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Borderlands Aff
Tournament: gbx | Round: 1 | Opponent: good question | Judge: good question =Borderlands QI 1AC=
Part One is La Frontera:
The borderlands are defined by the rigid barriers that we impose on people of the strict categorization of ethnicity, race, class, gender that serve as the structure for various forms of oppression. Not only are the borderlands defined by the modes of thinking we have in the status quo but also the geographic spaces we have.
Tamdgidi 08
Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, Prof. @ U. Mass-Boston, "I Change Myself, I Change the World": Gloria Anzaldua's Sociological Imagination in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza", Humanity and Society, 2008, p. JSTOR "The thesis of global social change via radical self-knowledge and transformation AND transformative nature of Anzaldua's writings in general and in her Borderlands in particular."
Breaking down the borderlands is key in order for Latinx youth to challenge their own identities and positions in society and lead to real world change.
Salazar-Jerez and Fránquiz "Ni de aquí, ni de allá: Latin@1 Youth Crossing Linguistic AND Denver Journal of Border Educational Research Volume 6 l Number 2 l 2007 DD
"Although decades ago the U.S. Census Bureau began forecasting that Latin@s would become the largest minority group in the United States of America, in 2005 ordinary citizens were surprised to learn this projection had become a reality. For some, the reality that Latin@s comprised 13 of the U.S. population (Pew Hispanic Center, 2005) was a hard fact to swallow. The additional prediction from the U.S. Census Bureau ~predicts~ that by the year 2050, Latin~x~@s will comprise approximately 25 of the U.S. population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2004) presents an even more difficult fact for intake. As researchers it is baffling to note that many school districts ignore these demographic changes until families come knocking on school office doors. The realization of Latin~x~@s becoming a significant student population in urban, suburban and rural U.S. schools is a demographic change mandate~es~ing that legislators, policy makers, educators ~to~ and ordinary citizens examine stereotypic information regarding how to best educate a social group who, by all accounts, will continue its very rapid rate of growth (Chapa and De La Rosa, 2004). While in the past, addressing the educational needs of Latin@ youth was conceived within deficit standpoints of who they are as a monolithic bloc and how they threaten both the future of the English language and U.S. resources, research finds that most Latin@ youth are born in the U.S., and prefer to speak and read English (Zentella, 2005). Additionally, these youth are growing up in order to work in the technical, sales, and administrative support sectors (Chapa and De La Rosa, 2004) of 21st century America. They live productive lives in families whose buying power is growing at impressive rates. Thus, we argue that the education of adolescents living in the current demographic reality cannot be addressed with deficit orientations accepted in the past. Instead, we argue that in U.S. schools experiencing "the Browning of America" (Aponte and Siles, 1994; Johnson, et.al. 1997) students must be approached with affirming orientations. These approaches must effectively address Latin~x~@ students' educational struggles as they cross a myriad of borders on a daily basis in order to remain engaged in schools."
==Part two: El Problema==
====Meet US citizen and latinx adolescent Juan Mendez who was shot to death by border patrol agent Taylor Poitevent for allegedly being an illegal alien. ==== "UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS." International Legal Materials 20.3 (1981): 650-53. Web. On October 5, 2010, Border Patrol Agent Taylor Poitevent, uniformed and on AND about 15 feet away from Poitevent, and both shots hit him.2
This very border patrol agent was later granted qualified immunity. Qualified immunity functions in order for governmental authorities to maintain their position in society and value their lives over other unarmed citizens. The discourse of this court case presents the image of Latinx lives as being lesser than that of a border patrol agent—it was either Poitevants life of Mendez's and somehow we allow the normalization of murder to protect the law even if no real threat or law had been broken.
"UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS." International Legal Materials 20.3 (1981): 650-53. Web Poitevent and the United States each moved for summary judgment. The district court granted AND continue summary judgment in order to give them an opportunity to conduct discovery.
A similar struggle confronts people that aren't US citizens but are killed by border patrol—without having the citizen rights that Americans do, there is little justice for those with violence imposed on them. Sergio Hernandez, a Mexican citizen was playing with friends in Ciduad Juarez when shot to death by Officer Jesus Mesa who was on the US side of the border in El Paso, Texas. The supreme court is to hear this case in 2016 to clarify where the jurisdiction of law extends to and if Mesa will be granted qualified immunity with no clear contradiction to the constitution.
Dean, Jamie. "Be Reasonable: Qualified Immunity, After-Discovered Facts, and the Case of Hernandez v. Mesa." Be Reasonable: Qualified Immunity, After-Discovered Facts, and the Case of Hernandez v. Mesa. Womble Carlyle, Oct.-Nov. 2016. Web. 10 Nov. 2016. Hernandez arises out of the 2010 shooting of Sergio Hernandez, a fifteen-year AND " those limits does not guarantee democracy and full rights for certain bodies.
Politicizing the criminal as the enemy subjects them not to law but unlimited sovereignty, enabling the state to justify sacrifice of the political community and making civil war inevitable
Lajous, 12 – doctor of Law at Yale, professor and researcher at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica, a Mexican center of research and higher education specialized in social sciences (Alejandro Madrazo, "Criminals and enemies? The Mexican drug trafficker in official discourse and in narcocorridos," translated by Fernanda Alonso)bghs-BI II. The criminal and the enemy in the political imaginary8 The temptation to label AND only a civil war can be deployed, no longer a normative system.
When the legitimacy and existence of a population is in question, politics become murderous – the entirety of the world is reduced to bare life in an attempt to rid the public sphere of all risk. The only option becomes the extermination of all life
Duarte, 5 – professor of Philosophy at Universidade Federal do Paraná (André, "Biopolitics and the dissemination of violence: the Arendtian critique of the present," April 2005, http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1017andcontext=andre_duarte)//bghs-BI These historic transformations have not only brought more violence to the core of the political AND actions of acknowledging and welcoming, of extending hospitality and solidarity towards others.
Part three: El Papel
The judge should adopt mestiza consciousness in order to challenge the Borderlands.
Dualistic thinking is the root cause of all oppression. Adopt the mestizo consciousness and break down dualistic modes of thinking. The Borderlands are a thought experiment that forces us the imagine people, identities and cultures as they exist in various overlapping borderlands. Engaging and transcending rigid barriers leads to a psychic break that could lead to global change.
The judge has a voice in the debate community and speaks through their ballot on the topic. By adopting the mestiza consciousness, the judge shifts from an objective to a subjective position. The objective position forces the judges to divorce themselves from their subjective feelings, which guide their actions, i.e. intuitions. Subjectivity reintroduces the others voice into debate. Koh and Niemi '15
The pedagogical practices should also be used to give Latinx students the ability to express themselves. To silence the Affirmative by T/Theory is the silence of Latinx culture. T/Theory also forces me to look down on Latinx culture as un-educational and unfair in the debate community. Salazar-Jerez and Fránquiz
"Ni de aquí, ni de allá: Latin@1 Youth Crossing Linguistic And Cultural Borders" María E. Fránquiz University of Texas at San Antonio María del Carmen Salazar-Jerez University of Denver Journal of Border Educational Research Volume 6 l Number 2 l 2007 DD Page 105-106. "The chasm between the socio-economic, socio-cultural and linguistic AND youth possess toward school, home, heritage language, and ethnic community."
2AC
antiblackness
cap
court clog
11/19/16
Free Speech Stock Aff
Tournament: Colleyville | Round: 1 | Opponent: idk | Judge: idk Part 1 is Framwork My value for this round is individualism. Placing the individual above society is necessary to prevent oppression Rawls 93. John Rawls, Philosopher at Harvard. POLITICAL LIBERALISM, 1993, p. 146 To this objection, we say that the hope of political community must indeed be abandoned, if by such a community we mean a political society united in affirming the same comprehensive doctrine. This possibility is excluded by the fact of reasonable pluralism together with the rejection of the oppressive use of the state power to overcome it. The criterion is protecting individual rights Free speech as an individual right is a pre-requisite to any rational moral system- without it self-realization is impossible. Eberle 94. Eberle, Law @ Roger Williams, 94 (Wake Forest LR, Winter) The Court's decision in R.A.V. reaffirms the preeminence of free speech in our constitutional value structure. n62 Theoretically, free speech is intrinsically valuable as a chief means by which we develop our faculties and control our destinies. n63 Free speech is also of instrumental value in facilitating other worthy ends such as democratic or personal self-government, n64 public and private decisionmaking, n65 and the advancement of knowledge and truth. n66 Ultimately, the value of free speech rests upon a complex set of justifications, as compared to reliance on any single foundation. n67 The majority of the Court in R.A.V. preferred a nonconsequentialist view, finding that speech is valuable as an end itself, independent of any consequences that it might produce. In this view, free speech is an essential part of a just and free society that treats all people as responsible moral agents. Accordingly, people are entrusted with the responsibility of making judgments about the use or abuse of speech. n68 From this vantage point, the majority saw a certain moral equivalency in all speech. Even hate speech merits protection under the First Amendment, because all speech has intrinsic value. This is so because all speech, even hate speech, is a communication to the world, and therefore implicates the speaker's autonomy or self-realization. Additionally, any information might be valuable to a listener who can then decide its importance or how best to use it. Accordingly, any suspicion or evidence of governmental censorship must be vigilantly investigated. Observation 1: Free speech facilitates the development of moral reasoning- restrictions should be prima facie rejected. Dwyer 01. (Susan, Phil@Maryland, Nordic Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 2 ® Philosophia Press 2001) Direct Nonconsequentialism Let us return to the central topic: free speech. From the perspective just sketched, the value of a marketplace of ideas – that notion so central to the consequentialist justification of free speech – lies not so much in its long-term all-things-considered good consequences (the avoidance of dogmatism, democracy, truth, etc.) Rather, free speech is seen as a necessary condition for the realization of any human goods. Constraints on inquiry and expression are constraints on humanity itself. Echoing this thought, Nagel (1995) writes: That the expression of what one thinks and feels should be overwhelmingly one's own business, subject to restriction only when clearly necessary to prevent serious harm distinct from the expression itself, is a condition of being an independent thinking being. It is a form of moral recognition that you have a mind of your own: even if you never want to say anything to which others would object, the idea that they could stop you if they did object is in itself a violation of your integrity (96). A simple yet powerful fact both explains why speech is valuable in and of itself and justifies its stringent protection: when speech is threatened, we are threatened. Direct nonconsequentialism stands in stark contrast to consequentialist approaches which, as we have seen, make the value of speech contingent on its effects. And unlike indirect nonconsequentialism, it makes our status as language users, not our autonomy, the ground for limiting the state's attempts to interfere with our liberty. To repeat: direct nonconsequentialism asserts that speech is valuable because linguistic capacities are the expression of the essence of creatures (us) to whom we attribute the highest moral status. The way in which the direct nonconsequentialist makes explicit what is special about speech helps to make sense of a commonly experienced wariness regarding restrictions on speech we hate. We worry equally when the state seeks to prohibit the speech of sexists or Flat-Earthers. The consequentialist thinks this reaction is explained by attributing to us the belief that any state restriction of speech is the thin end of a wedge: we are discomforted by the thought of the muzzled sexist or Flat-Earther because we think our speech may be next. This may well be the right account of human psychology in these matters. But it is hardly an explanation of the prima facie wrongness of restrictions on lunatics' and sexists’ speech. Our discomfort is a moral discomfort. In bringing out the idea that speech is the expression of our essence, the direct nonconsequentialist is able to capture the true nature of our reaction to state restrictions on others' speech we do not particularly care for. Direct nonconsequentialism also gives substance to a powerful idea that some influential critics – notably, Catharine Mackinnon (1987) – find hopelessly abstract. This is the thought that “every time you strengthen free speech in one place, you strengthen it everywhere (164).” And seeing how direct nonconsequentialism does so will help illustrate some of the practical implications of this strategy for justifying free speech. Proponents of legislation designed to restrict or prohibit problematic speech and courts that rule on the constitutionality of such legislation, often reason in terms of how free speech interests are to be balanced with other interests. For example, proponents of speech codes argue that racist speech harms minorities’ interests in social and political equality; and in the United States, the constitutionality of restrictions on ‘fighting words’ is defended in light of the state’s interests in maintaining law and order. These arguments imply that the expressive rights of individual racists and troublemakers may sometimes be infringed in order to promote the good of some collective. But as the history of free speech debates reveal, once we admit that collective interests can trump individual rights, it is extremely difficult consistently to maintain the belief that a right to free speech imposes severe limits on what the state may do. The direct nonconsequentialist justification of free speech avoids this particular difficulty. Recall, we are working within the context of constitutional provisions – that is, we are thinking about rationales for stringent protections of speech, where these are understood as mechanisms for keeping the government out of some aspect of our lives. In this sense, such provisions express rights had by individuals against the state. But the direct nonconsequentialist’s account of the basis of these rights suggests that it is a mistake to think of them as radically individualistic. True, each of us has a right to free speech, but we have that right in virtue of our membership in a collective – the species H. sapiens – where every member has the same right for the same reason. Thus, in stressing that a universal feature of the species – language mastery – grounds protections on speech, the direct nonconsequentialist avoids individualizing the right to free speech in a way that makes it perpetually vulnerable to the assertion of some collective good. If we think of a person’s right to free speech as protecting just one aspect of his liberty among others, we run the risk of obscuring what is morally relevant about speech. The hatemonger and the pornographer each have a right to free speech, but this is not to be understood in terms of their being free to act on contingent desires they have. My occurrent desire to eat ice-cream holds no weight in the big scheme of things; even I would concede that it is permissible for the state to thwart my satisfying this desire, if doing so meant promoting some very important collective good. But speech is different. It is worthy of protection not because people want to say certain things, but (to repeat) because speech expresses our very nature. What someone wants to say is neither here nor there. Thus, in decoupling the value of free speech from individual desires, direct nonconsequentialism gives content to the idea that when we strengthen (protect) free speech in one place, we strengthen (protect) it everywhere.
In the absence of freedom of expression which includes a free and independent media, it is impossible to protect other rights, including the right to life. Once governments are able to draw a cloak of secrecy over their actions and to remain unaccountable for their actions then massive human rights violations can, and do, take place. For this reason alone the right to freedom of expression, specifically protected in the major international human rights treaties, must be considered to be a primary right. It is significant that one of the first indications of a government's intention to depart from democratic principles is the ever increasing control of information by means of gagging the media, and preventing the freeflow of information from abroad. At one end of the spectrum there are supposedly minor infringements of this fundamental right which occur daily in Western democracies and would include abuse of national security laws to prevent the publication of information which might be embarrassing to a given government: at the other end of the scale are the regimes of terror which employ the most brutal moves to suppress opposition, information and even the freedom to exercise religious beliefs. It has been argued, and will undoubtedly be discussed at this Hearing, that in the absence of free speech and an independent media, it is relatively easy for governments to capture, as it were, the media and to fashion them into instruments of propaganda, for the promotion of ethnic conflict, war and genocide. 2. Enshrining the right to freedom of expression The right to freedom of expression is formally protected in the major international treaties including the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In addition, it is enshrined in many national constitutions throughout the world, although this does not always guarantee its protection. Furthermore, freedom of expression is, amongst other human rights, upheld, even for those countries which are not signatories to the above international treaties through the concept of customary law which essentially requires that all states respect the human rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by virtue of the widespread or customary respect which has been built up in the post World War II years. 3. Is free speech absolute? While it is generally accepted that freedom of expression is, and remains the cornerstone of democracy, there are permitted restrictions encoded within the international treaties which in turn allow for a degree of interpretation of how free free speech should be. Thus, unlike the American First Amendment Rights which allow few, if any, checks on free speech or on the independence of the media, the international treaties are concerned that there should be a balance between competing rights: for example, limiting free speech or media freedom where it impinges on the individual's right to privacy; where free speech causes insult or injury to the rights and reputation of another; where speech is construed as incitement to violence or hatred, or where free speech would create a public disturbance. Given that these permitted restrictions are necessarily broad, the limits of free speech are consistently tested in national law courts and, perhaps even more importantly, in the regional courts such as the European Commission and Court of Human Rights. In recent years several landmark cases have helped to define more closely what restrictions may be imposed by government and under what circumstances. In particular, it has been emphasised by the European Court that any restriction must comply with a three-part test which requires that any such restriction should first of all be prescribed by law, and thus not arbitrarily imposed: proportionate to the legitimate aims pursued, and demonstrably necessary in a democratic society in order to protect the individual and/or the state. 4. Who censors what? Despite the rather strict rules which apply to restrictions on free speech that governments may wish to impose, many justifications are nevertheless sought by governments to suppress information which is inimical to their policies or their interests. These justifications include arguments in defence of national and/or state security, the public interst, including the need to protect public morals and public order and perfectly understandable attempts to prevent racism, violence, sexism, religious intolerance and damage to the indi-vidual's reputation or privacy. The mechanisms employed by governments to restrict the freeflow of information are almost endless and range from subtle economic pressures and devious methods of undermining political opponents and the independent media to the enactment of restrictive press laws and an insist-ence on licensing journalists and eventually to the illegal detention, torture and disappearances of journalists and others associated with the expression of independent views. 5. Examples of censorship To some the right to free speech may appear to be one of the fringe human rights, especially when compared to such violations as torture and extra-judicial killings. It is also sometimes difficult to dissuade the general public that censorship, generally assumed to be something to do with banning obscene books or magazines, is no bad thing! It requires a recognition of some of the fundamental principles of democracy to understand why censorship is so immensely dangerous. The conditon of democracy is that people are able to make choices about a wide variety of issues which affect their lives, including what they wish to see, read, hear or discuss. While this may seem a somewhat luxurious distinction preoccupying, perhaps, wealthy Western democracies, it is a comparatively short distance between government censorship of an offensive book to the silencing of political dissidents. And the distance between such silencing and the use of violence to suppress a growing political philosophy which a government finds inconvenient is even shorter. Censorship tends to have small beginnings and to grow rapidly. Allowing a government to have the power to deny people information, however trivial, not only sets in place laws and procedures which can and will be used by those in authority against those with less authority, but it also denies people the information which they must have in order to monitor their governments actions and to ensure accountability. There have been dramatic and terrible examples of the role that censorship has played in international politics in the last few years: to name but a few, the extent to which the media in the republics of former Yugoslavia were manipulated by government for purposes of propaganda; the violent role played by the government associated radio in Rwanda which incited citizens to kill each other in the name of ethnic purity and the continuing threat of murder issued by the Islamic Republic of Iran against a citizen of another country for having written a book which displeased them. 6. The link between poverty, war and denial of free speech There are undoubted connections between access to information, or rather the lack of it, and war, as indeed there are between poverty, the right to freedom of expression and development. One can argue that democracy aims to increase participation in political and other decision-making at all levels. In this sense democracy empowers people. The poor are denied access to information on decisions which deeply affect their lives, are thus powerless and have no voice; the poor are not able to have influence over their own lives, let alone other aspect of society. Because of this essential powerlessness, the poor are unable to influence the ruling elite in whose interests it may be to initiate conflict and wars in order to consolidate their own power and position. Of the 126 developing countries listed in the 1993 Human Development Report, war was ongoing in 30 countries and severe civil conflict in a further 33 countries. Of the total 63 countries in conflict, 55 are towards the bottom scale of the human development index which is an indicator of poverty. There seems to be no doubt that there is a clear association between poverty and war. It is reasonably safe to assume that the vast majority of people do not ever welcome war. They are normally coerced, more often than not by propaganda, into fear, extreme nationalist sentiments and war by their governments. If the majority of people had a democratic voice they would undoubtedly object to war. But voices are silenced. Thus, the freedom to express one's views and to challenge government decisions and to insist upon political rather than violent solutions, are necessary aspects of democracy which can, and do, avert war. Government sponsored propaganda in Rwanda, as in former Yugoslavia, succeeded because there weren't the means to challenge it. One has therefore to conclude that it is impossible for a particular government to wage war in the absence of a compliant media willing to indulge in government propaganda. This is because the government needs civilians to fight wars for them and also because the media is needed to re-inforce government policies and intentions at every turn. Part 2 is the Case Proper Contention One First amendment rights on college and university campuses are being violated. Alexander 16 (11-25-2016, "University of Tennessee Police Violate Independent Media's Rights at Public Protest," Cop Block, http://www.copblock.org/168632/university-of-tennessee-police-violate-independent-media-rights/) Free speech zones are illegal on public campuses. University of Tennessee Police Officers and official policies, practices, or customs resulted in a deprivation of my rights. Because the protest was not an official “event of national significance,” I cannot be forced, as a citizen or media, into a separate area, under duress. “The First Amendment represents “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964). Our institutions of higher learning play a central role in a system of freedom of expression because “the college…surround-ing (sic) environs is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas.’” Healy, 408 U.S. at180. In this regard, “the first danger to liberty lies in granting the State the power” to limit freedom of expression in contravention of the “background and tradition of thought and experiment that is at the center of our intellectual and philosophic tradition.” Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the Univ. of Va., 515 U.S. 819, 835 (1995). The First Amendment provides in pertinent part that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech or of the press,” and is applicable to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.” On November 10th This past Friday a group(s) held a protest regarding the election of Donald Trump. The Knox News Sentinal wrote: “The protest, loosely comprised of the campus’ Diversity Matters student coalition, started near the amphitheater outside the humanities building at 12:30 p.m. The group marched along around the building and up pedestrian walkway.” Trying to get the law or officers’ orders on record…I spoke to Officer A. O’neal. She stated “They just call us and tell us what we need to do.” She was speaking of campus policies and customs. I let her know that you don’t need to go through any procedure to be on public property. Soon after speaking with Officer O’neal, I headed to the protest that was taking place in the walkway on campus. Before I was able to get there, I was approached by Officer McCarter. His first words were, “Let’s go down here for a minute. You do not have permission to be here.” He pointed to and told me directed reporters to go to a “free speech zone.” I asked why I could not go on my way to the protest. I had planned on recording the events. I do not actively participate in protests as a protestor. I do not believe I have ever been a protestor. I have been to many protests to report on them. I was not asked by the officer if I was protesting or going to be protesting. I had no signs. I only record the events. He said that I was not affiliated with the university. We verbally disagreed on whether or not I could be there. Even though I knew I was on a public property, I asked if I was on public property for verification. The officer stated, “This is private property. It belongs to the State of Tennessee.” Again, I said, “Then it’s public property.” His response, “No Sir.” He said that I had to be student, staff, faculty or be here to conduct business. Again, university policy. I asked what happens next. He said I needed to go to the free speech zone, which was not near the protest. I asked what would happen if I did not do that. He said that I could be taken to jail for criminal trespass. My press credentials were visible on my neck the entire day, and I was the only one at the event or at my location with both a photo ID and press credentials on my neck. My media credentials include my photo, date of expiration, address, signature and my affiliations and large bold letters PRESS. He looked at my press credentials and sent me to an and was eight ft. long “free speech zone.” The officer then mentioned I needed to go stay with my friend. The “friend,” I had seen only once before in my life when I was covering the election. I said he was not with me. I was only covering him because that is where the news was at the time. This was clarified, and I was still told to go to the free speech zone by officer McCarter. I was respectful, but I was forced to go to the free speech zone as I verbally protested to the officer. My rights were violated and under threat of arrest, again, I had no choice but to follow the officer’s commands in order to get more clarification and offer respect to the officer. Revolutionary thinkers will be most vulnerable to suppression under regimes that reserves the right to criminalize any unsatisfactory speech. It’s easy to think that restrictions will only be applied to those who legitimately pose some threat- like groups spewing hate speech- but this ignores the nature of politics and the current social climate. Bernstein 03 (David E. Bernstein, Defending the First Amendment from Antidiscrimination Laws, 82 N.C. L. Rev. 223, 240-41 (2003). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=489063 David E. Bernstein is the George Mason University Foundation Professor at the George Mason University School of Law) Ironically, protecting freedom of expression from government regulation ultimately will benefit left-wing scholars who support censorship, such as radical feminists and critical race theorists, as much as anyone. These scholars advocate speech regulations while living primarily in the very left-wing academic world, where their views are only marginally out of the mainstream. Yet, if the First Amendment is weakened sufficiently by antidiscrimination law that the government gains the power to suppress speech more broadly, feminists and critical race theorists, as holders of views wildly at variance to those of the public at large, are likely to be among the first victims. FN125 That leftists writing in a society that has long been and continues to be hostile to their ideology FN126 would want to weaken the principle that government may not suppress expression because of hostility to its viewpoint seems counterintuitive, to say the least. Indeed, many critical race scholars and feminists argue that America is innately and irredeemably racist and sexist. FN127 One need not accept this vision to realize that the Critical Race and Radical Feminist Party, if such a thing existed, would not exactly sweep the American electorate anytime soon. FN128 Because many critical race theorists and feminists claim to believe that America is so hostile to their values, they should find constitutional protections against the majority are especially meaningful. Indeed, if left-wing professors wish to preserve their own academic freedom, they will need to learn to be more tolerant of those whose speech they currently seek to suppress. For the last several decades, pressure to censor free speech on university campuses has come primarily from the left. The current war against terrorism, and the frequent dissent within the academy to that war, has shifted the dynamic, putting many radical professors on the defensive. The First Amendment, and the values of academic freedom that it has fostered, will protect the vast majority of dissenters, but only because the radical's war against the First Amendment has as yet been largely unsuccessful. Of course, left-wing censors imagine a world in which the government silences only their ideological enemies, and they advocate censorship as an integral part of a much broader scheme for reconstructing society along egalitarian lines. Yet, it should be a cardinal principle of political advocacy that one should not support granting the government regulatory powers that one would not want applied to oneself. This principle would not only reduce hypocrisy, but also remind political activists that politics is unpredictable, driven by power rather than morality. Power given to government is often unexpectedly ultimately used against those who advocated that the power be exercised against others. As William Graham Sumner remarked many years ago: The advocate of government interference takes it for granted that he and his asociates will have the administration of their legislative device in their own hands. . . . They never appear to remember that the device, when once set up, will itself be the prize of a struggle; that it will serve one set of purposes as well as another, so that after all the only serious question is: who will get it?" FN129 This is a lesson that academic advocates of censorship would do well to learn. This is especially true for students of color. Black students are unsure of their first amendment protections. Newkirk 16. Vann R. Newkirk Ii, 4-7-2016, "Why Fears About Free Speech on College Campus Are Misguided," Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/first-amendment-college-campus-millennials/477171/ Black students are seem to be less sure about First Amendment protections than their white counterparts, though. Across each of the five freedoms—religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition—black students were less likely to rate them as secure; two-thirds of all black students said they believe freedom of assembly is under threat. While certain writers have caricatured racial “social-justice warriors” as anti-freedom zealots who simply wish to curtail speech they don’t agree with, this data point provides a reality check. How does that caricature fit with this survey’s suggestion that black students are more afraid than anyone of losing their freedoms? Recent events such as the University of Missouri protests especially bring this into focus. After professor Melissa Click stonewalled a reporter at a protester camp, that incident became an opportunity to chide student protesters. But the black students involved seemed to be deeply concerned about their own rights to assemble and speak out freely, a fear that was well-informed by America’s history of crushing racial dissent. The apparent gulf between student viewpoints and commentary could have a deeper cause: Some American students may have novel conceptualizations of the appropriate boundaries of free speech. According to this survey, the vast majority of college students, even women and black students, believe campuses should not restrict political views as a matter of policy, even if those views are offensive to some. Students tend to but draw the line at slurs and ethnically stereotypical costumes, however, with 69 and 63 percent, respectively, believing campuses should have the ability to restrict those kinds of expressions. A previous study has indicated that other adults are far less enthusiastic about creating policy to minimize slurs, which showcases just how much students and older adults differ in their views of free speech.
Contention Two Removing restrictions prevents prohibiting speech which is an essential freedom—restrictions in the status quo prevent people from acting on their agency no matter how miniscule the restrictions is. Lambert 16 (Saber, writer @ being libertarian, “The Degradation of Free Speech and Personal Liberty,” April 9, 2016, https://beinglibertarian.com/the-degradation-of-free-speech-and-personal-liberty// Many individuals in society claim that they live in a free nation full of individual liberties. North American constitutions such as the ones implemented in the United States and Canada allow for freedom of speech. However, it is evident that the government has implemented and enforced policies to the contrary. There are a plethora of entertainment programs that have strict censorship policies that go against freedom of speech as it disallows, for example, television producers and musicians to use words or phrases that may be offensive directly or indirectly to a person or group. Regardless, if it is possibly offensive to one or many, the U.S. and Canadian constitutions allow for individuals to say very controversial things. However, restricting one’s freedom of speech in the form of censorship greatly impacts the exchange of ideas that are said to contribute to the (possibly) improvement of society. It is not up to the government to decide what individuals choose to say, read, or hear, and it should not be up to the government to decide what is acceptable within society. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States controls all forms of television broadcasting and claims “it is a violation of federal law to air obscene programming at any time. It is also a violation of federal law to air indecent programming or profane language during certain hours.” It is quite clear that censorship by institutional power is a way to control a society in the sense that it determines what individuals in society can legally say, hear, or read. It is against the majoritarian virtues and values that are constitutionally instilled within a society, and is often paralleled to a form of dictatorship – no matter how miniscule. Lack of free speech re-create the majority/minority divide that means the minority loses out on having their voice heard. Cartwright 3 (Will, “Mill on Freedom of Discussion,” Richmond Journal of Philosophy 5 (Autumn 2003), http://www.richmond-philosophy.net/rjp/back_issues/rjp5_cartwright.pdf// Though freedom of discussion was widely accepted even in Mill’s own day, he thinks that the arguments for it are not widely appreciated, something that is no doubt still true, and he holds, as he makes clear in chapter II, that one should not have beliefs without knowing the reasons for them. Moreover these arguments for free discussion have a wider relevance to issues of liberty, for Mill holds that these arguments, suitably adapted, are also arguments for freedom of action.2 There is a third reason for Mill’s emphasis on the arguments for free discussion and for freedom generally. He thinks that freedom is increasingly threatened, not so much by the law as by an oppressive public opinion, in England at least.3 Curbing this threat requires a widespread appreciation of why freedom of discussion and other freedoms are important. And the character of Mill’s arguments for free discussion is instructive in this context. They do not particularly emphasise the predicament of those who have been forcibly silenced. Thus we do not hear about the peculiar frustrations of being prohibited from expressing one’s view of the world and exploring it with others. Nor do we hear about the individual’s right to free speech. As a utilitarian Mill rejects the idea of natural rights, and emphasises that society as a whole, not just the silenced individual, loses by the repression of free discussion. But this means that the social majority, which is the source of the oppressive public opinion that Mill fears, also loses by repression. And it is the case, as we will see, that Mill’s detailed arguments emphasise that silencing people is in one way or another counterproductive, not just for society generally, but for the silencers in particular. One cannot help feeling that an important part of Mill’s aim is to persuade those occasionally inclined to curb free discussion, who will surely sometimes include Mill’s own civilised readers, and therefore us, that such curbs are self-defeating. So Mill has his reasons for devoting so much of his discussion to the case for a freedom that we all ostensibly believe in already. The reason why, in contrast, he has so little to say about the limits to this freedom, dealing with them in the first paragraph of chapter III, is perhaps in part because his position on this is apparently very simple. However it is fair to add that Mill elaborates this issue, with reference to freedom more generally, later in On Liberty.4 Mill’s Case for Liberty of Discussion Mill sets out his arguments for freedom of speech in chapter II of On Liberty. They are linked by a common concern with truth. The general idea is that truth is a casualty of the suppression of free discussion. In effect there are three arguments that are attached to three possible scenarios. In the first you are to imagine that a majority who share a certain view seek to silence the minority who disagree. You are further to suppose that the majority view is false, as it happens, and the minority view is true. Mill argues that in these circumstances it is disastrous to silence the minority, disastrous for the majority, that is, because there is now no means of releasing it from its belief in a falsehood. If however the minority remains free to express its doubts about the majority view, then there is a chance that the majority will be brought to see the falsity of its view. This is a powerful argument. The second scenario is the same as the first except that this time the majority view is true and the minority view false. Here a concern for truth might seem to support silencing the minority since its view is false. Suppressing falsehoods presumably supports truth. However Mill ingeniously denies this. He argues that if the majority silences its opponents, it will never have to defend its belief and over time will forget the arguments for it. But to have a belief without knowing the reasons for it is no way to hold a belief according to Mill. The belief may be true, but it is held as a prejudice. As well as losing its grasp of the arguments for its belief, Mill adds that the majority will in due course even lose a sense of the real meaning and substance of its belief. What earlier may have been a vital belief will be reduced in time to a series of phrases retained by rote. The belief will be held as a dead dogma rather than as a living truth. Finally, beliefs held like this are extremely vulnerable to serious opposition when it is eventually encountered. They are more likely to collapse because their supporters do not know how to defend them or even what they really mean. Mill thinks history repeatedly demonstrates this process at work and offers Christianity as an illustrative example. By Christianity Mill means the ethical core of the religion rather than its full apparatus of metaphysical beliefs, and he seems to think this ethical core is true. But by suppressing opposition to it over the centuries Christians have ironically weakened rather than strengthened Christian belief, and Mill thinks this explains the decline of Christianity in the modern world. Truth is, after all, a casualty of the suppression of falsehood. Mill’s third scenario involves both parties of opinion, majority and minority, having a portion of the truth but not the whole of it. He regards this as the most common of the three scenarios, and his argument here is very simple. To enlarge its grasp of the truth the majority must allow the minority to express its partially truthful view. These three scenarios exhaust for Mill the possible permutations on the distribution of truth, and he holds that in each case the search for truth is best served by allowing free discussion. Assessment of Mill’s Case The first and third of Mill’s arguments are the most persuasive. If the majority view is wholly or partially false, then allowing critical discussion surely enhances the chances of truth replacing error. But if the majority view is already true, as in the second argument, allowing critical discussion does involve risk. In the rough and tumble of public debate people may be seduced away from truth to false ideas. What Mill does in this argument is to draw attention to the risks to truth involved in the opposite strategy of silencing criticism. But the balance of risks here makes this argument less persuasive than the other two.
2/4/17
GHILL Natives Aff
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Klein Oak AG | Judge:
Natives aff
1AC
Part 1: Case
====The resolution demands that we discuss nuclear power through the lens of the liberal Humanist discourse of the settler colonial state that will always undermine the interests and the demands of the natives for land. We constantly see the use of rhetoric in discussions of nuclear power framed around protecting the settler and to keep them from feeling guilty. This discussion would merely manifest re-center the colonizer and the colonized systems of exploitation that reproduces because of the grand structure of settler colonialism. ====
Meet Charley Colorado, a man part of the Navajo who lived in his ancestral sheepherding grounds where the United States had uranium mine shafts in 1957. Today he faces extreme consequences as a result of the US's failure to notify indigenous people with the dangers and consequences of radioactive waste that they were being exposed to.
Brandon Loomis, the Republic, azcentral.com Now, Colorado, 87, spends much of his time wedged between a medical AND Linda. "They didn't tell the people. None of them knew."
====The pacific islands and southwestern regions of the United States are plagued by nuclear colonialism- the resolution's focus on countries relationship to nuclear power paves over those whose land an lives have been irreparably changed by nuclear energy. We much attune our discourse to those areas that are constantly asked to be forgotten==== Hsu, Hsuan. "Nuclear Colonialism." Environment and Society Portal. Virtual Exhibitions, n.d. Web. Sept.-Oct. 2016. The impact of US nuclear testing had been ~is~particularly heavy on two AND to the international network of indigenous rights and sovereignty.—Kuletz 2002, 132
Nuclear testing, uranium mining, and waste dumping has all occured at the expense of Indigenous lives and their land. While the countries gain access to the benefits of entering the nuclear community, all the advantages to nuclear energy that the negative discusses come at the bodily and cultural destruction of native bodies, there is blood on their hands.
Endres 09 (Endres, Danielle. "The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.1 (2009): 39-60. JSTOR. Web. 19 Aug. 2016.) Since the Manhattan Project, we have seen the Janus-faced development of nuclear AND through contaminated soil and water, which could harm animal and plant life.
====Thus, we demand that the production of nuclear power ought to be prohibited. The 1AC is a form of indigenous activism and resistance that is key to breakdown the discursive structures that maintain global settler colonialism. Nuclear colonialism is not only witnessed in the acts of nuclear waste and dumping but also the rhetoric in which we discuss nuclear power will always exclude the native. ==== Endres 09 (Endres, Danielle. "The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.1 (2009): 39-60.JSTOR. Web. 19 Aug. 2016.) American Indian resistance is an important part of the story of ~to~ nuclear AND that would power the atomic bomb and help America stare down the Soviets.
Settler colonialism is the impetus and structure that produces indigenous, racial violence, and neoliberalism. White settler alienation from land and maintenance of excess on land that sets the impetus for neoliberal domination- any alternative that endorses unclear power or the state will always reproduce indigenous violence
Tuck and Yang 12 (Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, Eve Tuck State University of New York at New Paltz K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego)TR Incommensurability is an acknowledgement that decolonization will require a change in the order of the AND . Today, 85 of people incarcerated at Angola, die there.
Reliance on state based solutions for native persons only involves the reification of settler colonial oppression
Barker 12 (Adam J. Barker, Department of Geography, University of Leicester, "(RE)ORDERING THE NEW WORLD: SETTLER COLONIALISM, SPACE, AND IDENTITY", Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Leicester, Page 225-234, December 2012) Historical geographer Cole Harris chose to reprint his essay 'The Good Life Around Idaho AND to differentiate between genocidal acts based on arbitrary distinctions, splitting colonial hairs.
Part 2 is the ROB
The ROB is to vote for the debater that best deconstructs settler colonialism. I advocate the judge to adopt an alternative framework through red pedagogy. Decolonization is a movement that is a constant process to challenge entrenched thoughts and modes of thinking.
Grande 4 (Sandy, "Red Pedagogy," pg. 165-167) As we raise yet another generation in a nation at war, it is even AND ( 1999) model for self-determined and self-directed communities.
Only decolonization can solve other forms of oppression within settler culture.
Churchill, 3 (Ward Churchill, I am Indigenist: Notes on the Ideology of the Fourth World, Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader, p. _) Not only is it perfectly reasonable to assert that a restoration of native control over unceded lands within the U. S. would do nothing to perpetuate such problems as sexism and classism, but the reconstitution of indigenous societies this would entail stands to free the affected portions of North America from such maladies altogether. Moreover, it can be said that the process should have a tangible impact in terms of diminishing such things elsewhere. The principle is this: sexism, racism, and all the rest arose here as concomitants to the emergence and consolidation of the eurocentric state form of sociopolitical and economic organization. Everything the state does, everything it can do, is entirely contingent upon its maintaining its internal cohesion, a cohesion signified above all by its pretended territorial integrity, its ongoing domination of Indian Country. Given this, it seems obvious that the literal dismemberment of the state inherent to Indian land recovery correspondingly reduces the ability of the state to sustain the imposition of objectionable relations within itself. It follows that realization of indigenous land rights serves to undermine or destroy the ability of the status quo to continue imposing a racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, militaristic order upon nonindians. A brief aside: anyone with doubts as to whether it's possible to bring about the dismemberment from within of a superpower state in this day and age ought to sit down and have a long talk with a guy named Mikhail Gorbachev. It would be better yet if you could chew the fat with Leonid Brezhnev, a man who we can be sure would have replied in all sincerity—only three decades ago—that this was the most outlandish idea he'd ever heard. Well, look on a map today, and see if you can find the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It ain't there, my friends. Instead, you're seeing, and you're seeing it more and more, the reemergence of the very nations Léon Trotsky and his colleagues consigned to the "dustbin of history" clear back at the beginning of the century. These megastates are not immutable. They can be taken apart. They can be destroyed. But first we have to decide that we can do it, and that we will do it. So, all things considered, when indigenist movements like AIM advance slogans like "U. S. Out of North America, " nonindian radicals shouldn't react defensively. They should cheer. They should see what they might do to help. When they respond defensively to sentiments like those expressed by AIM, what they are ultimately defending is the very government, the very order they claim to oppose so resolutely. And if they manifest this contradiction often enough, consistently enough, pathologically enough, then we have no alternative but to take them at their word, that they really are at some deep level or other aligned—all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—with the mentality which endorses our permanent dispossession and disenfranchisement, our continuing oppression, our ultimate genocidal obliteration as self-defining and self-determining peoples. In other words, they make themselves part of the problem rather than becoming part of the solution.
Only having a willingness to exterminate the settler can ensure the destruction of U.S. colonialism.
Meister, 11 (Robert Meister, prof of Social and Political Thought @ UC Santa Cruz, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights, p. google books, note: ev is gender-modified) The Roots of Genocide The secular logic of genocide arises from the moral psychology AND return-to-sender of the genocidal message of the colonialism itself.
Evaluating abstract philosophies before issues of oppression is nonsensical – it's just a way to avoid confronting oppression
Matsuda '89 ~Mari, Associate Professor of Law @ the University of Hawaii, "When the First Quail Calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method", 11 Women's Rts. L. Rep. 7 1989~ The multiple consciousness I urge lawyers to attain is not a random ability to see AND for these writers as they enter into mainstream debates about law and theory.
9/17/16
Natives Aff
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 2 | Opponent: St Johns AW | Judge: Marilyn Myrick
Natives aff
Part 1: Case
====The resolution demands that we discuss nuclear power through the lens of the liberal Humanist discourse of the settler colonial state that will always undermine the interests and the demands of the natives for land. We constantly see the use of rhetoric in discussions of nuclear power framed around protecting the settler and to keep them from feeling guilty. This discussion would merely manifest re-center the colonizer and the colonized systems of exploitation that reproduces because of the grand structure of settler colonialism. ====
Meet Charley Colorado, a man part of the Navajo who lived in his ancestral sheepherding grounds where the United States had uranium mine shafts in 1957. Today he faces extreme consequences as a result of the US's failure to notify indigenous people with the dangers and consequences of radioactive waste that they were being exposed to.
Brandon Loomis, the Republic, azcentral.com Now, Colorado, 87, spends much of his time wedged between a medical AND Linda. "They didn't tell the people. None of them knew."
====The pacific islands and southwestern regions of the United States are plagued by nuclear colonialism- the resolution's focus on countries relationship to nuclear power paves over those whose land an lives have been irreparably changed by nuclear energy. We much attune our discourse to those areas that are constantly asked to be forgotten==== Hsu, Hsuan. "Nuclear Colonialism." Environment and Society Portal. Virtual Exhibitions, n.d. Web. Sept.-Oct. 2016. The impact of US nuclear testing had been ~is~particularly heavy on two AND to the international network of indigenous rights and sovereignty.—Kuletz 2002, 132
Nuclear testing, uranium mining, and waste dumping has all occured at the expense of Indigenous lives and their land. While the countries gain access to the benefits of entering the nuclear community, all the advantages to nuclear energy that the negative discusses come at the bodily and cultural destruction of native bodies, there is blood on their hands.
Endres 09 (Endres, Danielle. "The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.1 (2009): 39-60. JSTOR. Web. 19 Aug. 2016.) Since the Manhattan Project, we have seen the Janus-faced development of nuclear AND through contaminated soil and water, which could harm animal and plant life.
====Thus, we demand that the production of nuclear power ought to be prohibited. The 1AC is a form of indigenous activism and resistance that is key to breakdown the discursive structures that maintain global settler colonialism. Nuclear colonialism is not only witnessed in the acts of nuclear waste and dumping but also the rhetoric in which we discuss nuclear power will always exclude the native. ==== Endres 09 (Endres, Danielle. "The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.1 (2009): 39-60.JSTOR. Web. 19 Aug. 2016.) American Indian resistance is an important part of the story of ~to~ nuclear AND that would power the atomic bomb and help America stare down the Soviets.
Settler colonialism is the impetus and structure that produces indigenous, racial violence, and neoliberalism. White settler alienation from land and maintenance of excess on land that sets the impetus for neoliberal domination- any alternative that endorses unclear power or the state will always reproduce indigenous violence
Tuck and Yang 12 (Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, Eve Tuck State University of New York at New Paltz K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego)TR Incommensurability is an acknowledgement that decolonization will require a change in the order of the AND . Today, 85 of people incarcerated at Angola, die there.
Part 2 is Theory
Procedural arguments like T and theory are just another tool to maintain settler colonialism and whiteness in debate and this is a reverse voting issue – their reading of procedurals replicates the disciplinary power of the state over native populations. Think about it, the negative will constantly change the goal posts of what is considered "acceptable" to benefit their privileged stance in debate, this is no different than the history of broken treaties and trading in glass beads that have been staples of whiteness. Their interpretation of debate is an attempt to erase Indigeneity to create another space of exception which is key to maintain the sovereignty of settlerism
Barker 12 (Adam J. Barker, Department of Geography, University of Leicester, "(RE)ORDERING THE NEW WORLD: SETTLER COLONIALISM, SPACE, AND IDENTITY", Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Leicester, Page 225-234, December 2012) Historical geographer Cole Harris chose to reprint his essay 'The Good Life Around Idaho AND to differentiate between genocidal acts based on arbitrary distinctions, splitting colonial hairs.
Part 3 is the ROB
The ROB is to vote for the debater that best deconstructs settler colonialism. I advocate the judge to adopt an alternative framework through red pedagogy. Decolonization is a movement that is a constant process to challenge entrenched thoughts and modes of thinking.
Grande 4 (Sandy, "Red Pedagogy," pg. 165-167) As we raise yet another generation in a nation at war, it is even AND ) model for self-determined and self-directed communities.
Evaluating abstract philosophies before issues of oppression is nonsensical – it's just a way to avoid confronting oppression
Matsuda '89 ~Mari, Associate Professor of Law @ the University of Hawaii, "When the First Quail Calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method", 11 Women's Rts. L. Rep. 7 1989~ The multiple consciousness I urge lawyers to attain is not a random ability to see AND for these writers as they enter into mainstream debates about law and theory.
Welcome to the University of California Berkeley where recently administrators have made it clear that only an actual riot would justify canceling a fascist’s on campus lecture, but where just last semester, the same administration shut down a legitimate course on Palestine resistance to colonization. As Steven Salaita notes, the distinction between each situation is a relationship to power as it relates to free speech.
It’s important to keep in mind that free speech, in both philosophy and practice, is attached to structures of power (seen and unseen, discernible and oblique, steady and unstable). Despite the state’s professions of fairness and benevolence, free speech is never fixed or impartial. It is prosecuted according to circumstance. It is reified based on the needs of the audience. And it is conditioned by race, gender, nationality, class, religion, ideology, culture, sexuality and so forth. Steven Salaita, Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut, February 6, 2017, Facebook, accessed 2/17/17, https://www.facebook.com/steven.salaita/posts/10212081166492934 This is not an isolated incident, on campuses across the nation there exists a free speech exception when it comes to discussions of Israel-Palestine and settler colonialism. Students, educators, and activist clubs are silenced and punished for their activism against violence occurring in Palestine. Palestine Legal 15 (“The Palestinian Exception To Free Speech”, Palestine Legal, an independent organization dedicated to protecting the civil and constitutional rights of people in the United States who speak out for Palestinian freedom, September 2015, https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/09/Palestine20Exception20Report20Final.pdf) Over the last decade, a dynamic movement in support of Palestinian human rights, particularly active in US colleges and universities, has helped raise public awareness regarding the Israeli government’s violations of international law, as well as the role of corporations and the US government in facilitating these abuses. This activism, fueled by Israel’s increasingly destructive assaults on Gaza, presents a robust and sustainable challenge to the longstanding orthodoxy in the United States that excuses, justifies, and otherwise supports discriminatory Israeli government policies.¶ Fearful of a shift in domestic public opinion, Israel’s fiercest defenders in the United States—a network of advocacy organizations, public relations firms, and think tanks—have intensified their efforts to stifle criticism of Israeli government policies. Rather than engage such criticism on its merits, these groups leverage their significant resources and lobbying power to pressure universities, government actors, and other institutions to censor or punish advocacy in support of Palestinian rights. In addition, high-level Israeli government figures, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and wealthy benefactors such as Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban have reportedly participated in strategic meetings to oppose Palestine activism, particularly boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns.¶ These heavy-handed tactics often have their desired effect, driving institutions to enact a variety of punitive measures against human rights activists, such as administrative sanctions, censorship, intrusive investigations, viewpoint-based restriction of advocacy, and even criminal prosecutions. Such efforts intimidate activists for Palestinian human rights, chill criticism of Israeli government practices, and impede a fair-minded dialogue on the pressing question of Palestinian rights.¶ This Report, the first of its kind, documents the suppression of Palestine advocacy in the United States. In 2014, Palestine Legal—a nonprofit legal and advocacy organization supporting Palestine activism—responded to 152 incidents of censorship, punishment, or other burdening of advocacy for Palestinian rights and received 68 additional requests for legal assistance in anticipation of such actions. In the first six months of 2015 alone, Palestine Legal responded to 140 incidents and 33 requests for assistance in anticipation of potential suppression. These numbers understate the phenomenon, as many advocates who are unaware of their rights or afraid of attracting further scrutiny stay silent and do not report incidents of suppression. The overwhelming majority of these incidents—89 percent in 2014 and 80 percent in the first half of 2015—targeted students and scholars, a reaction to the increasingly central role universities play in the movement for Palestinian rights.¶ The tactics used to silence advocacy for Palestinian rights frequently follow recognizable patterns. Activists and their protected speech are routinely maligned as uncivil, divisive, antisemitic, or supportive of terrorism. Institutional actors—primarily in response to pressure from Israel advocacy groups—erect bureaucratic barriers that thwart efforts to discuss abuses of Palestinian rights and occasionally even cancel events or programs altogether. Sometimes the consequences are more severe: universities suspend student groups, deny tenure to faculty, or fire them outright in response to their criticism of Israel. Meritless lawsuits and legal threats, which come from a variety of Israel advocacy groups identified in this Report, burden Palestinian rights advocacy and chill speech even when dismissed by the courts. Campaigns by such groups have even resulted in legislation to curtail Palestine advocacy, criminal investigations, and filing of charges against activists.¶ Specifically, the Report documents the following tactics employed to undermine advocacy for Palestinian rights. Zionism is an extension of the global settler colonial structure that seeks to dispossess and erase indigenous Palestinians. Anti-settler politics, dissent, and discussion is crucial to understanding and dismantling the violent project of Zionism. Salamanca et al. 2012 (“Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine”, settler colonial studies volume 2, issue 1 (2012), Omar Jabary Salamanca is completing a PhD in political and human geography at the Middle East and North Africa Research Group, Ghent University. Mezna Qato is completing a DPhil in history at the University of Oxford. Kareem Rabie is completing his PhD in the Department of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Sobhi Samour is completing his PhD in the department of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. http://cmes.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Past-is-Present-Settler-Colonialism-in-Palestine.pdf) From the earliest Palestinian accounts to the vast majority of contemporary research, the crimes committed against Palestinian society by the Zionist movement and the state it built have been well recorded. Zionism is an ideology and a political movement that subjects Palestine and Palestinians to structural and violent forms of dispossession, land appropriation, and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish state and society. As for other settler colonial movements, for Zionism, the control of land is a zero-sum contest fought against the indigenous population. The drive to control the maximum amount of land is at its centre. The continued existence of Palestinians, therefore, poses severe problems for the completion of the Zionist project, and, consequently, informs Israeli state policies against Palestinians inside Israel, in the Occupied Territories, and in exile. Consequently, transfer – a Zionist euphemism for the coordinated, at times randomly applied, plethora of legal, military, and economic tactics to expel Palestinians – has been part of Israeli policy and public discourse since the creation of the state.2 As Israeli historian and neoconservative Benny Morris remarked, ‘had David Ben Gurion carried out full expulsion – rather than partial – he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations’.¶ Yet, plagued by ‘instability’, the settler colonial structure undergirding Israeli practices takes on a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, home demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration regarding security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial powers.¶ In the absence of a cohesive framework, scholarship often appears to catalogue Zionist practices and offences against Palestinians as a series of distinct – yet related – events. The Palestinian nation is pushed from one catastrophe to another as the Zionist project accelerates. However, viewed through the lens of settler colonialism, the Nakba in 1948 is not simply a precondition for the creation of Israel or the outcome of early Zionist ambitions; the Nakba is not a singular event but is manifested today in the continuing subjection of Palestinians by Israelis. In order to move forward and create a transformative, liberatory research agenda, it is necessary to analyse Zionism’s structural continuities and the ideology that informs Israeli policies and practices in Israel and toward Palestinians everywhere. In other words, while Israel’s tactics have often been described as settler colonial, the settler colonial structure underpinning them must be a central object of analysis.4 By bringing together scholars of both comparative settler colonialism and Palestine studies, this special issue intends to further a nascent conversation, and hopes to provide a spark for future cross-disciplinary research that contributes to both fields.¶ Despite the endurance of Israeli settler colonialism, settler colonial analysis has largely fallen into disuse in Palestine studies. As a framework, settler colonialism once served as a primary ideological and political touchstone for the Palestinian national movement, and informed the intellectual work of many committed activists and revolutionary scholars, whether Palestinians, Israelis, or allies.5¶ Today, research tends to focus on Palestine as an exceptional case, constituted in local contexts, in particular the West Bank. But these problems are far from simply the result of shifts in academic knowledge and practice: the Palestinian liberation movement has seen a series of ruptures and changes in emphasis, and in many ways scholarly production accurately mirrors the dynamics of incoherent contemporary Palestinian politics. Recent Palestinian political history has been a long march away from a liberation agenda and towards a piecemeal approach to the establishment of some kind of sovereignty under the structure of the Israeli settler colonial regime. In this environment, it is not surprising that even scholarship written in solidarity with Palestinians tends to shy away from structural questions. Much of the contemporary literature tends to take on micro-political issues or Israeli administrative practices within a given context and prodigiously overwork them. But when did Palestinians ever find themselves in a ‘post-colonial’ condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land and for return become a ‘postconflict’ situation? When did Israel become a ‘post-Zionist’ society? When did indigenous Palestinians in the Galilee (for example) become an ‘ethnic minority’? And when did the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and the consequent fortification of Palestinian reserves become ‘state-building’?¶ Moreover, the trend towards studying the occupation often internalises it as an ontological category distinct from the larger structures of Israeli settler colonialism. The occupation imposes boundaries on space and time; and categories, discourses, and materialities that are embedded in colonial power relations are operationalised in this literature. The Green Line, the border between Israel and the Palestinian reserves, is one example of this phenomenon: it has become a powerful symbolic and material signifier that enforces, and takes for granted, the fragmentation of the Palestinian polity. With few exceptions, it is a line that is rarely crossed in scholarly accounts of Palestine – in either direction.¶ Different Palestinian populations have come to be represented as isolated, analytically separate, pieces of an impossible puzzle. In addition, the focus on the second stage of colonisation, the 1967 occupation, emphasises settlement by Israelis in the West Bank and absolves previous generations of Zionists and Israel itself of settler colonialism.¶ ‘For natives’, as Patrick Wolfe puts it, ‘the issue is that, at the hands of the settlers, they face physical and symbolic elimination’.¶ Given such a threat, the central question for committed scholarship and liberatory movements should be how to develop a praxis that brings back decolonisation and liberation as the imperative goal. The advantage of advancing settler colonialism as a relevant interpretative framework for the study of Zionism is not only that it can offer conceptual and political possibilities for how we read Palestine today, but that it also dismantles deep-seeded analyses and assumptions sustaining claims of exceptionalism. It brings Israel into comparison with cases such as South Africa, Rhodesia and French-Algeria, and earlier settler colonial formations such as the¶ United States, Canada or Australia, rather than the contemporary European democracies to which Israel seeks comparison. For Palestine, it means the reiteration of the fact that Palestinians are an indigenous people, and an alignment of Palestine scholarship with indigenous and native studies.¶ In this context, John Collins notes, the challenge is to bring all the relevant tools of critically engaged scholarship … in order to pursue two related objectives: to understand the complex set of structures and processes … that have combined to produce the intolerable reality evident today; and to think creatively about how this understanding might enable individuals to transform that reality.¶ Otherwise, settler colonialism remains a descriptive category that does not move beyond sentiment and into strategy. While activists, both in Palestine and outside it, continue to push back against Zionist encroachment, intensify the demand for equal rights, and build a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement aimed at shaming and delegitimising Israel internationally, the creative offerings of the settler colonial studies paradigm remain underutilised. This lack of rigorous engagement has consequences for movement building. The historic response to settler colonialism has been the struggle for decolonisation; in the absence of a settler colonial analysis, Palestinian strategies have tended to target or accommodate settler colonial outcomes rather than aiming to decolonise the structure itself.
Thus, Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict constitutionally protected free speech.
The affirmative advocacy is not a pragmatic course of action nor an acceptance of the state but rather a radical rejection of status quo settler-colonialist policies and practices that seek to silence and erase indigenous populations. Our method of anarcha-indigenism cultivates a “Meeting-Point” for ethical scholarship and resistance which Challenges multiple modes of violence with an uncompromising refusal of state involvement that is key to break down settler colonialism. Lewis 12. . (Adam Gary Lewis, Degree of Masters of Arts, Cultural Studies @ Queen’s University. “Decolonizing Anarchism: Expanding Anarcha-Indigenism in Theory and Practice” ProQuest KevC) Anarcha-Indigenism To begin thinking about anarcha-Indigenism as an emerging political standpoint that brings Indigenous, anarchist and feminist perspectives together as a meeting point of theory, action and solidarity, a general definition or outline of the term needs to be considered. This concept finds one of its first articulations in the work of Taiaiake Alfred from his 2005 book Wasase6, as anarcho-Indigenism. In this book Alfred argues for a politics of resurgence and resistance within Indigenous communities – reconnecting to traditional governance structures and lifeways, as well as taking stock of current colonial realities and terrain of resistance. He argues for a militant warrior ethic of Indigenous resistance outside the state, with an aim of creating autonomous self-determining spaces for Indigenous communities. At this point he suggests that militancy must necessarily operate within the realm of nonviolence, not because of some sort of moral superiority but in part because the forces of the Canadian state are still vast compared to the ever-growing strength of Indigenous communities. Part of resistance efforts, therefore, must be to seek to begin to build strong autonomous communities of resurgence and resistance outside the state. Alfred (2005, 45) summarizes his project early on in the book as anarcha-Indigenism. I might suggest, as a starting point, conceptualizing anarcho-indigenism. Why? And why this term? Conveyance of the indigenous warrior ethic will require its codification in some form –a creed and an ethical framework for thinking through challenges. To take root in people’s minds the new ethic will have to capture the spirit of a warrior in battle and bring it to politics. How might this spirit be described in contemporary terms related to political though and movement? The two elements that come to my mind are indigenous, evoking cultural and spiritual rootedness in this land and the Onkwehonwe7 struggle for justice and freedom, and the political philosophy and movement that is fundamentally anti-institutional, radically democratic, and committed to taking action to force change: anarchism. Alfred goes onto detail further points of resistance under anarcho-Indigenism with a focus on decentralization, direct democracy and several other commonalities between anarchist and Indigenous philosophies namely: A rejection of alliances with legalized systems of oppression, non-participation in the institutions that structure the colonial relationship and a belief in bringing about change through direct action, physical resistance, and confrontations with state power (Alfred, 2005, 46). Alfred continues to argue that there have already been alliances forming between Indigenous peoples and anarchists in terms of direct action struggles to defend land and assert autonomy against colonial states. Alfred continues in his book to detail how Indigenous communities might move towards this sort of anti-state and anti-colonial politics by engaging with Indigenous theorists. He confronts some of the debates that come up within such a politics by speaking and detailing his conversations with Indigenous peoples themselves. In this way Alfred’s book is a key source in beginning to image what an anarcho-Indigenist politics might look like from the standpoint of Indigenous communities, and while interesting and necessary to read and engage, settler anarchists must start to think about an anti-state and anti-colonial politics from their own context –on the privileged end of colonialism. From Alfred’s 2005 book comes a greater interest in thinking through anarchist and Indigenous engagements with anarcho-Indigenism. Despite renewed engagements, anarcho- Indigenism is still young in its overall development in terms of naming this sort of politics in this specific way. First, however, it must be noted that the term anarcho-Indigenism in Alfred’s work has undergone a slight modification to anarcha-Indigenism to further recognize the necessity of feminist intersections with anarchism and Indigenism. This modification in later work (see for example Day 2008; Lasky 2011) highlights the feminist intersectional intervention that is taken up by anarcha-Indigenism, towards further developing a comprehensive politics of resistance in colonial contexts. It seeks to improve on Alfred’s project to expand integration of feminist intersections with anarchism and Indigenous political theory. So what are some of the key aspects of anarcha-Indigenism? At its base level anarcha-Indigenism seeks to bring Indigenous, anarchist, and feminist political and theoretical perspectives together. It acts as a sort of meeting point, as I develop later, for articulating anti-colonial anarchist practices for settlers, and anti-state or anti-authoritarian possibilities for Indigenous peoples. Day (2003) draws from the work of Marie Smallface Marule, Patricia Monture-Angus and Taiaiake Alfred, in conjunction with anarchist theorists, to suggests a convergence of values that see organization as occurring outside state forms – away from hierarchical relations towards non-coercive direct democratic forms of decision making and organization. Here Day argues that there are similarities, or more properly termed, affinities, between some aspects of Indigenous political theory and anarchism. This convergence sets the initial points of contact for constructing anarcha-Indigenism. By looking to Indigenous political theory, Day (2003) argues, we can see other descriptions of alternatives to the global dominant order of capitalist, colonial states beginning to take shape. Part of this resistance is directed against the ‘gifts’ of liberal multiculturalism and state sanctioned forms of self determination that the Canadian state has used as an attempt to assimilate Indigenous communities into the broader dominant order and to remove any impetus for resistance. Rather, Day (2001) argues, a new form of engagement needs to be taken up with Indigenous communities, embodied by the Two Row Wampum (to which I return in detail in Chapter 4). Here, the Two Row can be seen as a guide for conversations between Indigenous and Western political theory, most particularly with anarchist theorists (like Proudhon) who argue for decentralized and federated communities that maintain individual autonomy. As such, there is space for conversation and engagement across Indigenous and settler/Western political theory, but a new basis for relationship is required. This I think represents an early necessary commitment within anarcha-Indigenism, that relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples become fundamentally altered within a space of mutual engagement, thereby subverting colonial hierarchies of domination. From this point there might exist a potential to tease out some of the affinities between Indigenous and Western political theory, as Day (2001) argues, but more specifically between militant, direct action-oriented Indigenous peoples and anarchists. So what is anarcha-Indigenism? ‘If anarcha-Indigenism “is” anything,’ Richard Day (2008, 3) argues, ‘it is a meeting place, a site of possibilities, a potential for mutual aid in common projects within, outside, and against the dominant order. It is not an ideology or a party,’ he continues, ‘but an emergent and ever-changing network of autonomous subjects, organizations, and institutions’: a meeting point of ‘anarchisms, indigenisms and feminisms’, not some form of rigid, limited or homogenous set of political possibilities, but something broadly defined, dynamic and evolving (Day, 2008, 3). Day argues that although each of the perspectives that might come to offer possibilities to anarcha-Indigenism comes from specific standpoints and traditions, there is point of intersection that exists between these diverse perspectives that might continue to be developed as anarcha-Indigenism. It is to this point of intersection that I examine the concept of ‘third space’ from post-colonial theory and suggest a move to ‘n-dimensional space’8 for anarcha-Indigenism. Day offers the following comprehensive summary of some of the theoretical commitments and projects of anarcha-Indigenism that merits quoting at length: an anarcha-indigenist perspective is based on an interlocking analysis of oppression, which includes every site that has been raised as an antagonism, and privileges none over the others, in terms of their importance, intensity, or the order in which they are addressed in any work involving social change. This means, at this point in our understanding, that we must struggle against, and create alternatives to, ableism, ageism, capitalism, colonialism, heterosexism, patriarchy, racism/ethnocentrism, and religious and state domination. Since as all beings are interrelated and dependent upon the earth, we must also work to minimize the human domination of nature and ensure that our practices are ecologically sustainable in the short, medium, and long terms, both locally and globally. This work needs to be carried out within and against the dominant order, and within our own communities. It needs to operate both at a structural level, and at the level of daily practice (Day, 2008, 19). The work of anarcha-Indigenism, therefore, requires a commitment to root out injustice, oppression and domination at all of the levels of our lives, whether within our bodies and minds, in the dynamics of the political groups that we engage in resistance with, in the broader cultures of resistance that we seek to cultivate or in the larger macro-political and - economic structures that we struggle against. It is a relational possibility of resistance that carries different meanings depending on the context of the place, the particular people who seek to actualized it and the time when it occurs. ‘It is,’ as Jacqueline Lasky (2011, 7) argues, ‘relational…plural, multiple, contingent, transient, indeterminate and thoroughly unfixed’. Lasky argues that this sort of relationality is represented in the following quotation of Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas9: Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South America, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 p.m., a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains (cited in Lasky 2011, 8). Anarcha-Indigenism, therefore seeks to draw from multiple perspectives, while recognizing the individual contexts in which all people resist. It is a commitment to resistance, decolonization and the creation of alternative possibilities in all aspects of our being. It is, as well, about creating ‘openings’ within a dominant order of state, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy and colonialism with which to resist (Day, 2008), to find the gaps, the possibilities, the moments of play, joy, destruction and creation. It is certainly utopian in this respect but it aims to ground itself in the lived struggles of resistance of Indigenous peoples and those that seek to support such struggles.
We must recognize that the university is interested in the maintenance of power and domination. However, disengagement represents a privileged position that ignores settler colonial violence, as activist academics we have an ethical obligation to facilitate resistance within these spaces by mapping and detailing contradictions within the system to open the space for radical politics. This means the affirmative is prerequisite to any alternative. Recognizing that settler colonialism maintains itself in speech codes and by stifling Palestinian dissent is an example of one such institutional ethnographic method. Lewis 12. . (Adam Gary Lewis, Degree of Masters of Arts, Cultural Studies @ Queen’s University. “Decolonizing Anarchism: Expanding Anarcha-Indigenism in Theory and Practice” ProQuest) Finally, an activist research methodology requires the realization that the structures of the academy must also be sites of struggle and resistance. The university, Casas-Cortés and Cobarrubias (2007) argue, is part of the neoliberal (and colonial, as highlighted by Indigenous theorists below) order and reproduces elements activists seek to fight against. We must see the university as seeking to ‘categorize and classify’ in the maintenance of power and domination (Graeber and Shukaitis, 2007). We can take up institutional ethnographic (IE) methods to reveal the institutional constructions of power, social relations and administrative regimes, making visible their contradictions and weak points to make activism within them more effective (see Frampton et al., 2006). IE is employed to map social relations in order to produce knowledge to change the world (Kinsman, 2006). We thus have an obligation, as activist academics, to facilitate resistance in these spaces. As CasasCortés and Cobarrubias argue (2007, 124), the ivory towers of academia must be a space of our resistance: ‘They must be laid siege to, they must be infiltrated’.¶ By looking at movement literature that puts forth an explicitly political project and embedded research focus, I have traced some of the basic aspects of what ethical activist research might encompass. Embeddedness, self-reflexivity, affinity, the cultivation of relationships and resistance within the academy itself are all aspects that need to be considered for the foundation of ethical activist research. The Role of the Ballot is to endorse the best methodology for decolonization. Settler colonialism is a global phenomenon that provides the impetus and structure that produces indigenous, racial violence, and neoliberalism. Anti-Settlerism requires a politics that is incommensurate with the modern world structure, any alternative that does not foreground anti-settlerism represents a compromise that only re-entrenches settlerism at home and abroad. Tuck and Yang 12 (Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, Eve Tuck State University of New York at New Paltz K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego)TR Incommensurability is an acknowledgement that decolonization will require a change in the order of the world (Fanon, 1963). This is not to say that Indigenous peoples or Black and brown peoples take positions of dominance over white settlers; the goal is not for everyone to merely swap spots on the settler-colonial triad, to take another turn on the merry-go-round. The goal is to break the relentless structuring of the triad - a break and not a compromise (Memmi, 1991). Breaking the settler colonial triad, in direct terms, means repatriating land to sovereign Native tribes and nations, abolition of slavery in its contemporary forms, and the dismantling of the imperial metropole. Decolonization “here” is intimately connected to anti-imperialism elsewhere. However, decolonial struggles here/there are not parallel, not shared equally, nor do they bring neat closure to the concerns of all involved - particularly not for settlers. Decolonization is not equivocal to other anti-colonial struggles. It is incommensurable. There is so much that is incommensurable, so many overlaps that can’t be figured, that cannot be resolved. Settler colonialism fuels imperialism all around the globe. Oil is the motor and motive for war and so was salt, so will be water. Settler sovereignty over these very pieces of earth, air, and water is what makes possible these imperialisms. The same yellow pollen in the water of the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, Leslie Marmon Silko reminds us, is the same uranium that annihilated over 200,000 strangers in 2 flashes. The same yellow pollen that poisons the land from where it came. Used in the same war that took a generation of young Pueblo men. Through the voice of her character Betonie, Silko writes, “Thirty thousand years ago they were not strangers. You saw what the evil had done; you saw the witchery ranging as wide as the world" (Silko, 1982, p. 174). In Tucson, Arizona, where Silko lives, her books are now banned in schools. Only curricular materials affirming the settler innocence, ingenuity, and right to America may be taught. In “No”, her response to the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq, Mvskoke/Creek poet Joy Harjo (2004) writes, “Yes, that was me you saw shaking with bravery, with a government issued rifle on my back. I’m sorry I could not greet you, as you deserved, my relative.” Don’t Native Americans participate in greater rates in the military? asks the young-ish man from Viet Nam. “Indian Country” was/is the term used in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq by the U.S. military for ‘enemy territory’. The first Black American President said without blinking, “There was a point before folks had left, before we had gotten everybody back on the helicopter and were flying back to base, where they said Geronimo has been killed, and Geronimo was the code name for bin Laden.” Elmer Pratt, Black Panther leader, falsely imprisoned for 27 years, was a Vietnam Veteran, was nicknamed ‘Geronimo’. Geronimo is settler nickname for the Bedonkohe Apache warrior who fought Mexican and then U.S. expansion into Apache tribal lands. The Colt .45 was perfected to kill Indigenous people during the ‘liberation’ of what became the Philippines, but it was first invented for the ‘Indian Wars’ in North America alongside The Hotchkiss Canon- a gattling gun that shot canonballs. The technologies of the permanent settler war are reserviced for foreign wars, including boarding schools, colonial schools, urban schools run by military personnel. It is properly called Indian Country. Ideologies of US settler colonialism directly informed Australian settler colonialism. South African apartheid townships, the kill-zones in what became the Philippine colony, then nation-state, the checkerboarding of Palestinian land with checkpoints, were modeled after U.S. seizures of land and containments of Indian bodies to reservations. The racial science developed in the U.S. (a settler colonial racial science) informed Hitler’s designs on racial purity (“This book is my bible” he said of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race). The admiration is sometimes mutual, the doctors and administrators of forced sterilizations of black, Native, disabled, poor, and mostly female people - The Sterilization Act accompanied the Racial Integrity Act and the Pocohontas Exception - praised the Nazi eugenics program. Forced sterilizations became illegal in California in 1964. The management technologies of North American settler colonialism have provided the tools for internal colonialisms elsewhere. So to with philosophies of state and corporate land-grabbing24. The prominence of “flat world” perspectives asserts that technology has afforded a diminished significance of place and borders. The claim is that U.S. borders have become more flexible, yet simultaneously, the physical border has become more absolute and enforced. The border is no longer just a line suturing two nation-states; the U.S. now polices its borders interior to its territory and exercises sovereignty throughout the globe. Just as sovereignty has expanded, so has settler colonialism in partial forms. New Orleans’ lower ninth ward lies at the confluence of river channels and gulf waters, and at the intersection of land grabbing and human bondage. The collapsing of levies heralded the selective collapsibility of native-slave, again, for the purpose of reinvasion, resettlement, reinhabitation. The naturalized disaster of Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters laid the perfect cover for land speculation and the ablution of excess people. What can’t be absorbed, can’t be folded in (because the settlers won't give up THEIR land to advance abolition), translates into bodies stacked on top of one another in public housing and prisons, in cells, kept from the labor market, making labor for others (guards and other corrections personnel) making money for states -human homesteading. It necessitates the manufacturing of crime at rates higher than anywhere in the world. 1 in 6 people in the state of Louisiana are incarcerated, the highest number of caged people per capita, making it the prison capital of United States, and therefore the prison capital of the world. Table Omitted The Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers’ delta flood plain was once land so fertile that it could be squeezed for excess production of cotton, giving rise to exceptionally large-scale plantation slavery. Plantation owners lived in houses like pyramids and chattel slavery took an extreme form here, even for the South, beginning with enslaved Chitimachas, Choctaw, Natchez, Chaoüachas, Natchez, Westo, Yamasee, Euchee, Yazoo and Tawasa peoples, then later replaced by enslaved West Africans. Literally, worked to death. This “most Southern on earth”(Cobb, 1992) was a place of ultimate terror for Black people even under slavery (the worst place to be sold off too, the place of no return, the place of premature death). Black and Native people alike were induced to raid and enslave Native tribes, as a bargain for their own freedom or to defer their own enslavibility by the British, French, and then American settlers. Abolition has its incommensurabilities. The Delta is now more segregated than it was during Jim Crow in 1950 (Aiken, 1990). The rising number of impoverished, all black townships is the result of mechanization of agriculture and a fundamental settler covenant that keeps black people landless. When black labor is unlabored, the Black person underneath is the excess. Angola Farm is perhaps the more notorious of the two State Penitentiaries along the Mississippi River. Three hundred miles upriver in the upper Delta region is Parchment Farm. Both State Penitentiaries (Mississippi and Louisana, respectively), both former slave plantations, both turned convict-leasing farms almost immediately after the Civil War by genius land speculators-cum-prison wardens. After the Union victory in the Civil War ‘abolished’ slavery, former Confederate Major, Samuel Lawrence James, obtained the lease to the Louisiana State Penn in 1869, and then bought Angola Farm in 1880 as land to put his chattel to work. Figure Omitted Cages on wheels. To mobilize labor on land by landless people whose crime was mobility on land they did not own. The largest human trafficker in the world is the carceral state withinthe United States, not some secret Thai triad or Russian mafia or Chinese smuggler. The U.S. carceral state is properly called neo-slavery, precisely because it is legal. It is not simply a product of exceptional racism in the U.S.; its racism is a direct function of the settler colonial mandate of land and people as property. Black Codes made vagrancy - i.e. landlessness - illegal in the Antebellum South, making the self-possessed yet dispossessed Black body a crime (similar logic allowed for the seizure, imprisonment and indenture of any Indian by any person in California until 1937, based on the ideology that Indians are simultaneously landless and land-like). Dennis Childs writes “the slave ship and the plantation” and not Bentham’s panopticon as presented by Foucault, “operated as spatial, racial, and economic templates for subsequent models of coerced labor and human warehousing - as America’s original prison industrial complex” (2009, p.288). Geopolitics and biopolitics are completely knotted together in a settler colonial context. Despite the rise of publicly traded prisons, Farms are not fundamentally capitalist ventures; at their core, they are colonial contract institutions much like Spanish Missions, Indian Boarding Schools, and ghetto school systems26. The labor to cage black bodies is paid for by the state and then land is granted, worked by convict labor, to generate additional profits for the prison proprietors. However, it is the management of excess presence on the land, not the forced labor, that is the main object of slavery under settler colonialism. Today, 85 of people incarcerated at Angola, die there.
2/19/17
Queer Homelessness Aff
Tournament: TFA State | Round: 1 | Opponent: idk | Judge: Jennifer Melin Queer Homelessness Aff Part 1 is the Case Sassafras Lowrey had no choice but to run. Ze grew up abused, “the recipient of wandering fingers, of broken promises, black eyes, and manipulation.” (Sassafras prefers the gender-neutral pronouns “ze” and “hir.”) When ze came out, at 17, ze wasn’t met with love. Ze was told how to be “fixed.” So, like thousands of LGBT youth every year, Sassafras left. But the “safe” adults ze ran to also soon asked “if ze was over that whole gay thing.” Sassafras wasn’t straight, and because ze wasn’t going to pretend to be, ze found hirself homeless for the second time. Living on the streets presents enough challenges in and of itself, but it often creates new ones, like when Sassafras was kicked out of hir high school because they had never had a homeless student before and didn’t know how to handle it. (Other parents complained to the administration that ze was “leading their kids down a path to hell.”) On hir 17th birthday, Sassafras had a home, a family, and an education. On hir 18th, ze had none. Sassafras’ story is tragically common. As a new report from the Center for American Progress details, LGBT people, especially LGBT youth, are at a far greater risk not only of winding up homeless, but being abused on the streets as well. Keyes 13. Keyes, Scott. “Why Homelessness Is A Major LGBT Issue.” ThinkProgress, ThinkProgress, 24 Oct. 2013, thinkprogress.org/why-homelessness-is-a-major-lgbt-issue-bdbfc613158c. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017. Queer and trans individuals are prone to homelessness and violence due to the social and institutional barriers. NCOTH 14. "LGBT Homelessness." National Coalition for the Homeless. National Coalition for the Homeless, 2014. Web. 01 Mar. 2017. http://nationalhomeless.org/issues/lgbt/. LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) individuals face a particular set of challenges, both in becoming homeless as well as when they are trying to avoid homelessness. LGBT persons face social stigma, discrimination, and often rejection by their families, which adds to the physical and mental strains/challenges that all homelessness persons must struggle with. Frequently, homeless LGBT persons have great difficulty finding shelters that accept and respect them. LGBT individuals experiencing homelessness are often at a heightened risk of violence, abuse, and exploitation compared with their heterosexual peers. Transgender people are particularly at physical risk due to a lack of acceptance and are often turned away from shelters; in some cases signs have been posted barring their entrance. According to the Williams Institute, 40 of the homeless youth served by agencies identify as LGBT 43 of clients served by drop-in centers identified as LGBT 30 of street outreach clients identified as LGBT 30 of clients utilizing housing programs identified as LGBT Quare and Trans persons are denied access to homeless shelters, leaving them on the streets. Saffin 11. IDENTITIES UNDER SEIGE: Violence Against Transpersons of Color. Lori A. Saffin. Stanley, Eric. “Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex.” Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, AK Press, 2011, captivegenders.net/. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017. However, access to resources becomes compounded when examining people of color who are queer. Without community or familial support, many queers of color are pushed into even more economic vulnerability, with no family to fall back on in times of crisis or community to provide emotional support. Coupling racial economic inequity with homophobic attitudes leaves many queers of color in insecure, isolating conditions. The perceived gender transgression by many transpersons of color can cause serious consequences, ranging from daily abuse or harassment at home to being banished from their families and communities. As a result, many transpersons often end up homeless. Adult homeless shelters are inaccessible because of the fact that most facilities are sex-segregated and will either turn down a transgender person outright or refuse to house them according to their lived gender identity Thus, I demand that queer and trans individuals ought to have a right to housing. The 1AC is a form of queer activism and resistance that is key to breakdown the discursive structures that maintain heteronormativity. This struggle of gender self-determination is a struggle against the policing of racialized bodies, genders and sex through protesting against normative structures. Stanley 14 Eric A. Stanley is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Communication and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Eric is an editor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (2011) and has published articles in Social Text, Women and Performance, and American Quarterly., “Gender Self-Determination” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly Volume 1, Numbers 1–2 * May 2014 19 a 2014 Duke University Press Gender self-determination is a collective praxis against the brutal pragmatism of the present, the liquidation of the past, and the austerity of the future. That is to say, it indexes a horizon of possibility already here, which struggles to make freedom flourish through a radical trans politics. Not only a defensive posture, it builds in the name of the undercommons a world beyond the world, lived as a dream of the good life.1 Within at least the US context, the normalizing force of mainstream trans politics, under the cover of equality, operates by consolidation and exile. Or put another way, through its fetishistic attachment to the law and its vicissitudes, mainstream trans politics argues for inclusion in the same formations of death that have already claimed so many. This collusion can be seen in the lobbying for the addition of ‘‘gender identity’’ to federal hate crimes enhancements. While the quotidian violence many trans people face—in particular trans women of color—is the material of daily life, this push for the expansion of the prison-industrial complex through hate crimes legislation proliferates violence under the name of safety. Legislative and semilegislative apparatuses from the United Nations and NGOs to local governance have begun to include similar language around “gender equity.” Champions of such moves might cite the Yogyakarta Principles (2007), which are the findings of a human rights commission convened to foreground ‘‘Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity’’ globally, or such recent decisions as that of the Australian government to add a third gender option of ‘‘X’’ to their passports as signs of progress. However, an ethic of gender self-determination helps us to resist reading these biopolitical shifts as victories. Here the state and its interlocutors, including at times trans studies, work to translate and in turn confine the excesses of gendered life into managed categories at the very moment of radical possibility.2 To begin with the ‘‘self’’ in the wake of neoliberalism might seem a dangerous place to turn a phrase, especially one that is suggested to offer such radical potentiality—and perhaps it is. After all, the ‘‘self ’’ in our contemporary moment points most easily toward the fiction of the fully possessed rights-bearing subject of Western modernity, the foil of the undercommons. However, here it is not the individual but a collective self, an ontological position always in relation to others and dialectically forged in otherness, that is animated. The negation of this collective self, as relational and nonmimetic, is the alibi for contemporary rights discourse, which argues that discrete legal judgments will necessarily produce progressive change. Rather than believe that this is an oversight of the state form, critics of human rights discourse remind us that this substitution is a precondition of the state’s continued power. Antagonistic to such practices of constriction and universality, gender self-determination is affectively connected to the practices and theories of self-determination embodied by various and ongoing anticolonial, Black Power, and antiprison movements. For Frantz Fanon and many others, the violence of colonialism and antiblackness are so totalizing that ontology itself collapses; thus the claiming of a self fractures the everydayness of colonial domination. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense echoed a similar perspective in their 1966 Ten Point Plan. Self-determination, for the Panthers and for many others, is the potentiality of what gets called freedom. Connecting these histories, ‘‘gender self-determination is queer liberation is prison abolition’’ was articulated by the gender and queer liberation caucus of CR10, Critical Resistance’s tenth anniversary conference in 2008 (The CR10 Publications Collective, 2008: 7). To center radical black, anticolonial, and prison abolitionist traditions is to already be inside trans politics.3 From STAR’s (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) alliance with the Young Lords in New York City and the recent organizing against US drone attacks led by trans women in Sukkur, Pakistan, to Miss Major’s words that anoint this essay, these forms of gender self-determination, even if left unnamed, argue that national liberation and the overthrow of colonial and carceral rule must be grown together with gender liberation (see Littauer 2012). Gender self-determination opens up space for multiple embodiments and their expressions by collectivizing the struggle against both interpersonal and state violence. Further, it pushes us away from building a trans politics on the fulcrum of realness (gender normative, trans, or otherwise) while also responding to the different degrees of harm people are forced to inhabit. As a nonprescriptive politics, its contours cannot always be known in advance—it is made and remade in the process of its actualization, in the time of resistance and in the place of pleasure. Becoming, then, as Gilles Deleuze might have it—or more importantly, as Miss Major lives it (Stanley and Smith 2011)—is the moment of gender self-determination: becoming liberated as we speak. Utility and use value is extracted from denigrated bodies; we are already dead as heteronormative society prefigures who is capable of having subjectivity. Stanley 11 (Eric, Prof. President's Postdoctoral fellow in the departments of Communication and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego, "Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture) AMB What if it feels good to kill or mutilate homos?— Anonymous, restroom wall, University of California, Santa Cruz, ca. 2006–2008 A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence.— Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks “Dirty faggot!” Or simply, “Look, a Gay!” These words launch a bottle from a passing car window, the target my awaiting body. In other moments they articulate the sterilizing glares and violent fantasies that desire, and threaten to enact, my corporal undoing. Besieged, I feel in the fleshiness of the everyday like a kind of near life or a death- in- waiting. Catastrophically, this imminent threat constitutes for the queer that which is the sign of vitality itself. What then becomes of the possibility of queer life, if queerness is produced always and only through the negativity of forced death and at the threshold of obliteration? Or as Achille Mbembe has provocatively asked, in the making of a kind of corporality that is constituted in the social as empty of meaning beyond the anonymity of bone, “But what does it mean to do violence to what is nothing?”1 In another time and place, “ ‘Dirty nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’ ” (“Sale nègre! ou simplement: Tiens, un nègre!”) opened Frantz Fanon’s chapter 5 of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Lived Experience of the Black” (“L’expérience vécue du Noir”), infamously mistranslated as “The Fact of Blackness.”2 I start with “Dirty faggot!” against a logic of flattened substitution and toward a political commitment to non- mimetic friction. After all, the racialized phenomenology of blackness under colonization that Fanon illustrates may be productive to read against and with a continuum of antiqueer violence in the United States. The scopic and the work of the visual must figure with such a reading of race, gender, and sexuality. It is argued, and rightfully so, that the instability of queerness obscures it from the epidermalization that anchors (most) bodies of color in the fields of the visual. When thinking about the difference between anti- Semitism and racism, which for Fanon was a question of the visuality of oppression, he similarly suggests, “the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness.”3 Here it may be useful to reread Fanon through an understanding of passing and the visual that reminds us that Jews can sometimes not be unknown in their Jewishness. Similarly I ask why is antiqueer violence, more often than not, is correctly levied against queers. In other words, the productive discourse that wishes to suggest that queer bodies are no different might miss moments of signification where queer bodies do in fact signify differently. This is not to suggest that there is an always locatable, transhistorical queer body, but the fiercely flexible semiotics of queerness might help us build a way of knowing antiqueer violence that can provisionally withstand the weight of generality.4 Indeed, not all who might identify under the name queer experience the same relationship to violence. For sure, the overwhelming numbers of trans/queer people who are murdered in the United States are of color.5 Similarly, trans/gender nonconforming people, people living with HIV/ AIDS and/or other ability issues, undocumented and imprisoned trans/ queer people, sex workers, and working- class queers, among others, experience a disproportionate amount of structural violence. In turn, this structural violence more often than not predisposes them to a greater amount of interpersonal violence. Yet many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) folks in the United States who have access to normative power may in their daily lives know very little about either structural or personal violence. The long history and magnified present of gay assimilation illustrates these varying degrees of possibility and power available to some at the expense of others. In contrast, I am marking queer as the horizon where identity crumbles and vitality is worked otherwise. To this end, queer might be a productive placeholder to name a nonidentity where force is made to live. This is not to suggest that the negativity of queer and methodologies of violence define the end of queer worlding or that the parameters of opposition are sedimented as such.6 On the contrary, the very fact that queers do endure is evidence, as Fred Moten has beautifully argued about the history of blackness in relation to slavery, that “objects can and do resist.”7I start here, in reference to Fanon’s text, because he continues to offer us among the most compelling analyses of structural abjection, (non)recognition, and psychic/corporal violence. “Look, a Negro!” violently freezes Fanon in a timeless place as a black object, overdetermined from without, as a signifier with no meaning of its own making. In a similar way, the “dirty faggot” of my opening places queerness in the anonymity of history and shocks it into the embodied practice of feeling queer in a particular place, body, and time. This meditation will attempt to understand how the queer approximates the cutting violence that marks the edges of subjectivity itself. Race and gender figure the contours of my thinking on the work of violence in the gathering up of queer remains. Here the force of violence that interests me is not introduced after the formation of something that might be called queer. I am using the term queer to precisely index the collision of difference and violence. In other words, queer is being summoned to labor as the moment when bodies, non- normative sexuality/genders, and force materialize the im/possibility of subjectivity. Against an identity that assumes a prior unity, queer disrupts this coherence and also might function as a collective of negativity, void of a subject but named as object, retroactively visible through the hope of a radical politics to come.
This libidinal economy of near life crystalizes in structures that ground and intensify material violence. This nonsociality circumscribes the material reality of the contemporary queer subject Stanley 2011 (Eric, "Near Life, Queer Death Overkill and Ontological Capture," Social Text 107 s Vol. 29, No. 2 s Summer 2011)AMB If for Agamben bare life expresses a kind of stripped- down sociality or a liminal space at the cusp of death, then near life names the figuration and feeling of nonexistence, as Fanon suggests, which comes before the question of life might be posed. Near life is a kind of ontocorporal (non) sociality that necessarily throws into crisis the category of life by orientation and iteration. This might better comprehend not only the incomprehensible murders of Brazell, Paige, and Weaver, but also the terror of the dark cell inhabited by the queer survivor of the Holocaust who perished under “liberation.”33 Struggling with the phenomenology of black life under colonization, Fanon opens up critical ground for understanding a kind of near life that is made through violence to exist as nonexistence. For Fanon, violence is bound to the question of recognition (which is also the im/possibility of subjectivity) that apprehends the relationship between relentless structural violence and instances of personal attacks evidenced by the traumatic afterlives left in their wake. For Fanon, the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, as theoretical instrument for thinking about recognition, must be reconsidered through the experience of blackness in the French colonies. For Fanon, Hegel positions the terms of the dialectic (master/slave) outside history and thus does not account for the work of the psyche and the historicity of domination like racialized colonization and the epidermalization of that power. In other words, for Fanon, when the encounter is staged and the drama of negation unfolds, Hegel assumes a pure battle. Moreover, by understanding the dialectic singularly through the question of self- consciousness, Hegel, for Fanon, misrecognizes the battle as always and only for recognition. Informed by Alexandre Kojève and Jean- Paul Sartre, Fanon makes visible the absent figure of Enlightenment assumed by the Hegelian dialectic. For Fanon, colonization is not a system of recognition but a state of raw force and total war. The dialect cannot in the instance of colonization swing forward and offer the self- consciousness of its promise. According to Fanon, “For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.”34 Hegel’s dialectic that, through labor, offers the possibility of self- consciousness, for the colonized is frozen in a state of domination and nonreciprocity.35 What is at stake for Fanon, which is also why this articulation is helpful for thinking near life, is not only the bodily terror of force; ontological sovereignty also falls into peril under foundational violence. This state of total war, not unlike the attacks that left Brazell, Paige, and Weaver dead, is at once from without — the everyday cultural, legal, economic practices — and at the same time from within, by a consciousness that itself has been occupied by domination. For Fanon, the white imago holds captive the ontology of the colonized. The self/Other apparatus is dismantled, thus leaving the colonized as an “object in the midst of other objects,” embodied as a “feeling of nonexistence.”36 While thinking alongside Fanon on the question of racialized difference, violence, and ontology, how might we comprehend a phenomenology of antiqueer violence expressed as “nonexistence”? It is not that we can take the specific structuring of blackness in the French colonies and assume it would function the same today, under U.S. regimes of antiqueer violence. However, if both desire and antiqueer violence are embrocated by the histories of colonization, then such a reading might help to make more capacious our understanding of antiqueer violence today as well as afford a rereading of sexuality in Fanon’s texts. Indeed, Fanon’s intervention offers a space of nonexistence, neither master nor slave, written through the vicious work of epistemic force imprisoned in the cold cell of ontological capture. This space of nonexistence, or near life, forged in the territory of inescapable violence, allows us to understand the murders of queers against the logics of aberration. This structure of antiqueer violence as irreducible antagonism crystallizes the ontocorporal, discursive, and material inscriptions that render specific bodies in specific times as the place of the nothing. The figuration of near life should be understood not as the antihuman but as that which emerges in the place of the question of humanity. In other words, this is not simply an oppositional category equally embodied by anyone or anything. This line of limitless inhabitation, phantasmatically understood outside the intersections of power, often articulated as “equality,” leads us back toward rights discourse that seeks to further extend (momentarily) the badge of personhood. The nothing, or those made to live the death of a near life, is a break whose structure is produced by, and not remedied through, legal intervention or state mobilizations. For those who are overkilled yet not quite alive, what form might redress take, if any at all?
Part 2 is ROB The ROB is to vote for the debater that best deconstructs queer/quare oppression. We must center education around queer/quare experiences in order to remove them from the dark. Brooks and Parkes 4. Kim Brooks (Asst. Prof. Law @ Queen’s Univ.) and Debra Parkes (Asst. Prof. Law @ Univ. Manitoba). “QUEERING LEGAL EDUCATION: A PROJECT OF THEORETICAL DISCOVERY” (xo1) . Centering Queer Experience in All of Its Diversity My Tax class begins on time, as usual. A glance at the course outline reveals that the topic is the effect of relationships on in- come tax liability. The professor reviews arguments for and against couples aling joint returns and explores when income might be attributed to a particular individual on the basis of the parties’ relationship. I am taking notes but am not personally vested in any of this material. Although it is not articulated, I understand that “couples” means “heterosexual couples.” None of these rules will ever apply to me. The professor seeks to pro- vide an illustration. She says, “So, imagine that I am married . . . .” There is a long pause. She starts laughing. A few of us around the room start laughing. The sound is so liberating. We either know, or suspect, that she is a lesbian. She says, “Well, that example is not going to work. Imagine instead that X is married . . . .” A queer legal pedagogy that does not take queers seriously nor place queer lives at least temporarily as the focus of attention would be, well, not queer. Centering queer experience means moving it in from the shadowy margins of what is either not discussed or is only the subject of criminal cases.149 There is something about having a presence that reminds us that we are real.150 In the story above, it was recognition that made the moment so liberating, particularly in contrast to what had just seconds before felt like erasure. To feeling fully human requires students and professors to feel like they are connected to others—to their lives and experiences—and to feel that their human potential can be fulalled. One of the goals of legal education should be an opportunity to see yourself in those experiences, reoected in the cases you read, the discussions in class, the professors who teach you, and the students around you.151 As Adrienne Rich describes: When those who have power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you, whether you are dark- skinned, old, disabled, female, or speak with a different accent or dialect than theirs, when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul—and not just individual strength, but collective under- standing—to resist this void, the nonbeing, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.152 As academics, our visibility and invisibility can be powerful for both ourselves and our students. Our ability as professors in the classroom to express ourselves as fully as possible provides a voice that might other- wise be absent and potentially grants students some freedom to be them- selves in the classroom. Queer experience must be centered because we cannot accept the invisibility of our lives. Narrative will, therefore, nec- essarily play a part in our understanding of queer pedagogy.153 Our stories reveal that legal education is impoverished when it is based only upon the experiences of dominant groups and that it will be improved by the infusion of queer experiences.154
Any truth claim is epistemically suspect—there is always a higher order obligation in rejecting oppression so excluded voices can be incorporated into our epistemologies. Clifford and Burke ‘08 Derek and Beverley, Anti-Oppressive Ethics and Values in Social Work, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/1403905568.pdf Our view of the nature of ethics admits the possibility of giving reasons, drawing on both knowledge about the social world, and on the feelings that are common (and uncommon) to human experience, but without assuming that rationality, empirical evidence or human feelings can either by themselves or even together provide an absolute basis for ethics. Too much is known about the variability of human values and the limitations of human rationality to make such an assumption complacently. There are many inequalities of wealth, status and power, both reflecting and leading to cultural and structural social divisions. The social context of the professional working with vulnerable individuals and groups demands recognition of the need to act in a way that minimizes or overcomes some of the complex effects of discrimination and oppression, rather than adding to them through collusion, neglect or lack of self-awareness. Even worse, obviously, would be intentionally adding to existing oppression and exploitation. What matters is the possibility of dialogue between individuals and groups – the attempt to act in an anti-oppressive way is itself an endless search for ethical values in which we continually negotiate with and learn from each other – and especially from the ‘other’, in the sense of one who is socially and culturally different.
Evaluating abstract philosophies before issues of oppression is nonsensical – it’s just a way to avoid confronting oppression Matsuda ‘89 Mari, Associate Professor of Law @ the University of Hawaii, “When the First Quail Calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method”, 11 Women's Rts. L. Rep. 7 1989 The multiple consciousness I urge lawyers to attain is not a random ability to see all points of view, but a deliberate choice to see the world from the standpoint of the oppressed. That world is accessible to all of us. We should know it in its concrete particulars. We should know of our sister carrying buckets of water up five flights of stairs in a welfare hotel, our sister trembling at 3 a.m. in a shelter for battered women, our sisters holding bloodied children in their arms in Cape Town, on the West Bank, and in Nicaragua. The jurisprudence of outsiders teaches that these details and the emotions they evoke are relevant and important as we set out on the road to justice. These details are accessible to all of us, of all genders and colors. We can choose to know the lives of others by reading, studying, listening, and venturing into different places. For lawyers, our pro bono work may be the most effective means of acquiring a broader consciousness of oppression. Abstraction and detachment are ways out of the discomfort of direct confrontation with the ugliness of oppression. Abstraction, criticized by both feminists and scholars of color, is the, method that allows theorists to discuss liberty, property, and rights in the aspirational mode of liberalism with no connection to what those concepts mean in real people's lives. Much in our mainstream intellectual training values abstraction and denigrates nitty-gritty detail. Holding on to a multiple consciousness will allow us to op- erate both within the abstractions of standard jurisprudential discourse, and within the details of our own special knowledge. Whisperings at Yale and elsewhere about how deconstructionist heroes were closet fascists remind me of how important it is to stay close to oppressed communities. High talk about language, meaning, sign, process, and law can mask racist and sexist ugliness if we never stop to ask: "Exactly what are you talking about and what is the implication of what you are saying for my sis- ter who is carrying buckets of water up five flights of stairs in a welfare hotel? What do you propose to do for her today, not in some abstract future you are creating in your mind?" If you have been made to feel, as I have, that such inquiry is theoretically unsophisticated, and quaintly naive, resist! Read what Professor Williams, Professor Scales-Trent, and other feminists and people of color are writing.' The reality and detail of oppression are a starting point for these writers as they enter into mainstream debates about law and theory.
Epistemic modesty—oppression is bad under pretty much all ethical theories. We don’t have time to go through every moral theory possible in 45 minutes, but the probability of oppression being bad is high—moral uncertainty is inevitable and means you err aff on the framework debate
3/9/17
ST MARKS poems aff
Tournament: St Marks | Round: 3 | Opponent: idk | Judge: Jonathan Horowitz
Poems Aff
l poblamiento de América, se realizó por el Bering, de otra forma, ¿cómo hicieren?, no podría entender yo. Primitivos hacia el Norte, primitivos hacia el Centro, primitivos hacia el Sur; aún no tenían glamour, las leyes tenían su corte, y viajaban tour en tour. Tres períodos conformaron, nueva civilización, Meso Indio, Neo Indio y el Indo Hispano en que, hermano, cultura se implementó, con signos de tradición. Luego llegó la conquista, y en el Norte los ingleses, imponen puntos de vista, a indígenas iroqueses, y a otros tantos de su lista. En el Centro y hacia el Sur, Colón, enviado de España, llega con sus artimañas, disimulando glamour, y con todas las patrañas, al indígena, en talud, destrozan tal cual pirañas. En tres siglos que duró, dicha colonización, esclavitud se conformó, bajo el yugo y sumisión. Africanos secuestrados, para trabajos forzados, pues indígenas agotados, no respondían en breve, con tanto látigo hereje. Mayas, Aztecas e Incas, Arawacos y Caribes, junto a los Timotocuicas, sus patrias no circunscriben, pero en las guerras que aplican, les doman hasta el declive. Luego la mezcla de razas, del ser humano, en razón, por no traer de sus casas, mujeres, el Español. Blancos con indios y negros, fue la gran conformación, tal vez, conformes los suegros, y el mestizaje prosperó. La unión conformó los Pardos; negros con indios, los zambos; negros con zambos, los prietos; otros, y que salto atrás, ¿no podían inventar más?. Blanco con indio, mestizo; blanco con negro, mulato; blanco y mulato, cuaternón; !Oh, cuántos nombres, carrizo. Luego, con el cuaternón, se conformó el quinteron y ahí termina la cuestión. Surge después la nobleza, lo político y social, de una manera bestial; y entre tantos abatares, los blancos peninsulares y también blancos de orilla; blancos criollos ¡qué maravilla! y al indio, al negro y al pardo, les funden cual mantequilla; naturales que sin embargo, despiertan de pesadilla. América se vuelve tortilla, pues descendiente español, con el negro y el indígena, entran en revolución, y con firme decisión, vencen al conquistador, liberados, cual maravilla; sólo que otro la agarró, convirtiéndola en guerrilla, con su desprecio y acción. Los aportes culturales, transmitidos por los grupos, comenzaron por conucos, las hallacas, los maizales, la mazamorra, el cazabe, y los grupos musicales; hoy son ellos primordiales, conformando nuevos trucos, que con democracias reales, vencen imperios malucos; no habrá más rivalidades. Dilia.calderas, 27 de julio de 2008
Our existence in this place isn't neutral. Welcome to Dallas- a land muddled with a genocidal history- the Kiowa, Comanche, Sioux, Crows, Blackfeet and other tribes were systematically exterminated in order for structures like St. Marks. Our fugitive epistemology of poetry reads this city spatially and temporally as a place informed by colonialism; this is how we unsettle the settler
Martineau and Ritskes 14 (Jarrett Martineau , University of Victoria, and Eric Ritskes, University of Toronto, "Fugitive indigeneity: Reclaiming the terrain of decolonial struggle through Indigenous art", 2014, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society Vol. 3, No. 1 pg 5-9)/ warner Decolonial art does not abdicate or abandon the present; it re-inscribes indigeneity AND colonialism's best attempts to confine and contain Indigenous creators to the 'traditional'.
There are forms of colonialism in which we are not usually aware of, such as the Nuclear! Nuclear production, at every stage, happens at the risk of the lives and culture of indigenous populations. Whether it be through of exploitation of natural resources, testing or dumping, these forms of nuclear colonialism and environmental racism are well and alive today. Thus, prohibiting the production of nuclear power would eliminate the continued destruction of native populations through nuclear production.
Endres 09 (Endres, Danielle. "The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.1 (2009): 39-60. JSTOR. Web. 19 Aug. 2016.) Since the Manhattan Project, we have seen the Janus-faced development of nuclear AND through contaminated soil and water, which could harm animal and plant life.
Settler colonialism is the impetus and structure that produces indigenous, racial violence, and neoliberalism. White settler alienation from land and maintenance of excess on land that sets the impetus for neoliberal domination- any alternative that endorses unclear power or the state will always reproduce indigenous violence
Tuck and Yang 12 (Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, Eve Tuck State University of New York at New Paltz K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego)TR Incommensurability is an acknowledgement that decolonization will require a change in the order of the AND . Today, 85 of people incarcerated at Angola, die there.
====The 1AC is a form of indigenous activism and resistance that is key to breakdown the discursive structures that maintain global settler colonialism. Nuclear colonialism is not only witnessed in the acts of nuclear waste and dumping but also the rhetoric in which we discuss nuclear power will always exclude the native. ==== Endres 09 (Endres, Danielle. "The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.1 (2009): 39-60.JSTOR. Web. 19 Aug. 2016.) American Indian resistance is an important part of the story of ~to~ nuclear AND that would power the atomic bomb and help America stare down the Soviets.
The ROB is to vote for the debater that best deconstructs settler colonialism. I advocate the judge to adopt an alternative framework through red pedagogy. Decolonization is a movement that is a constant process to challenge entrenched thoughts and modes of thinking.
Grande 4 (Sandy, "Red Pedagogy," pg. 165-167) As we raise yet another generation in a nation at war, it is even AND ( 1999) model for self-determined and self-directed communities.
Only having a willingness to exterminate the settler can ensure the destruction of U.S. colonialism.
Meister, 11 (Robert Meister, prof of Social and Political Thought @ UC Santa Cruz, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights, p. google books, note: ev is gender-modified) The Roots of Genocide The secular logic of genocide arises from the moral psychology AND return-to-sender of the genocidal message of the colonialism itself.
