Tournament: cal | Round: 4 | Opponent: lynbrook ap | Judge: Calen Smith
Colorblindness is racism – their framework presumes equality, which re-entrenches dominant structures
Williams 11 (Monica Williams, "Colorblind Ideology Is a Form of Racism," Psychology Today, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/colorblind/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism, December 27, 2011)
Racial issues are often uncomfortable to discuss and rife with stress and controversy. Many ideas have been advanced to address this sore spot in the American psyche. Currently, the most pervasive approach is known as colorblindness. Colorblindness is the racial ideology that posits the best way to end discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible, without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity. At its face value, colorblindness seems like a good thing — really taking MLK seriously on his call to judge people on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It focuses on commonalities between people, such as their shared humanity. However, colorblindness alone is not sufficient to heal racial wounds on a national or personal level. It is only a half-measure that in the end operates as a form of racism. Problems with the colorblind approach Racism? Strong words, yes, but let's look the issue straight in its partially unseeing eye. In a colorblind society, White people, who are unlikely to experience disadvantages due to race, can effectively ignore racism in American life, justify the current social order, and feel more comfortable with their relatively privileged standing in society (Fryberg, 2010). Most minorities, however, who regularly encounter difficulties due to race, experience colorblind ideologies quite differently. Colorblindness creates a society that denies their negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives. Let's break it down into simple terms: Color-Blind = "People of color — we don't see you (at least not that bad ‘colored' part)." As a person of color, I like who I am, and I don't want any aspect of that to be unseen or invisible. The need for colorblindness implies there is something shameful about the way God made me and the culture I was born into that we shouldn't talk about. Thus, colorblindness has helped make race into a taboo topic that polite people cannot openly discuss. And if you can't talk about it, you can't understand it, much less fix the racial problems that plague our society. Colorblindness is not the answer Many Americans view colorblindness as helpful to people of color by asserting that race does not matter (Tarca, 2005). But in America, most underrepresented minorities will explain that race does matter, as it affects opportunities, perceptions, income, and so much more. When race-related problems arise, colorblindness tends to individualize conflicts and shortcomings, rather than examining the larger picture with cultural differences, stereotypes, and values placed into context. Instead of resulting from an enlightened (albeit well-meaning) position, colorblindness comes from a lack of awareness of racial privilege conferred by Whiteness (Tarca, 2005). White people can guiltlessly subscribe to colorblindness because they are usually unaware of how race affects people of color and American society as a whole.

The alternative is to reject the AFF – it's the only way to demand racial equality
Leonardo 2 (Leonardo, Zeus. "The souls of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse." Race, ethnicity and education 5.1 (2002): 29-50.)
The fragmenting effects of the global economy work in tandem with the fragmenting tendencies of whiteness. As a perspective, whiteness is historicaly fractured in its apprehension of racial formations. In order to ‘see’ the formation in full view, whites have to mobilize a perspective that begins with racial privilege as a central unit of analysis. Since starting from this point would mean whites engage in a thorough historical understanding of ‘how they came to be’ in a position of power, most whites resist such an undertaking and instead focus on individual merit, exception- alism, or hard work. The act of interpreting the totality of racial formations is an apostasy that white students and educators must undertake but one which does not come easy or without costs. The costs are real because it means whites would have to acknowledge their unearned privileges and disinvest in them. This is a different tack from saying that whites benefit from renouncing their whiteness because it would increase their humanity. Whites would lose many of their perks and privileges. So, the realistic appraisal is that whites do have a lot to lose by committing race treason, not just something to gain by forsaking whiteness. This is the challenge. In his discussion of gender and race, Terry Eagleton (1996) provokes a distinction between identity politics and class relations. He calls class position relational in a way that gender and race are not, because possessing a certain skin color or body configuration does not prevent another person from owning such traits. By contrast, a landless laborer occupies a material position because the gentleman farmer owns the land or property. Eagleton goes on to say that being black does not mean one is of a different species from a white person. Pigmentation is not definitive of a general human experience in the same way that freckle-faced people do not constitute an essentialy different human category. In this, Eagleton exposes the racist and patriarchal imagination by highlighting its contradictions and ilogics. However, his analysis leaves out a more powerful explanation of how racism actualy works. Like most oppressive systems, racism functions through an illogical rationalization process. For instance, the one-drop rule, or the Rule of Hypodescent, demarcates blacks from whites by drawing an arti cial and arbitrary line between them in order both to create more slaves and limit people’s power to achieve whiteness. Thus, the power of whiteness comes precisely from its ability to usurp reason and rational thought, and a purely rationalistic analysis limits our understanding of the way it functions. Despite its contradictions, the contours of racism can be mapped out and analyzed and this is what Cheryl Harris (1995) attempts when she compares whiteness to owning property. First, whiteness becomes property through the objecti cation of African slaves, a process which set the precondition for ‘propertizing’ human life (Harris, 1995, p. 279). Whiteness takes the form of ownership, the de ning attribute of free individ- uals which Africans did not own. Second, through the reification and subsequent hegemony of white people, whiteness is transformed into the common sense that becomes law. As a given right of the individual white person, whiteness can be enjoyed, like any property, by exercising and taking advantage of privileges co-extensive with whiteness. Third, like a house, whiteness can be demarcated and fenced off as a territory of white people which keeps Others out. Thus, caling a white person ‘black’ was enough reason, as late as 1957, to sue for character defamation; the same could not be said of a black person being mistaken for ‘white.’ This was a certain violation of property rights much like breaking into someone’s house. In al, whites became the subjects of property, with Others as its objects. As Charles Mils (1997) explains, the Racial Contract is an agreement to misinter- pret the world as it is. It is the implicit consensus that whites frequently enter into, which accounts for their fragmented understanding of the world as it is racialy structured. When confronted with the reality of racial oppression, according to Hurtado, whites respond with: I wil listen to you, sometimes for the  rst time, and wil seem engaged. At critical points in your analysis I wil claim I do not know what you are talking about and wil ask you to elaborate ad nauseam. I wil consistently subvert your efforts at dialogue by claiming ‘we do not speak the same language’. (cited in McLaren et al., 2001, pp. 211–212; italics in original) The frequent detours, evasions, and detractions from the circuits of whiteness cripple our understanding of the racio-economic essence of schools and society. It is a distortion of perfect communication in Habermas’s (1984) sense of it which creates what I cal an altogether ‘ideological speech situation.’ That is, communi- cation is ideological to the extent that the ‘ideal speech situation’ is systematicaly distorted, which is different from saying that it is always a bit distorted. As Hurtado plainly describes, radical communication about the Contract meets apathy and indifference, perhaps a bit predictably. Admitting the reality of white racism would force a river of centuries of pain, denial, and guilt that many people cannot assuage. In several instances, both in coleagues’ courses as wel as mine, white students have expressed their emotions and frustrations through tears when white privilege is confronted. In fact, Rains (1997) has described the same event occurring in her courses. Although it might seem cynical or unfeeling to analyze criticaly such an occurrence, it is important to deploy such a critique in the name of political and pedagogical clarity. It is imperative to address the local moment and ‘be there’ for al students but in slicing through the pathos, one also bene ts from re ection on the moment in its larger, global signi cance. The times when I have confronted this scenario can be described as the honest interrogation of racial power engaged by both white and non-white students. At certain moments, some anger has been expressed, sometimes frustration. In general, the milieu is emotional and politicaly charged. How can it not be? In one particular case, I witnessed a situation where a black student interrogated the issue of racial privilege and questioned a white coleague’s comments for failing to do the same. By the end of the exchange, the white student left the room crying and the discussion halted. In another case, an earnest discussion took place about racism and ways to address it in schools. A white student cried because she felt frustrated and a little helpless about how she comes into the fold of becoming an anti-racist educator. After a minute of pause, students of color returned to the discussion at hand, not breaking their stride. In a third instance, in the midst of discussing the importance of building solidarity between teachers against racism, a white student cries and asks her coleagues to remember that they must stay cohesive and support each other as comrades in struggle. A coleague reports a fourth instance where, during a dialogue about the experiences of women of color, a white woman repeatedly insisted that the real issue was class, not race, because her experiences as a woman were similar to the women of color. When a faculty of color informed her that she was monopolizing the discussion and in the process invalidated the voices of women of color, the white woman cried and was unable to continue. In al these cases, we observed the guilt of whiteness prompting the women to cry in shame. Made to recognize their unearned privileges and confronted in public, they react with tears of admission. Discussing (anti)racism is never easy and is frequently suppressed in mainstream classroom conditions. The establishment of the right conditions is precious but often precarious. In the  rst case, we must keep in mind that it was the black student who felt dehumanized and subsequently felt enough courage to express her anger about comments she perceived to be problematic. The act of crying by the white student immediately positioned the black student as the perpetrator of a hurt and erased/deraced the power of her charge. A reversal of sorts had just occurred. The white student earned the other students’ sympathy and the professor folowed her to the halway to comfort her white the black student nursed her anger by herself. Likewise, I could not help but feel for the white student. Upon re ection, an important difference needs to be discussed. In the act of crying, the student attenuated the centuries of hurt and oppression that the black student was trying to relay. In the act of crying, the student transformed racism into a local problem between two people. I couldn’t help feeling that other students in the class thought the black person was both wrong and racist, erasing/deracing the institutional basis of what she had to say. The room’s energy suddenly felt funneled to the white student. Clearly, there are more ‘harmonious’ ways of teaching the topic of race and racism. However, they also often forsake radical critique for feelings. Feelings have to be respected and educators can establish the conditions for radical empathy. That said, anger is also a valid and legitimate feeling; when complemented by clear thought, anger is frighteningly lucid. Thus, a pedagogy of politeness only goes so far before it degrades into the paradox of liberal feel-good solidarity absent of dissent, without which any worthwhile pedagogy becomes a democracy of empty forms. White comfort zones are notorious for tolerating only smal, incremental dozes of racial confrontation (Hunter and Nettles, 1999). This does not suggest that educators procure a hostile environment, but a pedagogical situation that fails to address white racism is arguably already the conduit of hostility. It fragments students’ holistic understanding of their identity development through the ability of whiteness to deform our complete picture of the racial formation. It practices violence on the racialized Other in the name of civility and as long as this is the case, racial progress wil proceed at the snail pace of white racial consciousness. White race traitors and progressive Others shal piece together a whole from the fragmentary pieces that whiteness has created out of this world. The Contract challenges educators of the new millennium to explain the untruth of white perspectives on race, even a century after Du Bois’s initial chalenge. Obviously, this does not mean that whites cannot grasp the Contract; many do, but they cannot accomplish this from the white point of view, a world-view which, according to Gibson, projects a ‘delusional world,’ ‘a racial fantasyland,’ and ‘a consensual halucination’ (cited in Mils, 1997, p. 18). With the rise of globalization, education—which prides itself for inculcating into students knowledge about the real world—struggles to represent the world in the most real way possible. White epistemology can be characterized as fragmentary and fleeting because white liveli- hood depends on this double helix. It is fragmentary because in order for whiteness to maintain its invisibility, or its unmarked status, it must by necessity mistake the world as non-relational or partitioned (Dwyer and Jones, III, 2000). This allows the white psyche to speak of slavery as ‘long ago,’ rather than as a legacy which lives today; it minimizes racism toward non-white immigrants today through a convenient and problematic comparison with white immigrants, like the Irish or Jews. It is also fleeting because it must deny the history of its own genesis and the creation of the Other. It can only be concerned with ‘how things are and not how they got to be that way.’ As a socio-spatial epistemology, whiteness sees the world upside-down. Mils (1997) and I agree when he says: Thus on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologicaly and socialy functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites wil in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. (p. 18; italics in original) According to Mils, whiteness concerns itself with racial details and misses the totality of the Racial Contract. Like the way it partitions the world according to its own image, whiteness constructs history as separate racial details without coherence. As a result, it fails to provide our students the language to link together California’s Proposition 187 (anti-immigrant), 209 (anti-af rmative action), and 227 (anti-bilin- gualism) as related to white hegemony. With the exception of particular Asian ethnic groups (to which I wil return later), al three legislations limit the rights of students of color. Fortunately, white and non-white activists have countered such measures with unrelenting protests and public organizing because, as Hopson et al. (1998) remind us, ‘Recognizing and valuing language varieties and multiple ways of speaking among students is a precondition to understanding how to teach them’ (p. 5). As a racial epistemology, whiteness is necessarily idealist in order to construct the Other as abstract, rather than concrete. Enslavement, discrimination, and marginalization of the Other work most efficiently when they are constructed as an idea rather than a people. They can be more easily controled, aggregated as the same, or marked as unchanging and constant when textbooks idealize them as inconse- quential to the history and evolution of humankind. In effect, whiteness eggs us on to yoke together different peoples around the globe under the sign of sameness.
Challenging racism is a prior ethical question— it makes violence structurally inevitable and foundationally negates morality
Albert Memmi 2k, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism, Translated by Steve Martinot, p. 163-165
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animosity to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is ‘the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsels respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall.” says the Bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal—indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.