Tournament: CPS | Round: 9 | Opponent: all | Judge: all
*will change some parts for HW
The 1AC’s protection of constitutional free speech doesn’t do anything in a world where the law protects verbal harassment and racist symbols
Center for Human Rights 2016. "First Amendment and Racial Terrorism." First Amendment and Racial Terrorism. Center for Human Rights, 2016. Web. 17 Dec. 2016.
The United States has distinctive political principles and values that define its national identity. The First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." The amendment was designed to insure that the debate on public issues is "uninhibited, robust and wide open." Those who believe absolutely in the First Amendment believe that racist ideas deserve as much protection as any other idea in a free democracy -- perhaps even more because of their odious content. Absolutists often quote Supreme Court jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes who declared that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." This "marketplace of ideas" approach is supposed to encourage the free exchange of ideas and a rational process by which listeners can choose the best ideas and ignore others. Such interpretations are insufficiently conscious of the social reality of uneven power relationships between racists and their targets. Absolutists ignore the persistent inequality in the power of oppressed groups to communicate their ideas in the marketplace, just like Bill Gates can keep other companies from selling computer operating systems. In fact, the dominant group not only has the greater power to communicate their ideas, but they even have more credibility doing so. Inequities in racial power makes competition in the social marketplace purely hypothetical. There is no space not already occupied by the dominant white culture. U.S. courts consistently fail to acknowledge that the purpose of racist speech is to continue the subordination of one people by another. This leads to a legalistic distinction between acts that constitute racial terrorism and the words and ideas that motivate the attackers. In our country, acts — assault, battery, vandalism, arson, murder, lynchings, physical harassment — are punishable under our court system. But words — like nigger — or symbols — such as Nazi swastikas or burning crosses -- are protected by the courts as acts of individual expression. To protect the status quo of white domination, our legal justice system first formally excluded African Americans from equality, and it now stands passively aside while private actors do the dirty work of legitimating social inequality and silencing victims. U.S. courts have not always privileged white racists to express themselves at the expense of the safety of African Americans and other people of color. A pertinent Supreme Court case was decided in 1952 after two race riots in Illinois in which more than one hundred men, women and children were killed, forcing another 6,000 African Americans to flee the state. In that case, Beauharnais v. Illinois, the head of the White Circle League distributed a leaflet declaring that African Americans would terrorize white neighborhoods with "rapes, robberies, knives, guns and marijuana." The pamphleteer was convicted when the court decided that libelous statements aimed at groups of people, like those aimed at individuals, fall outside First Amendment protection. While it was certainly a victory for the anti-racist movement, this decision did not go far enough in banning the activities of racist individuals, largely because the government was not yet ready to outlaw its own racist policies. The Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision occurred two years later in 1954. On the other hand, the current Supreme Court is dominated by the right wing. Its interpretations disconnect racial terrorism from the harm inflicted on victims. In 1992, the court decided in R.A.V. vs. St. Paul that a cross burned in the front yard of an African American family by white teenagers was a form of protected symbolic speech. This decision effectively trumped the family’s right to live in their home free from racial terrorism. Using the artificial distinction between speech and action, the Court decided that the act of burning a cross to intimidate a black family was equivalent to freedom of speech.
Couple of implications
a. Protecting constitutional free speech doesn’t do anything because racist speech is protected by the constitution
b. The discussions set up by the affirmative are still inherently white and dominated by whites
Wilderson 1 AND- The Affirmative’s focus on not restricting constitutionally protected free speech within the sphere of legitimate nation-states assumes a humanist grammar that is parasitic upon black positionality. Blackness can only be the total disconfiguration of civil society. They want to add more pages to the book, we say burn the whole fucking library.
Wilderson 2007 Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s Silent Scandal” in Warfare in the American Homeland ed. Joy James, p. 31-2
Slavery is the great leveler of the black subjects positionality. The black American subject does not generate historical categories of entitlement, sover¬eignty, and immigration for the record. We are "off the map" with respect to the cartography that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past but not a heri¬tage. To the data-generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a vir¬tual blank, much like that which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological Axis. This places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony. However, it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position because—and this is key—our presence works back on the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject— even-the most massacred among them, Indians—is required to have analogs within the nations structuring narrative, and the experience of one subject on whom the nations order of wealth was built is without analog, then that sub¬jects presence destabilizes all other analogs. Fanon writes, "Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder."12 If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the black body functions as the map of gra-tuitous violence, through which civil society is possible— namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history and no data for the categories of im¬migration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog—a past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for "whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says black (Sexton), and whoever says "aids" says black—the "Negro is a phobogenic object."13 Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic object, a past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament or, worse, disavowal—not at least, for a true revolutionary or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social move¬ment is to be neither social-democratic nor Marxist in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior part¬ners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today—even in the most antiracist movements, such as the prison abolition movement—invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually antiblack, meaning that it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the United States. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism or community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialec¬tic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a "program of complete disorder." One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elabo¬rated by it if, indeed, ones politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites ones politics, then through what strategy of legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this movements lines of political accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by dis¬order and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has ever been known to say, "Gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all." Yet few so-called radicals desire to be em¬braced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of blackness—and the state of political movements in the United States today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: "Gee-whiz, if only black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the foy of black than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society—with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If through this stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, the work will fail, for it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e., the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence of the black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises than as crowding y out scenarios of black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demand¬ing a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage) gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the black subject (whether a prison slave or a prison slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of civil so¬ciety, the black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that re¬claims blackness not as a positive value but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of "absolute dereliction." It is a "scandal" that rends civil society asun¬der. Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but that must, nonetheless, be pursued to the death.
Martinot and Sexton AND- State Involvement perpetuates white supremacy and shifts attention away from gratuitous violence. Turns the Case.
Martinot and Sexton 03 Martinot and Sexton, Director, critical race theorist at San Francisco State University and African American Studies School of Humanities UCI, 2003 (Steve and Jared, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003 Accessed 8-13-12)
The foundations of US white supremacy are far from stable. Owing to the instability of white supremacy, the social structures of whiteness must ever be re-secured in an obsessive fashion. The process of re-inventing whiteness and white supremacy has always involved the state, and the state has always involved the utmost paranoia. Vast political cataclysms such as the civil rights movements that sought to shatter this invention have confronted the state as harbingers of sanity. Yet the state’s absorption and co-optation of that opposition for the reconstruction of the white social order has been reoccurring before our very eyes. White supremacy is not reconstructed simply for its own sake, but for the sake of the social paranoia, the ethic of impunity, and the violent spectacles of racialisation that it calls the ‘maintenance of order’, all of which constitute its essential dimensions. The cold, gray institutions of this society — courts, schools, prisons, police, army, law, religion, the two-party system — become the arenas of this brutality, its excess and spectacle, which they then normalise throughout the social field. It is not simply by understanding the forms of state violence that the structures of hyper-injustice and their excess of hegemony will be addressed. If they foster policing as their paradigm — including imprisonment, police occupations, commodified governmental operations, a renewed Jim Crow, and a re-criminalisation of race as their version of social order — then to merely catalogue these institutional forms marks the moment at which understanding stops. To pretend to understand at that point would be to affirm what denies understanding. Instead, we have to understand the state and its order as a mode of anti-production that seeks precisely to cancel understanding through its own common sense. For common sense, the opposite of injustice is justice;however, the opposite of hyper-injustice is not justice. The existence of hyperinjustice implies that neither a consciousness of injustice nor the possibility of justice any longer applies. Justice as such is incommensurable with and wholly exterior to the relation between ordinary social existence and the ethic of impunity including the modes of gratuitous violence that it fosters. The pervasiveness of state-sanctioned terror, police brutality, mass incarceration, and the endless ambushes of white populism is where we must begin our theorising. Though state practices create and reproduce the subjects,discourses, and places that are inseparable from them, we can no longer presuppose the subjects and subject positions nor the ideologies and empiricisms of political and class forces. Rather, the analysis of a contingent yet comprehensive state terror becomes primary. This is not to debate the traditional concerns of radical leftist politics that presuppose (and close off) the question of structure, its tenacity, its systematic and inexplicable gratuitousness. The problem here is how to dwell on the structures of pervasiveness, terror, and gratuitousness themselves rather than simply the state as an apparatus. It is to ask how the state exists as a formation or confluence of processes with de-centred agency, how the subjects of state authority — its agents, citizens, and captives — are produced in the crucible of its ritualistic violence.
Wilderson 2 They say we should make the world better but this is the link we say that the world should not exist and any attempt to make it better creates more violence against the black bodies
Wilderson 2, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 31-32)
Black slavery is foundational to modern Humanism’s ontics because “freedom” is the hub of Humanism’s infinite conceptual trajectories. But these trajectories only appear to be infinite. They are finite in the sense that they are predicated on the idea of freedom from… some contingency that can be named, or at least conceptualized. The contingent rider could be freedom from patriarchy, freedom from economic exploitation, freedom from political tyranny (for example, taxation without representation), freedom from heteronormativity, and so on. What I am suggesting is that first, political discourse recognizes freedom as a structuring ontologic and then it works to disavow this recognition by imagining freedom not through political ontology—where it rightfully began—but through political experience (and practice); whereupon it immediately loses its ontological foundations. Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone start off with, quite literally, an earth-shattering ontologic and, in the process of meditating on it and acting through it, reduce it to an earth reforming experience? Why do Humans take such pride in self-adjustment, in diminishing, rather than intensifying, the project of liberation (how did we get from ’68 to the present)? Because, I contend, in allowing the notion of freedom to attain the ethical purity of its ontological status, one would have to lose one’s Human coordinates and become Black.
Wilderson 3 Impact: WITHIN THIS ANTI-BLACK PARADIGM, BLACK BODIES BECOME A METRIC AGAINST WHICH ALL OTHER BODIES ARE MEASURED AS A PRODUCT OF CIVIL SOCIETY’S SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION.
Wilderson 3 Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12)
Fanon (1968: 37) writes, "decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder." If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Svmbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history, and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog - a past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for "whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says Black, and whoever says "AIDS" says Black (Sexton) - the "Negro is a phobogenic object" (Fanon).
Wilderson 4 Alt- We must affirm violent revolution. Fear of violence is a conservative political maneuver –the question is not whether or not there will be violence but whether it will be directed at an unjust social order.
Wilderson 4 Frank B., University of California Irvine – African American Studies/Drama Department, The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents, InTensions Journal, Issue 5, Fall/Winter 2011
Many pacifist scholars and activists consider the strategies and tactics of armed revolutionaries in First World countries to be short-sighted bursts of narcissism.xvii What pacifist detractors forget, however, is that for Gramsci, the strategy of a War of Position is one of commandeering civic and political spaces one trench at a time in order to turn those spaces into pedagogic locales for the dispossessed; and this process is one which combines peaceful as well as violent tactics as it moves the struggle closer to an all-out violent assault on the state. The BLA and their White revolutionary co-defendants may have been better Gramscians than those who critique them through the lens of Gramsci. Their tactics (and by tactics I mean armed struggle as well as courtroom performances) were no less effective at winning hearts and minds than candle light vigils and “orderly” protests. If the end-game of Gramscian struggle is the isolation and emasculation of the ruling classes’ ensemble of questions, as a way to alter the structure of feeling of the dispossessed so that the next step, the violent overthrow of the state, doesn’t feel like such a monumental undertaking, then I would argue the pedagogic value of retaliating against police by killing one of them each time they kill a Black person, the expropriating of bank funds from armored cars in order to further finance armed struggle as well as community projects such as acupuncture clinics in the Bronx where drug addicts could get clean, and the bombing of major centers of U.S. commerce and governance, followed by trials in which the defendants used the majority of the trial to critique the government rather than plead their case, have as much if not more pedagogic value than peaceful protest. In other words, if not for the “pathological pacifism” (Churchill) which clouds political debate and scholarly analysis there would be no question that the BLA, having not even read Gramsci,xviii were among the best Gramscian theorists the U.S. has ever known. But though the BLA were great Gramscian theorists, they could not become Gramscian subjects. The political character of one’s actions is inextricably bound to the political status of one’s subjectivity; and while this status goes without saying for Gilbert and Clark, it is always in question for Balagoon and Bukhari. 34 How does one calibrate the gap between objective vertigo and the need to be productive as a Black revolutionary? What is the political significance of restoring balance to the inner ear? Is tyranny of closure the only outcome of such interventions or could restoration of the Black subject’s inner ear, while failing at the level of conceptual framework, provide something necessary, though intangible, at the level of blood and sweat political activism? These unanswered questions haunt this article. Though I have erred in this article on the side of paradigm as opposed to praxis, and cautioned against assuming that we know or can know what the harvest of their sacrifice was, I believe we are better political thinkers—if not actors—as a result of what they did with their bodies, even if we still don’t know what to do with ours. *
