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Respectability DA - Black Rage Article in 14

In response to these three primary black tropes, another controlling image emerges the

figure of black social conservatism through

black respectability, characterized by Don Lemon, Bill Cosby, and as deployed by black institutions such as the
church and the NAACP. Black respectability, as defined by Scholar Kali N. Gross, functions as a
resistance to negative norms of blackness. Her work focuses specifically
on the phenomenon of black respectability in the academy by thinking
through black academics desires to craft images of blackness that are
different from the ones that are circulated in the media, African Americans
adopt a "politics of respectability. Claiming respectability through
manners and morality furnished an avenue for African Americans to assert
the will and agency to redefine themselves outside the prevailing racist
discourses (Gross 15-17). Circulating an image of black respectability does
the image of

not disrupt negative feelings of blackness, in fact the circulation of

a black respectable image, serves to further reinforce systemic
controls based on white supremacy, classist, sexist, and abletist
notions of black people . The ramifications of this split are dangerous; it
disallows black people with the most financial and political resources to
align themselves with black communities who bear the brunt of oppressive
regimes of power every single day. The split functions to keep black folks
fighting each other when the fight is actually being waged against black
people on the outside. The attacks on black people are characterized by the slow erosion of civil right gains made by
movement foremothers and fathers during the tumultuous mid-century civil rights and Black Nationalist era. Specifically I am speaking to the
institutional changes that have nearly destroyed affirmative action, key parts of the 1965 voting right act, and any all-social welfare systems.

Instead black respectable outrage looks like Don Lemon furthering white
supremacist-neoliberal aims by telling black people how to fix the problem
of blackness he states: "Black people, if you really want to fix the problem, here's just five things that you should think about doing,"
Lemon continued. Those five things, he said, were hiking up their pants, finishing school, not using the n-word, taking care of their communities
and not having children out of wedlock. (Fung 1) Lemons comments are blaming all of the insidious terrors of white supremacy on black people
instead of critiquing the institutionalizing techniques of neoliberalism as played out on the bodies of black folk. Outside of black

internal fighting this era of neoliberalism is marked by a pervasive anti-black

racism that is rooted in claims by whites of reverse racism, substantiated by
technologies of diversity, and so-called color blind politics that are
operating in such a way that maintains our delicate race, classed,
gendered and abletist social order through the discourse of post raciality. All of these things
have worked to render our ability to struggle impossible .

Calmness DA

Their advo of analysis justifies white supremacist violence. It creates a

sphere where Whiteness is allowed to exist and morph against the stream
of Black Scholarship and Academic Radicalism, like Mari Matsuda and her
view of Angry Black People defending the Black and White Binary, and
her theories to decenter Blackness. I

Debate Slavery DA Farley in 05

Anthony P. Farley Boston College Law School, Anthony.Farley@bc.edu (Anthony P. Farley. "Perfecting Slavery." Loyola

Journal 36, (2005): 225-256.)

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: 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 follows 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, therefore our way,
University Chicago Law

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 than 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.
1.) Conditionality renders oppressed bodies invisible through an emphasis on
White Debate and historicity

Yancy 05 [George, professor at Duquesne University, Whiteness and the Return of the
Black Body, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol, 19, No. 4, 2005. JSTOR]
I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a profound source of knowledge connected to my

In philosophy,
the only thing that we are taught to expose is a weak argument , a
fallacy, or someones inferior reasoning power. The embodied self is
bracketed and deemed irrelevant to theory, superfluous and cumbersome
in ones search for truth. It is best, or so we are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white
philosopher/author presumes to speak for all of us without the slightest
mention of his or her raced identity. Self-consciously writing as white male philosopher, Crispin
raced body. Hence, I wrote from a place of lived embodied experience, a site of exposure.

Sartwell oberseves: Left to my own devices. I disappear as an author. That is the whiteness of my authorship. This
whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is
empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. But such an authorship and authority
is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self- forgetting or apparent transcendence of the mundane and the
particular, and the pleasure of power expressed in the comprehension of a range of materials (1998, 6). To
theorize the black body one must to turn the [black] body as the radix for interpreting racial experiences or the
social performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper, my objective is to describe

subjectivity, its lived reality, is reduced to

instantiations of the white imaginary resulting in what I refer to as the
phenomenological return of the black body. These instantiations are embedded within and
and theorize situations where the black bodys

evolve out of the complex of social and historical interstices of whites efforts at self-construction through complex
acts of erasure vis--vis Black people. These acts of self-construction, however, are myths/ideological constructions

white power. As James Snead has noted, Mythification is the

replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or
[Black] demotion along a scale of human value (Snead 1994, 4). How I understand and theorize the body
relates to the fact that the body- in this case, the Black Body, - is capable of
undergoing to a socio-historical process of phenomenological return vis-vis white embodiment. The bodys meaning- whether phenotypically white or black- its
ontology, its modalities of aesthetic performance, its comportment, its raciated reproduction, is in
predicated upon maintaining

constant contestation.

The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is seen its truth

The body is positioned by

historical practices and discourses. The body is codified as this or that in
terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through
processes of negotiation that are embedded within and serve various
ideological interests that are grounded within further power-laden social
processes. The historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of
contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of its being as lived and
meant within interstices of social semiotics . Hence, a.) the body is less of a
thing/being than a shifting/changing historical meaning that is a subject to
cultural configuration/reconfiguration. The point here is to interrogate the black body as a
fixed and material truth that pre-exists its relations with the world and with others; b.) The bodys
meaning is fundamentally symbolic (McDowell 2001, 301), and its meaning is congealed through
symbolic repetition and iteration that emits certain signs and presupposes certain norms; and c.) the body is
a battlefield, one that is fought over again and again across particular
historical moments and within particular social spaces . In other words, the concept
is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction.

of the body provides only the illusion of self-evidence, facticity, thereness for something fundamentally

it is not
only the black body that defies the ontic fixity projected upon it through
the white gaze and hence through epitome of whiteness, but the white
body is also fundamentally symbolic, requiring demystification of its
status as norm, the paragon of beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint,
and nobility. In other words, given the three suppositions above, both the black body and the white body
ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular social groups (301). On this score,

lend themselves to processes of interpretive fracture and to strategies of interrogating and removing the veneer of
their alleged objectivity.

Hooks in 92 [
Amazed the first time I read in history classes that white slave-owners (men,
women, and children) punished enslaved black people for looking, I
wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze had informed black
parenting and black spectatorship. The politics of slavery, of racialized
power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze.
Connecting this strategy of domination to that used by grown folks in southern
black rural communities where I grew up, I was pained to think that there was no
absolute difference between whites who had oppressed black people and ourselves.
Years later, reading Michel Foucault, I thought again about these connections, about
the ways power as domination -reproduces itself in -different locations employing
similar apparatuses, ' strategies, and mechanisms of control. Since I knew as a child
that the dominating power adults exercised over me and over my gaze was never
so absolute that I did not dare to look, to sneak a peep, to stare dangerously, I knew
that the slaves had looked, that all attempts to repress our black peoples'
right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look a
rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we
defiantly declared: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change

reality." Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability

to manipulate one's gaze in the face of structures of domination
that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency . In much of
his work, Michel Foucault insists on describing domination in terms of
relations of power" as part of an effort to challenge the assumption that power

is a system of domination which controls everything and which leaves no room for
freedom. " Emphatically stating that in all relations of power "there is
necessarily the possibility of resistance," he invites the critical thinker to
search those margins, gaps, and locations on and through the body where agency
can be found. Stuart Hall calls for recognition of our agency as black spectators in
his essay "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation." Speaking against the
construction of white representations of blackness as totalizing, Hall says of white
presence: "The error is not to conceptualize this 'presence' in terms of power, but to
locate that power as wholly external to Us as extrinsic force, whose influence can
be thrown off like the serpent sheds its skin. What Franz Fanon reminds us, in Black
Skin, White Masks, is how power is inside as well as outside: ... the movements,
the attitudes, the glances of the Other fixed me there, in the sense in which
a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an
explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been
put together again by another self. This "look, from - so to speak-the place of the
Other, fixes us, not only in its violence, hostility and aggression, but in the
ambivalence of its desire. Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein
we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at
one another, naming what we see. The "gaze" has been and is a site of
resistance for' colonized black people globally. Subordinates in relations of
power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that "looks" to document,
one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated
to assert agency by claiming and cultivating "awareness" politicizes
"looking" relationsone learns to look a certain way' in order to resist.