NC Cap K T 1AR Counterinterp w ground standard on T perms on K extensions of case NR Cap K K outweighs T 2AR RVIs on T
Alta
1
Opponent: East WH | Judge: Overing, Michael
AC police brutaity NC CRB CP (already disclosed) Hollow Hope 1AR Analytic answers to both NCs case extensions NR CP and Hollow Hope 2AR Covers everything
College Prep
1
Opponent: Bentley KS | Judge: Shan, Panny
AC Fem Rage NC Framework and rage-bad 1AR Analytic answers NR Framework 2AR Framework answersmethods good
College Prep
3
Opponent: Nueva AK | Judge: Olson, Ryan
AC Eudaemonia AFF NC CRT K AFC Bad 1AR Drop the arg on AFC CRT turns case extensions NR CRT 2AR Case extensions and CRT turns
Damus
4
Opponent: Harker QC | Judge: Angus, Thomas
AC Court legitimacy and civil rights NC turns Civilian Review Board CP TPP DA Case turns
Damus
2
Opponent: Albany EK | Judge: Crucilla, Sarah
AC Kant NC anti ethics and analytics on case 1AR case extensions and link turn on the K NR anti ethics 2AR link turns (Farr and consequentialism bad) on K
Yale
1
Opponent: Success Academy SC | Judge: Zhou, Paul
NC SSD CP Elections DA Warming DA
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Cites
Entry
Date
0 - AFC Bad
Tournament: College Prep | Round: 3 | Opponent: Nueva AK | Judge: Olson, Ryan A. Interp: the AFF may not claim that the NEG must concede their ethical framework
B. Violation: they read AFC
C. Standards:
Ground – they will always choose frameworks that are one sided or extremely narrow – empirically proven since _ give example of why offense flows AFF under their chosen FW. They’ll also always be ahead on a debate on their terms since they can choose cards and frontlines but we can’t under their advocacy.
12/18/16
0 - Anti ethics
Tournament: Damus | Round: 2 | Opponent: Albany EK | Judge: Crucilla, Sarah The 1AC perpetuates the exact abstraction that recreates anti-black violence by ignoring the underlying antagonism inherent to its structure – asking historically racist institutions to try and fix problems is blind optimism that dooms them to recreate anti-blackness. Curry 13 Dr. Tommy J. Curry 13, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Texas AandM, "In the Fiat of Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical", 2013. CC
Despite the rhetorical strategies adopted by both Black and white political theorists which urge Blacks and whites alike to demand Americans to continue their allegiance to the foundational de-racialized ethos of the post-Civil Rights era, the reality of the American racism—its sheer recurring violence against Black people—demands more than symbolic rhetorical allusion. To seriously grasp the reality of racist oppression and the sempiternal machinations of anti-Blackness throughout American society be it in its institutions like the prison industrial complex, its policies like Affirmative action, or its manipulation of Black social degradation and economic disadvantage to support pathological theses about disasters like Katrina or cultural deviance as in the death of Trayvon Martin, Darius Simmons, or Jordan Davis, the study of the matter itself—racism—must be a study of a conceptual disengagement with the myth of racial equality and the “automatic progressivism” of the American liberal project. This disengagement is not simply the refusal to accept the idealism of civil rights myth held beyond the realm of fact, but the disengagement with the illusions of democracy and equality that continue to ignore the role that violence has played and continues to play in the subjugation, incarceration, and vilification of Black life. As Dr. A.J. William Myers reveals in his work groundbreaking work entitled Destructive Impulses, Until at such time white America (and Black America) is openly willing to confront a historical legacy of its own violence (perpetrated against an American people of color), any venture into and/ or expository on race relations becomes an exercise in futility…As a result, therefore, white violence, confined to the subliminal recesses of the American psyche, continues to prevent the transition necessary for the country to move beyond the idea of race. In America, Blackness and the racism that continues to condemn those historical racialized peoples is violence—it is the forceful and coercion enclosing of human beings to an inferior social, political, and economic status of which their own humanity exceeds. This dehumanizing relegation of the raced citizen is not a gradual or incremental debasement, but rather the historically immediate condition of inferiority that presents progress to be attainable by the cyclical degrees of physical violence against the racialized population. For these racially oppressed peoples, violence is the permanent fixture of existence in America, since it is the vitiation of their humanity that rationalizes the varying techniques of their cultural erasure, birthing the emergent symbolic associations of degradation that replace their invisibility, and empowering the intentional enforcements of their societal exclusions. In fact, it is precisely this triumvirate that gauges what we take to be the negation of the necessity of revolutionary change--since the raced is taken to be present, as a result of a critical redefining of humanity, integrated into society.
Their framework arguments are another link – their ethics are colorblind and abstract from reality in a way in a way that is inaccessible to oppressed bodies – they serve as another hoop to jump through before we can engage in racism and are exactly what keeps that oppression prevalent. Curry 2 Dr. Tommy J. Curry 13, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Texas AandM, "In the Fiat of Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical", 2013. CC
In the post-structuralist era, post-colonial thinking about racism specifically, and difference/otherness generally, has given a peculiar ameliorative function to discourse and the performance of “other-ed” identities. In this era, the dominant illusion is that discourse itself , an act that requires as its basis the recognition of the “other” as “similar,” is socially transformative—not only with regard to how the white subject assimilates the similitude of the “other-ed,” but as an actual activity gauged by the recognition by one white person or by a group of white people in any given scenario, is uncritically accepted and encouraged as anti-racist politics.. In actuality such discourse appeals, which necessitate—become dependent on—(white) recognition, function very much like the racial stereotype, in that the concept of the Black body being the expression and source of experience and phenomena (existential-phenomenological-theorization) is incarcerated by the conceptualization created the discursive catalyst yearning to be perceived by the white thing seeing the Black. Such appeals lend potentiality-hope-faith to the already present/demonstrated ignorance-racism-interest of the white individual, who in large part expresses the historical tone/epistemology of their racial group’s interest. When morality is defined, not by the empirical acts that demonstrate immorality, but the racial character of those in question, our ethics become nothing more than the apologetics of our tyrannical epoch. Ought implies a projected (futural) act. The word commands a deliberate action to reasonably expect the world to be able to sustain or support. For the Black thinker, the Black citizen-subject-slave-(in)human, ought is not rational but repressive. For the oppressed racialized thinker, the ethical provocation is an immediate confrontation with the impossibility of actually acting towards values like freedom, liberty, humanity, and life, since none of these values can be achieved concretely for the Black in a world controlled by and framed by the white. The options for ethical actions are not ethical in and of themselves, but merely the options the immorality of the racist world will allow, thus the oppressed is forced to idealize their ethical positions, eliminating the truth of their reality, and the peeling away the tyranny of white bodies, so that as the oppressed, the can ideally imagine an “if condition,” whereby they are allowed to ethical engage racism from the perspective of: “if whites were moral and respected the humanity of Blacks, then we can ethically engage in these behaviors. Unfortunately, this ought constraint only forces Blacks to consciously recognize the futility of ethical engagement, since it is in this ought deliberation that they recognize that their cognition of all values are dependent not on their moral aspirations for the world, but the determined by the will of white supremacy to maintain virtue throughout all ethical calculations. In short, Black ethical deliberation is censored so that it can only engage moral questions by asserting that whites are virtuous and hence capable of being ethically persuaded towards right action, hence all ethical question about racism, white supremacy and anti-Blackness is not about how Blacks think about the world, but what possibility the world allows Blacks to contemplate under the idea of ethics. These ethics, the ethics that result from this vitiated morality, are not arbiters of oppression at all. They are not a rational calculus that is capable of revealing a categorical imperative, rather they function as the Kantian constraints upon human experience; the synthetic apriori upon which the phenomena of whiteness is the landscape of thinking about Blackness under the Western anthropos. There is an implicit appeal to a hierarchy of being that is both empirical and universal—all man is superior to non-man. Hence, ethics emerges as the product of the overrepresentation of Western man thinking itself—projecting itself—into the future. These ethics, theorized away from the anti-Blackness not within it, only uphold an overdetermined virtue of whiteness. They hold within them no actual delineation between good or bad, only a Puritanical call to reason to turn its attention towards the other-ed created. This attention however relies on the perceptions and caricatures of Black torment that appeal to the whites’ self-assuring imagining of themselves, so that even when confronted with racism and their role as whites thinking about Black people incarcerated within a racist society and dying, these whites can claim that their conceptualization of racism itself, or (inter-sectionally) next to other injustices like poverty, sexism, homophobia, etc. makes them (whites) virtuous. It is the process of, the appeal to, “getting whites to recognize” (racist) oppression that allows the destruction of reality, Black death, to continue unabated, since it is the exact moment that whites are forced to engage racist problems in America, be it the anti-Black violence of American society, which animates the aversion of the justice system, the police state, the white citizenry, or the practice of American democracy itself—where the death of Black people/criminals/deviants/thugs remain normal and justified by whites—that they, the white(s) thinking about racism, get to impose upon Black reality, a racist moral maxim, namely that racism is not death and beyond –the end of--ethical calculus or moral evaluation, but ultimately contingent in America and of measurable consequence so much so that must be weighed next to the other democratic values that preserve this great white society: security, safety, individuality, property, profit, and freedom, the very values that when enacted by whites continue to perpetuate one ultimate end, the death of Blacks.
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.
Thus the alternative is to embrace anti-ethics; we must refuse the notion that historically racist institutions can help minorities and stop exploitation—fiat is illusory, so we need to destroy and demystify the concept of the white man and white virtue. Curry 3
Dr. Tommy J. Curry 13, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Texas AandM, "In the Fiat of Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical", 2013. CC
The shift out of our present conception of Man, out of our present “World System”—the one that places people of African descent and the ever-expanding global, transracial category of the homeless, jobless, and criminalized damned as the zero-most factor of Other to Western Man’s Self—has to be first and foremost a cultural shift, not an economic one. Until such a rupture in our conception of being human is brought forth, such “sociological” concerns as that of the vast global and local economic inequalities, immigration, labor policies, struggles about race, gender, class, and ethnicity, and struggles over the environment, global warming, and distribution of world resources, will remain status quo. ¶ Anti-ethics; the call to demystify the present concept of man as illusion, as delusion, and as stratagem, is the axiomatic rupture of white existence and the multiple global oppressions like capitalism, militarism, genocide, and globalization, that formed the evaluative nexus which allows whites to claim they are the civilized guardians of the world’s darker races. It is the rejection of white virtue, the white’s axiomatic claim to humanity that allows the Black, the darker world to sow the seeds of consciousness towards liberation from oppression. When white (in)humanity is no longer an obstacle weighed against the means for liberation from racism, the oppressed are free to overthrow the principles that suggest their paths to liberation are immoral and hence not possible. To accept the oppressor as is, the white made manifest in empire, is to transform white western (hu)man from semi-deitous sovereign citizen to contingent, mortal, and un-otherable. Exposing the inhumanity of white humanity is the destruction/refusal of the disciplinary imperative for liberal reformism and dialogue as well as a rejection of the social conventions that dictate speaking as if this white person, the white person and her white people before you are in fact not racist white people, but tolerable—not like the racist white people abstracted from reality, but really spoken of in conversations about racism. The revelatory call, the coercively silenced but intuitive yearning to describe the actual reality set before Black people in an anti-Black society, is to simply say there is no negotiating the boundaries of anti-Blackness or the horizons of white supremacy. Racism, the debasement of melaninated bodies and nigger-souls, is totalizing. ¶ But such a reality can never be spoken or written about without fear. In order to preserve the possibility of being recognized by whites, be it as citizen-not-terrorist or as a scholar, colleague, human-not-angry-nigger, the Black philosopher, Blackened person must offer to whites vindication—acknowledgement that he recognizes and will speak of-write about whites as having the potentiality for virtue. The revolutionary activity, if that is how we understand the efforts to change the material-physical relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor, making one’s individual assertion of white inhumanity—the local act of critique—real and socially transformative beyond the dialogical (conversations between colleagues, within a discursive space, or disagreements between critics), is not convincing the white subject in dialogue with, the supposed rational ethical subject, that they-it can potentiality to be different, or better. This is a dead end appeal over-determined by trying to “win over,” “be recognized by,” the white subject. The revolutionary activity is to demonstrate as a matter of ontology (this is whiteness as is) that whiteness is irredeemable. In relativizing Western MAN, showing the ethnoclass limitation of Europe’s cultural invention, Black humanity is freed to begin thinking itself anew without the fear of falling into mimicry. In short, seeing whites as they are is the proof that Black consciousness has shifted our present conception of man and has found a new teleological/cultural orientation; an endarkening path towards a new humanity.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best deconstructs power relations – pedagogical contexts like debate are uniquely political and your ballot promotes a true opportunity for change. Trifonas
Trifonas, Peter. PEDAGOGIES OF DIFFERENCE: RETHINKING EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE. New York, London. 2003.
Domination and subordination, I imply that they are relations of power. In an educational context, the exercise of power is accomplished in interactions (i.e., in a social organization), manifesting itself as acts of exclusion, marginalization, silencing, and so forth. Thus, paying attention to how power operates along axes of gender, race, class, and ability (that is, recognizing that social differences are not given, but are accomplished in and through educational settings) is a step toward educational equity. What does the above discussion mean in the educational context? It means that in the interactions of teachers with students in the classroom, or in other contexts, attention needs to be directed toward how dominant and subordinate relations (be they based on race, gender, class, or ability) permeate these contexts and intersect in complicated ways to produce inequality and marginalization. The frequently used and well-meaning phrase, “I treat everyone the same, ” often used by teachers and administrators to indicate their lack of bias in a diverse educational setting, in fact masks unequal power relations. Similarly, educational policies that assume that people are the same or equal may serve to entrench existing inequality precisely because people enter into the educational process with different and unequal experiences. These attempts, well meaning though they may be, tend to render inequality invisible, and thus work against equity in education. In her exploration of white privilege in higher education in the United States, Frances Rains (1998), an aboriginal-Japanese American woman, states emphatically that these benign acts are disempowering for the minority person because they erase his or her racial identity. The denial of racism in this case is in fact a form of racism. Thus, in moving toward equity in education that allows us to address multiple and intersecting axes of difference and inequality, I recommend that we try to think and act “against the grain” in developing educational policies and handling various kinds of pedagogical situations. 5 To work against the grain is to recognize that education is not neutral; it is contested. Mohanty puts it as such: … Education represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations. It is a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political positions. (Mohanty 1990:184) We need to develop a critical awareness of the power dynamics operative in institutional relations-and of the fact that people participate in institutions as unequal subjects. Working against the grain is to take a proactive approach to understanding and acting upon institutional relations, whether in the classroom, in other interactions with students, or in policy development. Rather than overlooking the embeddedness of gender, race, class, ability, and other forms of inequality that shape our interactions, working against the grain makes explicit the political nature of education and how power operates to privilege, silence, and marginalize individuals who are differently located in the educational process. In her exploration of feminist pedagogy, Linda Briskin (1990) makes a clear distinction between nonsexist and antisexist education critical to our understanding here. She asserts that nonsexism is an approach that attempts to neutralize sexual inequality by pretending that gender can be made irrelevant in the classroom. Thus, for instance, merely asserting that male and female students should have equal time to speak-and indeed giving them equal time-cannot adequately rectify the endemic problem of sexism in the classroom. One of Briskin's students reported that in her political science tutorials that when the male students spoke, everyone paid attention. When a female student spoke, however, the class acted as if no one was speaking (13). Neutrality is an attempt to conceal the unequal distribution of power. An against the grain approach would acknowledge explicitly that we are all gendered, racialized, and differently constructed subjects who do not participate in interactional relations as equals. This goes beyond formulating sexism, racism, abilism, and class privilege in individualist terms and treating them as if they were personal attitudes. Terry Wolverton (1983) discovered the difference between nonracism and antiracism in her consciousness-raising attempt: I had confused the act of trying to appear not to be racist with actively working to eliminate racism. Trying to appear not racist had made me deny my racism, and therefore exclude the possibility of change. (191) Being against the grain means seeing inequality as systemic and interpersonal (rather than individual), and combatting oppression as a collective responsibility, not just as a personal attribute (so that somehow a person can cleanse herself or himself of sexism, racism, abilism, or class bias). It is to pay attention to oppression as an interactional property that can be altered (see Manners 1998). Roger Simon (1993) suggests, in his development of a philosophical basis for teaching against the grain, which shares many commonalities in how I think about an integrative approach to equity in education, that teaching against the grain is fundamentally a moral practice. By this he does not mean that teachers simply fulfill the mandate and guidelines of school authorities. He believes that teachers must expose the partial and imperfect nature of existing knowledge, which is constructed on the basis of asymmetrical power relations (for instance, who has the power to speak and whose voices are suppressed?). It is the responsibility of the teacher or educator to show how dominant forms of knowledge and ways of knowing constrict human capacities. In exposing the power relations integral to the knowledge construction process, the educator, by extension, must treat teaching and learning as a mutual and collaborative act between teachers and students. What may this ideal look like in practice? Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1991) also explores the notion of teaching against the grain in her research on how teachers and students worked together in a preservice program in the Philadelphia area. Borrowing from Gramsci's formulation that action is everyone's responsibility, she asserts that teaching is fundamentally a political activity. In practical terms, she outlines what it may mean to teach against the grain in an actual teaching and learning situation. Her succinct articulation is worth quoting at length: To teach against the grain, teachers have to understand and work both within and around the culture of teaching and the politics of schooling at their particular schools and within their larger school system and communities. They cannot simply announce better ways of doing things, as outsiders are likely to do. They have to teach differently without judging the ways other teach or dismissing the ideas others espouse…. They are not at liberty to publicly announce brilliant but excoriating critiques of their colleagues and the bureaucracies in which they labor. Their ultimate commitment is to the school lives and futures of the children with whom they live and work. Without condescension or defensiveness, they have to work with parents and other teachers on different ways of seeing and measuring development, connecting and dividing knowledge, and knowing about teaching and schooling. They have to be astute observers of individual learners with the ability to pose and explore questions that transcend cultural attribution, institutional habit, and the alleged certainty of outside experts. They have to see beyond and through the conventional labels and practices that sustain the status quo by raising unanswerable and often uncomfortable questions. Perhaps most importantly, teachers who work against the grain must name and wrestle with their own doubts, must fend off the fatigue of reform and depend on the strength of their individual and collaborative convictions that their work ultimately makes a difference in the fabric of social responsibility. (Cochran-Smith 1991:284-85) For me, to be against the grain is therefore to recognize that the routinized courses of action and interactions in all educational contexts are imbued with unequal distribution of power that produce and reinforce various forms of marginalization and exclusion. Thus, a commitment to redress these power relations (i.e., equity in education) involves interventions and actions that may appear “counter-intuitive.” 6 Undoing inequality and achieving equity in education is a risky and uncomfortable act because we need to disrupt the ways things are “normally” done. This involves a serious (and frequently threatening) effort to interrogate our privilege as well as our powerlessness. It obliges us to examine our own privilege relative though it may be, to move out of our internalized positions as victims, to take control over our lives, and to take responsibilities for change. It requires us to question what we take for granted, and a commitment to a vision of society built on reflection, reform, mutuality, and respect in theory and in practice. Teaching and learning against the grain is not easy, comfortable, or safe. It is protracted, difficult, uncomfortable, painful, and risky. It involves struggles with our colleagues, our students, as well as struggles within ourselves against our internalized beliefs and normalized behaviors. In other words, it is a lifelong challenge. However, as Simon (1993) puts it, teaching against the grain is also a project of hope. We engage in it with the knowledge and conviction that we are in a long-term collaborative project with like-minded people whose goal is to make the world a better place for us and for our children. The aff’s attempt to whitewash history by ignoring the racist foundations that underlie their theory allows for racial domination to remain invisible – you as a judge must reject the aff’s epistemology and acknowledge the reality of oppression. That’s a voting issue. Leonardo Leonardo, Zeus. "The souls of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse." Race, ethnicity and education 5.1 (2002): 29-50. CC
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.
Debate is a speech act – debaters should be held accountable for their discourse in round. Vincent Chris Vincent, Re-Conceptualizing our Performances: Accountability in Lincoln Douglas Debate, Vbriefly, 2013. NS
The question then becomes how does our discourse justify what we believe? For many debaters it is the gaming aspect of debate that allows us to assume that our speech can be disconnected from the speech act. The speech can be defined as the arguments that are placed on the flow, and is evaluated in the context of what is the most logical and rational argument to win the round. The critical distinction is the speech act, which is the performance of that discourse. It’s not what you say, but what you justify. Understanding the speech act requires critically assessing the ramifications of the debaters discourse. Debate is in and of itself a performance. To claim that it is not is to be divorced from the reality of what we do. We must evaluate what a debaters performance does and justifies. For white debaters it is easy to view the discourse as detached from the body. For those with privilege in debate, they are never forced to have their performance attached to them but instead their arguments are viewed as words on paper. They are taught to separate themselves from any ideologies and beliefs, and feel that there is no consequence to what they say. It becomes the way in which they justify what is deemed as “rational” and “logical” thought. The argument sounds like it will be competitive so it is read but it is deemed as just an argument. Judges evaluate this as just a speech. This becomes what I deem as a performance by the body, rather than a performance of the body. Performances by the body allow debaters to not be held accountable to the words they say. Words are seen as divorced from any meaning outside of the flow, versus the performance of the body where the words are attached to the body itself. Debaters often insert the performance by the body, when they make arguments that they claim that they do not believe, but think it is the best strategy for the round. This is a false assumption, since for black debaters meaning is always connected to their bodies. The best strategy should never be one that at the same time justifies acts of racism.
12/18/16
0 - Rage Bad
Tournament: College Prep | Round: 1 | Opponent: Bentley KS | Judge: Shan, Panny Framework—Evaluate the round with the question “is the aff more desirable than the squo or a competitive policy option”
A) Fairness – their RoB arguments are self-serving to moot 6 minutes of AC offense. They force a restart on a ridiculously small question, which prevents us from weighing the case. Kills engagement and is a prereq to their RoB because they arbitrarily exclude our offense and forces a restart in the 1ar.
B) Law is necessary – speaking the language of the law through reform can empower people to take back control over their own lives. We don’t have to endorse the law, but rather treat it as a tool to hold the powerful accountable.
The valorization of rage as a political leads to a vicious cycle of repetitive violence Wenning ’09 (Mario, Phd., Assistant professor of philosophy @ the University of Macau, “The Return of Rage,” Parrhesia No. 8 pg. 89-99) The valorization of erotic emotions and virtues over thymotic ones is as old as philosophy itself. Aristotle already insists that the virtuous person cultivates mildness of temper “the even tempered person confesses to be calm and not carried away by his feelings, but to be cross only in the way, at the things, and for the length of time that reason dictates.” 15 Compassion is introduced as an antidote to revenge. The virtuous character does not lose the control that is necessary to provide for a self-sufficient emotional economy, which is the precondition for achieving a life that is marked by wisdom, even-temperedness, and justice. Seneca’s influential work on rage, De ira, which was immensely influential for Christian and humanist ethics, calls for a Stoic control of the dangerous affect. The general suspicion against the destructive consequences of this aggressive emotion is not limited to the European tradition. Confucius already warns his students “to let a sudden fit of anger make you forget the safety of your own person or even that of your parents, is that not misguided judgment?” 16 Daoism and ZenBuddhism promote meditative practices and compassion to overcome our fixation on the need of being angry with ourselves and the world surrounding us. More recently, Martha Nussbaum argued that we should aim to understand “how to channel emotional development in the direction of a more mature and inclusive and less ambivalent type of love.” 17 According to Nussbaum, anger should at best operate as a tool of compassion. Acts of punishment are then seen as merciful rather than vindictive because they aim at the good of the victim. These representative examples illustrate that the erotization of the psyche replaced what is regarded as archaic forms of militancy that, it is contended, mistakenly suggest that honor, pride and craving for recognition (and the rage that results from the violation of these) has been considered to be more important than a concern for justice, equality and compassion. We might think that the dislike of negative emotions in general and potentially aggressive ones in particular results from an insight into the misfortunes these emotions bring about. Revenge, then, is undesirable because it tends to be too costly in producing long term damages. Hegel, for example, reminds us in the Philosophy of Right of the infinite chain of violence, the economy of pay-back that results from blind vengeance and selfadministered acts of justice. 18 The excesses of rage can easily lead to tragic repetitions of an original act of violence that might be impossible to get out of. Honor killings often lead to new honor killings rather than the reestablishment of justice and the fight against terror breed more terrorists.
Utilize rage as a means to mobilize ati-surveillance movements---targeted rage is key Lesage 85 (Julia, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson and Grossberg, http://pages.uoregon.edu/jlesage/Juliafolder/womensRage.html) Feminism by itself is not the motor of change. Class, anti-imperialist, and antiracist struggles demand our participation. Yet how, specifically, does women's consciousness change? How do women move into action? How does change occur? What political strategies should feminists pursue? How, in our political work, can we constantly challenge sexual inequality when the very social construction of gender oppresses women? In 1981 I visited Nicaragua with the goal of finding out how and why change occurred there so quickly in women's lives. "The revolution has given us everything," I was told. "Before the revolution we were totally devalued. We weren't supposed to have a vision beyond home and children." In fact, many Nicaraguan women first achieved a fully human identity within the revolution. Now they are its most enthusiastic supporters. For example, they form over 50 percent of the popular militias, the mainstay of Nicaragua's defense against United States-sponsored invasions from Honduras and Costa Rica. In the block committees, they have virtually eliminated wife and child abuse. Yet in Nicaragua we still see maids, the double standard sexually, dissatisfaction in marriage, and inadequate childcare. Furthermore, all the women I talked to defined their participation in the revolution in terms of an extremely idealized notion of motherhood and could not understand the choice not to reproduce. I bring up this example of Nicaragua because Nicaraguan women are very conscious of the power of their own revolutionary example. They know they have been influenced by the Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions and are very much shaping how Salvadoran women militants are looking at women's role in the Salvadoran revolution. Because of the urgency and violence of the situation, unity between men and women was and is necessary for their survival, but the women also want to combat, in an organized and self-conscious way, specific aspects of male supremacy in the workplace, politics, and daily life. Both here and in Nicaragua, women's daily conversation is about the politics of daily life. They talk to each other often, complaining about men and about managing the domestic sphere. Women's talk also encompasses complaints about poor and unstable work conditions, and about the onerous double day. However, here in the United States that conversation usually circulates pessimistically, if supportively, around the same themes and may even serve to reconfirm women's stasis within these unpleasant situations. Here such conversation offers little sense of social change; yet in our recent political history, feminists have used this preexisting social form--women's conversation in the domestic sphere--to create consciousness-raising groups. But to what degree is consciousness raising sufficient to change women's behavior, including our self-conception and our own colonized minds? We do not live in a revolutionary situation in the United States. There is no leftist political organization here providing leadership and a cohesive strategy, and in particular the struggle against women's oppression is not genuinely integrated into leftist activity and theory. Within such a context, women need to work on another, intermediate level, both to shape our revolutionary consciousness and to empower us to act on our own strategic demands. That is, we need to promote self-conscious, collectively supported, and politically clear articulations of our anger and rage. Furthermore, we must understand the different structures behind different women's rage. Black women rage against poverty and racism at the same time that they rage against sexism. Lesbians rage against heterosexual privilege, including their denial of civil rights. Nicaraguan women rage against invasions and the aggressive intentions of the United States. If, in our political work, we know this anger and the structures that generate it, we can more genuinely encounter each other and more extensively acknowledge each other's needs, class position, and specific form of oppression. If we do not understand the unique social conditions shaping our sisters' rage, we run the risk of divisiveness, of fragmenting our potential solidarity. Such mutual understanding of the different structures behind different women's anger is the precondition of our finding a way to work together toward common goals. I think a lot about the phenomenon of the colonized mind. Everything that I am and want has been shaped within a social process marked by male dominance and female submission. How can women come to understand and collectively attack this sexist social order? We all face, and in various ways incorporate into ourselves, sexist representations, sexist modes of thought. Institutionally, such representations are propagated throughout culture, law, medicine, education, and so on. All families come up against and are socially measured by sexist concepts of what is "natural"--that is, the "natural" roles of mother, children, or the family as a whole. Of particular concern to me is the fact that I have lived with a man for fifteen years while I acutely understand the degree to which heterosexuality itself is socially constructed as sexist. That is, I love someone who has more social privilege than me, and he has that privilege because he is male. As an institution, heterosexuality projects relations of dominance and submission, and it leads to the consequent devaluation of women because of their sex. The institution of heterosexuality is the central shaping factor of many different social practices at many different levels--which range, for example, from the dependence of the mass media on manipulating sexuality to the division of labor, the split between the public and private spheres, and the relations of production under capitalism. Most painfully for women, heterosexuality is a major, a social and psychological mode of organizing, generating, focusing, and institutionalizing desire, both men's and women's. Literally, I am wedded to my own oppression. Furthermore, the very body of woman is not her own--it has been constructed by medicine, the law, visual culture, fashion, her mother, her household tasks, her reproductive capacity, and what Ti-Grace Atkinson has called "the institution of sexual intercourse." When I look in the mirror, I see my flaws; I evaluate the show I put on to others. How do I break through representations of the female body and gain a more just representation of my body for and of myself? My social interactions are shaped by nonverbal conventions which we all have learned unconsciously and which are, as it were, the glue of social life. As Nancy Henley describes it in Body Politics, women's nonverbal language is characterized by shrinking, by taking up as little space as possible. Woman is accessible to be touched. When she speaks in a mixed group, she is likely to be interrupted or not really listened to seriously, or she may be thought of as merely emotional. And it is clear that not only does the voyeuristic male look shape most film practice, but this male gaze, with all its power, has a social analog in the way eye contact functions to control and threaten women in public space, where women's freedom is constrained by the threat of rape. We need to articulate these levels of oppression so as to arrive at a collective, shared awareness of these aspects of women's lives. We also need to understand how we can and already do break through barriers between us. In our personal relations, we often overcome inequalities between us and establish intimacy. Originally, within the women's movement we approached the task of coming together both personally and politically through the strategy of the consciousness-raising group, where to articulate our experience as women itself became a collective, transformative experience. But these groups were often composed mostly of middle-class women, sometimes predominantly young, straight, single, and white. Now we need to think more clearly and theoretically about strategies for negotiating the very real power differences between us. It is not so impossible. Parents do this with children, and vice versa; lovers deal with inequalities all the time. The aged want to be in communion with the young, and third-world women have constantly extended themselves to their white sisters. However, when women come together in spite of power differences among them, they feel anxiety and perhaps openly express previously suppressed hostility. Most likely, such a coming together happens when women work together intensively on a mutual project so that there is time for trust to be established. Yet as we seek mutually to articulate the oppression that constrains us, we have found few conceptual or social structures through which we might authentically express our rage. Women's anger is pervasive, as pervasive as our oppression, but it frequently lurks underground. If we added up all of women's depression--all our compulsive smiling, ego-tending, and sacrifice; all our psychosomatic illness, and all our passivity--we could gauge our rage's unarticulated, negative force. In the sphere of cultural production there are few dominant ideological forms that allow us even to think "women's rage." As ideological constructs, these forms end up containing women. Women's rage is most often seen in the narratives that surround us. For example: Classically, Medea killed her children because she was betrayed by their father. Now, reverse-slasher movies let the raped woman pick up the gun and kill the male attacker. It is a similar posture of dead end vengeance. The news showed Patty Hearst standing in a bank with a gun embodying that manufactured concept "terrorist," and then we saw her marrying her FBI bodyguard long after her comrades went up in flames. In melodrama and film noir, as well as in pornography, women's anger is most commonly depicted through displacement onto images of female insanity or perversity, often onto a grotesque, fearful parody of lesbianism. These displacements allow reference to and masking of individual women's rage, and that masked rage is rarely collectively expressed by women or even fully felt. We have relatively few expressions of women's authentic rage even in women's art. Often on the news we will see a pained expression of injustice or the exploitative use of an image of a third- world woman's grief. Such images are manipulated purely for emotional effect without giving analysis or context. Some great feminist writers and speakers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Tubman have provided models by which we can understand ourselves, but too often the very concept of "heroine" means that we hold up these women and their capacity for angry self-expression as the exception rather than the rule. In Illinois, women chained themselves together in the state house when it was clear that the ERA would not pass; the women sought to express our collective anger at our legislators' cowardice and to do so in a conspicuous, public way. But actions such as these often have little effect beyond their own time span. We need to think beyond such forms to more socially effective ones. It is a task open to all our creativity and skill--to tap our anger as a source of energy and to focus it aesthetically and politically. We may have to combine images of anger with something else--say, images of how women can construct the collectivity as a whole. It is here that, by their example, our third-world sisters have often taken the lead. Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus, Harriet Tubman leading slaves to the North, an Angolan mother in uniform carrying a baby and a rifle, a Vietnamese farmer tilling and defending her land, Nicaraguan women in their block committees turning in wife abusers to the police--these images let us see that women can gain more for themselves than merely negating the bad that exists. And it is in their constant need to attack both sexism and racism, as well as poverty and imperialist aggression, that third-world feminists now make us all see much more clearly both the urgent need for and the possibility of reconstructing the whole world on new terms. Artistically, emotionally, and politically women seem to need to glimpse dialectically the transcendence of our struggle against sexism before we can fully express sexism's total negation, that is, our own just rage. Sometimes our suppressed rage feels so immense that the open expression of it threatens to destroy us. So we often do not experience anger directly and consciously, nor do we accurately aim our rage at its appropriate target. To transcend negation and to build on it means that we have to see what is beyond our rage. An example of such transcendence was demonstrated by Nicaraguan mothers of "martyred" soldiers (those killed by U.S.-paid counterrevolutionaries) to Pope John Paul II when he visited Managua in April 1983. They stood in the rows closest to the podium where the Pope spoke and they all bore large photos of their dead children. As the events of the day unfolded, the women created an image that stirred the whole people, one that the Pope could not go beyond or even adequately respond to. Here is what happened: The Pope spoke on and on to the gathered crowd about obeying the hierarchy and not getting involved with the things of this world. In frustration and anger, the women began to shout, "We want peace," and their chant was taken up by the 400,000 others there. The women's rage at personal loss was valorized by the Nicaraguan people as a whole, as the grieving mother became a collective symbol of the demand for peace. The chant, "We want peace," referred simultaneously to national sovereignty, anti-imperialism, religion, and family life. The women spoke for the whole. This brings me back to my original question about women's political action in the United States today. One of the major areas of investigation and struggle in the women's movement has been the sphere of daily life. This struggle, represented by an early women's movement phrase--"the personal is the political"--derives from women's real material labor in the domestic sphere and in the sphere of social relations as a whole. Women have traditionally done the psychological labor that keeps social relations going. In offices, in neighborhoods, at home, they often seek to make the social environment safe and "better," or more pleasant. That such labor is invisible, particularly that it is ignored within leftist theory and practice, is one of the more precise indices of women's oppression. And it is feminists' sensitivity to and analysis of social process that clarifies for them the sexism on the Left. Often at a leftist conference or political meeting, many men continue to see women and women's concerns as "other," and they do not look at what the Left could gain from feminist theory or from women's subcultural experience or from an analysis of women's labor. Women who come to such an event have already made a commitment to learn and to contribute, so they make an effort to continue along with the group as a whole but are impeded by sexist speakers' intellectual poverty (e.g., use of the generic "he"), macho debating style, and distance from political activism. Furthermore, not only women feel this political invisibility at leftist events. When black labor and black subcultural experience in the United States is not dealt with, nor is imperialism, or when racism is theoretically subsumed under the rubric of "class oppression" and not accorded its specificity, then third-world participants face the same alienation. To demonstrate this process and analyze what divides us, I will describe an incident that occurred at the Teaching Institute on Marxist Cultural Theory in June 1983. It is worth discussing because it is the kind of incident that happens all too often among us on the Left. Early in that summer session, a coalition of students and the two women faculty members, Gayatri Spivak and me, formed to present a protest statement to the faculty. It was read in every class. Here is what it said: The Marxist-Feminist Caucus met on Friday June 17th and concluded that the "limits, frontiers and boundaries" of Marxist cultural theory as articulated by the Teaching Institute excluded and silenced crucial issues of sexism, racism and other forms of domination. We find ourselves reproducing in the classrooms of the Teaching Institute the very structures which are the object of our critique. The Marxist-Feminist Caucus therefore proposes that each class set aside an hour weekly to discuss strategic silences and structural exclusions. A Marxism that does not problematize issues of gender and race, or of class consciousness in its own ranks, cannot hope to be an adequate tool for either social criticism or social transformation. The institute had a format of having famous Marxist intellectuals lecture, specifically males with job security who have never incorporated a feminist analysis into their theoretical work. Both the format and the content of their lectures enraged some of us, but not others. In a sense, writing a protest statement divided the school's participants between the political ones and the consumers of Marxist theory. This is because critical theory itself has become a pathway for elitist advancement in the humanities and social sciences in universities where these areas are facing huge cutbacks. And the canon of that critical theory is based on Marx and Freud and their contemporary interpretants, Althusser and Lacan. Both at the Teaching Institute and at prestigious universities, young academics could get their quick fix of Marxism, the knowledge of which could help greatly in their academic career. This is a capitalist mode of consuming knowledge. Too many students, especially career- pressured graduate students, want only a well conceived lecture, a digest of Marxist theory and social analysis, something that can be written in a notebook, taken home, and quoted from in a future paper or journal article. Furthermore, we intellectuals fall into this capitalist competitive mode. We feel pressured inside ourselves to be the best. Students are told to buy the best. All the faculty at the Teaching Institute felt that they could not make a mistake, that they had to read and show they had read everything, that they had been challenged on their political practice, accused of being racist or sexist or undemocratic. Our control over the classroom and studied theoretical polish became a kind of professional hysteria and worked against the collective building of Marxist knowledge and theory that we have needed for more effective social change. Since the early 1970s women have come together in meetings like these, in feminist seminars, caucuses, and workshops, partly in resistance to a certain macho leftist or academic style and partly to build a new body of knowledge and feminist political practice. And we have been successful at doing this but it has meant double or triple work for us. Feminist scholarship does not usually lead to academic promotion for a woman. The knowledge women produce is easily marginalized, as was made painfully obvious at that summer school. Feminists and third-world students came to the Teaching Institute knowing how much they needed Marxist theory. They understood that abolishing capitalism and imperialism was the precondition for liberation. They came as political participants expecting to learn theoretical tools to use in fighting oppression. But sex and race were too often ignored--I would say stupidly ignored--as social determinants in the theories presented about social change. (Beyond that, students felt intimidated by name-dropping and teachers' and other students' failure to explain terms. They felt they had to give a polished rebuttal or a cohesive "strategic intervention" before they could speak to refute a lecturer's point.) And when students raised issues of sexism or racism, deflection became the all too frequent tactic used by teachers or some of the white male students in response. No wonder that women, with their sex-role socialization, were often too intimidated to speak. This is a sad analysis, but not an infrequent one in academia. It speaks about political theory and academic sexism and racism, and elitism and class privilege. The incident reveals much of what divides politically progressive people in the United States. These differences must be acknowledged in depth if we are to work together politically in a coalition form. In particular, I understand the texture of women's silence in a forum that demanded a highly rational and developed intervention. Many of the women students at the Teaching Institute already produced feminist theory, but the intimidating nature of this kind of aggressive public speaking made them seem like nonparticipants. And it often happens to me, too. I know that we watch and despair of our own colonized psyches which hold us back in silence precisely when we would choose to be political actors, especially in a Marxist forum. What we have seen in the 1970s and 1980s in North America and Europe is a supercession of political forms related to developments in radical consciousness. Conditions have evolved in the United States that make it impossible to conceive of a revolutionary organizing strategy that does not embrace a black and minority revolution and a feminist revolution. The lesson of the civil rights/black power movement was that blacks will organize autonomously. Now it is the offspring of that movement, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, that has taken the lead in building an anti-imperialist coalition that addresses the specific struggles and organizing forms of blacks, Latinos, women, and gays. Such a coalition relates to the existence of the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the anti-imperialist movement, by supporting these groups' autonomous organizing and granting new respect, not by subsuming or controlling them. Furthermore, at this point in U.S. history, issues of mass culture and mass communication have to be dealt with, so that minority figures such as Jesse Jackson or Harold Washington, Chicago's black major, have developed an ongoing analysis about racism in the press. As a feminist who has worked both in the cultural sphere and in anti-imperialist work, I have experienced this supercession of forms. In the early 1970s a politically active woman was either "on the Left" or "in the independent women's movement." Some socialist feminists within leftist organizations formed caucuses to try to influence their organizations. In the 1970s I chose to work mostly within the independent women's movement, especially in creating a women's studies program at an urban university. In developing feminist media now within the women's movement, I find many of my sisters addressing broader issues of imperialism, racism, class oppression, and the nuclear threat. Many of us are joining progressive coalitions around these issues. Within these coalitions we must be able openly to declare, "I am a feminist and our feminist position represents the most advanced stand. You men have to join us." Indeed, many men, often younger men, have. As feminists, we are the ones who are building a whole theoretical critique of mass culture and mass communication; we are the ones who are learning how to appropriate all of culture in an oppositional way. And because of our historical position in advanced capitalism, we are one of the first social movements to address cultural issues in such a thorough and complex way. Many feminists are eager to participate in coalitions, the major political strategy for us in the 1 980s. In Chicago, we saw the women's movement and the Left work to elect Harold Washington. In the San Francisco area, gays and lesbians have formed a Central America support group. Both in the United States and abroad, the antinuclear movement contains within it all-women's affinity groups. Latinos in various areas identify and organize as Puerto Rican or Mexican-American according to their ethnic origins and concentration, and also unite in Central American solidarity work. This great diversity of sectoral organizing enriches all of us who are working for social change. Some of the best aspects of current progressive organizing have, in fact, derived specifically from the development of the contemporary women's movement. I mentioned the consciousness-raising groups earlier. I think the women's movement has introduced into political discourse an open and direct critique of the macho style and political posturing of many male leaders. As feminist activists, we have created among ourselves new forms of discussion and a creative, collective pursuit of knowledge--in contrast to an older, more aggressive, male debating style. Particularly important for me, the women's movement has pursued and validated as politically important cultural and artistic work. In Chicago, where I live, I experience a strong continuum and network among community-based artists and women in the art world. We have built up intellectual ties between academic women and feminist film- and videomakers who have created an analysis of how sexuality is manipulated in the visual culture that surrounds us. As a consequence, feminist film criticism has developed a new theoretical framework for analyzing ideology and the mass media. In fact, I think that our building of a feminist cultural theory has made a key contribution to the Left and to revolutionary movements throughout the world. When I want to consider how unleashing our anger might capacitate us to act for change, I reconsider Frantz Fanon's essay "Concerning Violence" in The Wretched of the Earth. In that essay he describes decolonization, particularly the process by which the native sheds the colonizer's values and the colonizer's ways. I understand that my black and Latina sisters in the United States experience a rage against the economic and racial violence perpetrated every day against them; in a way that is similar to what Fanon describes: this rage knows its resolution lies in a complete change of the economic order in which we live. At the same time, I must ask what kind of rage it would be that would effectively contest women's oppression--given all the levels at which gender inequality and women's oppression is articulated in social and personal life. What Fanon describes to us is a specific historical moment at which mental colonization can be and is surpassed. As I look at women's mental colonization, I see our internalized sense of powerlessness, our articulation into masochistic structures of desire, and our playing out of personae that on the surface seem "passive," "self-defeating," "irrational," "hesitant," "receptively feminine," or even "crazy." Much of this behavior stems from internalized and suppressed rage. Fanon describes such behavior in the colonized and posits active rage, the violent response to violence, as its cure. What would the overturning of male supremacy and women's colonization mean to women? How would it be accomplished? Fanon understands that a whole social structure and a new kind of person must come into being, and that those with privilege know, fear, and resist this. His call to armed struggle, based on the very clear demarcations and abuses of power that the native always sees, signals a survival struggle that does not characterize the war between the sexes. As I read Fanon for what he can teach me about women's resistance to oppression in nonrevolutionary society, I read him as a communist psychiatrist talking about how social movements can change the mentality of the oppressed. When I ask about revolution for women now, minimally I see that our contestation cannot be conducted in the mode of nice girls, of managing the egos of and patiently teaching those who oppress, which is a skill and duty we learned from our mothers in the domestic sphere. If we do so, once again we will be placed in that very role of "helpmate" that we are trying to overcome. Angry contestation may take us the extra step needed to overcome our own colonized behavior and tardy response. Let me now rewrite for you parts of Fanon's essay to show its power when discussing the relation between psychological and social change. The distance between the violence of colonization and its necessary response in armed struggle, and the emotional rage I am referring to here in combating sexism, marks the distance between the periphery and the center of international capitalism. By using Fanon in this way, I do not wish to co-opt him for the women's movement but to learn from him, just as I learned from the Nicaraguan women's courage and tenacity. If women must learn to be openly angry, we must learn to draw links between ourselves and those who are more oppressed, to learn new methods of struggle and courageous response. Combating women's oppression as we know it is a historical process: that is to say, it cannot become intelligible or clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements that give it historical form and content. Combating women's oppression is the meeting of two intrinsically opposed forces, which in fact owe this originality to that sort of substantification that results from and is nourished by the social construction of gender. The husband is right when he speaks of knowing "them" well--for it is men who perpetuate the function of wife. Men owe the reproduction of their bodies and psyches to the family. Feminist revolution never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms passive femininity crushed with inessentiality into privileged agency under the floodlights of history. A new kind of woman brings a new rhythm into existence with a new language and a new humanity; combating women's oppression means the veritable creation of new women who become fully human by the same process by which they freed themselves. Feminists who decide to put their program into practice and become its moving force are ready to be constantly enraged. They have collectively learned that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called into question by absolute contestation. The sex-gender system is a world divided into compartments. And if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at last be able to reveal the lines of force it implies and to mark out the lines on which a nonoppressive society will be reorganized. At the level of individuals, anger is a cleansing force. It frees the woman from her inferiority complex and from despair and inaction; it makes her fearless and restores her self-respect. At this point I will stop citing from and reworking Fanon, deliberately at the point of individual rage. Now is a time when we need to work in coalitions, but we must be very honest about what divides us and what are the preconditions we need before we can work together. I have made the decision to work in leftist and feminist cultural work and in Latin American solidarity work. I think in all our strategies we must analyze the relation of that strategy to feminist, antiracist, and anti- imperialist demands. Women comprise over half the population; any class issues in the United States are intimately tied to the question of racism; we all live off the labor of workers, often underpaid women, in the Third World; and socialist revolution is being waged very near us. Personally, I know that it is by my contact with Nicaraguan women, who insist that men and women must struggle together for our mutual liberation, that I have been politically and emotionally renewed. The problems grow more acute. We know that the Right is racist, homophobic, and sexist. We in the women's movement must stop turning our anger against each other and learn the most effective ways to work together for social change. We can focus our anger and harness it, but to do that we must clearly analyze cause and effect. If theory accompanies anger, it will lead to effective solutions to the problems at hand. We have great emotional and social power to unleash when we set loose our all too often suppressed rage, but we may only feel free to do so when we know that we can use our anger in an astute and responsible way.
Anger-filled politics prevents effective coalition-building and causes movement failure Thomas Lifson 5, Editor and Publisher of the American Thinker, "Anger-based politics", September 3, awww.americanthinker.com/2005/09/angerbased_politics.html Anger is a terrific motivator. Angry people contribute money, go to events, wear buttons, t—shirts, and funny hats, and readily slap bumper stickers on their Volvos, Beetles, mini—vans, and Lexuses. They enjoy meeting and spending time with others who are in tune with their particular emotional orientation. Some even find that sharing outrage can lead to sharing other passions, via computer dating services linked to the Dean campaign.¶ But anger has many drawbacks as the basis for an American political movement. Americans tend to favor optimism and a sunny disposition in their political leadership. Ours is a nation built on the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right granted us by our Creator. More than two hundred years after this right was articulated in the Declaration of Independence, Ronald Reagan won overwhelming electoral support running on the slogan 'Morning in America.'¶ Let the Balkan peoples define themselves by their ancient wrongs waiting to be avenged. Let clans like the Hatfields and McCoys in the hollows of West Virginia carry their grudges for generations. They are the curious exception to our general rule of concentrating on what we can become, rather than what our ancestors were. Americans take seriously their birthright, and would rather wipe the slate clean than nurture a collective grudge. Anger is like an acid which curdles the sweet mother's milk of happiness, whose pursuit is so much a part of our national character.¶ Of course, there are some who do choose to define themselves by their ancestors' tragedies, and whose vision of a world put right consists of extracting vengeance of some sort. Most prominently, the movement to collect reparations for slavery, payable 150 years later to the presumptive descendents of slaves, is being touted as a path to cosmic justice. But even its most fervent proponents do not foresee the public ever using the democratic process to enact a reparations law. Rather, litigation, giving the judiciary the opportunity to impose reparations on parties found somehow liable for the damages incurred in the past, is the primary tactic being employed.¶ Aside from its limited electoral appeal, anger is operationally a tricky, even dangerous force to harness. 'Blind anger' is a common expression precisely because anger tends to render its carriers insensible to the complexities and subtleties of their environment. Particularly when the angry gather together, their anger feeds on itself and multiplies its force. It is precisely for this reason that mobs are recognized as dangerous.¶ Even if the shared anger is nonviolent, it still is capable of blinding the angry to the probable reactions of others. Convinced of their utter righteousness, seriously angry political movements readily overplay the cards they are dealt. Haters of Bill Clinton learned the hard way that the middle/majority of Americans could not be mobilized to share their passion, even when they held an ace, in the form of their enemy's false testimony under oath.¶ Anger, held by the candidate and shared by his coterie and followers is the probable reason that Howard Dean has proven so gaffe—prone. He honestly does not seem to understand how most people will react to his assertion that Osama bin Laden is innocent until proven guilty, and nobody around him can caution him to watch his step. The rage which brings them together also precludes them from seeing its dangers. Of course, Dean also seems to have a problem with talking before thinking, and acting on impulse is another characteristic of the angry.¶ Anger requires an object. There must be someone or some group at which the anger is directed. By its nature, therefore, anger divides people. If the object of the anger is external to the nation, then anger can unite a people, as it has such nations as the Greeks, Koreans, and Poles. But if the object is internal to a nation, then schism, a rejection of the 'we the people...' ethos, rears its head. Rage is self-destructive. At root, rage is an expression of the internalization of oppression that they experience. It is impossible to live as long as we live with rage. Greer 1/8 2k8 (Germaine, “The Rage Epidemic” http://albany.yourguide.com.au/news/national/national/general/the-rage-epidemic/1233455.aspx) Most people think that suicide is an act of grief; in fact it is part of the spectrum of self-destructive behaviour that we should associate with rage. The prime mover of self-harming is rage. The typical self-harmer has endured physical violence, emotional abuse or sexual abuse as a child or young adult; according to the British charity mental health charity Mind, "They might have been neglected, separated from someone they loved, been bullied, harassed, assaulted, isolated, put under intolerable pressure, made homeless, sent into care, into hospital or to other institutions." Humans can live with grief but they can't live for long with rage. Part of rage is self-loathing; self-loathing expresses itself in hostility towards those close enough to get hurt. Those who love the enraged person the most can expect the cruellest treatment. We have learnt how to recognise rage in traumatised children, and to distinguish real rage from the performance of rage, which we call a tantrum. Tantrums can be discouraged; rage is a different matter. Enraged children are a danger to themselves and to others. As rage chemicals flood their bodies they will tremble, clench their fists, go stiff, "zone out", become frenzied, revert to baby talk or gabbling, bang their heads against the wall and do their best to hurt anyone who comes close. They are so unaware of their surroundings that they cannot be allowed outside the house.
12/18/16
0 - T Framework
Tournament: College Prep | Round: 1 | Opponent: Bentley KS | Judge: Shan, Panny Interpretation - The AFF may only garner offense from hypothetical enactment of the resolution
This does not require the use of any particular style, type of evidence, or assumption about the role of the judge — only that the topic should determine the debate’s subject matter. Solves their method good offense – they can read as a framework argument to justify a topical plan, there’s no reason voting off it is key.
Insert topic definitions
Violation:
They defend which isn’t the topic.
Standards:
Engagement – there are infinite non topical AFFs - a precise and predictable point of difference is key to effective dialogue. Steinberg and Freeley 13
Steinberg and Freeley 13, * David, Lecturer in Communication studies and rhetoric. Advisor to Miami Urban Debate League. Director of Debate at U Miami, Former President of CEDA. And Austin, attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, JD, Suffolk University, Argumentation and Debate, Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, 121-4. NS from file
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a controversy, a difference of opinion or a conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a feet or value or policy, there is no need or opportunity for debate; the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four,” because there is simply no controversy about this statement. Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions of issues, there is no debate. Controversy invites decisive choice between competing positions. Debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants live in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity to gain citizenship? Does illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? How are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification card, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this “debate” is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies are best understood when seated clearly such that all parties to the debate share an understanding about the objective of the debate. This enables focus on substantive and objectively identifiable issues facilitating comparison of competing argumentation leading to effective decisions. Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, general feelings of tension without opportunity for resolution, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the U.S. Congress to make substantial progress on the immigration debate. Of course, arguments may be presented without disagreement. For example, claims are presented and supported within speeches, editorials, and advertisements even without opposing or refutational response. Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from informal to formal, and may not call upon an audience or judge to make a forced choice among competing claims. Informal discourse occurs as conversation or panel discussion without demanding a decision about a dichotomous or yes/no question. However, by definition, debate requires "reasoned judgment on a proposition. The proposition is a statement about which competing advocates will offer alternative (pro or con) argumentation calling upon their audience or adjudicator to decide. The proposition provides focus for the discourse and guides the decision process. Even when a decision will be made through a process of compromise, it is important to identify the beginning positions of competing advocates to begin negotiation and movement toward a center, or consensus position. It is frustrating and usually unproductive to attempt to make a decision when deciders are unclear as to what the decision is about. The proposition may be implicit in some applied debates (“Vote for me!”); however, when a vote or consequential decision is called for (as in the courtroom or in applied parliamentary debate) it is essential that the proposition be explicitly expressed (“the defendant is guilty!”). In academic debate, the proposition provides essential guidance for the preparation of the debaters prior to the debate, the case building and discourse presented during the debate, and the decision to be made by the debate judge after the debate. Someone disturbed by the problem of a growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, “Public schools are doing a terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public education?”—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities” and “Resolved; That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. This focus contributes to better and more informed decision making with the potential for better results. In academic debate, it provides better depth of argumentation and enhanced opportunity for reaping the educational benefits of participation. In the next section, we will consider the challenge of framing the proposition for debate, and its role in the debate. To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about a topic, such as ‘"homelessness,” or “abortion,” Or “crime,” or “global warming,” we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish a profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement “Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword” is debatable, yet by itself fails to provide much basis for dear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean Iliad the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose, perhaps promoting positive social change. (Note that “loose” propositions, such as the example above, may be defined by their advocates in such a way as to facilitate a clear contrast of competing sides; through definitions and debate they “become” clearly understood statements even though they may not begin as such. There are formats for debate that often begin with this sort of proposition. However, in any debate, at some point, effective and meaningful discussion relies on identification of a clearly stated or understood proposition.) Back to the example of the written word versus physical force. Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, cyber-warfare, disinformation, or what? What does it mean to be “mightier" in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be, “Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Laurania of our support in a certain crisis?” The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as “Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania.” Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided
Outweighs: A. Even if their method is good, it isn’t valuable if it’s not procedurally debatable – they don’t get access to any of their offense B. Debate is about process not content – we inevitably switch sides, even if it’s arguing against one method with another. The individual ideas we learn, like , aren’t as valuable as learning how to effectively apply those ideas outside of round by engaging in precise discussions instead of just asserting opinions. C. They force the NEG to extremist generics – this is why cap and anthro are such common responses to their position - which causes more evasion than if we had a substantive debate about in the topic. D. It’s key to long term activism which turns case and outweighs because of existential threats. Lundberg 10
Christian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311
The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy in an increasingly complex world.
2. Procedural Fairness - Non topical advocacies mean they can defend anything outside the resolution which is unpredictable, and also defend uncontestable offense like _. This kills NEG ground and thus equal access to the ballot.
This is an independent voting issue which outweighs:
A. Evaluation – even if their arguments seem true, that’s only because they already had an advantage – fairness is a meta constraint on your ability to determine who best meets their ROB. B. Fairness is key to effective dialogue. Galloway 07
Ryan, “DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RECONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE”, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)
Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning: Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships among equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197). Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective “counter-word” and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.
3. We solve all their offense -
A. Arguments don’t injure people, but policies do—voting aff on this is censorship because it says we can’t even introduce ideas without harming them. Anderson 06
Amanda Anderson 6, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University, Spring 2006, “Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 281-290
Probyns piece is a mixture of affective fallacy, argument by authority, and bald ad hominem. There's a pattern here: precisely the tendency to personalize argument and to foreground what Wendy Brown has called "states of injury." Probyn says, for example, that she "felt ostracized by the books content and style." Ostracized? Argument here is seen as directly harming persons, and this is precisely the state of affairs to which I object. Argument is not injurious to persons. Policies are injurious to persons and institutionalized practices can alienate and exclude. But argument itself is not directly harmful; once one says it is, one is very close to a logic of censorship. The most productive thing to do in an open academic culture (and in societies that aspire to freedom and democracy) when you encounter a book or an argument that you disagree with is to produce a response or a book that states your disagreement. But to assert that the book itself directly harms you is tantamount to saying that you do not believe in argument or in the free exchange of ideas, that your claim to injury somehow damns your opponent's ideas. When Probyn isn't symptomatic, she's just downright sloppy. One could work to build up the substance of points that she throws out the car window as she screeches on to her next destination, but life is short, and those with considered objections to liberalism and proceduralism would not be particularly well served by the exercise. As far as I can tell, Probyn thinks my discussion of universalism is of limited relevance (though far more appealing when put, by others, in more comfortingly equivocating terms), but she's certain my critique of appeals to identity is simply not able to accommodate the importance of identity in social and political life. As I make clear throughout the book, and particularly in my discussion of the headscarf debate in France, identity is likely to be at the center of key arguments about life in plural democracies; my point is not that identity is not relevant, but simply that it should not be used to trump or stifle argument. In closing, I'd like to speak briefly to the question of proceduralism's relevance to democratic vitality. One important way of extending the proceduralist arguments put forth by Habeimas is to work on how institutions and practices might better promote participation in democratic life. The apathy and nonparticipation plaguing democratic institutions in the United States is a serious problem, and can be separated from the more romantic theoretical investments in a refusal to accept the terms of what counts as argument, or in assertions of inassimilable difference. With respect to the latter, which is often glorified precisely as the moment when politics or democracy is truly occurring, I would say, on the contrary democracy is not happening then-rather, the limits or deficiencies of an actually existing democracy are making themselves felt. Acknowledging struggle, conflict, and exclusion is vital to democracy, but insisting that exclusion is not so much a persistent challenge for modern liberal democracies but rather inherent to the modern liberal-democratic political form as such seems to me precisely to remain stalled in a romantic critique of Enlightenment. It all comes down to a question of whether one wants to work with the ideals of democracy or see them as essentially normative in a negative sense: this has been the legacy of a certain critique of Enlightenment, and it is astonishingly persistent in the left quarters in the academy. One hears it clearly when Robbins makes confident reference to liberalisms tendency to ignore "the founding acts of violence on which a social order is based." One encounters it in the current vogue for the work of Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt. Saying that a state of exception defines modernity or is internal to the law itself may help to sharpen your diagnoses of certain historical conditions, but if absolutized as it is in these accounts, it gives you nothing but a negative diagnostic and a compensatory flight to a realm entirely other-the kind of mystical, Utopian impulse that flees from these conditions rather than confronts and fights them on terms that derive from the settled-if constantly evolving-normative basis of democratic modernity. If one is outraged by the flagrant disregard of democratic procedures in the current U.S. political regime, then one needs to be able to coherently say why democratic procedures matter, what principles underwrite them, and what historical movements and institutions have helped us to secure and support them. Argument as a critical practice and as a key component of democratic institutions and public debate has a vital role to play in such a task.
B. T version of the AFF
Voter: Drop the debater on T – the round is already skewed from the beginning because their advocacy excluded by ability to generate NC offense– letting them sever doesn’t solve any of the abuse
Theory is an issue of competing interpretations because reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention based on preference rather than argumentation and encourages a race to the bottom in which debaters will exploit a judge’s tolerance for questionable argumentation.
12/18/16
JANFEB Critical Race Theory
Tournament: College Prep | Round: 3 | Opponent: Nueva AK | Judge: Olson, Ryan Their philosophy preaches that everyone is equal – this colorblind ideology perpetuates anti blackness under the myth of American liberalism. Curry 13
Dr. Tommy Curry, In the Fiat of Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical, Academia.edu, 2013. NS
Despite the rhetorical strategies adopted by both Black and white political theorists which urge Blacks and whites alike to demand Americans to continue their allegiance to the foundational de-racialized ethos of the post-Civil Rights era, the reality of the American racism—its sheer recurring violence against Black people—demands more than symbolic rhetorical allusion. To seriously grasp the reality of racist oppression and the sempiternal machinations of anti-Blackness throughout American society be it in its institutions like the prison industrial complex, its policies like Affirmative action, or its manipulation of Black social degradation and economic disadvantage to support pathological theses about disasters like Katrina or cultural deviance as in the death of Trayvon Martin, Darius Simmons, or Jordan Davis, the study of the matter itself—racism—must be a study of a conceptual disengagement with the myth of racial equality and the “automatic progressivism” of the American liberal project. This disengagement is not simply the refusal to accept the idealism of civil rights myth held beyond the realm of fact, but the disengagement with the illusions of democracy and equality that continue to ignore the role that violence has played and continues to play in the subjugation, incarceration, and vilification of Black life. As Dr. A.J. William Myers reveals in his work groundbreaking work entitled Destructive Impulses, ¶ Until at such time white America (and Black America) is openly willing to confront a historical legacy of its own violence (perpetrated against an American people of color), any venture into and/ or expository on race relations becomes an exercise in futility…As a result, therefore, white violence, confined to the subliminal recesses of the American psyche, continues to prevent the transition necessary for the country to move beyond the idea of race. ¶ In America, Blackness and the racism that continues to condemn those historical racialized peoples is violence—it is the forceful and coercion enclosing of human beings to an inferior social, political, and economic status of which their own humanity exceeds. This dehumanizing relegation of the raced citizen is not a gradual or incremental debasement, but rather the historically immediate condition of inferiority that presents progress to be attainable by the cyclical degrees of physical violence against the racialized population. For these racially oppressed peoples, violence is the permanent fixture of existence in America, since it is the vitiation of their humanity that rationalizes the varying techniques of their cultural erasure, birthing the emergent symbolic associations of degradation that replace their invisibility, and empowering the intentional enforcements of their societal exclusions. In fact, it is precisely this triumvirate that gauges what we take to be the negation of the necessity of revolutionary change--since the raced is taken to be present, as a result of a critical redefining of humanity, integrated into society. Their notion of the first amendment is colorblind and obscures anti-black violence. Boler 04 Boler, Megan Megan Boler is a Full Professor in the Department of Social Justice Education, at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto.. "All Speech Is Not Free: The Ethics of" Affirmative Action Pedagogy"." Counterpoints 240 (2004): 3-13. On what basis might one justify an affirmative action pedagogy? The first justifica-¶ tion is forwarded by legal scholars in the area of critical race theory. The authors of¶ Words That Wound (Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, and Crenshaw, 1993) address the¶ tension between the First and Fourteenth Amendment. The tension arises because,¶ in fact, all people are not equally protected under the law because of the institu-¶ tionalized inequities within our society. This reality complicates the effectiveness¶ of the First Amendment. Scholarship in critical race theory and educational analy-¶ ses document that in recent years, we find incidents of hate speech primarily to be¶ directed at racial, religious, or sexual minorities. Not surprisingly, one finds in turn¶ that invocations of the right to free speech are most often invocations to protect¶ the right of the members of the dominant culture to express their hatred toward¶ members of minority culture. These authors make important legal and historical¶ cases to support their observation that, in practice, while the rhetoric of the First¶ Amendment is a buzz word that makes all of us want to rally for its principle, in¶ practice "the first amendment arms conscious and unconscious racists - Nazis and¶ liberals alike - with a constitutional right to be racist. Racism is just another idea¶ deserving of constitutional protection like all ideas" (Matsuda et al., 1993, p. 15). A¶ scholar from another discipline addresses classroom dynamics and similarly argues¶ that we must "read the appeal to the First Amendment as itself a kind of panic re-¶ sponse in the same order as hate speech itself" (Roof, 1999, p. 45).¶ A second justification for privileging marginalized voices is based on the meas-¶ urement of the psychological effect of hate speech on targeted groups and individ-¶ uals. As one legal scholar explains, hate speech affects its victim in the visceral ex-¶ perience of a "disorienting powerlessness" (Lawrence, 1993, p. 70), an effect¶ achieved because hate speech is comparable to an act of violence. In reaction to¶ hate speech, the target commonly experiences a "state of semishock," nausea, and dizziness, and an inability to articulate a response. This scholar gives an example of a student who is white and gay. The student reports that in an instance where he¶ was called "faggot" he experienced all of the above symptoms. However, when he¶ was called "honky," he did not experience the disorienting powerlessness. As the¶ scholar remarks, "the context of the power relationships in which the speech takes¶ place, and the connection to violence must be considered as we decide how best to¶ foster the freest and fullest dialogue within our communities" (Lawrence, 1993,¶ p. 70).¶ These considerations bring me to another key point: The analysis of utterance¶ in the classroom requires more than rational dialogue. In fact, the critical race¶ theorists argue that because racism is irrational, no amount of rational dialogue¶ will change racist attitudes. I disagree, in part because I am convinced that class-¶ room discussion must recognize the emotions that shape and construct the mean-¶ ings of our claims, our interchange with one another, and our investments in par-¶ ticular worldviews. Thus, a discussion of racism or homophobia cannot rely¶ simply on rational exchange but must delve into the deeply emotional investments¶ and associations that surround perceptions of difference and ideologies. One is po-¶ tentially faced with allowing ones worldviews to be shattered, in itself a pro-¶ foundly emotionally charged experience
Rhetoric propagating free speech as the answer to social ills directly trades off with our ability to fight injustice. Free speech is a tool that courts wield in colorblind ways against people. Delgado and Stefancic ‘92 Richard Delgado - Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law, University of Colorado. J.D., U. California-Berkeley, 1974. and Jean Stefancic - Technical Services Librarian, University of San Francisco School of Law. M.L.S., Simmons College, 1963; M.A., University of San Francisco, 1989. “IMAGES OF THE OUTSIDER IN AMERICAN LAW AND CULTURE: CAN FREE EXPRESSION REMEDY SYSTEMIC SOCIAL ILLS?” Cornell Law Review. September 1992. http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3571andcontext=clr JJN III. How THE SYSTEM OF FREE EXPRESSION SOMETIMES MAKES MATTERS WORSE Speech and free expression are not only poorly adapted to remedy racism, they often make matters worse-far from being stalwart friends, they can impede the cause of racial reform. First, they encourage writers, filmmakers, and other creative people to feel amoral, nonresponsible in what they do. 18 8 Because there is a marketplace of ideas, the rationalization goes, another film-maker is free to make an antiracist movie that will cancel out any minor stereotyping in the one I am making. My movie may have other redeeming qualities; besides, it is good entertainment and everyone in the industry uses stock characters like the black maid or the bumbling Asian tourist. How can one create film without stock characters? 18 9 Second, when insurgent groups attempt to use speech as an instrument of reform, courts almost invariably construe First Amendment doctrine against them.1 90 As Charles Lawrence pointed out, civil rights activists in the sixties made the greatest strides when they acted in defiance of the First Amendment as then understood. 191 They marched, were arrested and convicted; sat in, were arrested and convicted; distributed leaflets, were arrested and convicted. Many years later, after much gallant lawyering and the expenditure of untold hours of effort, the conviction might be reversed on appeal if the original action had been sufficiently prayerful, mannerly, and not too interlaced with an action component. This history of the civil rights movement does not bear out the usual assumption that the First Amendment is of great value for racial reformers. 19 2 Current First Amendment law is similarly skewed. Examination of the many "exceptions" to First Amendment protection discloses that the large majority favor the interests of the powerful. 19 3 If one says something disparaging of a wealthy and well-regarded individual, one discovers that one's words were not free after all; the wealthy individual has a type of property interest in his or her community image, damage to which is compensable even though words were the sole instrument of the harm. 194 Similarly, if one infringes the copyright or trademark of a well-known writer or industrialist, again it turns out that one's action is punishable. 19 5 Further, if one disseminates an official secret valuable to a powerful branch of the military or defense contractor, that speech is punishable. 19 If one speaks disrespectfully to a judge, police officer, teacher, military official, or other powerful authority figure, again one discovers that one's words were not free;1 9 7 and so with words used to defraud, 198 form a conspiracy, 1 99 breach the peace, 200 or untruthful words given under oath during a civil or criminal proceeding.20 1 Yet the suggestion that we create new exception to protect lowly and vulnerable members of our society, such as isolated, young black undergraduates attending dominantly white campuses, is often met with consternation: the First Amendment must be a seamless web; minorities, if they knew their own self-interest, should appreciate this even more than others. 20 2 This one-sidedness of free-speech doctrine makes the First Amendment much more valuable to the majority than to the minority. The system of free expression also has a powerful after-the-fact apologetic function. Elite groups use the supposed existence of a marketplace of ideas to justify their own superior position. 203 Imagine a society in which all As were rich and happy, all Bs were moderately comfortable, and all Cs were poor, stigmatized, and reviled. Imagine also that this society scrupulously believes in a free marketplace of ideas. Might not the As benefit greatly from such a system? On looking about them and observing the inequality in the distribution of wealth, longevity, happiness, and safety between themselves and the others, they might feel guilt. Perhaps their own superior position is undeserved, or at least requires explanation. But the existence of an ostensibly free marketplace of ideas renders that effort unnecessary. Rationalization is easy: our ideas, our culture competed with their more easygoing ones and won. 20 4 It was a fair fight. Our position must be deserved; the distribution of social goods must be roughly what fairness, merit, and equity call for.20 5 It is up to them to change, not us. A free market of racial depiction resists change for two final reasons. First, the dominant pictures, images, narratives, plots, roles, and stories ascribed to, and constituting the public perception of minorities, are always dominantly negative. 20 6 Through an unfortunate psychological mechanism, incessant bombardment by images of the sort described in Part I (as well as today's versions) inscribe those negative images on the souls and minds of minority persons. 20 7 Minorities internalize the stories they read, see, and hear every day. Persons of color can easily become demoralized, blame themselves, and not speak up vigorously.208 The expense of speech also precludes the stigmatized from participating effectively in the marketplace of ideas. 20 9 They are often poor-indeed, one theory of racism holds that maintenance of economic inequality is its prime function2 0 -and hence unlikely to command the means to bring countervailing messages to the eyes and ears of others. Second, even when minorities do speak they have little credibility. Who would listen to, who would credit, a speaker or writer one associates with watermelon-eating, buffoonery, menial work, intellectual inadequacy, laziness, lasciviousness, and demanding resources beyond his or her deserved share? Our very imagery of the outsider shows that, contrary to the usual view, society does not really want them to speak out effectively in their own behalf and, in fact, cannot visualize them doing so. Ask yourself: How do outsiders speak in the dominant narratives? Poorly, inarticulately, with broken syntax, short sentences, grunts, and unsophisticated ideas.21' Try to recall a single popular narrative of an eloquent, self-assured black (for example) orator or speaker. In the real world, of course, they exist in profusion. But when we stumble upon them, we are surprised: "What a welcome 'exception'!" Words, then, can wound. But the fine thing about the current situation is that one gets to enjoy a superior position and feel virtuous at the same time. By supporting the system of free expression no matter what the cost, one is upholding principle. One can belong to impeccably liberal organizations and believe one is doing the right thing, even while taking actions that are demonstrably injurious to the least privileged, most defenseless segments of our society.21 2 In time, one's actions will seem wrong and will be condemned as such, but paradigms change slowly.2 1 3 The world one helps to create-a world in which denigrating depiction is good or at least acceptable, in which minorities are buffoons, clowns, maids, or Willie Hortons, and only rarely fully individuated human beings with sensitivities, talents, personalities, and frailties-will survive into the future. One gets to create culture at outsiders' expense. And, one gets to sleep well at night, too. Racism is not a mistake, not a matter of episodic, irrational behavior carried out by vicious-willed individuals, not a throwback to a long-gone era. It is ritual assertion of supremacy, 214 like animals sneering and posturing to maintain their places in the hierarchy of the colony. It is performed largely unconsciously, just as the animals' behavior is. 2 15 Racism seems right, customary, and inoffensive to those engaged in it, while bringing psychic and pecuniary advantages.21 6 The notion that more speech, more talking, more preaching, and more lecturing can counter this system of oppression is appealing, lofty, romantic-and wrong.
And, more speech is not better – speech tends to reinscribe power relations rather than break them down. Delgado and Yun ‘94 Richard Delgado - Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law, University of Colorado. J.D. 1974, University of California, Berkeley. David H. Yun – Member of the Colorado Bar. J.D. 1993, University of Colorado. “Pressure Valves and Bloodied Chickens: An Analysis of Paternalistic Objections to Hate Speech Regulation.” California Law Review. 1994. http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1712andcontext=californialawreview JJN D. "More Speech"-Talking Back to the Aggressor as a Preferable Solution to the Problem of Hate Speech Defenders of the First Amendment sometimes argue that minorities should talk back to the aggressor.85 Nat Hentoff, for example, writes that antiracism rules teach black people to depend on whites for protection, while talking back clears the air, emphasizes self-reliance, and strengthens one's self-image as an active agent in charge of one's own destiny.8 6 The "talking back" solution to campus racism draws force from the First Amendment principle of "more speech," according to which additional dialogue is always a preferred response to speech that some find troubling.87 Proponents of this approach oppose hate speech rules, then, not so much because they limit speech, but because they believe that it is good for minorities to learn to speak out. A few go on to offer another reason: that a minority who speaks out will be able to educate the speaker who has uttered a racially hurtful remark."8 Racism, they hold, is the product of ignorance and fear. If a victim of racist hate speech takes the time to explain matters, he or she may succeed in altering the speaker's perception so that the speaker will no longer utter racist remarks.8 9 How valid is this argument? Like many paternalistic arguments, it is offered blandly, virtually as an article of faith. In the nature of paternalism, those who make the argument are in a position of power, and therefore believe themselves able to make things so merely by asserting them as true.90 They rarely offer empirical proof of their claims, because none is needed. The social world is as they say because it is their world: they created it that way.91 In reality, those who hurl racial epithets do so because they feel empowered to do so. 92 Indeed, their principal objective is to reassert and reinscribe that power. One who talks back is perceived as issuing a direct challenge to that power. The action is seen as outrageous, as calling for a forceful response. Often racist remarks are delivered in several-on-one situations, in which responding in kind is foolhardy. 93 Many highly publicized cases of racial homicide began in just this fashion. A group began badgering a black person. The black person talked back, and paid with his life.94 Other racist remarks are delivered in a cowardly fashion, by means of graffiti scrawled on a campus wall late at night or on a poster placed outside of a black student's dormitory door.95 In these situations, more speech is, of course, impossible. Racist speech is rarely a mistake, rarely something that could be corrected or countered by discussion. What would be the answer to "Nigger, go back to Africa. You don't belong at the University"? "Sir, you misconceive the situation. Prevailing ethics and constitutional interpretation hold that I, an African American, am an individual of equal dignity and entitled to attend this university in the same manner as others. Now that I have informed you of this, I am sure you will modify your remarks in the future"? 96 The idea that talking back is safe for the victim or potentially educative for the racist simply does not correspond with reality. It ignores the power dimension to racist remarks, forces minorities to run very real risks, and treats a hateful attempt to force the victim outside the human community as an invitation for discussion. Even when successful, talking back is a burden. Why should minority undergraduates, already charged with their own education, be responsible constantly for educating others?
Turns the case – hate speech does real violence to people of color and necessarily locks in relationships of domination. Delgado and Stefacic ‘09 Richard Delgado - University Professor, Seattle University School of Law; J.D., 1974, University of California, Berkeley. Jean Stefancic – Research Professor, Seattle University School of Law; M.A., 1989, University of San Francisco. “FOUR OBSERVATIONS ABOUT HATE SPEECH.” WAKE FOREST LAW REVIEW. 2009. http://wakeforestlawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Delgado_LawReview_01.09.pdf II. OBSERVATION NUMBER TWO: THE EVALUATION OF HARMS HAS BEEN INCOMPLETE One way, of course, to end the current standoff is for one of the parties to defer to the other’s point of view. Indeed, by pursuing an aggressive campaign of litigation, the free-speech camp has been implicitly urging that the other side do just that.58 One could also argue that a host of campus administrators, by enacting successive versions of hate-speech codes, are attempting to do the same thing, namely, wear the other side down.59 Ordinarily, though, it is the free-speech faction, with a string of lower-court victories to its credit, who urge the other side to “get over it” and toughen its collective hide.60 Yet, a careful weighing of the costs and benefits of speech regulation suggests that the case for it is closer than the ACLU and some courts seem ready to acknowledge. Before addressing the costs of hate-speech regulation versus the opposite, it is advisable to arrive at an understanding of what hate speech is. A Types of Hate Speech Hate speech, including the campus variety, can take a number of forms—direct (sometimes called “specific”) or indirect; veiled or overt; single or repeated; backed by power, authority, or threat, or not.61 One can also distinguish it in terms of the characteristic— such as race, religion, sexual orientation, immigration status, or gender—of the person or group it targets.62 It can isolate a single individual (“Jones, you goddamned X.”) or group (“The goddamned Xs are destroying this country.”). It can be delivered orally, in writing, on the Internet, or in the form of a tangible thing, such as a Confederate flag, football mascot, or monument.63 It can be anonymous, as with graffiti or a leaflet surreptitiously placed on a bulletin board or under a dormitory door, or its author can be plainly identified.64 The object of the speech may be free to leave, or trapped, as in a classroom or workplace.65 B. The Harms of Hate Speech The various forms of hate speech present different kinds and degrees of harm. The face-to-face kind is the most immediately problematic, especially if the target is not in a position to leave and the one delivering it possesses the power to harm. 1. Direct or Face-to-Face Hate Speech Although some courts and commentators describe the injury of hate speech as mere offense,66 the harm associated with the face-toface kind, at least, is often far greater than that and includes flinching, tightening of muscles, adrenaline rushes, and inability to sleep.67 Some victims may suffer psychosocial harms, including depression, repressed anger, diminished self-concept, and impairment of work or school performance.68 Some may take refuge in drugs, alcohol, or other forms of addiction, compounding their misery.69 2. Hate Speech and Children With children, the harms of hate speech may be even more worrisome. A child victimized by racial taunts or browbeating may respond aggressively, with the result that he or she is labeled as assaultive.70 Or, the child can respond by internalizing the harm and pretending to ignore it. Robbed of self-confidence and a sense of ease, such a child can easily become introspective and morose.71 If the child’s parents suffer the same fate at work, they may bring these problems home so that the parents retain even less energy for their families than before.72 Recent scholarship points out how the pathologies associated with social subordination may be transgenerational, lasting for centuries, if not millennia, and include pain, fear, shame, anger, and despair.73 3. General Hate Speech With general hate speech, such as anonymously circulated flyers or speeches to a crowd, the harms, while diffuse, may be just as serious.74 Recent scholarship shows how practically every instance of genocide came on the heels of a wave of hate speech depicting the victims in belittling terms.75 For example, before launching their wave of deadly attacks on the Tutsis in Rwanda, Hutus in government and the media disseminated a drumbeat of messages casting their ethnic rivals as despicable.76 The Third Reich did much the same with the Jews during the period leading up to the Holocaust.77 When the United States enslaved African Americans and killed or removed the Indians, it rationalized that these were simple folk who needed discipline and tutelage, or else bloodthirsty savages who resisted the blessings of civilization.78 When, a little later, the nation marched westward in pursuit of manifest destiny, it justified taking over the rich lands of California and the Southwest on the ground that the indolent Mexicans living on them did not deserve their good fortune.79 Before interning the Japanese during World War II, propagandists depicted the group as sneaky, suspicious, and despotic.80 It is possible that the connection between general hate speech and instances of mass oppression may not be merely statistical and contingent, but conceptual and necessary.81 Concerted action requires an intelligible intention or rationale capable of being understood by others. One cannot mistreat another group without first articulating a reason why one is doing it—otherwise, no one but a sadist would join in.82 Without a softening-up period, early steps toward genocide, such as removing Jews to a ghetto, would strike others as gratuitous and command little support. Discriminatory action of any kind presupposes a group that labors under a stigma of some kind.83 The prime mechanism for the creation of such stigma is hate speech.84 Without it, genocide, imperialism, Indian removal, and Jim Crow could gain little purchase.85 C. The Harms of Speech Regulation If the harms of hate speech are sobering, what lies on the other side? What happens to the hate speaker forced to hold things in? Will he or she suffer psychological injury, depression, nightmares, drug addiction, and a blunted self image?86 Diminished pecuniary and personal prospects?87 Will hate-speech regulation set up the speaker’s group for extermination, seizure of ancestral lands, or anything comparable?88 The very possibility seems far-fetched. And, indeed, regimes, such as Europe’s and Canada’s, that criminalize hate speech exhibit none of these ills.89 Speech and inquiry there seem as free and uninhibited as in the United States, and their press just as feisty as our own.90 What about harm to the hate speaker? The individual who holds his or her tongue for fear of official sanction may be momentarily irritated. But “bottling it up” seems not to inflict serious psychological or emotional damage.91 Early in the debate about hate speech, some posited that a prejudiced individual forced to keep his impulses in check might become more dangerous as a result.92 By analogy to a pressure valve, he or she might explode in a more serious form of hate speech or even a physical attack on a member of the target group.93 But studies examining this possibility discount it.94 Indeed, the bigot who expresses his sentiment aloud is apt to be more dangerous, not less, as a result. The incident “revs him up” for the next one, while giving onlookers the impression that baiting minorities is socially acceptable, so that they may follow suit.95 A recently developed social science instrument, the Implicit Association Test (“IAT”), shows that many Americans harbor measurable animus toward racial minorities.96 Might it be that hearing hate speech, in person or on the radio, contributes to that result?97 III. OBSERVATION NUMBER THREE: INTEREST BALANCING MUST TAKE ACCOUNT OF RELEVANT FEATURES OF HATE SPEECH If all types of hate speech are apt to impose costs,98 large or small, how should courts and policymakers weigh them? Not every victim of hate speech will respond in one of the ways described above. Some will shrug it off or lash back at the aggressor, giving as good as they got.99 The harm of hate speech is variable, changing from victim to victim and setting to setting.100 By the same token, it is impossible to say with assurance that the cost of hate-speech regulation will always be negligible. Some speakers who might wish to address sensitive topics, such as affirmative action or racial differences in response to medical treatments, might shy away from them.101 The interplay of voices that society relies on to regulate itself may deteriorate. In balancing hate speech versus regulation, two benchmarks may be helpful: a review of current freespeech “exceptions” and attention to the role of incessancy. A. Current Free-Speech Exceptions Not all speech is free. The current legal landscape contains many exceptions and special doctrines corresponding to speech that society has decided it may legitimately punish. Some of these are: words of conspiracy; libel and defamation; copyright violation; words of threat; misleading advertising; disrespectful words uttered to a judge, police officer, or other authority figure; obscenity; and words that create a risk of imminent violence.102 If speech is not a seamless web, the issue is whether the case for prohibiting hate speech is as compelling as that underlying existing exceptions. First Amendment defenders often assert that coining a new exception raises the specter of additional ones, culminating, potentially, in official censorship and Big Brother.103 But our tolerance for a wide array of special doctrines suggests that this fear may be exaggerated and that a case-by-case approach may be quite feasible. How important is it to protect a black undergraduate walking home late at night from the campus library?104 As important as a truthful label on a can of dog food or safeguarding the dignity of a minor state official?105 Neither free-speech advocates nor courts have addressed matters like these, but a rational approach to the issue of hate-speech regulation suggests that they should.106 B. Incessancy and Compounding Two final aspects of hate speech are incessancy—the tendency to recur repeatedly in the life of a victim—and compounding.107 A victim of a racist or similar insult is likely to have heard it more than once. In this respect, a racial epithet differs from an insult such as “You damn idiot driver” or “Watch where you’re going, you klutz” that the listener is apt to hear only occasionally. Like water dripping on stone, racist speech impinges on one who has heard similar remarks many times before.108 Each episode builds on the last, reopening a wound likely still to be raw. The legal system, in a number of settings, recognizes the harm of an act known to inflict a cumulative harm. Ranging from eggshell plaintiffs to the physician who fails to secure fully informed consent, we commonly judge the blameworthiness of an action in light of the victim’s vulnerability.109 When free-speech absolutists trivialize the injury of hate speech as simple offense, they ignore how it targets the victim because of a condition he or she cannot change and that is part of the victim’s very identity. Hate speakers “pile on,” injuring in a way in which the victim has been injured several times before. The would-be hate speaker forced to keep his thoughts to himself suffers no comparable harm. A comparison of the harms to the speaker and the victim of hate speech, then, suggests that a regime of unregulated hate speech is costly, both individually and socially. Yet, even if the harms on both sides were similar, one of the parties is more disadvantaged than the other, so that Rawls’s difference principle suggests that, as a moral matter, we break the tie in the victim’s favor.110 Moreover, the magnitude of error can easily be greater, even in First Amendment terms, on the side of nonregulation. Hate speech warps the dialogic community by depriving its victims of credibility. Who would listen to one who appears, in a thousand scripts, cartoons, stories, and narratives as a buffoon, lazy desperado, or wanton criminal? Because one consequence of hate speech is to diminish the status of one group vis-à-vis all the rest, it deprives the singled-out group of credibility and an audience, a result surely at odds with the underlying rationales of a system of free expression.111
Anti-Blackness is the root cause of white supremacy and social oppression. It outweighs the case. Heitzeg 15
Heitzeg, Nancy A a Professor of Sociology and Director of the¶ interdisciplinary Critical Studies of Race/Ethnicity Program at St. Catherine¶ University, St. Paul, MN.. "On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964: Persistent White Supremacy, Relentless Anti-Blackness, And The Limits Of The Law." Hamline J. Pub. L. and Pol'y 36 (2015): 54.
While all communities of color suffer from racism in general¶ and its manifestation in criminal justice in particular, “Black” has¶ been the literal and figurative counterpart of “white”. Anti-black¶ racism is arguably at the very foundation of white supremacy; the¶ two constitute the foundational book-ends for the legal, political and¶ every day constructions of race in the United States.12¶ For this¶ reason, in combination with the excessive over-representation of¶ African Americans in the criminal justice system and the prison¶ industrial complex, this analysis will largely focus on the ways in¶ which the law has been a tool for the oppression of African¶ Americans via the furtherance of white supremacy and antiblackness¶ in both law and practice.¶ While race has never reflected any biological reality, it is¶ indeed a powerful social and political construct. In the U.S. and¶ elsewhere, it has served to delineate “whiteness” as the “unraced”¶ norm – the “unmarked marker” – while hierarchically devaluing¶ “other” racial/ethnic categories with Blackness always as the antithesis.13¶ The socio-political construction of race coincides with the¶ age of exploration, the rise of “scientific” classification schemes, and¶ perhaps most significantly capitalism. In the United States, the¶ solidification of racial hierarchies cannot be disentangled from the capitalist demands for “unfree” labor and expanded private property.¶ By the late 1600s, race had been a marker for either free citizens or¶ slave property, and colonial laws had reified this decades before the¶ Revolutionary War.14 The question of slavery was at the center of¶ debates in the creation of the United States and is referenced no less¶ than ten times.15 By the time of the Constitutional Convention of¶ 1787, the racial lines defining slave and free had already been rigidly¶ drawn – white was “free” and black was “slave” – and the result¶ according to Douglass was this: “assume the Constitution to be what¶ we have briefly attempted to prove it to be, radically and essentially¶ pro-slavery”.¶ 16 The Three-Fifths Clause, the restriction on future¶ bans of the slave trade and limits on the possibility of emancipation¶ through escape were all clear indications of the significance of¶ slavery to the Founders. The legal enouncement of slavery in the¶ Constitution is one of the first of many “racial sacrifice covenants”¶ to come, where the interests of Blacks were sacrificed for the nation.¶ 17¶ The social and constitutional construction of white as free and¶ Black as slave has on-going political and economic ramifications.¶ According to Harris, whiteness not only allows access to property,¶ may be conceived of per se as “whiteness as property”.¶ 18 These¶ property rights produce both tangible and intangible value to those¶ who possess it; whiteness as property includes the right to profit and¶ to exclude, even the perceived right to kill in defense of the borders¶ of whiteness.19 As Harris notes:¶ The concept of whiteness was premised on white¶ supremacy rather than mere difference. “White” was¶ defined and constructed in ways that increased its¶ value by reinforcing its exclusivity. Indeed, just as whiteness as property embraced the right to exclude,¶ whiteness as a theoretical construct evolved for the¶ very purpose of racial exclusion. Thus, the concept¶ of whiteness is built on both exclusion and racial¶ subjugation. This fact was particularly evident¶ during the period of the most rigid racial exclusion,¶ as whiteness signified racial privilege and took the¶ form of status property.20¶ Conversely, Blackness is defined as outside of the margins of¶ humanity as chattel rather than persons, and defined outside of the¶ margins of civil society. Frank Wilderson, in “The Prison Slave as¶ Hegemonys (Silent) Scandal,” describes it like this: “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.”¶ 21 Directly¶ condemned by the Constitution in ways that other once excluded¶ groups (American Indians, women, immigrants, LGBTQ) were not,¶ Blackness as marked by slavery– as property not person - creates an¶ outsider status that makes future inclusion a daunting challenge.22
The alternative is to embrace the demand of abolitionism – we must recognize that whiteness operates subtly through hands-off policies that preserve the status quo. We choose to challenge the university system at the grassroots intersection with other liberation movements. Oparah 14
Oparah, Julia. Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College and a founding member of Black Women Birthing Justice "Challenging Complicity: The Neoliberal University and the Prison–Industrial Complex." The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (2014).
¶ In my earlier work on the academic-prison-industrial complex, I suggested that activist scholars were producing and disseminating countercarceral knowledge by bringing academic research into alignment with the needs of social movements and interrogating and reorganizing relationships between prisoners and researchers in the free world.50 Given the history of epistemic and physical violence and exploitation of research subjects by the academy, such a reorganizing of relationships and accountabilities is clearly urgently needed. Yet no matter how radical and participatory our scholarship is, we ultimately fail to dismantle the academic-military-prison-industrial com- plex (academic-MPIC) if we address it only through the production of more knowledge. Since knowledge is a commodity, marketed through books, arti- cles, and conferences as well as patents and government contracts, the pro- duction of “better,” more progressive or countercarceral knowledge can also be co-opted and put to work by the academic-MPIC.¶ An abolitionist lens provides a helpful framework here. Antiprison schol- ars and activists have embraced the concept of abolition in order to draw attention to the unfinished liberation legislated by the Thirteenth Amend- ment, which abolished slavery “except as a punishment for a crime.”51 Aboli- tionists do not seek primarily to reform prisons or to improve conditions for prisoners; instead they argue that only by abolishing imprisonment will we free up the resources and imagine the possibility of more effective and less violent strategies to deal with the social problems signaled by harmful acts. While early abolitionists referred to themselves as prison abolitionists, more recently there has been a shift to prison-industrial complex abolitionism to expand the analysis of the movement to incorporate other carceral spaces— from immigrant detention centers to psychiatric hospitals—and to empha- size the role of other actors, including the police and courts, politicians, corporations, the media, and the military, in sustaining mass incarceration.52¶ How does an abolitionist lens assist us in assessing responses to the academic-MPIC? First, it draws our attention to the economic basis of the academic-MPIC and pushes us to attack the materiality of the militari- zation and prisonization of academia rather than limiting our interventions to the realm of ideas. This means that we must challenge the corporatization of our universities and colleges and question what influences and account- abilities are being introduced by our increasing collaboration with neoliberal global capital. It also means that we must dismantle those complicities and liberate the academy from its role as handmaiden to neoliberal globaliza- tion, militarism, and empire. In practice, this means interrogating our uni- versities’ and colleges’ investment decisions, demanding they divest from the military, security, and prison industries; distance themselves from military occupations in Southwest Asia and the Middle East; and invest instead in community-led sustainable economic development. It means facing allega- tions of disloyalty to our employers or alma maters as we blow the whistle on unethical investments and the creeping encroachment of corporate fund- ing, practices, and priorities. It means standing up for a vision of the liberal arts that neither slavishly serves the interests of the new global order nor returns to its elitist origins but instead is deeply embedded in progressive movements and richly informed by collaborations with insurgent and activ- ist spaces. And it means facing the challenges that arise when our divest- ment from empire has real impact on the bottom line of our university and college budgets. Andrea Smith, in her discussion of native studies, has argued that politi- cally progressive educators often adopt normative, colonial practices in the classroom, using pedagogical strategies and grading practices that rein- scribe the racialized and gendered regulation, policing, and disciplining that PIC abolitionists seek to end.53 In this sense, there could be no “postcarceral” academy. Certainly, sanctions for undergraduate and graduate students and faculty who challenge the university’s regular practices—from failing grades and expulsions to tenure denials and deportation—are systemically distrib- uted, along with rewards for those who can be usefully incorporated. Yet uni- versities and colleges also hold the seeds of a very different possible future, evoked, for example, by the universal admissions movement or by student strikes in Britain and Canada that demand higher education as a right, not a privilege of the wealthy. Rather than seeking to eradicate or replace higher educational institutions altogether, I suggest that we demand the popular and antiracist democratization of higher education.¶ The first step toward this radical transformation is the liberation of aca- demia from the machinery of empire: prisons, militarism, and corporations. Speaking of abolishing the white race, Noel Ignatiev argues that it is neces- sary for white people to make whiteness impossible by refusing the invisible benefits of membership in the “white club.”54 Progressive academics are also members of a privileged “club,” one that confers benefits in the form of a pay- check, health care, and other fringe benefits; social status; and the freedom to pursue intellectual work that we are passionate about. But we can also put our privilege to work by unmasking and then unsettling the invisible, symbi- otic, and toxic relationships that constitute the academic-MPIC.¶ Decoupling academia from its velvet-gloved master would begin the pro- cess of fundamental transformation. Without unfettered streams of income from corporations, wealthy philanthropists, and the military, universities and colleges would be forced to develop alternative fund-raising strategies, relationships, and accountabilities. Can we imagine a college administration aligned with local Occupy organizers to protest the state’s massive spend- ing on prisons and policing and demand more tax money for housing, edu- cation, and health care? Can we imagine a massive investment of time and resources by university personnel to solve the problem of how to decarcerate the nation’s prisons or end the detention of undocumented immigrants in order to fund universal access to higher education? Can we imagine a uni- versity run by and for its constituents, including students, kitchen and gar- den staff, and tenure-track and adjunct faculty? These are the possibilities opened up by academic-MPIC abolition.
The role of the ballot is to interrogate the AFF’s scholarship using the lens of critical race theory. This makes the passage of the plan irrelevant.
First, their refusal of minority voices is a conscious choice. Delgado 84
Delgado, Richard. "The imperial scholar: Reflections on a review of civil rights literature." University of Pennsylvania Law Review 132.3 (1984): 561-578.
It does not matter where one enters this universe; one comes to the¶ same result: an inner circle of about a dozen white, male writers who¶ comment on, take polite issue with, extol, criticize, and expand on each¶ other's ideas." It is something like an elaborate minuet.¶ The failure to acknowledge minority scholarship extends even to¶ nonlegal propositions and assertions of fact. W.E. DuBois, deceased¶ Black historian, receives an occasional citation.5 Aside from him, little¶ else rates a mention. Higginbotham's monumental In the Matter of¶ Color' might as well not exist. The same is true of the work of Kenneth¶ Clark,1 Black psychologist and past president of the American¶ Psychological Association, and Alvin Poussaint,8 Harvard Medical¶ School professor and authority on the psychological impact of race. One¶ searches in vain for references to the powerful book by physicians Grier¶ and Cobbs, Black Rage,' or to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the¶ Earth,10 or even to writings of or about Martin Luther King, Jr.,1¶ "¶ Cesar Chavez, 2 and Malcolm X."3 When the inner circle writers need authority for a factual or social scientific proposition about race they¶ generally cite reports of the United States Commission on Civil¶ Rights1 4 or else each other.1 5¶ A single anecdote may help to illustrate what I mean. Recently a¶ law professor who writes about civil rights showed me, for my edification,¶ a draft of an article of his. It is, on the whole, an excellent article.¶ It extols the value of a principle I will call "equal personhood." Equal¶ personhood is the notion, implicit in several constitutional provisions¶ and much case law, that each human being, regardless of race, creed, or¶ color, is entitled to be treated with equal respect. To treat someone as¶ an outsider, a nonmember of human society, violates this principle and¶ devalues the self-worth of the person so excluded.¶ I have no quarrel with this premise, but, on reading the one hundred-plus¶ footnotes of the article, I noticed that its author failed to cite¶ Black or minority scholars, an exclusion from the community of kindred¶ souls as glaring as any condemned in the paper. I pointed this out¶ to the author, citing as illustration a passage in which he asserted that¶ unequal treatment can cause a person to suffer a withered self-concept.¶ Having just written an article on a related subject, 8 I was more or less¶ steeped in withered self-concepts. I knew who the major authorities¶ were in that area.¶ The professor's authority for the proposition about withered selfconcepts¶ was Frank Michelman, writing in the Harvard Law Review. I pointed out that although Frank Michelman may be a superb scholar¶ and teacher, he probably has relatively little first-hand knowledge¶ about withered self-concepts. I suggested that the professor add references¶ to such works as Kenneth Clark's Dark Ghetto1¶ " and Grier and¶ Cobbs's Black Rage,"' and he agreed to do so. To justify his selection of¶ Frank Michelman for the proposition about withered self-concept, the¶ author explained that Michelman's statement was "so elegant."¶ Could inelegance of expression explain the absence of minority¶ scholarship from the text and footnotes of leading law review articles¶ about civil rights? Elegance is, without question, a virtue in writing, in¶ conversation, or in. anything else in life. If minority scholars write inelegantly¶ and Frank Michelman writes elegantly, then it would not be¶ surprising if the latter were read and cited more frequently, and the¶ former less so. But minority legal scholars seem to have less trouble¶ being recognized and taken seriously in areas of scholarship other than¶ civil rights theory.19 If elegance is a problem for minority scholars, it¶ seems mainly to be so in the core areas of civil rights: affirmative action,¶ the equality principle, and the theoretical foundations of race relations¶ law.¶ In 1971, Judge Skelly Wright wrote an article entitled, Professor¶ Bickel, the Scholarly Tradition, and the Supreme Court.20 In the article,¶ Judge Wright took a group of scholars to task for their bloodless¶ carping at the Warren Court's decisions in the areas of racial justice¶ and human rights. He accused the group of missing the central point in¶ these decisions-their moral clarity and passion for justice-and labelled¶ the group's excessive preoccupation with procedure and institutional¶ role and its insistence that the Court justify every element of a¶ decision under general principles of universal application, a "scholarly tradition."'2 1¶ I think I have discovered a second scholarly tradition. It consists of¶ white scholars' systematic occupation of, and exclusion of minority¶ scholars from, the central areas of civil rights scholarship. The mainstream¶ writers tend to acknowledge only each other's work. It is even¶ possible that, consciously or not, they resist entry by minority scholars¶ into the field,2 2 perhaps counseling them, as I was counseled, to establish¶ their reputations in other areas of law. I believe that this "scholarly¶ tradition" exists mainly in civil rights; nonwhite scholars in other fields¶ of law seem to confront no such tradition.23
Second, a focus on political action assumes a kind of democratic liberalism that is inaccessible to marginalized voices. Refuse their demand for concrete state action. Lopez 03
López, Gerardo R. University of Utah, Salt Lake City "The (racially neutral) politics of education: A critical race theory perspective." Educational Administration Quarterly 39.1 (2003): 68-94.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of tactics and mechanisms privileged in¶ the field emerge from a strong belief in the democratic process—providing a¶ somewhat optimistic take on the efficacy of political and civic participation.¶ Such strategies not only ignore the political fact that power and influence¶ largely remain the dominion of White, middle-class men (Marshall, 1997a),¶ but they also disregard the fact that the vast majority of underrepresented¶ groups do not largely participate in these kinds of political activity (Arax,¶ 1986; Bush, 1984; Flores and Benmayor, 1997; Gaventa, 1980; Preston,¶ Henderson, and Puryear, 1987). In other words, although these theories support¶ and strengthen our collective beliefs in democracy, political action, representational politics, influence, accountability, and the importance of a¶ whole host of input factors in the decision-making process, they nevertheless¶ fail to address why certain individuals fail to participate in the political process¶ altogether and/or how and why the “democratic” process itself¶ marginalizes and silences diverse peoples, their actions, and their perspectives¶ (Marshall, 1993a; Marshall et al., 1989).¶ Willis Hawley (1977) recognized the limitations of the field almost three¶ decades ago when he stated:¶ Whether one accepts Lasswell’s definition of “who gets what when and how”¶ or other such widely held and related conceptions that politics involves the authoritative¶ allocation of resources and values, my point is the same—political¶ scientists have been more interested in studying the political processes than¶ they have been in studying who receives what benefits from the political process.¶ (p. 319)¶ As Hawley suggested, scholars in the field are more concerned with “input”¶ and “process” factors, and not necessarily with the outcomes and effects of¶ the political process. The focus on one aspect, to the detriment of the other,¶ certainly has been a shortcoming in the field.¶ This is a critically important point, because the outcome of policy can be¶ tangible and identifiable (such as the effects of a public policy on a particular¶ group) or intangible and anomalous (such as people’s perceptions of the¶ political system). As Schram (1995) contended, the field disproportionately¶ suffers from an “overly instrumental view of rationality that masks its latent¶ biases” (p. 375). Certainly, the relentless belief in the effectiveness of political¶ and civic participation is itself a type of bias that is often taken for granted¶ by most scholars in the field.¶ Within the politics of education, we assume that all (legal) citizens of this¶ society have certain inalienable rights—including the right to vote to ensure¶ that government and policies work in their best interest. The field also¶ assumes that all individuals act in politically rational ways and, when necessary,¶ will assert their rights as citizens—through influence, power, conflict,¶ political pressure, voting, or some other mechanism—to minimize real and¶ opportunity costs.¶ Unfortunately, for the vast majority of people of color, the working poor,¶ women, gays/lesbians/bisexuals, and other marginalized groups—who are¶ constantly reminded on a daily basis that they are second-class citizens in this¶ country—the concept of rights is elusive. Their treatment, in historical and¶ contemporary times, attests to the fact that they have never been afforded¶ their full rights as citizens of this country (Delgado, 1997; Flores and¶ Benmayor, 1997; Guinier, 1991; Preston et al., 1987; Spann, 1995; Williams, 1995b). For people of color, their subordination has not only been socially¶ sanctioned but legally sanctioned as well:¶ As the “Other,” racial minorities have often been neither thought of nor treated¶ as Americans. Historically they have by a number of legal and informal means¶ been excluded from buying property in certain areas, prohibited from voting,¶ and restricted as to whom they could marry. In practice, full American citizenship¶ has been restricted to Whites. Over many years of struggle, rights have¶ been extended and the concept of who belongs to America has expanded. Even¶ so, racial and gender discrimination continue to create real differences in opportunities¶ and in people’s perception of their treatment. (Rosaldo and Flores,¶ 1997, p. 58)¶ If having rights is part of being an American citizen (Flores, 1997), then¶ clearly, racial minorities in the United States are far from full incorporation in¶ this regard. They may be equal members of society under the law—but socially,¶ politically, and economically, they are rendered one down by a racist¶ political and legal system that marginalizes them on an everyday basis. As¶ Slater and Boyd (1999) suggested, individuals can be members of the larger¶ polity but may not necessarily be afforded equal status in the larger polity.¶ Therefore, to suggest that all individuals have equal rights under the law¶ and have equal ability and potential to exercise those rights via political¶ action and/or influence—in other words, to suggest that all individuals, irrespective¶ of race or power, act in politically rational ways—is not only shortsighted¶ but disingenuous. It suggests the public space is racially neutral and¶ that contextual factors do not matter in the larger social and political arena.
Third, Debate is a space in which racial identity can be understood—This dynamic is key to confronting racial domination and questioning the underlying aspects of negative racial identities. Reid-Brinkley 08 Shanara Rose. PhD in Philosophy from the University of Georgia. The Harsh Realities Of “Acting Black”: How African-American Policy Debaters Negotiate Representation Through Racial Performance And Style. https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/reid-brinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf pgs 2-3. 7/5
The attempts at educational reform are not limited to institutional actors such as the local, state, and federal governments. Non-profit organizations dedicated to alleviating the black/white achievement gap have also proliferated. One such organization, the Urban Debate League, claims that “Urban Debate Leagues have proven to increase literacy scores by 25, to improve grade-point averages by 8 to 10, to achieve high school graduation rates of nearly 100, and to produce college matriculation rates of 71 to 91.” The UDL program is housed in over fourteen American cities and targets inner city youths of color to increase their access to debate training. Such training of students defined as “at risk” is designed to offset the negative statistics associated with black educational achievement. The program has been fairly successful and has received wide scale media attention. The success of the program has also generated renewed 3 interest amongst college debate programs in increasing direct efforts at recruitment of racial and ethnic minorities. The UDL program creates a substantial pool of racial minorities with debate training coming out of high school, that college debate directors may tap to diversify their own teams. The debate community serves as a microcosm of the broader educational space within which racial ideologies are operating. It is a space in which academic achievement is performed according to the intelligibility of one’s race, gender, class, and sexuality. As policy debate is intellectually rigorous and has historically been closed to those marked by social difference, it offers a unique opportunity to engage the impact of desegregation and diversification of American education. How are black students integrated into a competitive educational community from which they have traditionally been excluded? How are they represented in public and media discourse about their participation, and how do they rhetorically respond to such representations? If racial ideology is perpetuated within discourse through the stereotype, then mapping the intelligibility of the stereotype within public discourse and the attempts to resist such intelligibility is a critical tool in the battle to end racial domination.
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NOVDEC Cap K
Tournament: Alta | Round: 3 | Opponent: San Marino VL | Judge: Inglet, Sierra Our system of policing is no accident – it is a direct result of economic policies keep to put poor and disenfranchised people on the margins with no political power. . Potter 15
Starting with the Reagan administration the federal government began to cease investment in urban renewal programs and urban development. Funds which had been made available to local city governments dried up and disappeared. The withdrawal of federal support had two main impacts. First, a wide range of positive social and development programs were terminated. Second, cities faced a problem of rapidly increasing debt. With the federal government’s retreat from governance to sovereignty urban governments increasingly looked to banks and financiers to cover their costs and obligations. The banks were only too happy to fill the void. They predicated their underwriting of municipal governance with three demands. First, social welfare programs had to be ravaged. Second, municipal services and space had to be privatized. Third, order maintenance through aggressive policing had to serve the interests of land developers, realtors, banks, corporations and private business. In other words, municipal government had to divest itself from its own populace and as a result the police no longer served the community they served finance capital alone.¶ So, municipal governments no longer governed. They became profit-producing, entrepreneurial, sovereign fiefdoms no longer serving their residents but totally focused on policies that made urban areas financially, socially and politically attractive to corporations, developers and banks. A combination of private and corporate financial investment and urban government policies created the conditions for a perfect storm of gentrification that deliberately displaced impoverished neighborhoods, massively widened wealth differentials, exacerbated class conflicts and required a militarized, violent army of occupation. Gentrification turned police departments into privately-owned, violent, security forces who no longer answered to the people they allegedly served.¶ New Crime and Actuarial Policing¶ The simple fact is that almost everyone’s contact with the criminal justice system starts with the police. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Americans will have interactions with the police as their only criminal justice system contact. These interactions rarely result in arrest, let alone prosecution conviction or incarceration. In fact, of all those people who have been subjected to “stop and frisk” police tactics, 90 are never found to be engaged in criminal activity. That fact alone demonstrates that the police are not fighting crime but are engaged in a pattern of discipline and regulation directed at those targeted by neoliberal policies. The police are not protecting communities and keeping them secure, the police are playing a key role in destabilizing and reshaping those communities for the benefit of financial entrepreneurs.¶ Beginning in the 1990s many police departments abandoned “crime-fighting” in favor of an “order maintenance” policing strategy. Rather than targeting serious crimes like assault, robbery, rape, burglary, theft and homicide police departments turned their attention to minor, low-level instance of “disorder.” So incivility and behavior which is somehow defined as annoying like homelessness, panhandling, public alcohol consumption and minor vandalism became the new “index crimes” targeted by police departments. The result was obvious. The police engaged in punitive, oppressive and often violent tactics directed primarily at poor, inner-city communities. The net impact was that policing was no longer directed at serious crime, it was the new social engineering policy of the state to attack poverty.¶ The neoliberal demand for order maintenance makes a mockery of arguments that policing strategies are designed to protect us from harm from violent and property crimes. In 2013 police made 11,302,102 arrests. Of those 480,360 (4) were for violent crimes and 1,559,284 (13.8) were for property crimes. In view of the simple fact that arrest is the starting point for most police violence against civilians the question becomes what exactly is the police doing that require so many other arrests? The answer is that they were engaged in policing disorder, rudeness and bothersome behavior not crime.¶ The most telling category of arrests is the amorphous category of “all other offenses, defining by the FBI as “all violations of state or local laws not specifically identified as Part I or Part II offenses, except traffic violations.” In other words all criminal acts not defined by the FBI as being “serious” crimes. In 2013 police made 3,282,651 (29) arrests for “all other” infractions, a number dwarfing arrests for both violent and property offenses. But, it’s worse than that. In addition to the “all other offenses” category police made 1,441,209 arrests (12.8 of all arrests) for vandalism, curfew violation and loitering, vagrancy, disorderly conduct, drunkenness and liquor law violations (excluding drunk driving), extremely minor offenses as well. So 42 of police arrests were for public order indiscretions. If we add to those numbers the victimless crimes of prostitution and drug abuse (1,549,663 arrests and 13.7 of all arrests) we end up with a total 56 of all arrests that posed no discernible threat to the public.¶ Punitive policing has nothing to do with crime. It is, in fact, a symbolic representation of state power, a form of public humiliation and public punishment. Order maintenance strategies were direct almost exclusively against the poor and people of color in the United States. Policing became the primary tool of neoliberalism to control, humiliate and regulate the poor.¶ New crimes and new policing strategies like those associated with Wilson and Kelling’s infamous “Broken Windows Theory” had very little to do with serious crime. Instead, a plethora of new laws and policing priorities were focused on one thing and one thing only, the protection of capital flows to protect and enhance private investment and development in urban settings. For example, one of the first campaigns launched by NYPD under its “broken windows” paradigm was to crack down on and arrest street vendors. It was, of course, just this type of policing strategy that led to the tragic police-killing of Eric Garner for selling cigarettes on the streets. The demand for new laws and aggressive policing of street life came directly from commercial interests who argued that street vending, street artists, and the like created congestion on sidewalks and competed with the products being peddled in their stores. Aggressive policing toward sidewalk vendors, singers, dancers and artists had nothing to do with serious crime. It had everything to with private profit.¶ Similarly, it was corporate real estate developers who pushed for aggressive policing and changes in police deployment strategies as a means to clear out neighborhoods for gentrification. Once again new laws and aggressive policing strategies were aimed at the homeless, the poor and the mentally ill. Corporate elites wielded their considerable political clout to reallocate police resources from “crime” to removing obstacles to their takeover of land and buildings and their subsequent profits from skyrocketing rents and sales of refurbished urban housing. Simply put, the police were used to displace entire populations and sanitize the streets not for the benefit of residents, but for the profits of corporations.¶ NYPD’s Compstat program is the prime example of how police resources are reallocated for private profit. New York’s police commissioner Bill Bratton was a primary architect of this new form of police accountability to corporate interests. Bratton reorganized the NYPD around “private-sector business practices and principles for management.” Compstat, in addition to heightening police accountability to financial capital also decreased police accountability to poor communities. No longer were the concerns of residents the primary motivation for police activity. Now the police were accountable only to actuarial statistical patterns and numbers which served to define “disorder” in a manner conducive to private business and development. Compstat in no way provided any meaningful community input to policing. It was and is a total rejection of community input and the full embrace of private business and financial section input.¶ The result of all of this was the criminalization of “disorder.” Suddenly police became more concerned about panhandling, public singing and dancing, loitering, public drinking, bicycle riders, boom boxes, prostitutes, graffiti and street vending than they were about serious criminal harms. Criminalizing previously noncriminal acts resulted in a strategy of order-maintenance policing that was both punitive and judgmental in vilifying those who might be marginally annoying but in no way dangerous. This was both a gift to corporate interests and a war on the poor. In concert with the severe cuts to social service programs and the new definition of “crime” as disorder, policing became a major policy initiative in dealing with structural poverty. Neoliberal policies including massive corporate tax cuts and even corporate tax forgiveness along with the gutting of the progressive income tax created levels of inequality in the United States unheard of since slavery and the rise of the robber barons. The redistribution of income alone was astonishing. In 1980 the top 10 of income earners controlled 35 of all income. Today they control more than 50. The Gini Ratio which measures income inequality soared to .46 making the United States the most unequal industrialized country in the world.¶ At the same the U.S. prison population soared from around 500,000 in 1980 to over 2.5 million today with another 5 million under the control of one or another correctional programs. Today the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world and one out of every 30 adults are under control of the correctional system. And all this occurred in the midst of a dramatic drop in criminal victimization. The violent crime rate in 1981 was 52.3 per 1,000 people. In 2013 it was 26.1 per 1,000 people. The rise in incarceration had nothing to with crime. It had everything to do with an orderly corporatized society.¶ Neoliberalism has adopted a policy of incarceration as a response to control of poor communities and a growing surplus population of the unemployed and underemployed. As neoliberal policies have abandoned the state’s function of governance and eviscerated welfare policies it has looked to the criminal justice system as its primary response to poverty. That response has included both punitive and aggressive policing and the vindictive use of incarceration. The disorderly among us are subjected to arrest, police violence, incarceration and displacement from their communities. Order maintenance policing (Broken Windows) targets the homeless, the mentally ill and the poor for arrest and prosecution. Police resources are disproportionately reassigned to poor communities. A massive 33 nationwide cut in spending on health care for the mentally ill, including funds for medication, has resulted in police intervention as a primary modality to deal with psychiatric problems. Once the concept of crime was replaced by quality-of-life violations of local ordinances it was easy for police to find “cause” to stop-and-frisk almost anyone. Despite the fact that stop-and-frisk policies rarely resulted in arrests or the discovery of actual “crime” nonwhites were subjected to the tactic six times more frequently than Caucasians even with crime rates held constant. In New York City 90 of the precincts with high frequencies of police stops were majority-minority precincts. Analyzes of stops found that the strongest predictive variable was the poverty rates of the neighborhoods in which the stops occurred.
The affirmative’s legalistic approach to police violence brings us further away from recognizing the economic forces at work that makes police violence inevitable. Lane 7/21.
If what we are witnessing in these violent encounters with police is neoliberalism in action, then we have to come up with an entirely different set of solutions to change policing. This is not to dismiss body cameras and training, which will no doubt save some lives. But they are technical fixes that do not address at all the neoliberal character of our police departments, the transformation of peace officers into neoliberal police, the policies that align policing with corporate power, and the violence that neoliberalism produces.¶ In fact, these fixes amount to our use of the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. After all, through neoliberal policies governments regularly take “outside of the realm of the political” the myriad problems that communities face and then render these problems “technical and actionable,” as Lester Spence has observed. So when we offer solutions like body cameras, we make fixing the police a technical matter rather than a political matter, and in so doing we legitimize and further entrench neoliberal policies and practices that enact invisible, spectacular, and ultimately normalized violence on those who don’t fit the mold. The consequence is that we’ll continue to receive tweets and Facebook feeds of police killings.¶ But we’ll also see more retaliatory killings of police officers – like the killings that occurred recently in Dallas and Baton Rouge – as more people realize that neoliberal policing, and the violence it enacts, is exactly the kind of policing our governments intend. Such counter-violence, however, is extraordinarily ironic, for individuals who engage in retaliatory killings – individuals who are, and will likely continue to be, primarily men – ultimately express just how deeply they have internalized the ideals that constitute the Virtuous Neoliberal Citizen: self-reliance or rugged individualism, personal responsibility, distrust of government, efficiency, cruelty. With an Izhmash-Saiga 5.45 mm rifle or some other AK-style weapon in tow, they alone will fix the problem of police violence, and in so doing, they will precisely, and finally, fit the neoliberal mode.¶ Repairing the police and our system of policing, then, clearly demands that we end not only neoliberal policing, but also the transformation of men and women into neoliberal police. To do this, we must relentlessly break down these moments of violence between officers and the community in order to unearth the neoliberal politics they express and enact, and that our government officials (local, state, national) continue to impose upon us at our expense (and for the benefit of the wealthy), but most especially at the expense of our abandoned, disposed children, women and men.¶ It is through this kind of work, in fact, that we can begin to upend an order that neoliberal proponents present as the only alternative and that appears all-powerful and all-encompassing. By doing this work, we’ll discover just how much neoliberalism and the violence it produces is, as Oksala makes clear, a “specific, rationally reflected and coordinated way of governing” – including the hiring, oversight, and training of police – that we absolutely have the power to change.
Blaming violence on ‘bad individual’s through civil suits replicates neoliberalism – it deflects blame on to individuals whose actions are predetermined by neoliberalism. Smith 15
Robert C. Smith The author of several books and over 100 academic articles, Robert is a Teaching-Scholar at the Cooperative Institute of Transnational Studies. He is also the founder of Heathwood Institute and PressHeathwood Institute and Press¶ AN INSTITUTION OF OPPRESSION OR FOR PUBLIC WELL-BEING AND CIVIL RIGHTS? REFLECTIONS ON THE INSTITUTION OF POLICE AND A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE May 4, 2015¶ http://www.heathwoodpress.com/an-institution-of-oppression-or-for-public-well-being-and-civil-rights-reflections-on-the-institution-of-police-and-a-radical-alternative-r-c-smith/ My aim here, however, has less to do with critique than with a consideration of alternatives, particularly when it comes to police. Movements in response to recent events in the US have rightly put demands for police reform at the top of the agenda. But there is something of a myth around such belief in reform. To paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, when tackling the problem of the institution of police and the issue of “police authority” (not to mention “power”), the real problem is one of restoring democratic authority.12 To put it another way: “a reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.”13¶ One cannot meaningfully dismantle the racist and unjust institution of the police without, firstly, tackling the belief that all our social problems can be solved with force.14 Secondly, the question of modern political-economy and its principle mode of relations must also be brought into direct focus, especially considering the manner in which current social-economic conditions tend to foster deep alienation which, in turn, establishes a social world open to the reproduction of practical and institutional power, domination, and coercion.¶ To this point, the American preference – as with much of the west in general – for considering the actions of ‘bad individuals’, as opposed to the function of ‘(bad) social systems’, represents a position of convenience. It deflects from the necessary course of difficult questions that need to be asked – a course that fundamentally challenges the status quo (Adorno). Regarding police brutality, is there an element of individual agency that we must recognize? Of course. If the modern institution of police represents a form of structural violence, as in the case of the almost daily murders of young black men and women, we must also bring into question the individual officer. Somewhere, at some point, the officer has a choice to stand-down, to drop the baton and shield, rip off the badge and refuse to partake in the violent repression of a citizen’s movement. On the side of structure, however, this choice is also defined within the context of economic coercion; ideological pressures to preserve status and economic benefits for one’s family; and twisted narratives of tribalism and of the positive values of a less-than-emancipatory system of law and order (what Sartre might have called “facticity”).¶ In further considering this point, allow me to ask the following question. Can it be said that every police officer is racist or believes in the oppression of others? Is it possible that some believe in the role of policing as a community service, rather than as an oppressive institution? The question that each officer should ask themselves, as they stand together in their militarized lines, facing fellow citizens with their modern weaponry, is ‘what actually am I standing for?’ Does one stand for oppression? Does one stand for indifferent corporations? Or does one stand for community and the rights of each citizen? In case of the latter, the very institution, the validity or legitimacy of the very concept of modern policing, collapses under the weight of its own illegitimacy.¶ If, as Luis Fernandez once said, asking the question ‘what are the alternatives to policing?’ is really to ask ‘what are the alternatives to capitalism?’, then the argument for or against the police boils down to either civil liberty or its opposite. And this is precisely the point or line of thought I would like to strike when reflecting on an alternative to police. In another way: it is along this line of thought that I think we might best formulate a structural critique of modern policing and an alternative, one that is for community, for the promotion of the “mediating subject”15 and mutual recognition16, and the protection of minority groups, civil rights and actual democracy.¶ If modern policing is based on the regulation and control of a community, the alternative, which could no longer be called “policing”, would be largely non-hierarchical, in line, perhaps, with a progressive notion of restorative justice inclined toward defending civil rights and principles of actual democracy as opposed to undermining them.¶ While this alternative would represent unarmed mediation, dialogue, and reconciliation in practice,17 it would also coincide with and mutually reinforce significant transformations across all norms of society: from the economic and political to health, education, food and so on. To be clear, what I am indicating is an alternative to police in the context of broader, holistic structural and systemic change across all social spheres or domains.¶ Rather than superficial reforms that maintain the status quo (Adorno), which the 1 would surely lobby for, the transformation of law, of justice, of policing in line with a progressive notion of restorative justice would need to coincide with a greater transformative vision and social philosophy. This transformative vision and social philosophy would not only support decriminalization. Or disarmament. Or the community development of a supportive social apparatus (as opposed to police) comprised of support-workers, case-workers, teachers, mental-health professionals and therapists, drug counselors, guidance counselors – all working on the basis of a person-centred and humanistic approach. It would also represent the reorganisation of political-economy and the establishing of social-economic conditions that would foster and support direct and participatory democratic models, which are particularly vital to any notion of restorative justice, and therefore also a complete transformation of society – of a post-police, post-capitalist society.
This turns the aff – police violence is a direct result of neoliberalism. A failure to recognize that makes violence inevitable. Lane 7/21
If we examine through the prism of neoliberalism the killing of Philando Castile – that is, if we think of the killing as a “moment when violence and neoliberalism coalesced” – then we are immediately confronted with the fact that, to a great extent, the current problem of policing is a problem of neoliberal policing. It is a problem of the production of police as officers whose enforcement of the law is guided by neoliberal policies and procedures, the violence of which no amount of body cameras or use of force training or diversity training can adequately address. Indeed, the fact of neoliberal policing requires from all of us a radically different response to policing and police killings, a response by which we directly confront policing, and our governments’ constitution of law enforcement, as neoliberal practice.¶ So let’s talk about this moment when neoliberalism and violence converged:¶ Over the course of fourteen years, Minnesota police initiated at least 52 encounters (a staggering number) with Philando Castile, citing him for minor offenses like driving without wearing a seat belt, speeding, and driving without a muffler. These encounters resulted in Philando being assessed a total of $6,588 in fines and fees.¶ Given these circumstances, let’s assume (indeed, it is probably safe to assume) that St. Anthony Police Department – the police department that employs Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philando – operates under a scheme similar to the one that was in place in Ferguson, Missouri when Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown.¶ Under that scheme (as the U.S. Department of Justice found), City of Ferguson officials “routinely” urged its Chief of Police “to generate more revenue” for the City “through enforcement” and to meet specific revenue goals. In response, the Chief pressured his officers and created a culture in which officers competed with one another in generating revenue; created opportunities to issue citations in order to meet revenue goals; engaged primarily African American citizens as objects from which they could profit as well as subjected them to the department’s and City’s market discipline; and, measured their own value and success as police officers in market terms (the department looked favorably upon and rewarded officers who met their revenue demands).¶ Through this scheme, the City in essence transformed the police into neoliberal police officers, into men and women who would enforce the law in ways that folded penal discipline into the “market-driven disciplinary logic” of neoliberalism, and whose policing became the expression of what Simon Springer calls neoliberalism’s “fundamental virtues”: “individualism, competitiveness and economic self-sufficiency.”¶ As they sought out opportunities to generate revenue, officers also engaged in the kind of ‘Othering’ upon which neoliberalism depends. As Springer writes, neoliberalism not only “treats as enemies” those “who don’t fit the mold of a proper neoliberal subject” (e.g., possessive individualism, economic self-sufficiency); it also “actively facilitates the abandonment of ‘Others’ who fall outside of ‘neoliberal normativity’, a conceptual category that cuts across multiple categories of discrimination including class, race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, age and ability.”¶ Ferguson’s neoliberal police officers (and city officials) regarded African Americans and poor people as those who don’t fit the mold. The latter were not the victims of neoliberal policies that had been embraced on a local, national and global scale. Instead, they were failures, people who were unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and remake themselves in the ways that the market demanded. Consequently, it was right to treat both as objects by which to profit and “as enemies” who needed to be disciplined and controlled.¶ That the City’s scheme and the neoliberal logic behind it would create the circumstances that led to Michael Brown’s death is clear. Indeed, through that scheme Ferguson officials and the police department produced a “‘state of exception,’ wherein…exceptional violence” – i.e.., violence that shocks, that “elicits a deep emotional response” – was “transformed into exemplary violence,” into violence that “forms the rule,” and particularly for those excluded and abandoned. Without social media, Brown’s death would have merely been a part of the everyday violence that police directed at Ferguson’s African American community and poor people generally, violence made increasingly likely by the market driven imperative of the Ferguson police force. And of course Brown’s death took place against the backdrop of the invisible violence of the City’s neoliberal policies (creation of unequal and increasingly privatized schools, attraction of business that paid little taxes and employed workers at low wages, privatization of public services, etc.).¶ If Officer Yanez worked under a governmental scheme similar to the one in Ferguson, then in that moment when he pulled the trigger (four or five times) he embodied, expressed and enacted the neoliberal principles and logic by which his department and his city operate.¶ But let’s suppose that the St. Anthony Police Department is not a business enterprise disguised as a police department, made so at the behest of city officials. Does that change the conclusion?¶ Hardly.¶ We live in the context of a global neoliberal order. And to a frightening degree, “we have become entrepreneurs of our lives,” as Johanna Oksala writes, “competing in the free market called society.” Indeed, we “compete in an ever-expanding range of fields, and invest in ourselves by enhancing our abilities and appearance, by improving our strategies of life coaching and time management. Our life has become an enterprise that we must lead to success.”¶ In other words, we are all neoliberals now, and as Springer argues, all of us are “implicated in the perpetuation of neoliberalised violence.”¶ A few months ago, I complained to my partner that the preschool our three-year old attends had not yet taught her the alphabet and numbers – at least not in any way that in my mind reflected academic rigor. “How is she going to succeed?” I asked. “When she gets to kindergarten, all the other kids will be way ahead.” I was ready to pull her out and send her to a school with a more disciplined, focused program, one that would lead to her academic success and, eventually, her career success. Lurking in the back of my mind was the fate of black girls, who have very little the market recognizes as valuable.¶ Let me repeat: my daughter is three. She attends a school in which learning happens outdoors – in a forest – where the kids discover things like rabbits and tadpoles and swarms of ladybugs and dead birds and, from those things, learn about habitats and camouflage and metamorphosis and death.¶ Against a neoliberal, market-driven idea of education – one that permeates the public sphere and that has redefined the purpose of school and education – I measured this wide-open, wonderful way of learning and found it wanting. Without even thinking about it, I was ready to subject my three-year old to the disciplinary logic of a neoliberal education and thus to perform an act, the violence of which (to creativity, to learning) I could not see.¶ Even if Officer Yanez had not performed his duty in accordance with the kind of policies that guided Ferguson’s police department, he nevertheless killed Philando within the context of a broader neoliberal framework that marked men like Philando as always already outside of neoliberal normativity (black male + broke ass car = enemy) and denied them any claim to the neoliberal virtues of economic self-sufficiency and possessive individualism. As to the latter, black people throughout United States history have been cast as anything but a collection of individuals. Instead, we are a monolith that can be used and disposed of at will (hence, Dallas police killer Micah Xavier Johnson is not Micah Xavier Johnson as such; instead, he is Black Lives Matter).¶ Moreover, that broader neoliberal framework, which defines (in the words of Lester Spence) “freedom in market terms rather than political terms,” is a racial capitalist framework that defines African Americans as unfree Others in order to naturalize class hierarchies. Thus, when Officer Yanez encountered Philando, he encountered an unfree Other who – in spite of that mark – had the audacity to claim the status of a free person by openly carrying a gun. Officer Yanez encountered the enemy.¶ My point in all of this is that Officer Yanez – like all of us, like me – was (is) immersed in neoliberalism and inevitably internalized as well as reproduced it in his employment life (and probably in his personal life as well). He was armed with it, so to speak, when he encountered and then killed Philando Castile, and I suspect this was true as well for Officer Darren Wilson of Ferguson, Missouri.
Our critique independently outweighs the case - neoliberalism causes extinction and massive social inequalities – the affs single issue legalistic solution is the exact kind of politics neolib wants us to engage in so the root cause to go unquestioned. Farbod 15 ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.
The alternative is an embrace of class-consciousness as a method of critiquing neoliberalism’s grip on policing. LaVenia 15
Peter A. LaVenia PhD in Political Science from the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the Secretary of the NY State Green Party and manages Matt Funiciello’s campaign for Congress. JANUARY 16, 2015 “Police Behavior and Neoliberalism” http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/16/police-behavior-and-neoliberalism/
The cause of impotence on the part of elected officials even in the face of public intransigence by their own police forces lies rather within the socio-political landscape of declining US hegemony in the world-system and its byproduct, neoliberalism. The latter is too often a catch all explanation for Marxists and leftists trying to explain the current era, but here it makes sense. Policing in post-1980 America, roughly the beginnings of neoliberalism, are predicated on the “broken windows” theory first put into practice by NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton: crack down on working class behaviors now designated as unwanted or illegal, use the fines and fees from enforcing the criminalization of working class life to prop up municipal budgets gutted by tax cuts, offshoring, and underconsumption caused by wage stagnation. Interestingly the NYC police have essentially admitted as such during their slowdown and refusal to issue quality-of-life tickets over the past few weeks.¶ In conjunction with this politicians like de Blasio, assuming he actually would want to reform police behavior, find a distinct lack of allies in their own class (and parties) on this issue. Broken windows policing is popular with the financial elites and the ruling class because the money collected and produced by it means more progressive taxation that would otherwise fill the budget gaps of municipalities and states is avoided. It also has the consequence of splitting working people who might otherwise band together to demand – in a class conscious way – better living conditions, wages, and political power. Whites learn to be fearful of minority communities alternatively seen as both enemy and victim of circumstances, all the while needing the police and state to protect them. Of course maintaining this is crucial to legitimizing capitalism and preventing concerted resistance – that’s what the buildup of irrational attitudes of submission to authority do (to quote Chomsky) on the one hand, and on the other the racism inherent in the splitting of the US working class into white and minority groups.¶ There is, then, an implicit understanding by these mayors that their only allies in restraining the police would be working class Americans, and that to begin to do so would mean to put forward a broadly pro-worker agenda of higher wages, progressive taxation, restoring once-gutted social programs, and expanding the political power of the average worker. Quality-of-life problems will only be eliminated when their cause – ultimately capitalism – is, but by beginning to lift millions out of poverty and rebuilding communities the rationale for broken windows policing would begin to disappear. In another era, one with a faction of big business and finance capital willing to compromise on issues of wages and taxation, Mayor de Blasio and his peers would have found allies in the establishment. Now, the stark choice for the mayors and local pols on police behavior is to either acquiesce in one way or another or to throw in your lot with what would rapidly take on the characteristics of a working class political movement.¶ Nothing is likely to happen without protests and organization by labor and working Americans who demand not just an end to broken windows policing but the conditions that supposedly necessitated it in the first place. Crumbling infrastructure, decaying housing, bad schools, crappy jobs and low wages, lack of real health care, gutted social programs: these so-called broken windows that have been used to justify police militarization are the symptom of a rotten system. It is very hopeful indeed that protests against police brutality have sprung up across the United States, and could evolve into a movement to reject the neoliberal consensus. Until then we are likely to see nothing but equivocation by local officials and big city mayors. Framework – Generic
The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan.
First, neoliberalism sustains itself by operating by propagating a narrow lens of what it means to be ‘political.’ We situate the judge as a critical educator who steps back to evaluate the frames through which we view policy first. Blalock, JD, 2015 (Corinne, “NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CRISIS OF LEGAL THEORY”, Duke University, LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS Vol. 77:71) MG from file RECOVERING LEGAL THEORY’S RELEVANCE? The lens of neoliberalism not only allows one to see how these narratives fit together to reveal a larger rationality but also to understand why the solutions they propose fail to challenge or even escape that rationality. I address the three most prominent prescriptions being offered by critical legal scholars today: (1) a pragmatic turn to politics, (2) a return to more explicit normative and moral claims, and (3) acceptance in recognition that the decline is merely an ebb in the regular cycles of theory. A. Prescription: More Politics The most common prescription for recovering legal theory’s vibrancy is a greater participation in politics—scholars should eschew descriptive projects, especially those that might be used to bolster the conservative argument on an issue or in a case, as well as those critiques that appear purely academic, in favor of projects intended to influence the courts in progressive ways.134 One can certainly understand why this is a tempting prescription in light of the success of explicitly conservative legal theory and methods135 and concern that left-leaning legal academics have not taken up this charge.136 However, this demand for political engagement has unintended consequences: It legitimizes the current frameworks. As the Roberts Court further embraces neoliberal principles, persuading the Court means functioning within neoliberal logic and is therefore counterproductive for the revitalization of critical legal theory. Moreover, this political prescription tends to produce a reified notion of what counts as politics, limiting the political as well as intellectual potential of theoretical projects. For example, in the wake of the of the Court’s incremental move toward recognition of same-sex marriage in United States v. Windsor, 137 many progressive legal scholars have written on the subject hoping to nudge the Court toward full recognition. But in light of Nancy Fraser’s work, one should ask just what kind of recognition that would be—whether it would displace materialist claims or reify forms of identity.138 Full recognition of same-sex marriage is a destination toward which the Court is already heading and an area where the public discourse has largely already arrived. Emphasizing this area also participates in the ideology of erasure, leading many to believe that the current Court is making progressive interventions because it is progressive on identity and cultural issues, even though Windsor was handed down in a term in which the Court retrenched on significant materialist issues and embodied a number of blatantly neoliberal positions.139 Even if not writing for the Court, a legal scholar’s attempt to be useful to those in the profession who share her political goals risks constraining the legal profession and its own professional and disciplinary norms.140 In this way, the focus on concrete political effects helps foster legal thought’s “considerable capacity for resisting self-reflection and analysis,”141 which has only become more pronounced in the face of the neoliberalization of the academy as instrumental knowledge is increasingly privileged. When attempting to counter hegemony, what one needs to do is disrupt the legible—to expand the contours of what is considered political—not to accept the narrowly circumscribed zone of politics neoliberalism demarcates. Therefore, it is crucial not to judge critical legal scholarship according to whether its political impact is immediate or even known, and thus a turn to politics is not the remedy for legal theory’s marginalization. B. Prescription: More Normativity Some scholars recognize the danger of embracing a reified notion of politics that unwittingly reaffirms the status quo, and instead champion assertions of substantive morality to counteract the cold logics of pragmatism and efficiency.142 This proposed solution advocates a return to more substantive ideals of justice and equality. Although it may be true that change will ultimately require wresting these liberal and democratic ideals from neoliberalism and refilling their hollowed-out forms, this approach entails a number of pitfalls. The first is simply the inevitable question regarding moral claims: Whose morality is to be asserted? This question has created crisis on the left before, even producing some of the schisms among the crits recounted above. Neoliberalism does not have to contend with this issue—it foregrounds its formal nature and holds itself out as not needing to create a universal morality or set of values. More importantly, it claims to provide a structure in which one can keep one’s own substantive morals. Therefore, neoliberalism’s logic cannot be countered by moral claims without first disrupting its illusion of amorality. The ineffectiveness of the progressive critique of law and economics, based in claims of distributive justice and moral imperative, provides a clear example of how the neoliberal discourse can capture normative claims. The work of Martha McCluskey, one of the few legal scholars writing about neoliberalism in the domestic context over the last ten years, highlights the extent to which the “distributive justice” critique, which argues against the privileging of efficiency over equality and redistribution, fails to challenge the underlying logic.143 McCluskey illustrates how critics of law and economics who critique the approach’s inattention to redistribution have already ceded the central point, by arguing within the conventional views that “efficiency is about expanding the societal pie and redistribution is about dividing it.”144 “Neoliberalism’s disadvantage is not, as most critics worry, its inattention to redistribution, but to the contrary, its very obsession with redistribution as a distinctly seductive yet treacherous policy separate from efficiency.”145 In order to challenge this rationality, she explains, one cannot “misconstrue neoliberalism as a project to promote individual freedom and value-neutral economics at the expense of social responsibility and community morality.”146 One must instead recognize that neoliberalism has redefined social responsibility and community morality. Therefore, one must refuse the false dichotomy between the economic and cultural spheres (a division that allows the neoliberal discourse to displace cultural concerns to a moment after the economic concerns have been dealt with). Merely asserting the falsity of this separation is not sufficient. Neoliberalism has real effects in the world that strengthen its ideological claims.147 Therefore, it is not a struggle that can take place solely on the terrain of discourse or ideology. Like neoliberalism generally, law and economics does not hold itself out as infallible or as an embodiment of social ideals, but instead as the best society can do. It functions precisely on the logic that there is no alternative. Like Hayek’s theory, “law and economics is full of stories about how liberal rights and regulation designed to advance equality victimize the all-powerful market, undermining its promised rewards.”148 In light of this, it is a mistake to see neoliberalism as disavowing moral principles in favor of economic ones; it instead folds them into one another: “The Law and Economics movement is rooted in the moral ideal of the market as the social realization of individual liberty and popular democracy.”149 Neoliberalism’s approach presents itself not only as efficient, but also as just. Legal scholars need to recognize neoliberalism’s focus on the market is not only a form of morality, but also a powerful one. They cannot assume that in a battle of moralities the substantive communitarian ideal will win.150 Furthermore, the neoliberal framework, through its reconfiguration of the subject as an entrepreneur, justifies material inequalities—in contrast to liberalism’s mere blindness to them. Consequently, merely asserting the existence of material inequalities does not immediately undermine neoliberalism’s claims. Far from the engaged citizen who actively produces the polis in liberal theory, the neoliberal subject is a rational, calculating, and independent entity “whose moral autonomy is measured by her capacity for ‘self-care’—the ability to provide for her own needs and service her own ambitions.”151 The subject’s morality is not in relation to principles or ideals, but is “a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences.”152 If efficiency is the morality of our time, the poor are cast not only as “undeserving” but also as morally bankrupt. Therefore, efficiency replaces not only political morality, but also all other forms of value. Therefore, critics are right that other forms of value have been crowded out; but the logic is deeper than they seem to realize. It goes beyond the scope of what is being done in the legal academy. It is a logic that organizes our time and therefore must be countered differently. More normativity is not the answer to legal theory’s marginalization because neoliberalism’s logic can accommodate even radically contradictory moralities under its claims of moral pluralism. Ethical claims of justice and community may need to be made, but one must first recognize that countering hegemony is harder than merely articulating an alternative; hegemony must be disrupted first. Disrupting neoliberalism’s logic thus entails not only recognizing that neoliberalism has a morality, but also taking that morality seriously. C. Prescription: Acceptance The final response of legal theorists to their field’s marginalization is to dismiss it as merely the regular ebb and flow of theory’s prominence.153 Putting it in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, the contemporary moment is just the “normal science” of the paradigm brought about by the crits’ revolutionary moment in the 1970s and 1980s.154 The vitality, this narrative contends, will return when a competing paradigm emerges. There are several problems with this perspective on the decline. First, it entails an error in logic insofar as it takes an external perspective. Legal theory does not inevitably rise and fall but only according to the work being produced; or, to put it another way, this descriptive account of theory’s ebb can be a selffulfilling prophecy insofar as it decreases scholars’ motivation to pursue and receptivity toward theoretical projects. Second, legal scholars cannot be content with normal science when it has the kinds of consequences for democracy and economic inequality that neoliberal hegemony does. The Court is currently entrenching these principles at an unprecedented rate in areas of free speech, equal protection, and antitrust to name a few.155 At first, such acceptance appears to be what Janet Halley is advocating in “taking a break from feminism,”156 but upon closer inspection it is not. Halley is cautioning against the left’s nostalgia—concluding that operating under the banner of feminism and a preoccupation with “reviving” feminism looks backward instead of forward.157 Critical legal scholarship instead needs to be “self-critical” and to recognize that “how we make and apply legal theory arises out of the circumstances in which we recognize problems and articulate solutions.”158 Theory must arise from engagement with the current circumstances. Acceptance cannot be the solution; legal theory must produce the momentum to move forward. VII CONCLUSION: WHERE WE GO FROM HERE The way forward cannot entail a return to reified notions of theory any more than by a return to reified notions of politics. Critical legal scholars should not attempt to revitalize previous critical movements but, instead, reinvigorate the practice of critique within the legal academy. A. Why Critique Naming neoliberalism is necessary in order to counteract it. Without explicit identification, there can be no truly oppositional position. It also makes legible connections that would otherwise go unseen, as was the case with scholars writing about the decline. But there must also be a step beyond naming: critique. Critique means taking neoliberal rationality seriously. The approach must not be dismissive, merely pointing out neoliberalism’s inconsistencies, but instead must recognize that neoliberal rationality is inherently appealing. One cannot merely indict efficiency as contrary to more substantive values, but one also must recognize that efficiency is inextricably tied to beliefs about liberty, dignity, and individual choice, as well as corresponding beliefs about the capacities and limits of the state to effectuate change. No one is arguing that neoliberalism is the best of all possible worlds; in fact, its power comes precisely from abandoning such a claim. In recognizing its hegemonic status, legal scholars can understand the critical task as being more than just demystification. Neoliberal does not paper over inequalities after all; it justifies them. Ultimately, critique should function as a means of opening the conversation in ways that go beyond the picture of law painted by the Roberts Court—to refuse to allow the legal academy to be merely mimetic of a Court that is clearly embracing a neoliberal vision. Critique provides a means of thinking about law as not limited by what the markets can tolerate; it is the means through which one can discover a form of resistance that goes beyond nostalgia for the liberal welfare state. And finally, critique is simply a means of asserting that things can be different than they are in a world that constantly insists that there is no alternative.
Second, the knowledge claims of the AC are the jumping off point for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their analysis is wrong, they haven’t.
Third, serial policy failure – policing is about culture. A refusal to stop and recognize the cultural underpinnings of the AFF dooms repeating the same failed policies that created the problem. . Smith 15 Robert C. Smith The author of several books and over 100 academic articles, Robert is a Teaching-Scholar at the Cooperative Institute of Transnational Studies. He is also the founder of Heathwood Institute and PressHeathwood Institute and Press¶ AN INSTITUTION OF OPPRESSION OR FOR PUBLIC WELL-BEING AND CIVIL RIGHTS? REFLECTIONS ON THE INSTITUTION OF POLICE AND A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE May 4, 2015¶ http://www.heathwoodpress.com/an-institution-of-oppression-or-for-public-well-being-and-civil-rights-reflections-on-the-institution-of-police-and-a-radical-alternative-r-c-smith/
As others have already argued, it is important that we acknowledge the systemic relation between police as an oppressive force and their utilization and instrumentalism as an extension of the order of economic coercion and domination. “In spite of the prevalence of its brutality …/ in the end the institution of the police is but an extension of the more deeply rooted institution of property – which, in turn, is the manifestation of wealth and economic power (which, in a capitalist society, translates to political power as well). In light of this, in confronting racism it is insufficient (though nevertheless still crucial) to focus our efforts on the brutality of the police. The police is but the tip of the racist iceberg.”6¶ It is a mistake, in seeking police reform, to limit one’s campaign solely to the institution of police. Groups engaged in anti-oppression and racial struggle, like those engaged in anti-capitalist struggle, share in one way or another a common universal struggle against a system which runs against the well-being of all, against the prospect of actual democracy, equality and egalitarianism. This is not to take anything away from the particular suffering, conflict and fight experienced by black communities across the US. If Chris Hedges is right, moreover, in his observation that the “discontent in Ferguson, Athens, Cairo, Madrid and Ayotzinapa” and now Baltimore “is one discontent”, this is because the fundamental source of injustice that unites them all is an unjust social-political, economic system. Emerging revolts around the world by minority groups may ‘come in many colors, speak many languages and have many belief systems’, but the common antagonist is an economic system and political order which produces and reproduces the precise social coordinates of injustice, inequality, the legitimation of state violence, and fraudulent models of democracy.¶ Slavoj Žižek once observed, “the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.”7 Perhaps this is true, if we consider the dominant narrative of democracy in terms of its capitalist conception. But I think it is more consistent with fact or reality to suggest that, instead of the link being broken between the two, democracy simply never was. The link was always, in reality, non-existent. That is to say underlying the recent evolution of the institutions and structures of western society is not a sudden broken link, as if there has unfolded some ultimate social betrayal of actual democratic content on a structural and systemic level. In spite of the ballot-box elections and right to vote, democratic capitalism has never been actually democratic. To put it differently: modern democracy, as a concept and as a thing, has always had less to do with the actual content of “democracy” as an egalitarian system of political-economic values than with the neglect of this content for its (mere) form. The concept of democracy today is really the leftover after the actual content (Equality, Egalitarianism, Justice, Rights, etc.) has been boiled away.8 This sentiment is expressed most clearly on the streets, where the chant ‘there can be no democracy in capitalism’ is frequently voiced. Even if only intuitively expressed at times, there is a profound truth underlining this statement, one which discloses the all too known yet incredibly cloudy reality of the fraudulent status of western democracy.¶ The sooner the fraudulent status of modern western democracy is comprehensively conceptualised as such, which includes challenging certain liberal resistances, might we begin to reframe the debate concerning the structural conflicts now prevalent under the rule of neoliberal policy. This point has particular relevance when it comes to understanding the recent uprisings in Baltimore as well as the conflicts in Ferguson and elsewhere. What we witnessed in the brutal killing of Freddie Gray and the mobilization of state violence in response to uprisings in Baltimore, “is symptomatic of the neoliberal, racist, punishing state emerging all over the world,” wherein one of the only modes “of control left by corporate-controlled societies is violence, but a violence that is waged against the most disposable such as immigrant children, protesting youth, the unemployed, the new precariat and black youth.”9
12/3/16
NOVDEC Civilian Review Board CP
Tournament: Damus | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harker QC | Judge: Angus, Thomas Governments responsible for police officers should implement the Coalition Against Police Abuse proposal for civilian review which includes- -establish “Loyal Opposition Policy Review Boards” for civilian oversight of police conduct, policy, and hiring/firing decisions -The boards should be: elected, paid, and independent of police agencies -The boards should have special investigators with unrestricted access to crime scenes and the power to subpoena police department personnel and records -The board should have authority over all claims of police misconduct including: assault, discrimination, infiltration of community groups, sexual harassment, false arrest, and misuse of force. The board should be able to mandate training or discipline for officers up to and including firing, protections for police whistleblowers, and mandate of municipal damages -Special city prosecutors should be appointed independent of the city attorney’s office and the city council who handle all criminal cases against police officers and have full subpoena powers -staff should be hired on the basis of affirmative action policies
CRBs are a legitimate alternative to immunity reform- their decisions affect the ‘clearly established’ doctrine which solves the case without judicial change Meltzer, JD, 14 (Ryan E., Texas LR 92: 1277 Qualified Immunity and Constitutional-Norm Generation in the Post-Saucier Era: “Clearly Establishing” the Law Through Civilian Oversight of Police) In the course of investigating discrete incidents of alleged police misconduct, civilian external investigatory bodies engage in fact-finding and identification and application of governing legal standards in much the same way as a court assesses a motion to suppress evidence or a § 1983 claim alleging a deprivation of constitutional rights.31 More importantly, these bodies constantly encounter novel factual scenarios, particularly ones implicating the Fourth Amendment,32 such that their findings epitomize the sort of fact-specific guidance endorsed by the Court.33 Further, to the extent that they are empowered to make policy recommendations to the police departments they oversee, civilian external investigatory bodies also resemble compliance agencies like the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), whose advisory reports have helped to provide the sort of “notice” required to overcome an official’s qualified immunity.34 Consequently, the Court’s qualified immunity jurisprudence appears to permit the findings of such bodies to contribute to the clearly-established-law analysis. At present, however, the work of civilian external investigatory bodies—work that produces a wealth of valuable information and often confronts constitutional questions that might otherwise escape formal adjudication— is largely divorced from that of the courts.35 This state of affairs represents a costly missed opportunity, especially in the wake of Pearson. (1281-2)
The CP Solves the Case
Only EXTERNAL, CIVILIAN oversight can alter police behavior- the AFF’s internal legal reform drives police misconduct underground- it’s a trap Akbar, 15 – Assistant Professor of Law at Michael E. Moritz College of Law, the Ohio State University (Amna, “National Security’s Broken Windows”, UCLA Law Review, Vol. 62, pg. 834, May 2015, Lexis) This Article has attempted to identify the problems with community engagement and counterradicalization in the national security context, drawing from the critiques of community policing and broken windows in the ordinary criminal context. The canvas for this critical engagement was limited insofar as *906 Muslim communities' experiences in these programs have been largely sheltered from public view. Harvesting those experiences is no doubt essential to understanding the possibilities and limitations of these programs. This Article provided a sketch of the problems lurking near the surface - that is left to future work. Is community engagement salvageable? Moving community engagement toward its most democratic aspirations - toward a more genuine exercise in community consultation, contestation, and collaboration - would involve ridding the program of its pernicious baggage. For example, law enforcement could end community engagement's integration with community-wide intelligence gathering, or could decouple community engagement from CVE and counterradicalization. Certainly there are strong normative reasons, including those that motivate this Article, to expect and demand that law enforcement account for the realities of marginalized communities. But we cannot expect that dialogue will necessarily lead to accountability, meaningful contestation, or realignment of police approaches in marginalized communities. After all, law enforcement is itself a significant vehicle for marginalization and racialization in the United States. It is reasonable to question whether community policing - or policing at all - can be expected to be the vehicle for the change we are seeking. The problem and the solution may be entirely mismatched. The allure of community policing rests in part on a broader construct of dialogue as inherently valuable. While dialogue can certainly be valuable, its value will depend on the context and the point of view from which it is being evaluated. Dialogue often serves a different function for the more powerful in the conversation than the less powerful. The idea that dialogue is the cure-all for poor relationships between police and marginalized communities emerges from a failure to recognize the structures and histories of police impunity in these communities, as well as the material realities that keep inequality in place. When the dialogue in question is with the police, initiated by the police, and on the police's own terms, not only is the function of the dialogue necessarily limited, the entire initiative should raise red flags. How will the dialogue change the material reality of policing in the community? Does the dialogue further exacerbate inequality or simply validate preexisting policing practices through the performance of democratic legitimacy? Or is it really allowing for messy democratic contestation, and the possibility for change in the material conditions of the relationship between the police and the marginalized? For community policing to be an effective tool in changing the relationship between the marginalized and law enforcement, marginalized communities cannot simply be offered a seat at the table to participate in preconceived policing *907 programs. They must have the political power to hold police accountable. For community policing mechanisms to offer potential for real change to marginalized communities, communities must build capacity and political power to demand accountability. So while we might advocate for law enforcement to engage marginalized communities, we cannot rely on law enforcement initiatives to recalibrate relationships long rife with deep inequality. The pressure for meaningful change must come from outside, from the communities themselves organizing for change. n325 2. The AFF attempts to improve regulation of INDIVIDUAL OFFICERS. The CP changes police culture as a whole. This reduces police opposition and rights violations Seybold, 15 – JD Candidate (Steven D, “Somebody's Watching Me: Civilian Oversight of Data-Collection Technologies,” March 2015, Texas Law Review, Vol. 93, pg. 1029) First, even a highly effective LOPRB providing quality policy recommendations to a police department would likely encounter some department resistance to the civilian oversight. This resistance may be created because of police department views of a civilian entity "meddling" or just the potential perception of an adversarial relationship between the *1058 LOPRB and police department. n207 However, the structure of LOPRBs help overcome most of this resistance traditionally leveled against civilian oversight from police departments. The emphasis on policy review, rather than complaint review, means that LOPRBs will not directly regulate individual police officers but rather the department as a whole. This change in focus will likely reduce the intensity of any police department resistance because the potential adversarial relationship will be between the LOPRB and the police department instead of individual officers. n208 Furthermore, any resistance can be ameliorated by public pressure on police departments to enact the LOPRB's policy recommendations. The LOPRB's outreach will inform the local community of the use of data-collection technologies, potentially generating popular support behind LOPRB recommendations. LOPRBs can thus indirectly enforce their recommendations through utilizing that popular support and pressure on police departments. That indirect pressure on police departments will help reduce potential police department resistance because policy changes brought about through public pressure will be a reaction by the police department to the public at large, rather than directly reacting to the adversarial LOPRB. Thus, while police department resistance likely cannot be completely overcome, LOPRBs can ameliorate this traditional civilian oversight problem.
3. The CRB doesn’t have to work- it creates a deterrent effect Seybold, 15 – JD Candidate (Steven D, “Somebody's Watching Me: Civilian Oversight of Data-Collection Technologies,” March 2015, Texas Law Review, Vol. 93, pg. 1029) 3. Individual Deterrence and Systemic Correction. - Finally, civilian oversight has some meaningful deterrence on individual actors while also providing a functioning mechanism to address local systemic issues. n163 Individual police officers are more likely to undertake regulation of their own behavior when the officer knows that they are being watched by an oversight body. n164 External civilian oversight can ensure greater accountability not only among rank-and-file officers, but also among command officers, and can also address systemic issues facing dys-functional departments. n165 Approximately two-thirds of civilian oversight entities undertake policy review in addition to complaint review, n166 allowing civilian oversight bodies to review general policies and advocate for systemic reform. n167 Samuel Walker, a scholar whose work focuses on police accountability, emphasized that successful civilian oversight bodies "take a proactive view of their role and actively seek out the underlying causes of police misconduct or problems in the complaint process." n168 If civilian oversight mechanisms continually provide policy recommendations to police departments, those recommendations as a whole can have a significant effect on police misconduct, while at the same time making the police department more "accustomed to input from outsiders." n169 Civilian oversight thus can have a transformative impact on entire police departments rather than only correcting the actions of a singular officer.
4. Civilian review is mutually exclusive and more efficient than court action Weinbeck, 11 – JD Candidate William Mitchell College of Law (Michael P, “Watching the Watchmen: Lessons for Federal Law Enforcement from America's Cities,” William Mitchell Law Review, Vol. 36, pg. 1306) A police department's internal affairs unit, operating on its own, lacks the credibility to conduct an independent investigation that is satisfactory to the community. n50 Minneapolis city council members, in an attempt to assuage community members and preserve their own political futures, established the city's review authority. n51 In theory, at least, a system of civilian oversight inserts into the police investigation process a watchman without allegiance to the police who will ensure that the investigation is conducted without bias. n52 This, in turn, generally supports a perception by the community that its police department is operating with a proper respect for individual rights. n53 As a result, a greater level of trust develops between the police and the *1315 community that ultimately greases the cogs of crime detection and prevention. n54 There are other benefits that municipalities enjoy when establishing a system of citizen oversight. Chief among them is the political coverage that the city's elected officials receive when establishing the agency. n55 For example, the Minneapolis Civilian Police Review Authority came into being in 1990 after police officers identified the wrong house in a drug raid. n56 During the course of the botched raid, the police killed an elderly couple who lived in the house. n57 In another episode not long after, the Minneapolis Police Department broke up a peaceful party of college-aged African Americans at a Minneapolis hotel. n58 In response to both incidents, outraged community members engaged in vehement and highly publicized demonstrations. n59 Besides providing a measure of political coverage, citizen oversight may also operate as a mechanism for saving cities money. n60 Wronged citizens, instead of bringing their grievances to court, enter the civilian oversight system where they may achieve redress that ends up costing the city nothing more than the administrative costs of the investigation. n61
The net benefit is Tech Shift A. Absent established, oppositional civilian review, police harassment will shift to technology based surveillance which avoids rights protections Seybold, 15 – JD Candidate (Steven D, “Somebody's Watching Me: Civilian Oversight of Data-Collection Technologies,” March 2015, Texas Law Review, Vol. 93, pg. 1029) Technology has provided police departments with powerful tools to collect extensive data on private citizens. Those tools have captured images of every license plate passing through an intersection; n1 used facial-recognition technology to determine whether Super Bowl attendees had criminal records; n2 and implemented multi-technology systems that "aggregate and analyze information from approximately 3,000 surveil-lance cameras around the city ... ." n3 New technologies allow police departments to collect a range of data on the public space, including private citizens not under investigation, raising concerns regarding how that data may be used in the future. n4 And as storage and database capabilities have become cheaper and more efficient, the potential for expansive databases has become not only a science-fiction trope n5 but a reality. n6 *1030 But despite potential, these new tools fit poorly within the current regulatory framework. Police departments have embraced the information age with little guidance or oversight, raising significant privacy concerns regarding the effect of mass-data collection on the privacy rights the general public has enjoyed for centuries. n7 At the same time, current regulatory mechanisms have not adequately addressed how police departments should use cutting-edge surveillance technologies. n8 Such regulatory mechanisms often are inhibited by conflicting motivations n9 or poorly adapted to technological change. n10 Scholars have proposed a variety of solutions to address the privacy and criminal law concerns raised by these "data-collection technologies," but these approaches often provide inadequate flexibility to local jurisdictions to address their unique problems n11 or focus too narrowly on correcting a particular, novel iteration of the problem. n12 *1031 To overcome this regulatory deficit, civilian oversight can provide effective regulatory oversight of police departments' use of new and emerging technologies. Specifically, I argue that a specialized form of civilian oversight, the "Loyal Opposition" Policy Review Board (LOPRB), would function as a regulatory mechanism that not only provides proactive regulatory guidance on technology usage by police departments but would also allow for that guidance to be specifically tailored to the local community. n13 LOPRBs, composed of members who are informed on and invested in technology and civil rights, would undertake policy review of police department procedures for the use of new technologies and recommend "best practices" approaches to ensuring that individual privacy rights and police department investigative needs are effectively balanced. n14 Such a civilian oversight mechanism would ensure that the privacy concerns of the average citizen remain protected as new technologies are incorporated into the daily operations of police departments. B. Civil rights focus fails- it takes a black and white approach to police conduct that ensures resistance Schlanger, 15 – Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law, University of Michigan (Margo, “Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency's Civil Liberties Gap”, Harvard National Security Journal, Vol. 6, pg. 112, 2015, Lexis) I have suggested that rights discourse tends to sweep under the rug the messiness of civil liberties protections--the policy issues that lie at the core of civil liberties interests. That messiness will be apparent in what follows; there are no magic bullets here. But a measure can be useful even if messy or compromised. It is possible that that none of the offices described below will accomplish very much. It seems to me, however, that soft administrative measures are useful tools in the civil liberties toolkit, well worth trying by a principal--whether that principal is the President or the Congress--who wants to give more priority to civil liberties but lacks the institutional capacity to do so directly and repeatedly over time. Each of these three offices might represent civil liberties interests more systematically than current arrangements, and might advocate for more liberty protective government protocols and programs. It is worth emphasizing, too, that measures such as these might have not just cumulative but also mutually reinforcing effects, creating a civil liberties cadre with security clearances, who might assist each other in a variety of ways. n360 In addition to promoting civil liberties/privacy interstitially, offices like these assist other more authoritative rulemakers to understand the civil liberties implications of their choices. For example, they can help Congress in its otherwise very difficult oversight task, flagging issues that need more congressional attention. n361 And in several different ways, they may increase public access to otherwise secret matters, which in turn increases pressure on those authoritative rulemakers: They generate reports--both public and private--which can be used by Congress and the public. n362 And they build relationships with non-governmental organizations that promote increased official disclosure. My argument is not that offices like these are a cure-all *193 for achieving optimal policy, but that they may be a useful part of a complicated ecology.
Civil suits don’t help the perception of the law. Civil suits don’t encourage reform- prefer our evidence it’s a direct response to their AC. Cheh evidence Harmon, Law @ Virginia, 09 (Rachel A., PROMOTING CIVIL RIGHTS THROUGH PROACTIVE POLICING REFORM, 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, from the Stanford Law Review at 62 STAN. L. REV. 1 (2009). For information visit http://lawreview.stanford.edu. ) Federal law has played an important role in regulating police misconduct. In particular, federal criminal prosecutions, civil suits for damages under § 1983, and the exclusionary rule are all legal tools that attempt to reduce police misconduct by punishing specific incidents of it and by deterring it in the future. Unfortunately, each is inadequate to promote wholesale institutional change. Federal criminal civil rights prosecutions face significant legal and practical obstacles, including that federal law imposes an onerous intent requirement on civil rights crimes; that victims of police misconduct often make problematic witnesses; and that juries frequently believe and sympathize with defendant officers.16 As a result, prosecutions against police officers are too rare to deter misconduct. Even if criminal prosecutions were more common, however, it is not clear that charges against individual officers would encourage departmental change. Almost inevitably, when some officers in a department are prosecuted, others are not. Criminal prosecution may therefore enable cities to characterize egregious misconduct as resulting from individual pathology rather than systemic problems and to deny the need for departmental improvement.17 Successful § 1983 suits for damages encourage some departmental reform, but they too are limited. Suits against individual officers are difficult to win, both because they suffer some of the same trial challenges as criminal cases against officers, and because officers often have qualified immunity for their actions, even when the conduct is unconstitutional.18 Suing supervisors or chiefs often requires establishing deliberate indifference or reckless action rather than negligence, and suing a city requires a plaintiff to show that misconduct was not only unconstitutional, but reflected municipal “policy” or “custom.”19 Some civil actions succeed despite these obstacles, but many incidents of serious misconduct result in an unsuccessful § 1983 suit or an inexpensive settlement, and therefore provide little incentive for reform.20 Moreover, some scholars have argued that even when plaintiffs win civil suits, damages actions against government actors are an ineffectual—even perverse—means of encouraging local officials to reduce misconduct.21 Daryl Levinson, for example, contends that government officers, police chiefs, and mayors respond to political incentives, and may never be forced to internalize the economic costs of damages paid by municipalities.22 Although Levinson may overstate the case against civil suits,23 he persuasively argues that even when they are successful, civil suits are at best an inefficient and limited means of encouraging institutional reform.24 2. Fosters more resentment towards the law and resentment. Rosen 05 Michael M. Rosen, January 2005, " A Qualified Defense: In Support of the Doctrine of Qualified Immunity in Excessive Force Cases, With Some Suggestions for its Improvement" Golden Gate University Law Review, http://digitalcommons.law.ggu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1899andamp;context=ggulrev MG
It is hard to deny that the more time police officers spend at trial defending their conduct, the less time they spend patrolling the streets, the more money their departments expend in their defense, and the more frequently the officers will second-guess certain behaviors in the heat of the moment. These drawbacks may well be justified for the sake of society's prevention of tortious and unreasonable conduct on the part of law enforcement agents. Nevertheless, police agencies, Supreme Court justices, and some scholars highlight the important role that qualified immunity can play in reducing unnecessary costs and in improving deterrence of crime. In its amicus brief in support of the Saucier petitioner, NAPO addressed several concerns related to costs and deterrence.47 It began by asserting that officers currently face too many lawsuits related to their conduct, litigation that generally is resolved in their favor and therefore wastes taxpayer time and money! It pointed to an "ever increasing number of lawsuits against law enforcement officers" and the threat that increase poses to the general public interest.49 The increased threat of lawsuits, according to this argument, deters effective police performance, thereby diminishing public safety: NAPO referred to Justice Scalia's assertion in Anderson v. Creighton5l that permitting frivolous lawsuits against law enforcement to go to trial "entails substantial social costs, including the risk that fear of personal monetary liability and harassing litigation will unduly inhibit officials in the discharge of their duties."·2 Several scholars echo NAPO's concerns. Richard Fallon and Daniel Meltzer describe the fears of the Supreme Court in Harlow v. Fitzgerald,53 explaining that such litigation works its evils by deterring officers through the threat of personal liability. Barbara Armacost notes that such liability begets poor law enforcement, which in turn harms the very people the officers are sworn to protect. 54 The chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Academy's Legal Instruction Unit echoes these sentiments. 55 Thus, at least in theory, the proliferation of lawsuits appears to involve serious risks to agents as well as the public. Of course, this entire edifice hangs on the assumption that law enforcement agents regularly face personal liability for their conduct when acting under color of law. Fallon and Meltzer challenge this premise. 57 They contend that in most situations, the police department and/or the officers' union make use of a legal defense fund while the officer need not expend a penny of his or her own.58 Thus, Fallon and Meltzer contend that the entire policy argument rests on a false assumption. Nonetheless, despite the unlikelihood of an officer facing personal liability, frivolous litigation imposes serious secondary costs on his or her conduct. First, contributions or premiums paid to a legal defense insurance plan will likely increase with the amount of litigation the officer faces. Second, the officer's career may endure a stain or stigma despite a victory on the merits of an excessive force case. Third, the department, as the officer's employer, may impose discipline, whether formal or informal, on any officer's involvement in litigation, whether successful or unsuccessful. Suspensions or unpaid leave may accompany lawsuits faced even by officers who are ultimately victorious in court. Thus, litigation indeed affects officers' conduct, in the heat of the moment, whether reasonably or not.59 This effect dovetails with a growing tendency toward "depolicing" that has become prevalent in several of America's urban cores.60 According to many officers, recent years have seen an increase in lawsuits and informal complaints brought against law enforcement, a correlate tendency in departments to steer officers away from necessarily risky conduct in do-or-die situations, and a concomitant decline in officer morale. 61 In 1981 in the State of California,"2 residents placed 8,686 complaints against peace officers, of which 1,552 or 18 were ultimately sustained.63 In 2000, Californians recorded 23,395 complaints, of which 2,395 or 10 were sustained. 64 This ballooning of claims - in particular unsuccessful ones65 - is as troubling as it is dramatic. The Oakland, California, Citizens Police Review Board ("CPRB") embodies this deterrent effect.66 This board provides an independent forum in which aggrieved citizens can register their complaints about police conduct. 67 At the same time, Detective Jesse H. Grant, who has had personal experience appearing before the CPRB, notes that complaints, more than 80 of which were not sustained in 2002, impose a serious deterrent effect on police conduct. 68 Officers now more than ever think twice and act conservatively - although not necessarily safely - when engaged in violent altercations with or apprehensions of dangerous suspects. 69 Ironically, the presence of entities like the CPRB undermines the justification for excessive force lawsuits to begin with: by providing an avenue for voicing grievances over police conduct, such boards obviate some of the need for civil actions. Moreover, they reflect the deterrent effect that wide-open public access to disciplinary bodies can breed. Thus, there exist significant reasons for the courts to grant some kind of immunity to law enforcement officials in order to ensure the contin-ued quality of their work. By increasing the threat of litigation, frivolous lawsuits can serve to deter officers' reasonable conduct, thus imperiling public safety and upending the delicate balance society seeks between forcefully fighting crime and respectfully treating all citizens.
3. Controversial decision coming that will harm the Court’s image either way it’s decided. Compton Herald ‘10/31 Compton Herald serves as an important objective voice providing general coverage of important issues that impact the public to up-close-and-personal investigative stories of public officials. “Supreme Court to hear transgender bathroom case.” The Compton Herald. October 31, 2016. http://comptonherald.com/supreme-court-hear-transgender-bathroom-case/ JJN WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Supreme Court of the United States has agreed to hear a case involving transgender restroom use, the Compton Herald has learned. The decision was announced Oct. 31 and is the first case of this kind to reach the high court. Once heard, the high court’s decision on this widely debated and controversial nationwide issue may well set a major historical precedent. The case involves a Virginia high school student who was born female but views herself as a male. Originally, a lower level court ruled the student would be allowed to use the boys’ restroom, but the Supreme Court placed a temporary stay while an appeal was reviewed, which was filed by the Gloucester County School Board. The student brought the case after the school upheld ordinary restroom use restrictions on the student when community members came forward with concern over the privacy of other students. “Students with gender identity dysphoria, to no fault of their own, should be treated with love and respect. However, such treatment must also be respectful of children of the opposite sex who don’t want their dignity and privacy violated daily in a locker room,” said Brad Dacus, president and founder of Pacific Justice Institute. The case is also important because the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education have issued a letter asserting that Title IX, which requires equal treatment between the sexes in the provision of educational services, applies to transgendered pupils. When Title IX was passed in 1972 Congress understood sex to be based purely on biological status. “What is important is whether the executive branch can unilaterally change the terms of a statute,” Dacus noted. “So in addition to the issue of privacy and transgenderism, the case has profound implications for the rule of law.” The Supreme Court is set to hear the case as early as next year. “It is PJI’s hope the Supreme Court will rule to protect the privacy and decency of all children in their decision,” Dacus added. Turns
Qualified immunity establishes a good relationship between law and citizens. Kirby 2k John D. Kirby, May, 2000, "Qualified Immunity for Civil Rights Violations: Refining the Standard " Cornell Law Review, http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3450andamp;context=clr MG Some sacrifice of individual rights for the sake of effective government is the inevitable price of living in a society organized and run by fallible human beings. 70 The early common law recognized that the threat of personal liability might prevent officials from executing their duties with the necessary decisiveness. 71 The framers embodied this recognition in the Constitution. 72 Indecisiveness caused by fear of personal liability can lead to grave public harm. For example, a mayor may decide not to demolish a row of houses to provide a fire-break if he thinks he will subsequently be held liable for destroying the homes.7 3 This trade-off rationale implies that the protection that the qualified immunity doctrine supplies should be closely tailored to the needs of different levels of public officials. It should give no more protection than is necessary for the official to effectively fulfill his duties because each additional measure of protection divests victims of a greater range of remedies for violations of their constitutional rights. Providing more protection than is necessary to prevent officials from being unduly inhibited in the performance of their duties results in an unjustifiable sacrifice of individual constitutional rights.
11/7/16
NOVDEC Hollow Hope
Tournament: Alta | Round: 1 | Opponent: East WH | Judge: Overing, Michael The new generation LGBTQ movement is working with community-based solutions, moving away from the flare of courts. Lazare ‘10/13 Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet, A former staff writer for Common Dreams. “Meet 5 Movement Leaders Across the U.S. Fighting for LGTBQ Issues on the Ground.” Alternet. October 13, 2016. http://www.alternet.org/lgbtq/meet-5-movement-leaders-across-us-fighting-lgtbq-issues-ground JJN "We've gotten dragged into a national conversation where same-sex marriage is held up as the pinnacle of the LGBTQ struggle, but there are so many other things our communities struggle around, issues that have to do with life and death,” Paulina Helm-Hernandez, the co-director of the queer liberation group Southerners on New Ground (SONG), told AlterNet. “We’re dealing with issues like criminalization, health care access and core safety. We’re thinking about ways our people know a lot about violence and how to survive." Helm-Hernandez is one of countless movement leaders in rural communities and urban centers across the country bringing a queer lens to racial, social and economic justice activism. LGBTQ organizers are at the helm of the Movement for Black Lives, calling for an end to extrajudicial police killings, and on the frontlines of native resistance at Standing Rock, where indigenous earth defenders have erected a "two-spirit camp," for gay and lesbian indigenous people. They are demanding an stop to deportations and mass incarceration and devising concrete, community-safety alternatives to calling the police. While fending off the racist incitement of the 2016 election cycle, LGBTQ organizers are also going on the offensive, preparing to mobilize for demilitarization at home and abroad no matter who wins in November. AlterNet spoke with five U.S.-based organizers whose political and cultural work shows that LGBTQ movements go far beyond marriage equality, and are shaping the social movements that define our times. 1. Kym Anthoni, New Orleans “Second lining is very big in New Orleans culture,” said Anthoni, an organizer with the youth-led LGBTQ organization BreakOUT. “After someone passes away, people will do a dance celebrating resilience. Every year around the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we do a second line for the people who died to celebrate resilience, strength and moving forward.” “When a transgender woman has been killed, or you’ve gone through a bunch of bullshit, we embody the culture of second line, recognizing that we have a lot of pain and embracing resilience, saying let’s let go of the harsh shit that you’ve been through and celebrate the fact that you made it,” Anthoni continued. “Last year for the Trans March of resilience, we had a whole second line. We were uplifting the voices that are normally not uplifted in our culture.” New Orleans has been hit hard in recent years by a wave of killings targeting transgender women of color. Among them was BreakOUT community member Penny Proud, a 21-year-old black transgender woman murdered in 2015. This summer, the organization released a statement reading, “It is with heavy hearts that we share the news that another young, black trans/gender non-conforming person, Devin Diamond, has been murdered in New Orleans, just a few weeks after 24-year-old Erica ‘E’ Davis was shot in the Treme neighborhood on her way to work.” Key to BreakOUT’s organizing is the principle that “we deserve to walk down the street and not be attacked, we deserve to not be criminalized,” said Anthoni. This demand is aimed at curbing vigilante violence as well as law enforcement brutality. The organization’s first campaign was called We Deserve Better and took on rampant abuse by the New Orleans Police Department. According to a report released in 2014 by BreakOUT, police abuse is widespread. The survey found that “75 percent of people of color respondents feel they have been targeted by police for their sexual orientation or gender identity or gender expression compared with 24 percent of white respondents.” In addition, the report states that “43 percent of people of color respondents have been asked for a sexual favor by police compared with 11 percent of white respondents.” Anthoni emphasized that it is important for the broader public to understand that police brutality is also an LGBTQ issue. “Police always target trans women of color just for being trans,” Anthoni said. “They over-eroticize transgender bodies. The queer and transgender youth of color are most targeted by law enforcement. It’s a huge issue because it takes your power away, it makes you feel vulnerable. Our vulnerability can sometimes cost us our lives.” In addition to organizing, political education and youth work in local high schools, Anthoni said, “The main core of what we do is heart healing justice work. We focus on finding ways to heal as a community.”
The aff sucks other minority rights movements into the courts. Kairys ‘10 David Kairys is Professor of Law at Temple University School of Law. “The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique.” ReadHowYouWant.com. November 5, 2010. https://books.google.com/books?id=RNiy5dY7B0YCanddq=22Brown+is+an+invitation+to+use+the+courts+to+carry+on+social+struggle.+Yet+as+attractive+as+that+invitation+has+been,+and+continues+to+be,+it+is+one+contingently+and+variously+taken+up+by+disadvantaged+persons22andsource=gbs_navlinks_s JJN Brown Is an Invitation to use the courts to carry on social struggle. Yet as attractive as that invitation has been, and continues to be, it is one contingently and variously taken up by disadvantaged persons and groups. The so called lure of litigation, while powerful, Is by no means irresIstible.7 In spite of the contlnu- ing importance of Brown and the similarly rare though dramatic instances when the judiciary sides with the disadvantaged in their quest for social justice, disad-vantaged citizens have a complicated relationship to the promise of rights and the judiciary's role in the symbolic structure of liberal legality. They live in an approach-avoidance relation to courts. They feel the symbolic pull of law even as they simultaneously see through and around its mystifications.B As Kristin Bumiller notes, such people are "attracted to the 'ra-diance of the Law" 'though they acknowledge the law's limitations and its unresponsiveness as well as its occasional irrelevance to their social situation.9 When the courts do side with the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable, they keep alive hope that law will matter to those with few other places to turn for help. Yet it would not be accurate to suggest that it is false consciousness that draws the disadvantaged to court.
Courts destroy the possibility of reform. NeJaime ‘12 Douglas NeJaime - Associate Professor of Law, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles (Loyola Marymount University). “Winning Through Losing.” The Dukeminier Awards Best Sexual Orientation Law Review Articles. 2012. JJN
Judges don’t want to depart from mainstream 2. Separation of powers constraint 3. Backlash 4. Flypaper A. CONSTRAINED COURTS AND THE EMPTY PROMISE OF LITIGATION Scholars who argue that litigation is an ineffective vehicle for social reform point to several constraints that courts (and strategies reliant on courts) face. n20 As an initial matter, even when framing claims within the accepted language of legal rights, social movement advocates push the limits of courts' willingness to depart from existing practices by asking them to recognize a new right or to extend an existing right to a new group. While advocates themselves might see the step for the court as minor and work to frame the request in that way, judges may remain hesitant to move be-yond existing law and interpret precedent in an expansive--and often liberal--direction. n21 Judges face political pressure to stay within the mainstream; as part of a dominant legal culture with an interest in maintaining the status quo, judges understand the political and professional risks of departing from accepted norms. n22 More concretely, the ability of judges to break new ground is constrained by precedent and (for all but Supreme Court Justices) the prospect of rever-sal. n23 In addition to institutional factors internal to the judiciary, Rosenberg identifies constraints on courts that derive from external pressures. n24 Despite popular understandings of courts as politically insulated, judges themselves appre-ciate the more complicated relationship they have with other governmental branches. Courts may be reluctant to contra-vene perceived community and legislative preferences and, accordingly, may look for adequate support from other gov-ernmental branches before ordering reform. n25 Even where courts manage to overcome key constraints and order significant social reform, they often lack ade-quate independent power to *950 ensure that such reform materializes. Courts may need help from other actors, par-ticularly ground-level administrators, to implement and enforce their decisions. n26 Through tactics ranging from stalling and withholding necessary funds to overt opposition and defiance, those resistant to the decision can make realization of the court's ordered reform exceedingly difficult. n27 Scholars who adhere to this pessimistic view of courts point to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education n28 decision as a paradigmatic example of litigation's failed promise. n29 Even though this decision followed in a line of desegregation and racial-equality decisions, it met with intense resistance from both elites and ordinary citizens. Absent action by other governmental branches, implementation and enforcement surfaced as significant problems that severely limited the effectiveness of the Court's decision. n30 Despite the Court's impassioned rhetoric and commitment to deseg-regation, school integration remained elusive in the decade following Brown. n31 As legal historian Michael Klarman puts it, "Brown had almost no immediate direct impact on desegregation." n32 Accordingly, Rosenberg concludes that "Brown and its progeny stand for the proposition that courts are impotent to produce significant social reform." n33 In addition to the claim that courts are generally incapable of directly producing significant reform, scholars in the "constrained courts" camp make the more contested and controversial claim that litigation rarely yields positive extra-judicial effects. In other words, litigation not only fails to directly produce reform, but also fails to produce indirect ef-fects that might contribute to reform. Under this approach, the ancillary benefits supposedly generated by litigation are illusory. More specifically, these scholars argue that litigation often fails to mobilize movement constituents, positively *951 influence public opinion, convince elites, or accelerate the pace of legislative change. n34 Returning to Brown, Rosenberg and Klarman find scant evidence to suggest that the judicial pronouncement in-spired activists or mobilized constituents. n35 Indeed, Rosenberg observes a "muted" reaction to Brown within the black community. n36 Moreover, he contends that desegregation decisions neither changed public opinion nor influenced press coverage. n37 Of equal significance, Rosenberg and Klarman find that Brown itself did not directly influence Congress or the executive branch. n38 Rather, they link meaningful federal intervention in civil-rights issues to direct-action tactics and cultural changes. n39 Rosenberg concludes that the "claim that a major contribution of the courts in civil rights was to give the issue salience, press political elites to act, prick the consciences of whites, legitimate the grievances of blacks, and fire blacks up to act is not substantiated." n40 Worse yet, the pessimistic account of court-centered change claims that litigation may actually produce negative indirect effects for a social movement by deradicalizing movement politics and inspiring political backlash. n41 First, focusing on courts (and litigation) diverts scarce resources away from more effective strategies and demobilizes a po-tentially vibrant movement. n42 In this view, time, energy, and money that could be spent on *952 mobilization, polit-ical organizing, and direct action are instead spent on attempting to convince an institution that ultimately has relatively little ability to bring about change. n43 For instance, in the civil-rights movement, Rosenberg argues that the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. used their funds and credibility to work through the courts rather than "take to the streets." n44 They did so, according to this account, while direct-action tactics, like boycotts and sit-ins, did the actual work of mobilizing constituents, positively influencing public opinion, and forcing political con-cessions. n45 Next, a court decision ordering significant social reform might depart from public opinion and accordingly inspire backlash that further complicates implementation of reform and makes additional advances unlikely. n46 In this view, court decisions ordering reform disrupt the natural evolution of social change, thereby provoking backlash that puts new and substantial obstacles in a social movement's path. n47 Both Rosenberg and Klarman note that the Brown deci-sion produced powerful backlash that manifested itself in oppositional activism and extreme violence. n48 Intense oppo-sition from political elites and the general public prevented effective implementation and enforcement of desegregation. n49 Even courts became part of the backlash; biased federal and state judges in the South used a variety of tools at their disposal to delay and reject Brown's command. n50 For Rosenberg and Klarman, litigation does indeed produce extra-judicial effects, but these effects are harmful to the litigating movement. n51 In their view, litigation is not merely unpro-ductive; it can be counterproductive.
The LGTBQ movement is crucial to end human suffering – o/w all their impx because we control the internal link. Tatchell ’89 Peter Tatchell - is a British human rights campaignerbest known for his work with LGBT social movements, was selected as Labour Party Parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey. “Gay Liberation is Central to Human Emancipation.” Peter Tatchell.net. However, note at the bottom: “An edited version of this article was published in "Labour Briefing", 1989. See also "Beyond lesbian and gay rights", Interlink. May /June 1989.” http://www.petertatchell.net/masculinity/gay_liberation.htm JJN *bracketed for offensive language Lesbian and gay LGTBQ liberation is of critical importance to the broader project of human emancipation. It is not merely a minority issue, nor purely a question of civil rights and sexual freedom. The ultimate aim is a cultural revolution to end heterosexual supremacism and the concomitant cult of heterosexual masculinity which underpins all relations of oppression and exploitation. This was the revolutionary agenda of the lesbian and gay liberation movement which emerged 20 years ago following the Stonewall Riots in New York in June 1969. In contrast to earlier liberal-oriented movements for homosexual equality, the lesbian and gay liberation movement did not seek to ape heterosexual values or secure the acceptance of homosexuals within the existing sexual conventions. Indeed, it repudiated the prevailing sexual morality and institutions - rejecting not only heterosexism but also heterosexual masculinity with its oppressive predisposition to rivalry, toughness and aggression (most potently symbolised by the rapist and the queer-basher). In contrast the "radical drag" and''gender-bender" politics of the Gay Liberation Front glorified male gentleness. It was a conscious, if sometimes exaggerated, attempt to renounce the oppressiveness of masculinity and subvert the way masculinity functions to buttress the subordination of women and gay men. Lesbian and gay liberation is therefore truly revolutionary because it specifically rejects the male heterosexual cult of masculine competitiveness, domination and violence. Instead, it affirms the worthwhileness of male sensitivity and affection between men and, in the case of lesbians, the intrinsic value of an eroticism and love independent of heterosexual men. By challenging heterosexual masculinity, the politics of lesbian and gay liberation has profound radical implications for oppressed peoples everywhere: it actively subverts the male heterosexual machismo' values which lie at the heart of all systems of domination, exploitation and oppression. Lesbian and gay liberation is therefore not an issue which is peripheral. It is, indeed absolutely central to revolutionary change and human liberation in general. Without the successful construction of a cult of heterosexual masculinity and a mass of aggressive male egos, neither sexual, class, racial, species, nor imperialist oppression are possible. All these different forms of oppression depend on two factors for their continued maintenance. First, on specific economic and political structures. And second, on a significant proportion of the population, mainly heterosexual men, being socialised into the acceptance of harsh masculine values which involve the legitimisation of aggression and the suppression of gentleness and emotion. The embracing of these culturally-conditioned macho values, whether consciously or unconsciously, is what makes so many millions of people able to participate in repressive regimes. (This interaction between social structures, ideology and individual psychology was a thesis which the communist psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, was attempting to articulate nearly 60 years ago in his book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism). In the case of German fascism, what Nazism did was merely awake and excite the latent brutality which is intrinsic to heterosexual masculinity in class societies. It then systematically manipulated and organised this unleashed masculine violence into a fascist regime of terror and torture which culminated in the holocaust. Since it is the internalisation of the masculine cult of toughness and domination which makes people psychologically suited and willing to be part of oppressive relations of exploitation and subjection, repressive states invariably glorify masculine "warrior" ideals and legally and ideologically suppress those men - mainly homosexuals - who fail to conform to them. Given that this internalisation of masculine aggression within the male population is a prerequisite for injustice and tyranny, love and tenderness between men ceases to be a purely private matter or simply a question of personal lifestyle. Instead, it objectively becomes an act of subversion which undermines the very foundations of oppression. Hence the Nazis' vilification of gay men as "sexual subversives" and "sexual saboteurs" who, in the words of Heinrich Himmler, had to be "exterminated- root and branch." In conclusion: the goal of eradicating injustice and exploitation requires us to change both the social structure and the individual personality to create people who, liberated from masculinity, no longer psychologically crave the power to dominate and exploit others and who are therefore unwilling to be the agents of oppressive regimes (whether as soldiers, police, gaolers and censors or as routine civil servants and state administrators who act as the passive agents of repression by keeping the day-to-day machinery of unjust government ticking over). By challenging the cult of heterosexual masculinity, lesbian and gay liberation politics is about much more than the limited agenda of human rights. It offers a unique and revolutionary contribution to the emancipation of the whole of humanity from all forms of oppression and subjugation.
12/3/16
NOVDEC T - eliminate
Tournament: Alta | Round: 3 | Opponent: San Marino VL | Judge: Inglet, Sierra A. Interpretation- the word limit means to “restrict” not to ban or eliminate
Limit has a variety of definitions, but they all mean “bound” not eliminate COURT OF APPEALS OF MARYLAND 02 (SY-LENE OF WASHINGTON, INC. v. STARWOOD URBAN RETAIL II, LLC No. 132, September Term, 2002 COURT OF APPEALS OF MARYLAND 376 Md. 157; 829 A.2d 540; 2003 Md. LEXIS 455 July 29, 2003, Filed) Definitions of the word "limit" include the following: (1) to assign within limits, to appoint, fix definitely, to specify; (2) to confine within limits, to set bounds to, to prohibit a person from something; (3) to border upon a country; (4) to beg within specified limits. Each of these definitions incorporates the concept of a boundary or restraint. To limit something is to define its extent, and in so doing, to quantify it. The suggestion that the concept of elimination is contained within the term limit conflicts with the idea that a limit defines an area or range. 2. Legal consensus- limit does not mean eliminate COURT OF SPECIAL APPEALS OF MARYLAND 14 (SIERRA CLUB, ET AL. v. DOMINION COVE POINT LNG, L.P. No. 2429, September Term, 2012 COURT OF SPECIAL APPEALS OF MARYLAND 216 Md. App. 322; 86 A.3d 82; 2014 Md. App. LEXIS 18; 44 ELR 20037 February 28, 2014, Filed) Before the Court of Appeals, the plaintiff argued that the lease was ambiguous and that parol evidence should be admitted to determine the parties' intent at the time the lease was signed. Id. at 165. The defendant countered, arguing that the plain language of the lease did not provide any upper or lower limit to the number of spaces that must be provided, and therefore, it could eliminate all the spaces. It also argued that because the language was clear, no parol evidence should be admitted. Id. at 166. The Court noted that HN11Go to this Headnote in the case.under the objective test of contract interpretation, if the written contract is clear the court will give effect to its plain meaning. It explained, however, that a contract is ambiguous if it could be "subject to more than one interpretation when read by a reasonably prudent person." Id. at 167. The Court then looked to the language of the contract, to answer the question *18 of whether the term "limit" meant that the defendant could eliminate. Id. at 168. First, it reviewed the dictionary definition of the word "limit," and then addressed the parties' arguments regarding the various meanings of the term. After examining caselaw from other states, the Court concluded that the "limit" did not mean "eliminate" and ruled that the defendant could not deny plaintiff any parking spaces entirely. Id. at 169. The Court remanded the case back to the circuit court in order for it to consider parol evidence and determine the intended amount of spaces at the time of contracting. Id. 3. This case law represents broad precedent COURT OF APPEALS OF ARIZONA 08 (COURT OF APPEALS OF ARIZONA, DIVISION ONE, DEPARTMENT E 2008 Ariz. App. Unpub. LEXIS 1013 May 1, 2008, Amended by Order Filed ) P34 We find support for our conclusion in Sy-Lene and Schuster. In Sy-Lene, the lease provided that the tenant would pay for each employee parking space as needed for its employees and provided that the "landlord reserves the right to limit the number of employee parking spaces to be provided Tenant". 829 A.2d at 543. After a dispute arose between the parties, the landlord told the retail tenant that it would provide no reduced-fee employee parking spaces. Id. The trial court dismissed the action and the special court of appeals affirmed, holding that the right to limit the number of spaces implicitly included the right to limit the number to zero. Id. at 543-45. The Maryland Court of Appeals granted a writ of certiorari and reversed. Id. at 544. The court of appeals held that the definition of the word "limit" did not incorporate the concept of elimination. *23 Id. at 547. It then remanded the case to the trial court to determine the parties' intentions at the time of executing the lease as to what limit of spaces would be acceptable. Id. at 547-48. B. Violation- the affirmative does not mandate a quantitative or qualitative restriction on qualified immunity, they eliminate it entirely C. Reasons to prefer
Ground- the topic is designed to force the affirmative to defend the process of legal reform. Predictable negative ground includes counterplans to regulate police conduct outside of immunity reform, court precedent disads, and critiques of the legal system like CLS. Allowing the aff to abolish immunity access a different literature base over whether or not policing is a legitimate government function which makes the topic bidirectional and turbocharges aff solvency 2. The affirmative interpretation is unreasonable- no definition of limit includes eliminate, its only justified by semantic gymnastics. The topic could have been written to prohibit immunity but was not. This places the affirmative outside your jurisdiction- they haven’t presented a topical advocacy, you can vote negative on presumption 3. Legal precision – we cite an evolving case law from multiple courts proving a consensus that limit does not include eliminate. This makes our interpretation the most predictable- it’s a legal topic, we should focus on legal definitions over random dictionary cards or field contextual evidence with no intent to define D. Topicality is a voting issue- it sets the balance of ground for debate and tells the negative what they do and do not have to prepare for. It should be evaluated via competing interpretations- its not what they do it’s what they justify.
12/3/16
NOVDEC TPP DA
Tournament: Damus | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harker QC | Judge: Angus, Thomas TPP is predicted to pass, but there’s no time to waste. Mitchell ‘11/2 Peter Mitchell - AAP US Correspondent, Australian Associated Press. “US: White House bullish on TPP passing.” News.com.au. November 2, 2016. http://www.news.com.au/world/breaking-news/us-white-house-bullish-on-tpp-passing/news-story/66aaccb30c94f3301f95fa652040190f JJN US President Barack Obama's top Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiator has bullishly predicted the trade deal will be approved by Congress after next week's presidential election if congressional leaders bring it up for a vote. Michael Froman also warned if Congress does not ratify the 12-nation free trade proposal Australia, China and other nations will swoop in and steal markets from the US in the Asia-Pacific. "It's up to the congressional leadership to decide to bring it forward," Mr Froman told CNBC on Tuesday. "If they bring it forward I think we can get the votes there." Presidential frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both oppose the TPP and members of Congress, many who are also up for re-election next Tuesday, have been reluctant to show public support for the contentious trade pact. Mr Obama and Mr Froman are hoping the the anti-trade sentiment will recede after the election and members of Congress will be willing to ratify it before Mr Obama moves out of the White House in January. "I think the key thing is the rest of the world isn't standing by whether it is China negotiating its own trade agreements or the EU, Canada or Australia or others, they are going to move ahead and get access to these markets at our expense," Mr Froman said. "Our market share is actually in decline in some of these important, fast growing and large markets so it is awfully important we show leadership." The TPP signatories are: Australia, the US, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru.
TPP is top of Obama’s priorities, PC is key. Creighton ‘10/27 Adam Creighton – economics correspondent Washington. “Hope for TPP as Obama administration works the phones.” The Australian Business Review. October 27, 2016. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/economics/hope-for-tpp-as-obama-administration-works-the-phones/news-story/8ce5e112900eb06ca2bb0711d3aa16ce JJN The world’s biggest free trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Australian officials have written off as a casualty of a fierce anti-trade backlash in the US, has an almost even chance of success in Congress, according to people familiar with the matter in Washington DC. The Obama administration has been hitting the phones and sending cabinet ministers to remote US towns in an unprecedented bid to persuade Congress to pass the controversial Asia-Pacific trade deal among 12 countries. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have repudiated the deal. The former top economics adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden, Jared Bernstein, said the chance the TPP would be passed after November 8 but before the new president took office was almost 50 per cent, offering hope for the deal signed by the Turnbull government and 11 other nations in February, which frees up trade and investment across 40 per cent of the world’s GDP. “I think the probability is a lot higher than conventional wisdom on the street; I’d give it a 45 per cent chance,” said Mr Bernstein. He said President Obama would certainly send the deal to Congress whoever won the election. “What’s interesting is just how (hard) the administration is working it … full-court press behind the scenes,” he said. “More than on healthcare, more than on stimulus, more than on financial reform: it’s remarkable,” added Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizens Global Trade Watch. She said cabinet ministers had been traipsing the country trying to convince wavering Congressmen. “They are working the phones to a degree that actually is really interesting; cabinet secretary folks are once or twice a week since April calling House members who they might have any kind of chance with,” she added. “The odds of stopping it are slightly better, but it’s close.” Ambassador Joe Hockey and visiting Turnbull government ministers have been strenuously promoting the TPP in Washington, but confidence that the deal — which is also being sold as a way to entrench US and Australian commercial norms in a region increasingly dominated by China — will pass has dwindled significantly. Consonant with the mix of confected and genuine dissatisfaction with the TPP that permeates Republican and Democrat ranks in Congress, Republican congressman Kevin Brady earlier told The Australian the deal wouldn’t pass without additional protections for intellectual property, which Australia has publicly ruled out. Ms Wallach and Mr Bernstein, now at the Centre for Budget Priorities, by contrast argued the TPP deal had been captured by US corporate interests, and should be renegotiated to pare back the extra patent and intellectual property protections demanded by the US on behalf of its pharmaceutical industry. They also want to see clauses outlawing currency manipulation and removing investor-state dispute clauses that potentially limit governments’ freedom to make policies that damage foreign commercial interests. The TPP would be the first trade agreement to be rejected by Congress. If it doesn’t pass in the “lame duck” session — before the new house, senate and president are in place — it will be very unlikely the US would begin new trade negotiations given the febrile environment. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made rewriting or rescinding US trade agreements the centrepiece of his economic strategy. “One of the reasons it’s 45 per cent (chance of success) and not 25 per cent is because … the undecideds are getting much more pressure from the administration than from (labour groups),” said Mr Bernstein. “Democrat and Republican elites have literally for decades ignored the costs of trade.”
(IF ACTOR IS COURTS) Court decisions are politicized – spur debate in Congress and reflects on Obama. Zeleny ‘10 Jeffrey Dean Zeleny is the senior Washington correspondent for CNN. “Political Fallout From the Supreme Court Ruling.” The Caucus, The Politics and Government Blog of the NY Times. January 21, 2010. http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/political-fallout-from-the-supreme-court-ruling/ JJN Today’s ruling upends the nation’s campaign finance laws, allowing corporations and labor unions to spend freely on behalf of political candidates. With less than 11 months before the fall elections, the floodgates for political contributions will open wide, adding another element of intrigue to the fight for control of Congress. At first blush, Republican candidates would seem to benefit from this change in how political campaigns are conducted in America. The political environment – an angry, frustrated electorate seeking change in Washington – was already favoring Republicans. Now corporations, labor unions and a host of other organizations can weigh in like never before. But the populist showdown that was already brewing – President Obama on Thursday sought to limit the size of the nation’s banks – will surely only intensify by the Supreme Court’s ruling. The development means that both sides will have even louder megaphones to make their voices and viewpoints heard. Mr. Obama issued a statement – a rare instance of a president immediately weighing in on a ruling from the high court – and said his administration would work with Congressional leaders “to develop a forceful response to this decision.” “With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics,” Mr. Obama said. “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.” Republicans, of course, hailed the ruling as a victory for the First Amendment. “I am pleased that the Supreme Court has acted to protect the Constitution’s First Amendment rights of free speech and association,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “These are the bedrock principles that underpin our system of governance and strengthen our democracy.” Democrats, not surprisingly, said the ruling would be bad for democracy. “Giving corporate interests an outsized role in our process will only mean citizens get heard less,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “We must look at legislative ways to make sure the ledger is not tipped so far for corporate interests that citizens voices are drowned out.”
The plan sparks congressional debate. Orenstein ‘16 WALKER ORENSTEIN. “Reform advocates upset over pushback over changing malice law.” The News Tribune. July 29, 2016. http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/politics-government/article92684372.html JJN When an effort by state lawmakers to make prosecuting police for improper use of deadly force easier stalled last year, legislators compromised. They agreed to let a task force study the issue and recommend policy to next year’s Legislature on how to reduce violent interactions involving law enforcement. But some on the state-appointed committee, which had its second meeting Tuesday, say lawmakers overseeing the panel are filibustering even a dialogue about changing controversial state law regulating police use of deadly force. Amending state statute on the subject was a key component of reform-advocates’ demands that spurred the task force. It’s also the subject of a proposed initiative to the Legislature that would amend the law if enacted. Washington’s law is regarded as unique in the country. Convicting an officer for using deadly force requires proof the officer acted with “malice.” It’s a standard many, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have said is more or less impossible to meet, effectively giving police immunity when they use deadly force. Some committee members say changing the law would reduce police use of deadly force, a stated end-goal of the task force. Others on the panel have pushed back, saying changing the statute won’t help that cause. The split could derail what Karen Johnson, chairwoman of the Black Alliance of Thurston County, described as a “golden opportunity” to be a “national model” for discourse between law enforcement and police reform advocates. ‘SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY’ De’Sean Quinn, a member of the state’s African American Commission on the task force, said he wants the group to be “action oriented.” Real action for him might include recommending the state collect data on police use of force to easier analyze how to reduce it, he said. But the key aim, he said, is to reach consensus on how to change Washington’s malice law, particularly in light of the recent police killings of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana. “I feel a sense of responsibility for my kids that we really try and address this issue,” Quinn, who has two sons, said in an interview. Gerald Hankerson, a member of the committee and president of the NAACP of Alaska, Oregon and Washington, said lawmakers and some law enforcement officials on the panel have been hesitant to broach the topic in seriousness. Others on the task force agree. Tuesday’s meeting centered mostly on law enforcement training. Toshiko Hasegawa, appointed to the task force as a member of the state’s Asian American Commission, called out lawmakers during committee session, saying they were avoiding a deeper discussion on changing the law by “hiding behind procedure.” She added in a later phone interview that committee co-chairman Sen. Kirk Pearson, R-Monroe, was deliberately avoiding the topic. “Why is the police task force on deadly force not discussing deadly force?” Hasegawa asked. The task force is required to meet only four times. Johnson, Quinn, Hasegawa and others signed a letter sent to Pearson and co-chairman Rep. Roger Goodman, D-Kirkland, before Tuesday’s meeting, asking for clearer guidelines on discussing the malice statute and more input on meeting agendas. Quinn said he felt work on the statute was being ducked, and said the Legislature is not responding fast enough to outcries for police reform in the country. “It’s not OK to not deal with the difficult issues,” he said. Although the Legislature is not obligated to act on task force recommendations, “consensus with law enforcement” on legal changes “would be significant for the Legislature going forward,” said Sen. David Frockt, D-Seattle. Rather than building consensus, the meetings so far have “almost been like it’s a dog and pony show,” Hankerson said. ‘NOT THE FIRST THING ON MY MIND’ Rep. Dave Hayes, R-Camano Island, is a sergeant with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office and one of four legislators on the panel. He said the task force should look at all sorts of avenues to reduce violent interactions involving police, and said changing Washington’s malice standard is “definitely not the first thing on my mind.” Added Hayes: “I don’t believe that changing the statute is going to fix anything.” He said he expects the result of the task force to be “a couple bills regarding data collection and how we use that data to make our local law enforcement officers better.” He cautioned the Legislature would have to weigh the cost of those bills to not place a burden on local law enforcement departments. Pearson, who left before the conclusion of Tuesday’s meeting, did not return calls or messages from The News Tribune asking for comment. On Tuesday, he said reviewing past applications of the malice statute is “beyond” what the committee was designed to do. Goodman said at the meeting the task force needs to learn more about perspectives of law enforcement officers, their training, and about data collection, and not just work on the malice statute. “We can’t be sort of rushing to focus on one aspect — one very important aspect and that is perception of flaws in the law — but we need to sit back and continue to listen,” he said during the committee meeting. Sue Rahr, the executive director of the Criminal Justice Training Commission, said at the meeting that prosecuting officers for improper use of deadly force “isn’t enough” to reduce violent encounters with law enforcement. Police officers in Washington train at Rahr’s organization with the exception of the Washington State Patrol. Rahr is on the task force. “If the task force does change the law, that’s only going to solve one piece of the problem,” she said. “The problem is much bigger and much more complex than that.” GOING FORWARD Johnson and others have tried to soothe brewing discontent in the group. She reminded task force members there would be more meetings, and that they can schedule more than four if needed. Goodman promised a more collaborative approach to setting new meeting agendas. A minority report can be filed if task force members don’t agree with the final group report to the Legislature. Frockt said Monday that he was looking at the malice law “very seriously,” and feels “ a deep sense of obligation and gravity surrounding this given what’s happening around the country.” “There are people who are going to be clearly disappointed if we don’t make some changes in some Washington law,” he added. “I hope that this is not the situation where the task force goes through, does a lot of work and nothing really happens with it.” Quinn said he’s still optimistic that thorough work on the malice statute will come. But, he said, “there needs to be a demonstration that we need to address these issues.”
Solves multiple extinction scenarios. Morimoto ‘15 Andy Morimoto is a research associate at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “The Strategic Costs of TPP Failure.” The Diplomat. August 22, 2015. http://thediplomat.com/2015/08/the-strategic-costs-of-tpp-failure/ JJN The Trans-Pacific Partnership is in trouble. Trade ministers failed last month to conclude the massive 12-nation trade deal by their hoped-for summer deadline, putting negotiations in danger of collapse. This is a problem. Trade advocates argue that letting the TPP die would be a significant lost opportunity for the global economy. But there’s a potentially bigger problem here – one that may have serious consequences for both U.S. national security and regional stability in the Asia-Pacific. Just consider the strategic backdrop against which last month’s negotiations occurred. Maritime disputes flaring across the South China Sea. Tensions rising between Beijing and Tokyo. Perennial friction between China and Taiwan and a growing nuclear stockpile in North Korea. If the TPP falls through, it could greatly hurt the America’s ability to stabilize the fraught geopolitics of Asia. Some have argued that a TPP failure would be a net positive for regional stability. The deal, they claim, would isolate and provoke China, and should therefore be abandoned. But this view is blinkered. Given the high trade volumes and trade arrangements across the Asia-pacific, China stands very little chance of being isolated. Moreover, Chinese officials have other ventures on their minds. According to He Weiwen, a former Chinese Commerce Ministry official, “the Chinese are more or less neutral because we have our own agenda, pushing forward ASEAN plus six and the Silk Road.” In fact, there are a number of reasons to believe that the opposite is true: that a TPP failure will cause a number of strategic problems for the U.S. in the Asia-Pacific. First, failure would mean stunting the growth of America’s Pacific partners. This is problematic for two reasons. Most importantly, fewer states would be devoting fewer resources to meet shared challenges like counterterrorism and climate change. In addition, as countries get richer and more interdependent, they become more invested in the well-being of their neighbors. And while free trade, interdependence, and prosperity do not guarantee stability and peace (see: World War I), they do create conditions that make conflict less appealing. Second, failure would create more potential for instability and crises. Consider a hypothetical scenario in which China and one of its neighbors along the South China Sea (say, Vietnam) get into a serious spat over territorial claims. With the TPP, this spat would be less likely to escalate into a full-blown crisis, as China understands that the U.S. is more inclined to intervene in situations that threaten its growing trade interests. Without the TPP, there is less clarity about U.S. resolve, so the potential for miscalculation and escalation increases. Third, failure would send a strong signal that the U.S. no longer has the political will to lead in the region. This would come at a time when allies are already uncertain of U.S. commitments. Earlier this week, for example, Japan’s trade minister expressed disappointment in last month’s trade meetings, saying “every TPP country wondered why the U.S. was quick to give up the conclusion without its usual relentless persistence.” If the U.S. allows negotiations to collapse, it would demonstrate the Obama administration’s declaration – that the U.S. is “all in, when it comes to the Asia-Pacific” – to be hollow. This has important geopolitical implications. If Asia’s great powers perceive the U.S. to be unserious about its role in the region, this will increase the incentive for the powerful regional states (i.e. China and Japan) to jockey with one another for regional hegemony. Finally, failure would be a missed opportunity for the U.S. economy – and America’s ability to project strength abroad rests on its economic foundation at home. According to an analysis from the Peterson Institute, U.S. income gains under the TPP would be significant, potentially adding $59 billion per year by 2020. Failing to conclude the TPP would forego these potential gains, and would make it more difficult for the U.S. to stem the defense cuts put in place by the sequester and invest in our military presence in the Asia-Pacific. The Nobel Prize winning economist Thomas Schelling noted that “trade is what most of international relations are about. For that reason trade policy is national security policy.” Today, U.S. trade policy – and indeed, its national security policy – are in danger of falling apart. Getting something as big and complicated as the TPP across the line won’t be easy. But given the smoldering flashpoints across Asia, the U.S. can hardly afford to squander any tools in its foreign policy toolkit. The stakes are too high.
Regional hegemony is key to stop nuke war. Rudd 11
THE GEO-STRATEGIC RAMIFICATIONS But as nations change, so too do relations between nations. The emergence of new powers inevitably brings new strategic complexity, as the power relativities of the 20th century give way to the new ones. Asia will be vulnerable to a host of strategic uncertainties, arising from the need for new powers to integrate into the global economic and political order, and for the established powers to accommodate them. The potential for misunderstanding — and the consequences of miscalculation — is also vast. Tensions like those we see in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Korean Peninsula and the Persian Gulf may become even more difficult to manage. Make no mistake: these aren’t just regional problems. Questions about the future of the South China Sea touch on every regional country’s future, given their global strategic and economic significance. This theme isn't new, but what I can tell you about this strategic shift is that we — Australia and the United States — will face it as allies. Sure, there is the possibility of instability in our region. But we've faced the possibility of conflict — and actual conflict — together in the past. Many different tests, circumstances and challenges have put the acid to our alliance since the ANZUS treaty was signed, 60 years ago. We've been reminded again that the only time the ANZUS treaty has been formally invoked was ten years ago this week — in response to the attacks on September 11. But military and intelligence cooperation with the US continues across a wide range of theatres within the framework of the Alliance. Here in San Francisco — where the ANZUS treaty was signed, all those years ago — I'm reminded that Australian and American servicemen and women have fought, flown, sailed and — I'm reliably informed — surfed together since the Pacific War. Today, that Alliance continues to grow in meaning and intensity. We are fighting together in Afghanistan; working together against global threats like piracy; and responding together to natural disasters across the region. For us, for our relationship, the end of the Cold War hasn’t meant a downgrading of the importance of our Alliance — if anything, it’s become more intense and more important. So as we face the challenges of the 21st Century — the challenges of the shift of power to Asia — we will do so together. We’re working together to ensure our forces are aligned in the right way to provide for the national security of our two countries, and to help us shape the emerging regional environment. Our forces have to be able to respond to the range of contingencies that can arise in our region, including humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. Increasingly, we aren’t just working with each other, but with other regional players. I'm not just talking about the Pacific, or the Asia-Pacific. The critical region for our future now extends to include the Indian Ocean as well. The growing strategic importance of the Indian Ocean starts with India's rise. India is the largest democracy in the world. Forecast to be the third largest economy in the world in coming decades, it is in the interest of both the United States and Australia for India to play the role of a major international power. For now, India’s focus remains South Asia. But its strategic weight is increasing with its increasing economic size and strength. India is increasingly looking east with interest, both for strategic and economic reasons, and because of long-standing cultural connections. But the importance of the Indian Ocean also lies in its unique role in maritime security and sea lines of communication for a much larger group of economies, both in Europe and Asia. Lying between the Middle East energy sources and the dynamic global engine room of Asia, its importance grows with each passing year. The pressures on the Gulf and West Indian Ocean choke points will intensify, as India grows and East Asian centres of growth remain reliant on Gulf energy and African resources. In the 21st Century, questions of resource, energy and food security are becoming more vital than ever. As Robert Kaplan says, the Indian Ocean is once again at the heart of the world, as it was in ancient and medieval times. THE ROLE OF THE UNITED STATES The United States has been a guarantor of security and economic prosperity in the Asia-Pacific for decades. But the 21st Century will demand more. As the world changes, it's even more critical that the US builds its engagement with our region. As the United States transitions back from tough and unforgiving wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it might seem tempting to resist the case for further international engagement. President Obama has already rightly intensified US involvement with East Asia. It remains the case, in one way or another, that the United States is vital in solving common problems collectively. No other power is able or willing to support essential global public goods — like the free movement of trade, capital and people around the world. Sea-lane security, regional security in critical regions like the Gulf, open markets, the reserve currency, deep and liquid capital markets — who else provides these global public goods? America has faced these questions before. On the eve of entry into World War II, Henry Luce's seminal editorial in Life magazine on the American Century was much more than a statement about relative power, as America assumed its position in the new order. It was a call for American leadership in international affairs. It is in America’s interest and the world’s interest to provide that leadership — because in its absence, the risks grow that we will see destabilisation that threatens us all. The interdependence of our economies has been shown clearly by the financial crisis, and a collapse in the conditions for open trade would be an economic disaster for all trading nations. I share President Obama's view that America can neither retreat from "responsibility as an anchor of global security" nor "confront... every evil that can be found abroad". But President Obama talked of the need for a "more centered course" — and that lies in a deep US engagement in Asia. I believe the vast majority of the countries of Asia welcome that continued and expanded American strategic role in our hemisphere. As Indonesia’s President Yudhoyono said in November 2008, as the financial crisis was wreaking havoc upon us, “none of these global challenges can be addressed by the world community without having America onboard. And conversely, none of these issues can be resolved by the United States alone.” And as Lee Kuan Yew said a year later, “the consensus in ASEAN is that the US remains irreplaceable in East Asia.” In the 21st Century, the US needs substantial, sophisticated, nimble engagement in the region.