The Middle Passage actively constructs anti-Blackness in America the marking

of black bodies has perfected gratuitous violence on an incalculable scale.

Prisoners of war and victims of intertribal violence entered ships as people and
exited as commodities the Middle Passage stole death away from the slave.
Smallwood. 2007. Associate Professor, Dio Richardson Endowed Professor, Ph.D. Duke
University.
(Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora.
Harvard University Press. Pg. 140-141)
Properly memorialized, death afforded the opportunity to join the living community through a
protective web of connections to the ancestors and the not-yet-born. Mourning and interment
mitigated the disruptive threat that death posed, by channeling the sacral power of death into
the renewal of life. Suitable rituals thus protected the community from the unmitigated loss of its
members and protected the individual from the threat of annihilation; the "necral space" of the burial
ground and the rituals associated with it served as the medium through which these vital
connections were maintained."' Ancestors "consecrated" the ground in which they were buried, "and continuous
rituals connecting them with their heirs created a single community consisting of the dead,
their heirs, and the soil they shared. "41 The departure and migration to the realm of the ancestors could only be
carried to completion by the performance of mortu- ary practices that affirmed the close affinity between these two do- mains.
Death without a funeral compromised the journey on to a new realm. With no food and drink
to sustain the deceased in the domain of the ancestors, neither clothing nor tools with which to continue the activities of
earthly life in the new realm, and no earth to receive the dead bodies, how were the deceased to find their
way out of the Watery realm to the land Of the ancestors? In essence, a fully realized death could not be
accomplished alone. Nor was it something one could attain at Far more than the economic event Blake casually recorded
in his journal, this first death Of a slave aboard the James was an event that held singularly traumatic consequences: for the
deceased, death at sea meant an unfulfilled journey to the grave and therefore also to the realm Of
the ancestors; for the kinsmen Of the deceased, his death meant that a thread Of the special power
and protection only ancestral members Of the community could provide Was lost to them forever. For
the collective Of African captives remaining aboard the James, the death Of one Of their number left them
With the burden Of a tormented soul, trapped here among them because its migration to join the ancestors
had been thwarted. TWO more deaths followed in the next eight weeks, a time When small numbers of captives were onboard.
While Blake bar- tered for gold, his crew prepared the ship to receive the large num- bers that would "complete " its human
cargo. Once the cargo On the James approached capacity in January, the forward motion Of the vessel would be charted by the
dispersal of bodies committed with- out ceremony to the sea, an accumulation Of displaced souls. One week following receipt
of the group of "very thin ordinary slaves" from Winneba (Chapter 3), the death march continued.

Modern institutions are shaped by slavery, the Middle Passage was different
from all other historical events and narrowing our focus is key
Sutton 14 (ED SUTTON, staff writer , 03/03/2014, THE WORLD WE LIVE IN IS CREATED
BY SLAVERY http://antidotezine.com/2014/03/03/the-world-we-live-in-is-created-by-
slavery/)-AG
GG: The modern world that we live in is created by slavery. Oftentimes the national discussion
about reparations focuses mostly on the negative effects of slavery in terms of uncompensated wages that some
people have calculated at a trillion dollars, counted in todays currency. Other people focus on the post-Abolition harm done as a result of discrimination, the exclusion of
African Americans from the New Deal or from mortgage programs that would have benefited them. But I think that focus obscures the way
slavery contributed to other institutions. Medicine, insurance, what we know of as modern Christianity and
modern international law come out of defending slavery, fighting against slavery, or trying to reform slavery. Modern
philosophy, the way we think of the individual, is a result of slavery. Brooks Brothers, the plush clothing
company from New York, had its start selling coarse clothing to slave plantations. The insurance company Aetna got its start underwriting slaves and slave voyages. So
there are ways in which we benefit just in the way that we live our lives and the institutions we live our lives through. CM: So heres the thinga friend of mine once told
me that he didnt believe in reparations for the descendants of slaves because he didnt enslave people and he didnt benefit from it because he isnt from the 1850s. This
happened 150 years ago. It doesnt have anything to do with him. What would you say to somebody who says that there shouldnt be reparations because they arent
benefiting from slavery? GG: Well, look, theres a lot of technical questions about trying to seek social redress, or redress through the court system. How would you
define the claimants, how would you define the defendants, how would you define the damages? These are real questions that would need to be answered. But I think
that in this country, the way we deal with our past is often through litigation. And it is the debate over
reparations which forces these questions onto the agenda, and forces us to confront the reality of how much wealth and value was created through slavery. And the
wealth and profits generated from slavery went well beyond just the cotton that slave plantation owners sold to Britain or the sugarcane that slaves cut. It capitalized
banks, it capitalized insurance companies in the North. The Norths economic diversification and industrialization
were financed by slavery. And thats just in economic terms. Again, the institutions that we live our lives
throughthe churches, the universitieswere shaped by the experience of slavery. Centuries of buying and selling human
beings and transporting them across continents, across oceans, created the modern world. And it is through the reparations debate that these issues are addressed and
confronted. CM: Before I do any research for a guest, Greg, I try to think of the most general questions that are often based on the most horrible opinions in the world.
One of the things that seems always to be brought up in the discussion of slavery is the complicity that Africans had in the slave market, that the slaves were being sold
off by Africans. What do you say to those who blame Africans for slavery, who say that they were complicit? GG: Well, two things. One: it is true that
slavery was the normal condition of social relations for millennia. The idea of individuals buying and selling their
labor as free men and women in the free labor market is a new thing, coming out of the Age of Revolution and the Enlightenment. The kinds of slavery that existed were
different in Africa, different in Europe, different in the Middle East, in Russia, in Asia. There were different degrees and variations
of forced labor. But what emerges with the Atlantic economy is qualitatively different in terms
of the work that was demanded, in terms of the absolute treatment of people as chattel, in terms of the
brutality, in terms of the equation of forced labor with skin color, in terms of the distances
traveled and the massive number of people that were ripped out of their homes12.5 million people
by some estimates, and thats probably a conservative estimate. The second thing I would say is that European intervention in Africa
disrupted social relations, communities, and balances of power and led to the wars and
conflicts among ethnic groups that became a source of slaves. So yes, it is true that like all social
systems, people participating are complicit in different ways, but I think that we
could step back and make a broader moral judgment about degrees of responsibility
and degrees of oppression.


Vote to affirm radical negativity in response to the resolution and its calls for
development by understanding the middle passage as the first American
developmental project.

Civil society is defined in negation to the black body the focus on contingent
violence is the hallmark of Whiteness only by rupturing the grammar of work,
productivity, and ethics WITHIN civil society can combatting anti-black violence
begin before you begin to evaluate comparing impacts, and before we begin
to compare then it is important to recognize our experience is corporeal we
are giving up our badges.
Wilderson 10
(Frank - PhD in Rhetoric and Film Studies from UC Berkley, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and
the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms pg. 108-118)
As noted above, before the healthy rancor and repartee that represent the cornerstone of civil
society (be it in the boardroom, at the polling booth, in the bedroom, or on the analysts couch) can get underway,
civil society must be relatively stable. But how is this stability to be achieved, and for whom? For
Black people, civic stability is a state of emergency. Frantz Fanon (Wretched) and Martinot and Sexton (The
Avant-garde of White Supremacy) explain why the stability of civil society is a state of emergency for
Blacks. Fanon writes of zones. For our purposes, we want to bear in mind the following: the zone of the Human (or
non-Blacknotwithstanding the fact that Fanon is a little to loose and liberal with his language when he calls it the zone of
the [postcolonial native]) has rules within the zone that allow for existence of Humanist
interactioni.e., Lacans psychoanalytic encounter and/or Gramscis proletarian struggle. This stems from the different
paradigms of zoning mentioned earlier in terms of Black zones (void of Humanist interaction) and White zones (the
quintessence of Humanist interaction). The zone where the native lives is not complementary to the
zone inhabited by the settler. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of higher unity. Obedient
to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of
the two terms, one is superfluousThe settlers town is a town of white people, of foreigners. (Wretched 38-39) This is the
basis of his assertion that two zones produce two different species. The phrase not in service of higher unity dismisses any
kind of dialectical optimism for a future synthesis. Fanons specific context does not share the same historical or national
context of Martinot and Sexton, but the settler/native dynamic, the differential zoning and the gratuity (as opposed to
contingency) of violence which accrue to the blackened position, are shared by the two texts. Martinot and Sexton assert the
primacy of Fanons Manichean zones (without the promise of higher unity) even when faced with the facticity of American
integration: The dichotomy between white ethics [the discourse of civil society] and its
irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is not dialectical; the two are
incommensurable whenever one attempts to speak about the paradigm of policing,
one is forced back into a discussion of particular eventshigh profile homicides and their related
courtroom battles, for instance [emphasis mine]. (Martinot and Sexton 6) It makes no difference that in the USA the casbah
and the European zone are laid one on top of the other, because what is being asserted here is the schematic
interchangeability between Fanons settler society and Sexton and Martinots policing paradigm. (Whites in America are now
so settled they no longer call themselves settlers.) For Fanon, it is the policeman and soldier (not the discursive, or the
hegemonic agents) of colonialism that make one town White and the other Black. For Martinot and Sexton, this Manichean
delirium manifests itself by way of the US paradigm of policing which (re)produces, repetitively, the
inside/outside, the civil society/Black void, by virtue of the difference between those bodies
that dont magnetize bullets and those bodies that do. Police impunity serves to distinguish between the
racial itself and the elsewhere that mandates itthe distinction between those whose human being is put permanently in
question and those for whom it goes without saying (Martinot and Sexton 8). In such a paradigm White people are, ipso
facto, deputized in the face of Black people, whether they know it (consciously) or not. Until the recent tapering
off of weekly lynching in the 1960s, Whites were called upon as individuals to perform this deputation. The 1914 Ph.D.
dissertation of H. M. Henry (a scholar in no way hostile to slavery), The Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina, reveals
how vital this performance was in the construction of Whiteness for the Settlers of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s, as well as for
the Settler-scholar (Henry himself) of the 1900s: The evolution of the patrol system is interesting. The need of keeping the
slaves from roving was felt from the very first. Among the earliest of the colonial acts in 1686 is one that gave any person the
right to apprehend, properly chastise, and send home any slave who might be found off his masters plantation without a
ticket. This plan was not altogether effective, and in 1690 it was made the duty of all persons under penalty of forty shillings to
arrest and chastise any slave [found] out of his home plantation without a proper ticket. This plan of making it everybodys
business to punish wandering slaves seems to have been sufficient at least for a time. (28-29) But today this process of
species division does not turn Blacks into species and produce Whites with the existential potential of fully realized
subjectivity in the same spectacular fashion as the spectacle of violence that Henry wrote of in South Carolina and that Fanon
was accustomed to Algeria. In fact, Martinot and Sexton maintain that attention to the spectacle causes us to think of violence
as contingent upon symbolic transgressions rather than thinking of it as a matrix for the simultaneous production of Black
death and White civil society: The spectacular event camouflages the operation of police law as contempt, police law is the
fact that there is no recourse to the disruption of [Black] peoples lives by these activities. (6) By no recourse the authors
are suggesting that Black people themselves serve a vital function as the living markers of
gratuitous violence. And the spectacular event is a scene that draws attention away from the paradigm of violence. It
functions as a crowding out scenario. Crowding out our understanding that, where violence is concerned, to be Black is
to be beyond the limit of contingency. This thereby gives the bodies of the rest of society
(Humans) some form of coherence (a contingent rather than gratuitous relationship to
violence): In fact, to focus on the spectacular event of police violence is to deploy (and thereby affirm) the logic of police
profiling itself. Yet, we cant avoid this logic once we submit to the demand to provide examples or images of the paradigm
[once we submit to signifying practices]. As a result, the attempt to articulate the paradigm of policing renders itself non-
paradigmatic, reaffirms the logic of police profiling and thereby reduces itself to the fraudulent ethic by which white civil
society rationalizes its existence [emphasis mine]. (6-7) The fraudulent ethic by which white civil society rationalizes its
existence endures in articulations between that species with actual recourse to the disruption of life (by the policing
paradigm) and another member of the same species, such as the dialogue between news reporter and a reader, between a
voter and a candidate, or between an analysand and his/her contemporaries. Recourse to the disruption of life is the first
condition upon which a conflict between entified signification and a true language of desire, a non-egoic language of
contemporaries, full speech, can be staged: one must first be on the policing side, rather than the policed side, of that division
made possible by the violence matrix. In other words, where violence is concerned, one must stay on this side of the wall of
contingency (just as one must stay on this side of the wall of language by operating within the Symbolic) to enable full
speech. Both matrixes, violence and alienation, precede and anticipate the species. Whiteness, then, and by extension civil
societys junior partners, cannot be solely represented as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers but must, in
the first ontological instance, be understood as a formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the
essence of their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifest in the fact that they are, if
only by default, deputized against those who do magnetize bullets: in short, White people are not simply
protected by the police, they are the police. Martinot and Sexton claim that the White subject-effects of
todays policing paradigm are more banal than the White subject-effects of Fanons settler paradigm. For Martinot and Sexton,
they cannot be explained by recourse to the spectacle of violence. Police spectacle is not the effect of the racial uniform;
rather, it is the police uniform that is producing re-racialization (Martinot and Sexton 8). This re-racialization echoes
Fanons assertion that the cause is the consequence. You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich
(Fanon Wretched40). Whereas in Fanons settler paradigm this White/rich/rich/White circularity manifests itself in the
automatic accrual of life producing potential, in Martinot and Sextons paradigm of policing it manifests itself in the automatic
accrual of life itself. It marks the difference between those who are alive, the subjects of civil
society, and those who are fatally alive (Marriott 16), or socially dead (Patterson), the species of
absolute dereliction (Fanon, Wretched). Again, the subject of civil society is the species that does not magnetize
bullets, though s/he does not necessarily perform any advocacy of police practices or of the policing paradigm the way s/he
had to in the H.M. Henrys 19th century South Carolina. As Martinot and Sexton argue, the civic stability of the 21st century U.S.
slave estate is no longer every White persons duty to perform. In fact, many Whites on the Left actually perform progressive
opposition to the police, but each performance of progressive opposition encounters what Martinot and Sexton call a
certain internal limitation. The supposed secrets of white supremacy get sleuthed in its spectacular displays, in pathology
and instrumentality, or pawned off on the figure of the rogue cop. Each approach to race subordinates it to something that is
not race, as if to continue the noble epistemological endeavor of getting to know it better. But what each ends up talking about
is that other thing. In the face of this, the lefts anti-racism becomes its passion. But its passion gives it away. It signifies the
passive acceptance of the idea that race, considered to be either a real property of a person or an imaginary projection, is not
essential to the social structure, a system of social meanings and categorizations. It is the same passive apparatus of whiteness
that in its mainstream guise actively forgets [in a way in which settlers of the first three centuries simply could not] that it
owes its existence to the killing and terrorizing of those it racializes for the purpose, expelling them from the human fold in the
same gesture of forgetting. It is the passivity of bad faith that tacitly accepts as what goes without saying the postulates of
white supremacy. And it must do so passionately since what goes without saying is empty and can be held as truth only
through an obsessiveness. The truth is that the truth is on the surface, flat and repetitive, just as the law is made by the
uniform. (7-9) A truth without depth, flat, repetitive, on the surface? This unrepresentable subject-effect is more complex
than H.M. Henrys early Settler performances of communal solidarity in part because: The gratuitousness of its
repetition bestows upon white supremacy an inherent discontinuity. It stops and starts self-
referentially, at whim. To theorize some political, economic, or psychological necessity for its repetition, its unending return to
violence, its need to kill is to lose a grasp on that gratuitousness by thinking its performance is representable. Its acts of
repetition are its access to unrepresentability; they dissolve its excessiveness into
invisibility as simply daily occurrence. Whatever mythic content it pretends to claim is a priori empty. Its secret
is that it has no depth. There is no dark corner that, once brought to the light of reason, will
unravel its system[I]ts truth lies in the rituals that sustain its circuitous contentless logic; it is, in fact, nothing but its
very practices [emphasis mine]. (10) To claim that the paradigm of policing has no mythic content, that its performance is
unrepresentable, and that there is no political, economic, or psychological necessity for its repletion is to say something
more profound than merely civil society exists in an inverse relation to its own claims. It is to say something more than what
the authors say outright: that this inversion translates today in the police making claims and demands on the institutionality of
civil society and not the other way around. The extended implication of Sexton and Martinots claim is much more devastating.
For this claim, with its emphasis on the gratuitousness of violencea violence that cannot be
represented but which positions species nonethelessrearticulates Fanons notion that, for Blacks,
violence is a matrix of (im)possibility, a paradigm of ontology as opposed to a performance
that is contingent upon symbolic transgressions. Alienation, however, that Lacanian matrix of symbolic and
imaginary castration, on which codes are made and broken and full (or empty) speech is possible, comes to appear, by way of
the psychoanalytic encounter, as 0the essential matrix of existence. We are in our place, Lacan insists, on this side of the wall of
language. (Ecrits 101) It is the grid on which the analysand can short circuit somatic compliance with hysterical symptoms and
bring to a halt, however temporarily, the egoic monumentalization of empty speech. Thus, the psychoanalytic encounter in
general, and Lacanian full speech in particular, work to crowd out the White subjects realization of his/her positionality by
way of violence. It is this crowding-out scenario that allows the analysand of full speech to remain White, but cured (a
liberated master?). And, in addition, the scenario itself weighs in as one more of civil societys enabling accompaniments (like
voting, coalition building, and interracial love) for the production of the slavethat entity: insensible to ethics; he [sic]
represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit,
the enemy of values, and in this sense he[/she] is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that
comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of
malefic0ent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces (Fanon, Wretched 41)
Traditional political thought assumes lived experiences for an articulation of
freedom this grammar of anti-blackness is a necessary analytic subject of civil
society this means the question for whom? comes first when devising
political strategies
Wilderson 10
(Frank - PhD in Rhetoric and Film Studies from UC Berkely, Red, Red, White, & Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms Pg 34-36)
Furthermore, the circulation of Blackness as metaphor and image at the most politically volatile
and progressive moments in history (e.g. the French, English, and American Revolutions), produces
dreams of liberation which are more inessential to and more parasitic on the Black, and more
emphatic in their guarantee of Black suffering, than any dream of human liberation in any era heretofore. Black slavery
is foundational to modern Humanisms ontics because freedom is the hub of Humanisms
infinite conceptual trajectories. But these trajectories only appear to be infinite. They are finite in the
sense that they are predicated on the idea of freedom from some contingency that can be named, or at
least conceptualized. The contingent rider could be freedom from patriarchy, freedom from economic exploitation, freedom
from political tyranny (for example, taxation without representation), freedom from heteronormativity, and so on. What I am
suggesting is that first, political discourse recognizes freedom as a structuring ontologic and then
it works to disavow this recognition by imagining freedom not through political ontology
where it rightfully beganbut through political experience (and practice); whereupon it immediately loses
its ontological foundations. Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone start off with, quite literally, an earth-shattering
ontologic and, in the process of meditating on it and acting through it, reduce it to an earth reforming experience? Why do
Humans take such pride in self-adjustment, in diminishing, rather than intensifying, the project of liberation (how did we get
from 68 to the present)? Because, I contend, in allowing the notion of freedom to attain the ethical
purity of its ontological status, one would have to lose ones Human coordinates and
become Black. Which is to say one would have to die. For the Black, freedom is an
ontological, rather than experiential, question. There is no philosophically credible way to attach an
experiential, a contingent, rider onto the notion of freedom when one considers the Blacksuch as freedom from gender or
economic oppression, the kind of contingent riders rightfully placed on the non-Black when thinking freedom. Rather, the
riders that one could place on Black freedom would be hyperbolicthough no less trueand ultimately untenable: i.e.,
freedom from the world, freedom from humanity, freedom from everyone (including ones Black self). Given the reigning
episteme, what are the chances of elaborating a comprehensive, much less translatable and communicable, political project
out of the necessity of freedom as an absolute? Gratuitous freedom has never been a trajectory of
Humanist thought, which is why the infinite trajectories of freedom that emanate from
Humanisms hub are anything but infinitefor they have no line of flight leading to the
Slave.


The United States remains institutionally racistthe house has been remodeled
but never been taken downseemingly race neutral policies mask the way
racism has imbedded itself

Feagin 2k (Joe-Prof of Sociology, Univ. of Fla. Gainesville; RACIST AMERICA: Roots, Current
Realities and Future Reparations; 235-236)
The liberal wing of the white elite has an inordinate fondness for setting up commissions to
study matters of racism in the United States. Over the last century at least a dozen major federal
government commissions have looked into problems of racial discrimination or racism. For
example, in 1997 President Bill Clinton set up a seven-member advisory board to start a
national conversation on race. The advisory board heard much important testimony about
racial and ethnic discrimination across the nation. Its final report, One America in the 21st
Century, incorporated important findings on racial stereotyping and discrimination but
concluded with mostly modest solutions. The report did not provide an integrated analysis of
how and why institutional racism still pervades the society, nor did it call for major restructuring
of institutions to get rid of racism.1 Most important, no serious congressional or presidential
action was taken to implement the reports more significant recommendations, such as
increasing enforcement of the civil rights laws. Today, U.S. society remains a racist system. It
was founded as such, and no largescale action has ever been taken to rebuild this system of
racism from the foundation up. From the first decades European colonists incorporated land
theft and slavery into the political-economic structure of the new nation. After the Civil War
slavery was replaced by the near slavery of legal segregation in the South, while some legal and
much de facto segregation continued in the North. These institutional arrangements were
designed to keep antiblack oppression firmly in place. Periodically, the racist structure has been
altered, particularly in the 1860s when slavery was abolished and in the 1960s when legal
segregation was replaced by the current system of more informal racial oppression. Other
Americans of color have been incorporated into U.S. society by whites operating from within
this well-established white supremacist framework. The American house of racism has been
remodeled somewhat over timegenerally in response to protests from the oppressedbut its
formidable foundation remains firmly in place. What is the likelihood of societal change on the
scale required to replace this racist foundation? On this point, there is some pessimism among
leading American intellectuals. For some time, African American analysts have pointed to the
great difficulty of bringing large-scale changes in the system of racism. In the 1940s sociologist
Oliver C.Cox noted that because the racial system in the United States is determined largely by
the interests of a powerful political class, no spectacular advance in the status of Negroes could
be expected.2 More recently, Derrick Bell has contended that [b]lack people will never gain
full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no
more than temporary peaks of progress, short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial
patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance.3Nonetheless, the racist patterns and
arrangements of U.S. society do regularly generate open resistance and organized opposition.
These patterns have been altered to some degree by antiracist movements in the past, and they
can conceivably be changed again. Historically, other societies have experienced large-scale
revolutions. Future domination of U.S. society by whites is not automatic. Viewed over the long
term, no hierarchical system is permanent, and such a configuration must be constantly
buttressed and diligently reinforced by its main beneficiaries. If we think dialectically and discern
the social contradictions lying deep beneath the surface of this society, we see that the racist
system has created the seeds of its eventual destruction. Thus, this system is legitimated by
widely proclaimed ideals of equality and democratic participation, ideals that have provided it
with some respect internally and internationally. While the equality ideals have been used to
gloss over persisting racial inequalities, they have also been adopted as bywords for movements
of the oppressed. The ideals of equality and democracy are taken very seriously by black
Americans and other Americans of color and have regularly spurred them to protest oppression.
The honed-by-struggle ideals of equality, justice, and civil rights are critical tenets of the
antiracist theory that has emerged over centuries of protest, and they are periodically
implemented in antiracist strategies. They have served as a rallying point and have increased
solidarity. The situation of long-term racist oppression has pressed black Americansand,
sometimes, other Americans of colorto unite for their own survival and, periodically, for large-
scale protest.

The Slave implicates every part of society its presences is inherent grounded in
every part of civil society. Understanding the hauntology of the slave is key.
Farley 5 (Anthony, boston College, Perfecting Slavery,
http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=lsfp)
Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. White-over-black
is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the distribution of
material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to segregation to
neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with post-modernity
or after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is
the movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is neosegregation. White-over-black
is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is white-over-black, only white-over-black,
and that continually. The story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie. The story of
progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of
law. And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows down before its
master of its own free will. That is the moment in which the slave accomplishes the impossible
reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself unfree.3 When exactly does this
perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down before its master when it prays for legal
relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the field of law hoping for an answer.
The slaves free choice, the slaves leap of faith, can only be taken under conditions of legal
equality. Only after emancipation and legal equality, only after rights, can the slave perfect itself
as a slave. Bourgeois legality is the condition wherein equals are said to enter the commons of
reason4 or the kingdom of ends5 or the New England town meeting of the soul to discuss
universalizable principles, to discuss equality and freedom. Much is made of these meetings,
these struggles for law, these festivals of the universal. Commons, kingdom, town meeting,
there are many mansions in the house of law, but the law does not forget its father, as Maria
Grahn-Farley observes:The law of slavery has not been forgotten by the law of segregation; the
law of segregation has not been forgotten by the law of neosegregation. The law guarding the
gates of slavery, segregation, and neosegregation has not forgotten its origin; it remembers its
father and its grandfather before that. It knows what master it serves; it knows what color to
count.6 To wake from slavery is to see that everything must go, every law room,7 every great
house, every plantation, all of it, everything. Requests for equality and freedom will always fail.
Why? Because the fact of need itself means that the request will fail. The request for equality
and freedom, for rights, will fail whether the request is granted or denied. The request is
produced through an injury.8 The initial injury is the marking of bodies for lessless respect,
less land, less freedom, less education, less. The mark must be made on the flesh because that is
where we start from. Childhood is where we begin and, under conditions of hierarchy, that
childhood is already marked. The mark organizes, orients, and differentiates our otherwise
common flesh. The mark is race, the mark is gender, the mark is class, the mark is. The mark is
all there is to the reality of those essencesrace, gender, class, and so onthat are said to
precede existence. The mark is a system.9 Property and law follow the mark. And so it goes.
There is a pleasure in hierarchy. We begin with an education in our hierarchies. We begin with
childhood and childhood begins with education. To be exact, education begins our childhood.
We are called by race, by gender, by class, and so on. Our education cultivates our desire in the
direction of our hierarchies.If we are successful, we acquire an orientation that enables us to
locate ourselves and our bodies vis--vis all the other bodies that inhabit our institutional
spaces. We follow the call and move in the generally expected way. White-over black is an
orientation, a pleasure, a desire that enables us to find our place, and therefore our way, in our
institutional spaces. This is why no one ever need ask for equality and freedom. This is why the
fact of need means that the request will fail. The request for rightsfor equalitywill always
fail because there are always ambiguities. To be marked for less, to be marked as less han zero,
to be marked as a negative attractor, is to be in the situation of the slave. The slave is not called.
The slave is not free. The slave is called to follow the calling that is not a calling. The slave is
trained to be an object; the slave is trained, in other words, to not be. The slave is death. Death
is the end of ambiguity. To be in the situation of the slave is to have all the ambiguities
organized against you. But there are always ambiguities, one is always free. How, then, are the
ambiguities organized? How is freedom ended? The slave must choose the end of ambiguity, the
end of freedom, objecthood. The slave must freely choose death. This the slave can only do
under conditions of freedom that present it with a choice. The perfect slave gives up the ghost
and commends its everlasting spirit to its master. The slaves final and perfect prayer is a legal
prayer for equal rights. The texts of law, like the manifest content of a dream, perhaps of
wolves, may tell a certain story or an uncertain story. The certainty or uncertainty of the story is
of absolutely no consequence. The story, the law, the wolves table manners, do not matter. The
story, the law, the story of law, the dream of wolves,10 however, represents a disguised or
latent wish that does matter. The wish is a matter of life or death. We are strangers to
ourselves. The dream of equality, of rights, is the disguised wish for hierarchy. The prayer for
equal rights is the disguised desire for slavery. Slavery is death. The prayer for equal rights, then,
is the disguise of the deathwish. The prayer for equal rights is the slaves perfect moment. The
slaves perfect prayer, the prayer of the perfect slave, is always answered. The slave, however,
knows not what it does when it prays for rights, for the slave is estranged from itself. Of its own
inner strivings it knows not. The slave strives to be property, but since property cannot own
property the slave cannot own its inner strivings. The slave strives to produce the final
commodity law. In other words, the slave produces itself as a slave through law. The slave
produces itself as a slave (as a commodity) through its own prayer for equal rights. And that
prayer is all there is to law. The slave bows down before the law and prays for equal rights. The
slave bows down before the law and then there is law. There is no law before the slave bows
down. The slaves fidelity becomes the law, and the law is perfected through the slaves struggle
for the universal, through the slaves struggle for equality of right. The slave prays for equality of
right. Rights cannot be equal. Its perfect prayer is answered; the laws ambiguities open, like the
gates of heaven, just above its head. And all of the white-over-black accumulated within the
endless ambiguities of law rains down. White over-black is slavery and slavery is death. Death is
the end of forever. The end of forever is perfection and perfection, for us, seems divine, beyond
the veil, beyond death; hence, the end of forever.




Revolutionary scholarship is key we provide the blue-prints for
revolutionaries. Starting outside the grasp of the state is critical empirics are
on our side.
Wilderson 10
(Frank - PhD in Rhetoric and Film Studies from UC Berkely, Red, Red, White, & Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms 187-188)
If the structure of political desire in socially engaged film hopes to stake out an antagonistic
relationship between its dream and the idiom of power that underwrites civil society,
then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of objects of social death. If
we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the Negro has been inviting Whites and civil
societys junior partners to the dance of death for hundreds of years. Cinema is just one of many
institutions that have refused to learn the steps. In the 1960s and 70s, as White radicalisms (especially The
Weather Undergrounds) discourse and political common sense was beginning to be authorized by the ethical dilemmas of embodied
incapacity (i.e. Blackness), White cinemas historical proclivity to embrace dispossession through the vectors of capacity (alienation and
exploitation) was radically disturbed. In some films, this proclivity was so profoundly ruptured that while the films in question did not
surrender to the authority of incapacity (did not openly signal their having been authorized by the Slave), they were nonetheless
unsuccessful in their attempts to assert the legitimacy of the White ethical dilemmas.lv The period of COINTELPROS
crushing of the Black Panthers and then the Black Liberation Army was also a period
which witnessed the flowering of the political power of Blacknessnot as institutional capacity but
as a zeitgeist, a demand capable of authorizing White (Settler/Master) radicalism. By 1980, White
radicalism had comfortably re-embraced capacitythat is to say, it returned to the discontents of civil society with the same formal
tenacity as it had from 1532lvi to 1967, only now that formal tenacity was emboldened by a wider range of alibis than just Free Speech or
Vietnam; for example, womens, gay, anti-nuke, and environmental movements.Cinema has been, and remains todayeven in its most
politically engaged momentsinvested elsewhere, away from the ethical dilemmas of beings positioned by social death. This is not to say
that the desire of all socially engaged cinema today is pro- White. But it is to say that it is almost always anti-Blackwhich is to say it will
not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. not
because it raises the specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of existing
resources) but because its condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance function
as both a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm; that is, it functions as a program of
complete disorder (Fanon Wretched...36). Bush Mama was able to embrace this disorder, this incoherence and allow for their
cinematic elaboration. For a brief moment in history, Black film assumed the Black desire to take this country down.


Race shapes modern social relations, the color-blind perspective of white
liberalism and material analysis of race and slavery actively paper over
necessary re-territorialization of social relations
Wilkins Catanese, 12, Ph.D., Drama and Humanities, Stanford University (Brandi The
Problem of the Color[blind], University Of Michigan Press, Muse)
While Proposition 54 dealt directly with the proper role of race in American life, it was in fact part of a much larger cultural
struggle relating to the tensions between the public and private sectors. Electoral and legislative activity in the earliest years of
the twenty-rst century have established deeply important yet seemingly inconsistent boundaries between personal and
public (group) rights, from the defense of marriage statutes that have spread across the country to deny same-sex couples
the legal protections that marriage affords to the second Bush administrations efforts to privatize Social Security. In the
former instance, the public (and by extension, the government) has a right to structure the most private of relationships
between consensual adults, yet in the latter case, the public and government are framed as intrusive presences in what ought
to be personal decisions regarding nances, wealth, and quality of life. In subtitling Proposition 54 the Racial Privacy
Initiative, Connerly and his associates exposed and affirmed a racial etiquette that dominates contemporary American culture.
As I have attempted to suggest with the title of this chapter, twenty-first-century social graces dictate that
references to race always be issued sotto voce, so as not to cause any undue discomfort.
Proposition 54 extends this logic, in effect criminalizing racial consciousness in the public
sphere. Implicitly, the legislation suggests that race is exclusively a matter of private
consciousness, only gaining publicly relevant materiality when and if indi- viduals confess their awareness of one
anothers bodily differences. In this schema, race is the unruly chin hair on the face of an otherwise
unblemished America: only bad manners would compel anyone to bring it up, and the
politest among us will instead do others the favor of not mentioning a thing that can only
cause embarrassment, discomfort, or shame. Anticipating these as the likely and logical outcomes of
foregrounding race is a reflection of what John L. Jackson names racial paranoia, a postcivil rights phenomenon constituted
by extremist thinking, general social distrust, the non-falsifiable embrace of in- tuition, and an unflinching commitment to
contradictory thinking.10 Such 6 / the problem of the color[blind] paranoia overdetermines racial identity
rather than racial injustice as the core problem of American society, daring people to speak
of race in a perverse game of tag: whoever mentions race first is the racist in the room.11
The irony of such foolish games is their ostensibly benevolent intention. We can read them as facile responses to W. E. B.
DuBoiss overinvoked claim about the color line. However, DuBois wrote at a moment of unique urgency for black Americans:
at the beginning of the twentieth century, decades after emancipation from slavery and the backlash
against Reconstruction, blacks continued to exist just beyond the limits of the civic
imaginary, to be prefigured, in DuBoiss simple yet trenchant words, as a problem that
could not or would not be solved through incorporation into the dominant society.12 A
century later, we continue to struggle with repairing racial inequality on one hand and, on the
other, recognizing the celebratory, emancipatory aspects of both elective and sometimes
coerced membership in racialized communities. In fact, DuBoiss concerns could now be reframed to assert
that the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the color-blind: those who wish
to disavow the continued material manifestations of race in our society. For reasons both well in-
tentioned and sinister, a signicant number of Americans believe that a total ig- norance of race is the obvious, and only,
solution to the problems that an acute attention to race has brought our society.
The Ballot is key there is no such thing as a neutral playing field this isnt the
wrong forum, its the only forum and silence in response to the 1ac is a reason
why they should lose radical disobedience is key.

The affirmative speech acts alone hold radical potential Procedural arguments
represent biased and white proprietary over dialogue that is arbitrarily
constructed to actively exclude arguments that question squo relations
Wilkins Catanese, 12, Ph.D., Drama and Humanities, Stanford University (Brandi The
Problem of the Color[blind], University Of Michigan Press, Muse)

Nontraditional casting as such is the most obvious frame of reference for fully appreciating this argument for the relationship
between racial representation and racial reality. Attendant to this is the performativity of race, which
demonstrates the shortcomings of color blindnesss emphasis on transcending racial
discourse, while creating a space for thinking through the possibilities of racial
transgression as a productive alternative. I align myself with the discourse of race that argues for its
antiessential nature without discounting what Harry Elam refers to as its situational signicance.46 Similarly, cultural
theorist Stuart Hall has said that race is like a language, a sign system whose significance exists
within, but not before, the act of social exchange.47 Race may have no absolute position within biological
discourse, but the influence of this profound ordering of difference instantiated at the sight of the body48 structures social
situations to the benefit and detriment of various types of bodies according to their valuation within the hierarchy of racial
classification. Race, therefore, gains its currency from discourses that enact the reality they
describe, meeting the most elemental standards of performativity. Shannon Jackson goes even further
in the theorization of racial performativity to argue that racism, rather than race, is the ultimate performative,49 because of
its inherently structural and institutional dimensions, which allow us to distinguish between conscious, voluntary notions of
race as performed identity and racism as a broader social system that recruits individuals wittingly and unwittingly to fortify
the institutions that create distinctions in privilege. Michael Omi and Howard Winant articulate the idea of racial formation as
a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized.50
Rather than postulating race as either entirely real (biological) or entirely illusory (social
construct), they pro- pose a definition of race as a concept which signifies and symbolizes
social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of bodies,51 one that
recognizes bodies as the cultural sites upon which ideas are routinely mapped. This
intersectional framework is especially valuable when trying to understand nonconforming
(perhaps a better word than nontraditional) racial casting and performances: sometimes
the body doesnt do what it says its doing, and some- times this failed correspondence is
produced not solely by the performer but partially by the spectator whose interpretive
competencies challenge the per- forming bodys efforts to speak for itselfthe history of social
conicts and in- Bad Manners / 19 terests of which the spectator is aware, and therefore uses to comprehend an ac- tors
performance, might grate against the narrative circumstances the actor tries to inhabit. These understandings of race are of
course very closely related to Judith Butlers theorization of gender as a repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated
acts, within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of
being.52 Performance offers the opportunity for both gendered and racial subversion by
allowing social and theatrical actors the opportunity to restyle the body and attempt to
gain momentum that will cause repetitions of this restylization to spread from their local
bodies to broader cultural sites. To borrow from Ann Pellegrini, We (the collective and
collaborative we of writer and reader, performer and audience) can only catch ourselves in the act of
becoming [racial] subject[s] when we see ourselves as if through the others I. 53 I would argue
by extension that we can only cat 8ch ourselves in the act of imposing racial objecthood upon others when we feel deeply
invested in our own racial I. Understanding race in this way privileges its external dimensions,
rather than its private ones, by emphasizing racial categorization of the self and other as the
enunciation of a social contract of sorts, an invitation to or provocation of a host of behaviors and expectations that grant
one access to society as a member of a privileged or problematized group. Race is best understood as a complex synthesis of
involuntary and voluntary attributes and affiliations whose significance is performative, produced through our delity to them
rather than as anterior, interior fact. Furthermore, this delity is structured around the allocation of privilege. In the theater
and in everyday life, knowing how and agreeing to perform your racial role correctly is often a guarantor of personal safety,
nancial reward, interpersonal respect, and even affection, reflecting E. Patrick Johnsons claim that the pursuit of authenticity
is inevitably an emotional and moral one.54