The Affirmative Is Simply an Attempt at Particular Reforms of Colonialism and Indo-Colonialism

Whiteness 1NC

Short

The affirmative is simply an attempt at particular reforms of colonialism and indo-colonialism that fails to address the underlying issues of surveillance that are based in race. All institutions of power have now become based on race. Undoing one harm will not solve.

Lieberman, 2003
ROBERT C. LIEBERMAN professor of political science and public affairs at Columbia University 2003 (Race and the Limits of Solidarity American Welfare State Development in Comparative Perspective Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform (Paperback) by Sanford F. Schram (Editor), Joe Soss (Editor), Richard C. Fording (Editor))

An alternative approach is to compare the United States to other countries that share certain political and social characteristics in order to see how countries with differently organized racial politics confronted similar problems of welfare state development and whether particular racial configurations are associated with particular social policy coalitions. In the United States, the centrality of race, usually taken as an exceptional feature of American politics, arises from the history of African slavery in North America that reaches back almost as far as permanent European settlement of the continent (Berlin 1998; see also Tannenbaum 1946; Elkins 1959). But slavery was only one form of rule based on racial distinctions. More generally, the processes by which racially defined rule shapes political institutions and strategic political circumstances may apply in a variety of contexts (Davis 1966). Other systems in which rule is based on racial categories include apartheid (including Jim Crow in the American South), certain brands of nationalism (including nationalism's totalitarian variants), and, most relevant for the present comparison, imperialism and colonialism. "Two new devices for political organization and rule over foreign peoples were discovered during the first decades of imperialism," wrote Hannah Arendt (1968, r8). "One was race as a principle of the body politic, and the other was bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination." Like slavery and segregation, imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constituted rule by "whites" of European descent over "blacks," conducted through a set of formal institutions and social arrangements supported by an ideology of racial superiority. All of these forms of rule were also justified and explained by other means economic, political, diplomatic and a complete explanation of slavery, segregation, or imperialism would surely involve all of these (see Baumgart 1982). But underlying these explanations, or at least deeply intertwined with them, is what W. E. B. Du Bois (1986, 16) called the color line, "the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Africa and Asia, in America and the islands of the sea." Similarly, imperialism and colonialism, no matter how extensively they involved other factors, constituted irreducible structures of racial rule.

Resisting racism is the highest ethical duty. Any concessions or legitimization of exclusion corrupts and bankrupts ethics, entrenching systems of violence.Memmi 00(Albert, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University of Paris, Racism, p. 163-5)

The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is “the truly capital sin.”fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.

The alternative is a genealogical criticism of whiteness. An historical tracing of struggle helps modern activists trace the roots of whiteness and create new types of resistanceMedina, 2011(Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism)

As Foucault puts it, ‚it is the coupling together of the buried scholarly knowledge and knowledges that were disqualified by the hierarchy of erudition and sciences‛ that gives strength to genealogical critique.34 What both of these forms of subjugated knowledgesbrings to the fore is the ‚historical knowledge of struggles,‛ ‚the memory of combats, the very memory that had until then been confined to the mar-gins.‛35 And this is exactly what the critical and transformative work of genealogical investigations consists in, according to Foucault: with the ‚coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories,‛ genealogical investigations provide ‚a meticulous rediscovery of struggles and the raw memory of fights‛; ‚this coupling allows us to constitute a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics.‛36 Genealogical investigations can unearth multiple paths from buried or forgotten past struggles to the present; and thus they can promote a critical awareness that things are as they are because of a history of past struggles that are hidden from view, which can have a great impact on how we confront our struggles in the present. As McWhorter’s genealogical investigations il-lustrate so well, ‚one consequence of that awareness is the recognition that today’s status quo was far from inevitable and need not persist into tomorrow.‛37 Genea-logies are insurrections against hegemonic power/knowledge effects of discursive practices. Thus, for example, McWhorter’s genealogical account of racism in the US is ‚an intellectual assault on the power-effects of institutionalized, entrenched, and taken-for-granted academic, clinical, moralistic, and religious discourses about ra-cism.‛38 And it is important to note that the possibilities of critique that are opened up by unearthing marginalized past struggles benefit not only those whose expe-riences and lives have been kept in the dark, but the entire social body, which can now become critically conscious of the heterogeneity of histories and experiences that are part of the social fabric. This is why McWhorter’s genealogy of racism makes racial oppression relevant in novel and unexpected ways to a wide variety of groups and publics that can now relate to old struggles in new ways.39

Long

The affirmative is simply an attempt at particular reforms of colonialism and indo-colonialism that fails to address the underlying issues of surveillance that are based in race. All institutions of power have now become based on race. Undoing one harm will not solve.

An alternative approach is to compare the United States to other countries that share certain political and social characteristics in order to see how countries with differently organized racial politics confronted similar problems of welfare state development and whether particular racial configurations are associated with particular social policy coalitions. In the United States, the centrality of race, usually taken as an exceptional feature of American politics, arises from the history of African slavery in North America that reaches back almost as far as permanent European settlement of the continent (Berlin 1998; see also Tannenbaum 1946; Elkins 1959). But slavery was only one form of rule based on racial distinctions. More generally, the processes by which racially defined rule shapes political institutions and strategic political circumstances may apply in a variety of contexts (Davis 1966). Other systems in which rule is based on racial categories include apartheid (including Jim Crow in the American South), certain brands of nationalism (including nationalism's totalitarian variants), and, most relevant for the present comparison, imperialism and colonialism. "Two new devices for political organization and rule over foreign peoples were discovered during the first decades of imperialism," wrote Hannah Arendt (1968, r8). "One was race as a principle of the body politic, and the other was bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination." Like slavery and segregation, imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constituted rule by "whites" of European descent over "blacks," conducted through a set of formal institutions and social arrangements supported by an ideology of racial superiority. All of these forms of rule were also justified and explained by other means economic, political, diplomatic and a complete explanation of slavery, segregation, or imperialism would surely involve all of these (see Baumgart 1982). But underlying these explanations, or at least deeply intertwined with them, is what W. E. B. Du Bois (1986, 16) called the color line, "the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Africa and Asia, in America and the islands of the sea." Similarly, imperialism and colonialism, no matter how extensively they involved other factors, constituted irreducible structures of racial rule.

Simply reforming the American system of surveillance is not enough. The 1AC is an attempt at making themselves feel better for the atrocities committed by the state, but this does not go far enough. Refusing to confront racialized surveillance means that the affirmative only reinforces what it probably would critique. Giroux, 2006

Henry A. Giroux Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University 2006 (College Literature 33.3 (2006) 171-196 Reading Hurricane Katrina)

The Bush administration was not simply unprepared for Hurricane Katrina as it denied that the federal government alone had the resources to address catastrophic events; it actually felt no responsibility for the lives of poor blacks and others marginalized by poverty and relegated to the outskirts of society. Increasingly, the role of the state seems to be about engendering the financial rewards and privileges of only some members of society, while the welfare of those marginalized by race and class is now viewed with criminal contempt. The coupling of the market state with the racial state under George W. Bush means that policies are aggressively pursued to dismantle the welfare state, eliminate affirmative action, model urban public schools after prisons, aggressively pursue anti-immigrant policies, and incarcerate with impunity Arabs, Muslims, and poor youth of color. The central commitment of the new hyper-neoliberalism is now organized around the best way to remove or make invisible those individuals and groups who are either seen as a drain or stand in the way of market freedoms, free trade, consumerism, and the neoconservative dream of an American empire. This is what I call the new biopolitics of disposability: the poor, especially people of color, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life's tragedies but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society. Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of socially homeless that allegedly no longer existed in color-blind America.How else to explain the cruel jokes and insults either implied or made explicit by Bush and his ideological allies in the aftermath of such massive [End Page 175] destruction and suffering? When it became obvious in the week following Katrina that thousands of the elderly, poor, and sick could not get out of New Orleans because they had no cars or money to take a taxi or any other form of transportation, or were sick and infirmed, the third-highest-ranking politician in Washington, Rick Santorum, stated in an interview "that people who did not heed evacuation warnings in the future may need to be penalized" (Hamill 2005). For Santorum, those who were trapped in the flood because of poverty, sickness, and lack of transportation had become an unwelcome reminder of the state of poverty and racism in the United States, and for that they should be punished. Their crime, it seems, was that a natural disaster made a social and politically embarrassing disaster visible to the world, and they just happened to be its victims. Commenting on facilities that had been set up for the poor in the Houston Astrodome in Texas, Bush's mother and the wife of former President George H.W. Bush said in a National Public Radio interview, "So many of the people here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them" ("Barbara Bush" 2005). Other right-wing ideologues seeking to deflect criticism from the obscene incompetence and indifference of the Bush administration used a barely concealed racism to frame the events of Katrina. For example, Neil Boortz, a syndicated host on WFTL-AM in Florida stated that "a huge percentage" of those forced to leave New Orleans were "parasites, like ticks on a dog. They are coming to a community near you" (Norman 2005). On the September 13 broadcast of The Radio Factor, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly overtly indulged his own racism before millions of his viewers in claiming that poor black people in New Orleans were basically drug addicts who failed to evacuate the city because they would not have access to their fix (2005).In one of the most blatant displays of racism underscoring the biopolitical "live free or die" agenda in Bush's America, the dominant media increasingly framed the events that unfolded during and immediately after the hurricane by focusing on acts of crime, looting, rape, and murder, allegedly perpetrated by the black residents of New Orleans. In predictable fashion, politicians such as Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco issued an order allowing soldiers to shoot to kill looters in an effort to restore calm. Later inquiries revealed that almost all of these crimes did not take place. The philosopher, SlavojŽižek, argued that "what motivated these stories were not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be able to say: 'You see, Blacks really are like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of civilization!'" (2005). It must be noted that there is more at stake here than the resurgence of old-style racism; there is the recognition that some groups have the power to protect themselves from such stereotypes and others do not, and [End Page 176] for those who do not—especially poor blacks—racist myths have a way of producing precise, if not deadly, material consequences. Given the public's preoccupation with violence and safety, crime and terror merge in the all-too-familiar equation of black culture with the culture of criminality, and images of poor blacks are made indistinguishable from images of crime and violence. Criminalizing black behavior and relying on punitive measures to solve social problems do more than legitimate a biopolitics defined increasingly by the authority of an expanding national security state under George W. Bush. They also legitimize a state in which the police and military, often operating behind closed doors, take on public functions that are not subject to public scrutiny (Bleifuss 2005, 22).3 This becomes particularly dangerous in a democracy when paramilitary or military organisations gain their legitimacy increasingly from an appeal to fear and terror, prompted largely by the presence of those racialized and class-specific groups considered both dangerous and disposable.