Critical Race Theory
Things to know about the argument: The K goes in the same direction as many of the aff’s that decrease racial profiling in surveillance. You can still make a negative argument if the aff approaches surveillance reduction in a colorblind manner, or makes an argument about upholding the constitution or American Democracy.
The file is also short on generic legal links, but we hope to augment that section in wave 2. The narrative good alternative cards can be re-appropriated for this purpose if you are looking for more in the meantime.
We included a possible 1ac that is a planless, narratives good affirmative. The basis is that racial profiling is based on federal legal whiteness. Inserting narratives of the oppressed into legal discussions blurs objectivity and challenges whiteness.
If you’d like to run a plan, there are various avenues that the courts or congress could address racial profiling in surveillance. Some of that solvency evidence is in the file, but would require some more research. Note that the 1ac doesn’t include an impact beyond racism. If you’d like to add an additional systemic claim to racism, you can pull from the impact portion of the K. Education arguments to answer framework are found in the FW section of the K.
Contributors to thank include: Carla Ho, Cayla Lee, Taya Smith and Michael Cho
***CRT GOOD***
AFF
***1ac ***
We present the following narrative to illustrate the pervasive effect that federal racial profiling law has on legal enforcement
Nelson, 2000 (Jill [Prominent African American Journalist and Novelist], "Police Brutality: An Anthology", 6/28/15, 92-93) // cjh
The gun never moved. When they asked me for my license (they had already discovered John's during the body search), I asked if I could reach down to get it or if they would prefer to get it themselves. I told them I was afraid to reach down. "Why is that, ma'am?" the "officer" responded. The other cop came around and retrieved my purse. He pulled out the wallet. He did not search the bag. The partner returned to the patrol car. The other cop's gun remained ready to fire into John's right temple. And the boy in blue just smiled on. Clearly, we had made his day. About five minutes later, the partner returned. "They do own the car," he mumbled. The gun was placed back in the holster. Then, I received the requisite apology. After all, I was the White woman with the registration and had a medical school ID. The trespass had not been the gun at John's temple, but the ten-minute delay I suffered as a result of "a police computer error" Clearly, John was still a "nigger," but I was apparently no longer a "nigger lovin' slut." The couple did not file a complaint. More fearful than angry, they saw little value in perpetuating a painful experience. Countless other victims of police abuse must reach a similar conclusion. Under those conditions, pragmatism prevails over courage. Principle is sacrificed to survival. This is America. There is a long history of de facto autho-rization for police to keep Blacks generally and Black men most specifically in the subordinate place that society approves and the law condones. Racial rhetoric? Hardly. From the earliest period in our history, a primary role of law enforcement was to keep Blacks under control, quite literally during the slavery era. To curb runaways and prevent the formation of insurrectionary plots, slaveholders developed elabo-rate systems of patrols made up of conscripted local Whites who traveled the roads and checked plantation quarters. Slaves caught without passes were summarily punished with twenty lashes, but the brutality of the patrols resulted in complaints from slaves and mas-ters alike.' The end of slavery in 1863 increased the danger of the now free Blacks, who posed a greater threat to Whites determined to keep the former chattels in their subordinate place. As a child in Durham, North Carolina, during the second decade of the twentieth century, Pauli Murray viewed the local police "as heavily armed, invariably mountainous red-faced [men] who to me seemed more a signal of calamity than of protection."' Albon Holsey, growing up in Georgia at the turn of the century, recalled having lived in "mortal fear" of the police, "for they were arch-tormenters and persecutors of Negroes."' The North was no better. Richard R. Wright Jr. remembered, "I was convinced early that policemen were my enemies. I never approached a policeman with a question until I had been in Chicago for nearly a year."' Leon Litwack has written that during the Jim Crow era, the subject of the police often dominated conversations among young Blacks. The stories revolved around chases, harassment, clubbings, illegal arrests, and coerced confessions.' Far worse than what the police did to Blacks is what they failed to do. From 1859 through the early 1960s, at least five thousand Blacks lost their lives by lynching.' There are few reports that police or other law enforcement officials posed a serious barrier to lynch mobs. And, of course, few, if any, of the perpetrators were ever brought to justice. According to a scholar of the period, lynchers had "little to fear from those who administered the southern legal sys-tem," and prosecutors often dismissed lynchings as "an expression of the will of the people."' In 1900, for example, there were at least 105 reported lynchings. In New Orleans during that year, -White mobs assaulted Blacks for three days, burning and robbing their homes and stores. Mass murder was not sufficient to save the first of several antilynching measures, this one introduced by G. H. White, a Black congressman from North Carolina, from dying in committee." Despite earnest campaigns by the NAACP, which was founded a decade later, and other groups, the Congress never passed any of the antilynching bills placed before it. Beyond documented lynchings by vigilante mobs, it is simply impossible to estimate the number of Blacks murdered by individual Whites in cases where the motive was racial antagonism. Only a small number of those who committed these crimes were tried for them.
The FBI surveillance has historically targeted people of color without ‘cause’
Cyril, 15 (Malkia [Activist and Writer], April issue of The Progressive, "Black America's State of Surveillance", 6/27/15, www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance) // cjh
Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, my mother, a former Black Panther, died from complications of sickle cell anemia. Weeks before she died, the FBI came knocking at our door, demanding that my mother testify in a secret trial proceeding against other former Panthers or face arrest. My mother, unable to walk, refused. The detectives told my mother as they left that they would be watching her. They didn’t get to do that. My mother died just two weeks later. ¶ My mother was not the only black person to come under the watchful eye of American law enforcement for perceived and actual dissidence. Nor is dissidence always a requirement for being subject to spying. Files obtained during a break-in at an FBI office in 1971 revealed that African Americans, J. Edger Hoover’s largest target group, didn’t have to be perceived as dissident to warrant surveillance. They just had to be black. As I write this, the same philosophy is driving the increasing adoption and use of surveillance technologies by local law enforcement agencies across the United States. ¶ Today, media reporting on government surveillance is laser-focused on the revelations by Edward Snowden that millions of Americans were being spied on by the NSA. Yet my mother’s visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the slave pass system to laws that deputized white civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other people of color have lived for centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy. ¶ It’s time for journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged classes learn they are targets of surveillance. We need to understand that data has historically been overused to repress dissidence, monitor perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an impoverished underclass.¶ In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies, law enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up to this technological advance. ¶ Concerned advocates see mass surveillance as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance is an obvious answer—it may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the inherently innocent.¶ The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved in any crime. ¶ For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate surveillance. ¶ Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, we’ve birthed a complex and coded culture—from jazz to spoken dialects—in order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood.
This continues today through federal surveillance, grounded in constitutionalism, and used to propagate the myth of ‘black criminality’
Marshall 12 - Assistant Professor — Ph.D., 2002, Government, Harvard University (Stephen, "The Political Life of Fungibility" http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v015/15.3.marshall.html)
Presumed guilt constituted Martin’s peculiar vulnerability and this presumption has a political constitution. When Zimmerman saw Martin he saw criminality, understood as the commission of crime, an intension to commit crime, an escape from prior crime, or some combination of the three. Tempting as it may be to look to the War on Drugs during the Reagan era as the seedbed for state practices of racialized surveillance, interdiction, and incarceration, both the Reagan era’s escalation of these practices and the presumption of Martin’s guilt are bound up with the criminalization of blackness that emerges in the context of US slavery. This is a history of racialization in which black agency is figured as criminality. Although the US Constitution artfully evades the word slavery and refuses express enumeration of the racial attributes of citizenship, it articulates the figure of black criminality as fundamental law and affirms practices of racialized surveillance and interdiction as civic virtue. Answering to lingering Jeffersonian questions about black humanity engendered by the 3/5 clause of Article I, Section II, Article IV defines national citizenship by setting it in an antagonistic relation to the crime of black fugitivity. Opposing the “immunities and privileges” of citizenship to the culpable derelictions of treason, felony, and escape from slavery, the framers yoke blackness to crime, legislate the intelligibility of black agency in the figure of the fugitive slave, and inscribe the “immunities and privileges” of citizenship as both a freedom from the presumption of criminal alterity and a duty to interdict the fugitive. Noting the fragility of constitutions and the indispensable constitutional scaffolding provided by criminal alterity and norms of interdiction, Alexis de Tocqueville writes, “the genuine sanction of political laws is to be found in the penal laws, and if the sanction is lacking, the law sooner or later loses its force. Therefore, the man who judges the criminal is really the master of society.”6 By expressly granting blacks entitlement to “immunities and privileges” of citizenship, the 14th Amendment (1868) sought to abolish black fugitivity and dissipate the antagonism between it and US citizenship. Grand as was the effort, such a revolution proved impossible. With commercial exchange of black bodies prohibited except as punishment for crime, Historian Kali Gross notes how Northern white newspapers invent the figure of the “Colored Amazon” to allege the growing menace of black women’s criminality and “supply a new and growing commercial trade in blackness.”7 Concurrently, white southerners rehabilitate black fugitivity in the more menacing figure of the black rapist and re-found the old antagonism upon the violent hatred patriarchal societies cultivate against sexual predators who assail the women it values. At the turn of the century, southern intellectual’s leading role in propagating selective census data which reflected repressive criminalization of southern black life helped to give birth to modern crime statistics as well as make the case that northern blacks were also unfit for citizenship. As Kalil Muhammad notes, one of the crucial legacies of “race conscious laws, discriminatory punishments, and new forms of everyday surveillance” is its contribution to a “statistical rhetoric of black criminality” that operates as “a proxy for a national discourse on black inferiority.”8 When the figures of the welfare queen and drug warlord were vibrantly recirculated in the 1980s in connection with the southern strategy of the Republican Party, they neither inaugurated the criminalization of blackness nor simply revived a disreputable national tradition of racial animus. Recovering constitutional principle that posits an antagonism between the citizen and the fugitive slave, the party refashioned black fugitivity in order to restore American citizenship in the post-civil rights Era.