value") protection if the Supreme Court pushed some of its analyses to their logical conclusions.4 The deep (economic)42 rationality assumption characteristic of the ideas marketplace, and of other markets as well, cannot hold in the real world: it ignores a host of factors that make us human, including altruism, habit, bigotry, panic, genius, luck or its absence, and factors such as peer pressures, institutions, and cultures that turn us into social animals. A dehumanized, desocialized, and often sexist "economic man" or "speech man" supposedly goes through life as if it were one long series of analogies to isolated transactions on the New York Stock Exchange.4
