1nc+full.docx

1 Interpretation- Non-black people should disclose their 1AC against black people. 4 reasons to prefer: a.) Fairness- non-white people are already structurally ahead in the debate community, this means that competitive equity and openness is especially key. b.) Securitization- the refusal to disclose against black folk is a securitization from nuanced dialogue because there’s have no time to prep. They literally disclosed no parts of the aff after being explicitly asked. This is external exclusion offense. c.) Resistance Clash- They destroy the quality of method debates because as the aff they get infinite permutations and prereq arguments so side bias already swings affirmative, which means all we have is the ability to create nuanced arguments against the aff. d.) Rush to Unintelligibility- In method debates there is always a rush to who can say the least in order to avoid clash which uniquely hurts method debates. We have a responsibility to build competitive standards with each other in order to engage methods. At best this is a reason to vote them down for their pedagogical model, but at worst they shouldn't get theoretical arguments like permutations because they’ve destroyed nuanced clash.

2 The 1AC’s affirmation of a state-based immigration reform produces a false hope in a system of power dedicated to the eradication of the black queer body. Their promise of a better, accessible life for non-citizens misunderstands how quare bodies are always already coded as outside the construct of citizen and therefore outside the reaches of state-based reforms. Allen’12 (Dr. Allen is the author of the critical ethnography of race, gender, sexuality and revolution, ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba; editor of Black/Queer/Diaspora– a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; and numerous scholarly and popular articles, book chapters, and blog posts. “Black/Queer/Diaspora At The Current Conjuncture”2012)NAE Since her The Boundaries of Blackness, Cohen has exposed how the US state and black institutions, academics, and families construct the dangerous vulnerabilities of the deeply and multiply subaltern — an analytic category she later formulated as “punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens.”34 In her essay “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” Cohen

critiques African American studies’ politics of respectability and argues that the reputed deviance of lesbians, gays, transgender and bisexual persons, single mothers, and state aid recipients — in the eyes of not just US policy makers but also scholars and civil society leaders — marks us not only as unruly would-be subject-citizens but also as outside cultural boundaries of belonging and care.35 Similarly, Alexander has argued that some bodies, such as those of the lesbian and the “prostitute,” cannot be included as citizens in former colonies of the Carib- bean precisely because they embody sexual agency and eroticism radically out of step with the aspiration of the nation to advertise itself as independent, developed, disciplined, and poised to join in the number of putatively civilized states.36 As she beautifully shows, this same “erotic autonomy” is the site out of which individuals and groups have staged various rebellions. Taken together, this work illustrates both a set of nettlesome political problems and a theoretical puzzle across black diaspora: Is

there any place where [the benefits and recognition of] citizenship can accrue to the unruly — the “prostitute,” the homosexual, “welfare queen,” transgender person, or the black? And what calculus emerges when these gendered, raced, and sexed categories of nonnational, deviant, nonethnic/racial subject, nonconforming, or merely “other” are compounded? Alexander has vividly shown what this looks like moving across borders: I am an outlaw in my country of birth: a national, but not a citizen. Born in Trinidad and Tobago . . . I was taught that once we pledged our lives to the new nation, “every creed and race (had) an equal place.” I was taught to believe “Massa Day Done,” that there would be an imminent end to foreign domination. . . . In the United States of North America where I live now, I must constantly keep in my possession the immigrant (green) card given to me by the American state, marking me “legal” resident alien; non-national; non-citizen . . . [in] twenty two states, even with green card in hand, I may be convicted of crimes various defined as lewd unnatural; lascivious conduct; deviant sexual intercourse; gross indecency; buggery or crimes against nature.37 There are crucial historical and political-economic distinctions that condition and structure both how a state — any state — attempts to regulate particular bodies and how national belonging is reckoned. Still, it seems the state — seemingly every state, though of course in wildly varying scales and intensities—depends on racialized heteropatriarchy (which is always also classed) to constitute and maintain itself in the global hierarchy of states. While literatures on globalization and transnationalism have tended to highlight how the state is disappearing or being eclipsed by global capital and new information technologies, even

neoliberal (leaning) states retain their power prerogative of surveillance, severe discipline, and in some cases expulsion or extermination of vulnerable persons, even as they continue to disinvest in public health, education, and welfare.38 My own research in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and Brazil and experiences at home in the United States impel taking seriously distinctions between socialist and liberal states, (post)colonial and imperial nations, North and South.39 Certainly, “diaspora” does constitute a way out of the nation-state. Still, failing inclusion as a properly hygienic citizen or subject, where is the place for the black queer? Most pressing for me: if in fact black(s and) queers cannot be full citizens in the liberal sense, can they at least be free? While the politics I highlight here continue to insist on the state’s responsibility to protect and care for those within its borders, and for families and com- munities to acknowledge and accept those within them, the stakes of belonging and unbelonging in black/queer/diaspora are high. The strokes I noted earlier can be, of course, (in the) back slashes—violently cutting out and cutting off. I query citizenship here not only because of the barriers black queers face when attempting to enjoy the full complement of citizenship — full “rights” within the nation’s political body — but more pointedly to ask whether the notion of citizenship, with its obvious rules of exclusion and exception, stands in for a wider range of assurances and freedoms. Complicating this, nonstate actors such as families, and religious and cultural organizations, often think like a state — making strange bed- fellows in their support for projects of respectability.40 Their shared project is to discipline individuals into local legibility and particular forms of subjectification. Witness, for example, how disparate black fundamentalist, religious, and middle- class “race leader” rhetorics, in various sites across the Americas, in Africa, and in Europe, seem so perfectly in sync with one another and with the transnational homophobia and sexism of the largely white US Christian Right.41 Still, observation of the everyday tactics and strategies of black queers, in a number of locations including those visited in this special issue, persuasively suggests that the “larger freedom” we seek may be more available outside the state’s purview and will certainly depend on a willingness to expose and articulate forms of deviance, and to be audacious in a variety of ways, at home in our various communities.42 This certainly does not excuse the state’s disinvestment, or civil society’s self-righteousness, but rather holds that sites of resistance and self-making must necessarily find air in other spaces. They do, because they must. These spaces include audacious performativity, eroticism, the spectral, and futurity, as many of the contributions to this special issue richly illustrate. Scholarly

work does not create everyday resistance within and survival by the most multiply vulnerable among us, but it can give light to it — helping expand recognition of those sites as legitimate political expression.

Containerization is not merely located within the terrain of enclosed social systems that render themselves visible to the outside, but also as the telos of the law. The Feds submit to the regime of protection by protecting immigrants, seducing refugees at the border, trapping aliens into the carceral regime, which cuts across the citizen/non-citizen divide by foregoing the project of our hearts and minds for ongoing securitization of the inside. This begs the question: what do we do with those deemed inassimable? Black people become the impossible domestic of the nation-state, open to the law’s assault while beget from the law’s protection. This impossible domesticity is the condition of possibility for the prison industrial complex which exacerbates antiblack militizared violence and expansion of the border zone in the name of preservation. Loyd 15 (Jenna M. Loyd is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at

University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963-1978 (2014, University of Minnesota Press) investigates everyday understandings of health and violence and people’s grassroots mobilizations for health and social justice. She is the co-editor, with Matt Mitchelson and Andrew Burridge, of Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (2012, University of Georgia Press), which won the Past Presidents’ Award from the Association of Borderlands Studies. She and Alison Mountz have a forthcoming book (University of California Press, 2018) on the late- and post-Cold War history of United States migration detention and border deterrence policy entitled Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States. “Carceral Citizenship in an Age of Global Apartheid” pgs.4-6. 2015)NAE Nicholas De Genova takes up the question of the stateless person or refugee who illustrates the limits of the nation-state and national citizenship.17 This national scale of citizenship serves to differentiate citizen from alien, domestic from foreign. The territorial form of the nation-state, in turn, locks rights to mobility to the territorial boundaries of the nation-state. Asylum within such a system, geographer Jill Williams writes, “replicates systems of injustice and exclusion, rather than challenging the territorial nature of the nation-state and related spatial frameworks for guaranteeing rights. Asylum, like all legal and social frameworks of belonging, fundamentally relies upon exclusion.”18 In practice, the hegemony of nation-state sovereign rights to regulate territorial boundaries means that the state trumps freedom of movement. However, De Genova insists, freedom of movement, as a human condition, “must be radically distinguished from any of the ways that such a liberty may have been stipulated, circumscribed, and domesticated within the orbit of state power (‘national,’ imperial, or otherwise).” He ties freedom of movement to social praxis, an equally ontological “capacity to creatively transform our objective circumstances.”19 In this way, De Genova moves beyond Arendt’s theorization of the refugee. By focusing on this nexus of movement and work through the figure of the “deportable alien,” he shows that the limit of citizenship is not (only) the stateless person. Rather, the “deportable alien” is included within practices of citizenship through exclusion, “a peculiar sociopolitical relation of juridical nonrelationality [that] is the material and

practical precondition for her thoroughgoing incorporation [as a worker] within a wider capitalist social formation.”20 De Genova writes that the regulation of labor through this division between citizen and alien takes place in “a proliferation of postcolonial metropolitan spaces” that differ from colonial regimes of “fixed or overriding spatial separations of the sort that distinguished the incarceration of whole populations within the militarized borders of colonies, which served to immobilize human energies within the confines of vast de facto prison labor camps.”21 Thus, it is not only at the boundary of a national territory where friend-enemy relations result in the militarized regulation of mobility, but also domestically, within spaces already differentiated by race, class, and differential citizenship. Legislation passed in the United States between 1886 and 1924 barring Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and other Asian people from citizenship was part of struggles over “free” and “unfree” labor that consolidated citizenship around whiteness. The construct of the “illegal alien” emerged over this time, and even though immigration laws of the 1920s did not exclude Mexican nationals, the authorization in 1924 for the Border Patrol to police the United States–Mexico borderlands rendered Mexicans the “single largest group of illegal aliens [as legal and political subjects] by the late 1920s.”22 According to Ngai, “The legal racialization of these ethnic groups’ [Asians’ and Mexicans’] national origin cast them as permanently foreign and unassimilable to the nation.”23 Thus, “these racial

formations produced ‘alien citizens’—Asian Americans and Mexican Americans born in the United States with formal U.S. citizenship but who remained alien to the nation.”24 Simultaneously, Black people who gained formal citizenship with the Fourteenth Amendment were positioned as the “impossible domestic,” Fred Moten writes, that is, “outside the law, outside of the law’s protection even if open to the law’s assault.”25 Today’s US carceral state, or prison-industrial complex, builds on these regional racial formations to produce a citizen-criminal divide whose far-reaching effects are yet to be fully understood. Black and Latino communities (particularly, though not exclusively) live with the burden of a vast system of criminalization, policing, and carceral immobilization. Upward of 2.5 million individuals who are now in cages for the most part are not laboring for the state or capital while in prison, but their labor power and mobility surely are being incapacitated.26 The power of criminalization does not necessarily strip citizenship to the point of statelessness (as was Arendt’s concern), but it does strip and differentiate rights among citizens. While the Fourteenth Amendment extended citizenship to formerly enslaved people, the freeunfree relationship undergirding chattel slavery and anti-Blackness was reconstructed through legislating proscribed behaviors and deploying coercive state powers. The scope and severity of the US carceral regime rest on this anti-Black racial animus.27 Thus, it is not only at the threshold of the citizen–deportable alien where global capitalist labor markets are being regulated but also through the relationship between criminal and citizen. Not only do contemporary US policies regarding imprisonment serve to regulate labor that capital has rendered surplus, but criminalization also serves as a means to rationalize the repressive restructuring of the social welfare state, stripping entitlements from undeserving citizens. The lasting social, political, and health effects of the US carceral state—ranging from temporary and permanent bars from voting and receiving social, housing, and educational services, to separation from family and community, to shortened life-span— fundamentally challenge the conceit of state protection.28 Crime policy is not simply domestic in its territorial jurisdiction or application to citizens. Profiling—whether in the name of national security, crime suppression, or unlawful presence— cuts across the citizen and noncitizen divide, but the consequences of crime policies differentially affect noncitizens. Conviction for any of the list of offenses, which has been expanding since 1988, subjects noncitizens (legal or unauthorized) to deportation.29 Moreover, programs like Operation Streamline deploy crime policies against people who are not authorized to be present in particular Border Patrol sectors along the United States–Mexico boundary, a process applicable only to noncitizens.30 Finally, just as a criminal conviction follows people after their reentry from prison, people

who have been deported are also frequently framed as the

source of their nation’s violence and crime problems.31 Dylan Rodríguez argues that the US prison regime is a form of “global statecraft, an arrangement and mobilization of violence that is, from its very inception, already unhinged from the delimiting ‘domestic’ (or ‘national’) sites to which it is presumptively tethered.” That is to say, Rodríguez troubles the production of policing and prisons “as problems of the American local, domestic, and/or national—as if the localities and domesticities of the United States are not already and complexly enmeshed in the societal ensembles and state produced violences of ‘the global.’”32 One region where a multiply scaled ensemble of US state violence cohered is the Caribbean, where the United States and other nations have a long, complex history of imperial and geopolitical relations.33 The place of Haiti—the first nation-state in the world established by enslaved subjects in the process of emancipating themselves—in this story is central, and the United States’ relationship with it points to an intertwined, transnational genealogy of mobility and carcerality.

The 1AC is an act of pornotroping that reduces black people and refugees barred by the Muslim ban to holders of violence that are powerless objects and reinscribes the state’s power to “save” them through legal strategy turning case. Weheliye (Alexander G., professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University) 2014 (Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Duke University Press, pg. 90-91 C.A.)

Spillers has referred to the enactment of black suffering for a shocked and titillated audience as "pornotroping": "This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: (1) the captive body as the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality, (2) at the same time— in stunning contradiction—it is reduced to a thing, to being for the captor; (3) in this distance from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of 'otherness'; (4) as a category of 'otherness,' the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerless- ness that slides into a more general 'powerlessness' " ("Mama's Baby, " 206). Spillers directs our seeing to several facets of the body/flesh, human/not- quite-human, sovereign/bare life, and so on pas des deux in her insistence on the simultaneous thingness and sensuality of the slave, which lays bare the extralegal components of this volatile Ding. Pornotroping unconceals the literally bare, naked, and denuded dimensions of bare life, underscoring how political domination frequently produces a sexual dimension that cannot be controlled by the forces that (re)produce it. As Daphne Brooks remarks, "born out of diasporic plight and subject to pornotroping," black flesh has "countenanced a 'powerful stillness." The

hieroglyphics of the flesh, embodied here by pornotroping, circumnavigate the connubial abyss of subjection and freedom, displaying at once the physical powerlessness of the dysselected slave subject and the untainted power of the selected master subject . In order to better follow Spillers's brilliant coarticulation of porno and trope, a brief etymological detour is in order. Originally porno signified "prostitute" and in the ancient Greek context whence it sprang, the term referred to female slaves that were sold expressly for prostitution. Also 2 derivation from Greek, trope, according to Hayden White, refers to "turn" and "way" or "manner"; later, by way of Latin, trope is aligned with "figure of speech." White states the following of the palimpsestic structure of this word: "Tropes are deviations from literal, conventional, or 'proper' language use. . It is not only a deviation from one possible, proper, meaning, but also a deviation towards another meaning."" In

pornotroping, the double rotation White identifies at the heart of the trope figures the remainder of law and violence linguistically, staging the simultaneous sexualization and brutalization of the (female) slave, yet—and this marks its complexity—it remains unclear whether the turn or deviation is toward violence or sexuality. Pornotroping, then, names the becoming-flesh of the (black) body and forms a primary component in the processes by which human beings are converted into bare life. In the words of Saidiya Hartman,

it marks "the means by which the wanton use of and the violence directed towards the black body come to be identified as its pleasure and dangers—that is, the expectations of slave property are ontologized as the innate

capacities and inner feelings of the enslaved, and moreover, the ascription of excess and enjoyment to the African effaces the violence perpetrated against the enslaved." The violence inflicted upon the enslaved body becomes synonymous with the projected surplus pleasure that always already moves in excess of the sovereign subject's jouissance; pleasure (rapture) and violence (bondage) deviate from and toward each other, setting in motion the historical happening of the slave thing: a potential for pornotroping. In Christina Sharpe's words, the black body and flesh "become the bearers (through violence, regulation, transmission, etc.) of the knowledge of certain subjection as well as the placeholders of freedom for those who would claim freedom as their rightful yield. "10 How does the historical question of violent political domination activate a surplus and excess of sexuality that simultaneously sustains and disfigures said brutality? Or what are the sexual dimensions of objectification in slavery and other forms of extreme political and social domination? My argument is not about erotics per se but dwells in the juxtaposition of violence as the antithesis of the human(e) (bondage) and "normal" sexuality (rapture) as the apposite property of this figure. n Once again, I am bracketing questions of agency and resistance, since they obfuscate—and not in a productive way—the textures of enfleshment, that is, the modes of being which outlive the dusk of the law and the dawn of political violence.

Onticide should come first in your impact calculus only by starting with the black queer as a conceptual framing for how we theorize our politics can we hedge back against the constant erasure of black queerness that results in material violence. Warren’15 (Calvin Warren is an Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University. Warren’s research interests are in the area of Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Black Philosophy, Afro-pessimism, and theology. His book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation is forthcoming from Duke University Press. “Onticide: Afropessimism, Queer Theory & Ethics”2015)NAE What I have argued throughout this essay is that the “black queer” is a conceptual problematic that is not fully understood in any of the theoretical discourses intended to explicate it. Neither “Queer theory” nor “Afro-pessimism” can articulate the fatal collision that pushes a being outside the symbolics of temporality, space, and meaning. Queer theory’s “closeted humanism” reconstitutes the “human” even as it attempts to challenge and, at times, erase it. The violence of captivity provides the condition of possibility for queer theory. Queerness must disavow this violence to assume the posture of “emancipatory meditation,” in some cases, and “radical divesture” in other cases. The social does not exist without the mutilated body of the captive—reduced to a “thing,” a being for the captive. Queer theory has yet to acknowledge or engage this history of violence at its core—every radical proclamation whether “anti” humanist or avowedly humanist is imbricated and complicit in this violence. Afro-pessimism, conversely, explicates the violence of captivity and rightly understands it as constitutive of the world itself. It, however, is caught in the “double-bind of communicability” that repeats the very violence of undifferentiation that it critiques. This double-bind is not the “creation” of the Afro-pessimist, but is, instead, an un- avoidable violence that exposes some black-objects to forms of anti-blackness not properly theorized (e.g. if we think of “anti-gay” violence as a particular form, or iteration, of anti-blackness itself). Because undifferentiation assumes a homogenous object pulverized by a monolithic violence, it often conceals the insidious ways that anti-blackness cuts the object differently. Some violence is directed to specific “object-forms,” and although we can not

properly call this specificity “identity,” “sexuality,” “gender,” or “orientation” because these are human attributes, we need a way of describing the violence directed toward the “inconceivable being-ness” of the black queer. The lack of a proper grammar outside of humanism to name both the target of this violence and the violence itself is a theoretical problem that redoubles itself in physical forms of destruction. I have given a name to this physical and theoretical violence—“onticide.” It is the meeting of the non-ontology of blackness, sustained through the viciousness of anti-blackness, and the extreme condition of suffering, sustained through compulsory performances, practices, and pleasures (anti-gay violence). The “Black Queer,” then, is a problem for thought, to borrow Nahum Chandler’s phrase, and to suggest that it does not “exist” is to indi- cate that it is outside of meaning and humanism’s grammar. [23] To assert its existence would amount to a conceptual contradiction be- cause “Blackness” is the ontological position of the derelict object, unredeemable, and “Queerness” is the site of a subjectivity pushed to its limit—pushed, but yet within the scope of humanity. The two positions are not reconcilable, and when they do intersect, the result is fatal. The suffering of anti-gay violence is within the world; we have a grammar to capture its horror. The “suffering” of the black-object is not of this world—it sustains the world, but is not of it—and the “suffering” of this object lacks a proper grammar (the word “suffer- ing” itself must be written in quotation marks or under erasure in relation to the black-asobject). The

‘being’ situated at the site of this violence is what we call a “black queer,” but it is a ‘being’ that does not exist within the onto-existential horizon, and if we insist on the “existence” of this being it inhabits such a low frequency that its existence becomes inconsequential. Indeed, bodies are visible and perceptible to the ‘eye,’ but every seeing, every phenomenal entity must first have a place within the Symbolic before it is comprehensible. Bodies without flesh, without the narratives of life, movement, and futurity that the flesh presents to the world, cannot be said really to exist at all—they are specters of ontology, socially dead bodies, stripped of flesh and existence. This social death is what Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland would call “raw life.” It is a life indistinguishable from death, existence reduced to “meat”—which is really no human existence at all. [24] What you “see” when you look at a “black queer” is the incomprehensible, the outer-worldly. To put things differently, my conception of existence here is the activation of ‘ flesh,’ which is different from the body— bodies do not exist without the flesh, and it is the “flesh” that was stolen from the captive, and it is the esh that is irretrievable, despite “optimistic” desires to reclaim it. [25] The “black queer” and the violence that engenders it present methodological problems that are unresolvable. Because of these problems, I have had to write within the tension of impossible com- municability; this necessitates using paradox, oxymoron, and contra- diction to describe the indescribable and to name the innominate. This is inescapable. One must articulate the underbelly of humanism through humanism—the discursive terrain is uneven and “unjust.” If there is indeed “no outside” to the “master” text of humanism, the methodological problem is a violence that forecloses the artic- ulation of blackness from the start. Blackness is a textual “slave” lacking recognition or resistance. The

“black queer” is entrapped in this methodological quagmire. This is the dreaded condition of the “black queer,” and it is a condition that we must continue to theorize around, even if we can never actually approach it.

The alternative is to think through onticide, an analyitical framework that negotiates the erasure of quare bodies from political and humanist grammars. The 1AC attempts to use a humanist grammar to resolve an onticidal problem. The alternative creates a new form of theorizing black queernesss that epistemologically disarticulates the possibility for political redress. Only by beginning with the question of the black queer can we create the locus call for the end of the world and a project of global liberation. Warren’17 (Calvin Warren is an Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University. Warren’s research interests are in the area of Continental Philosophy (particularly post-Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy), Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, Black Philosophy, Afro-pessimism, and theology. His book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation is forthcoming from Duke University Press. “Onticide: Afropessimism, Gay Nigger #1, and Surplus Violence”2015)NAE I propose “onticide” as a procedure of negotiating with an antiblack heritage, humanism. The erasure employed is not a deconstructive move, since the antagonism that structures an antiblack world cannot be deconstructed (much as the trace-structure for Derrida is undeconstructable); rather, the erasure is designed to signal a certain murderous operation through ontology. The line inserted through humanist terms of difference highlights the interdiction on black ontology and black capacity that enable these terms. Whereas Derrida’s deconstruction posits the tracestructure as providing the condition of possibility for language and the world, Afro-pessimism

would assert that the interdiction on black- ness preconditions the operations of humanist grammar and civil society. Rather than focus on language in general, as Derrida’s deconstructive procedure does, onticide is concerned with the terms of human difference, or identity, which pro- vide the building blocks for human uniqueness and individuality. Thus the line through the term Gay , for example, highlights the interdiction, a ban, on blackness that renders sexuality and sexual identity possible. Onticide’s erasure, then, would highlight the original death of blackness at the center of humanism. Humanism is fractured by this interdiction on blackness, and it is this fracturing that produces the field of human difference and uniqueness. In a word, ontology is made possible by the death of blackness—onticide. The erasure draws attention to this fact. Onticide also provides a procedure for negotiating with (un)differentiating violence because it allows us to conceptualize the fracturing within the fungible commodity and the specificity of the violence this commodity experiences. Put differently, the erasure through the humanist terms of difference indicates the exclusion of blackness, the ban, but also the necessity of using a grammar that is inadequate. The erasure through the term Gay, then, is a way to claim an impossible difference, not a structural adjustment; it does not embrace the term under erasure but recognizes that without an alternative grammar beyond humanism, we must use the term as we undermine its simultaneously. Will the erasure obliterate humanism? No. Only an “end of the world” will destroy humanism and its grammar, but because we are barred from the field of difference we use the term insubordinately. We use humanist terms and erase them to challenge and invalidate them. The erasure also highlights the inherent violence within humanist language as it concerns blackness: to articulate particularity or fracturing, the particular violence that a Gay Nigger #1 experiences in this instance, one must stand before the ban in language and align with the particularity of the term while recognizing that blackness is unrecognizable within its

terms. It is a strategic alignment with a term of exclusion with the dual purpose of critiquing humanism and providing a way through the performative contradiction that silences particular violence against fungible objects. This alignment, however, is not an appeal for inclusivity or incorporation into the term but an attempt to express the ineffable, difference outside Difference. An onticidal practice of writing Gay Nigger #1 would communicate that (1) the term Gay is a feature of human difference and that the bar written through it signals the death and exclusion of blackness that makes the term possible; (2) grammatical paucity is a feature of antiblack suffering, and to provide intellectual space for certain forms of sufferings and ontologies, we juxtapose blackness (Nigger in this instance) with the term of human difference (Gay) to indicate the fracturing of the fungible commodity; (3) Gay Nigger stands in for a conceptual crisis that we do not quite have a grammar to describe, but without it the violence against beings like Steen Keith Fenrich would become silenced by our attempts to avoid contradiction; (4) we do not erase the term Nigger in this instance because that is one term that is available for blacks as objects. Nigger is not a feature of human difference, so it does not orbit in the symbolic as the term Gay. Onticide cannot ultimately deconstruct the terms of difference, since we will never gain equivalence to humanity by inversion and displacement (the procedure of Deconstruction). Given

that antiblackness has rendered inversion and displacement impossibilities, by muting the black body and stripping it of “ontological resistance,” we erase the term of difference with the understanding that the erasure does not invert the vicious hierarchy of value but will, at the very least, highlight the interdiction on blackness that makes such terms possible. In meditating on the problem of grammar and violent syntax, Spillers (2003: 226) suggests: “The project of liberation for AfricanAmericans has found urgency in two passionate motivations that are twinned—(1) to break apart, to rupture violently the laws of American behavior that make such [anti-black] syntax possible; (2) to introduce a new semantic field/fold more appropriate to his/her own historic movement.” Although Afro-pessimism does not embrace the project of liberation—since liberation is an impossibility in an antiblack world—onticide would push us to consider the necessity of the second proposition that Spillers presents. This procedure is an attempt to move us toward a new semantic field more appropriate to the fungible commodity. Because we are unable to completely purge the field of humanism and antiblackness, onticide would expose the ban at the center of this field and imagine new lexical material to articulate the density of black suffering. Again, the procedure that I am proposing, onticide, is a way to think through the ontological implications of violence and the way this violence fractures the fungible commodity in multiple ways. Since blacks are excluded from the realm of Difference, we cannot properly call the fragmentation “difference” or “identity” (in the sense that we would for humans). Rather, the procedure, mindful of the double bind that humanism places on blackness, invades the field of difference insubordinately, by aligning with terms of exclusion as a way to undermine these very terms. Thus we can understand the violence that positioned Fenrich as “inexistent existence” (Gay Nigger #1) through an onticidal procedure instead of an intersectional one. What distinguishes the two procedures is that the intersectional approach seeks to understand blackness through forms of equivalence with human identity. In this instance, queerness and blackness are structurally aligned such that they become somewhat interchangeable forms of abstraction or are intelligible through each other (we do not need a bar through Gay with the intersectional approach because an interdiction against blackness does not exist, so the term Gay is readily available for blackness). We know queerness more accurately because we know blackness, and we know blackness more intimately because we

know queerness, according to this approach. Put differently, the intersectional approach makes epistemological claims by presenting blackness and queerness (and other forms of difference) as ontologically equivalent. The epistemological thrust of this approach is to figure blackness into the field of Difference without a barrier. The “Gay Nigger#1” is a possibility, then, through this approach—even for those who embrace Afro-pessimistic thematics. Onticide, conversely, refuses the epistemological temptation to understand blackness through maneuvers of equivalence; no form of human difference will render blackness intelligible. Onticide strategically erases and aligns with terms of difference to explicate the violent fracturing of the fungible commodity. This alignment does not render queerness and blackness equivalent, but signals the lack of a grammar to describe fracturing outside human difference. The erasure “plays” with difference precisely to expose the violence that sustains it—the inter- diction at the heart of humanism. The “alignment” that I have in mind here is not an endorsement of queerness or any human difference—blackness cannot fully recognize itself within the terms of human difference; instead, the alignment is more of a juxtaposition with a term of exclusion for the purpose of articulating ontological violence.

FW The role of the judge is to decide on an orientation of our subject-hoods. The ballot symbolizes an orientation to an analytical strategy for producing tactics. You should tune yourself out of the virtual reality of fiat forwarded by the 1AC in order to tune yourself into a strategy that moves beyond the world of Man. Reject legality as the starting point for how you evaluate the best strategy for abolishing the subjugation of non and sub-humans. Starting with legal framework only creates a cycle of hierarchies that produce infinite vulnerable populations. Only our framework allows the creation of radical strategies outside of the law that start from our subjecthood while rejecting the grounds that administers subjugation writ large. Weheliye ’14 (Alexander G. Weheliye is Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, also published by Duke University Press. “Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human”.pgs.59-60.2014)NAE We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world, and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law cannot capture, what it cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property ownership. Writing about the connections between transgender politics and other forms of identity-based activism that respond to structural inequalities, legal scholar Dean Spade shows how the focus on inclusion, recognition, and equality based on a narrow legal framework (especially as it pertains to antidiscrimination and hate crime laws) not only hinders the eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable populations but actually creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal “distribution of life chances.” 22 If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only one form of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence of hierarchical differences between full humans, notquite-humans, and nonhumans. This can be gleaned from the “successes” of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay rights movements, which facilitate the incorporation of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly criminalized and disposable populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated, etc.). 23 To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical assemblage removes from view that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous genocide, Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, domestic and international warfare, and so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the racializing assemblages in the world of Man. Instead of appealing to legal recognition, Julia Oparah suggests counteracting the “racialized (trans)gender entrapment” within the prison-industrial complex and beyond with practices of “maroon abolition” (in reference to the long history of escaped slave contraband settlements in the Americas) to “foreground the ways in which often overlooked African diasporic cultural and political legacies inform and undergird anti-prison work,” while also providing strategies

and life worlds not exclusively centered on reforming the law. 24 Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the “ ‘impossible’ worldview of trans political existence,” which redefines “the insistence of government agencies, social service providers, media, and many nontrans activists and nonprofiteers that the existence of trans people is impossible.” 25

A relational maroon abolitionism beholden to the practices of black radicalism and that arises from the incompatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man serves as one example of how putatively abject modes of being need not be redeployed within hegemonic frameworks but can be operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated assemblages in movements to abolish the grounds upon which all forms of subjugation are administered.

The focus of this debate should not be a question of non-sovereignty as a project of relationality but of UN-sovereignty as an demand for the end of liberal humanism Sexton 16 (Jared Sexton, associate professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine, associate professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, July 2016, “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology Volume 42 Numbers 4-5, modified) gz Native Studies scholars are right to insist upon a synthetic gesture that attempts to shift the terms of engagement. The problem lies at the level of thought at which the gesture is presented. The settler colonial studies critique of colonial studies must be repeated, this time with respect to settler colonialism itself, in a move that returns us to the body in relation to land, labor, language, lineage – and the capture and commodification of each – in order to ask the most pertinent questions about capacity, commitment, and concept . This might help not only to break down false dichotomies, and perhaps pose a truer one, but also to reveal the ways that the study of slavery is already and of necessity the study of capitalism, colonialism and settler colonialism, among other things; and that the struggle for abolition is already and of necessity the struggle for the promise of communism, decolonization, and settler decolonization, among other things. Slavery is the threshold of the political world, abolition the interminable radicalization of every radical movement . Slavery, as it were, precedes and prepares the way for colonialism, its forebear or fundament or support . Colonialism, as it were, the issue or heir of slavery, its outgrowth or edifice or monument . This is as true of the historic colonization of the Third World as it is the prior and ongoing settler colonization of the Fourth.23‘The modern world owes its very existence to slavery’ (Grandin, 2014a).24 What could this impossible debt possibly entail? Not only the infrastructure of its global economy but also the architecture of its theological and philosophical discourses, its legal and political institutions, its scientific and technological practices, indeed, the whole of its semantic field (Wilderson, 2010: A politics of abolition could never finally be a politics of resurgence, recovery, or recuperation . It could only ever begin with degeneration, decline, or dissolution . Abolition is

58).

the interminable radicalization of every radical movement, but a radicalization through the perverse affirmation of deracination, an uprooting of the natal, the nation, and the notion, preventing any order of determination from taking root, a politics without claim, without

demand even, or a politics whose demand is ‘too radical to be formulated in advance of its deeds’ (Trouillot, 2012: 88).25 The field of Black Studies consists in ‘tracking the figure of the unsovereign’ (Chandler, 2013: 163) in order to meditate upon the paramount question: ‘What if the problem is sovereignty as such’ (Moten, 2013)? Abolition, the political dream of Black Studies, its unconscious thinking, consists in the affirmation of the unsovereign slave – the affectable, the derelict, the monstrous, the wretched 26 – figures of an order altogether different from (even when they coincide or cohabit with) the colonized native – the occupied, the undocumented, the unprotected, the oppressed. Abolition is beyond (the restoration of) sovereignty . Beyond the restoration of a lost commons through radical redistribution (everything for everyone), there is the unimaginable loss of that all too imaginable loss itself (nothing for no one).27 If the indigenous relation to land precedes and exceeds any regime of property, then the slave’s inhabitation of the earth precedes and exceeds any prior relation to land – landlessness . And selflessness is the correlate. No ground for identity, no ground to [be] stand (on) . Everyone has a claim to everything until no one has a claim to anything. No claim. This is not a politics of despair brought about by a failure to lament a loss, because it is not rooted in hope of winning . The flesh of the earth demands it: the landless inhabitation of selfless existence .

Case Neoliberal migration policy leaves immigrants in limbo, subjecting them to a vicious cycle in which they are promised statuses that are revoked. This lands them in the position of precarious legality – not quite illegal, not a full citizen – to be exploited by neoliberalism. Gonzales 16 (Alfonso Gonzales, LBJ School of Public Affairs, UT Austin. “Neoliberalism, the homeland security state, and the authoritarian turn” Latino Studies 14(1) March 2016, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/lst.2015.52 cVs) I have provided an analysis of the authoritarian roots of neoliberalism and of the homeland security state. Through a discussion of the theoretical and intellectual work of disparate scholars Milton Friedman and Samuel Huntington I have shown how

neoliberalism has been accompanied by authoritarian politics in the United States. Rather than explaining away these tensions, I illustrated how these contradictory ideologies allowed for the development of a dominant bloc that was comprised of advocates of free market capitalism and neoconservatives that would play a vital role in the authoritarian turn that symbolically began with the election of Ronald Reagan. I also described how the theoretical insights of Antonio Gramsci allow us to conceive of the homeland security state as a dynamic and integral state with multiple sites of power that could not be separated from the neoliberal and neoconservative underpinnings of US society. Indeed, I described how the

authoritarian turn gave rise to the configuration of the modern migration control apparatus as a less accountable and undemocratic set of relationships. I also discussed some of the major layers of legislation and policy that helped to bring this configuration of the capitalist state to bear on the conjuncture at hand. In the Gramscian tradition the study of conjunctures is important because “it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organize” (Gramsci 2000, 201). Indeed

the development and continued expansion of the homeland security state has real implications for the strategies used by the Latino migrant movement and other social movements. The migrant movement remains the largest, most dynamic and sustained social movement in early twenty-first-century US society. It has not been able to meet its overarching goal, which for many sectors of the movement is so-called comprehensive immigration reform. Nonetheless the movement, which at first problematically appeared to outsiders as a homogeneous and generic movement of “undocumented Mexicans,” has evolved. The reality is far more complex than what most casual, and some academic, observers imagine. The struggle for the rights of migrants is global, multinational and multisectoral with dynamic bases ranging from indigenous migrants, Black migrants, South Asian and Asian organizations, undocuqueer activists, day laborers, undocumented youth – some of which refuse to call themselves DREAMers – and most recently a new sector of Mexican and Central American refugees. A significant portion of migrant activists and their allies are fighting to democratize state-civil society relations in the face of the authoritarian turn. By democratization I am referring to pulling back the tentacles of the homeland security state and forging institutional and social spaces in its place where undocumented migrants could be integrated into society on their own terms and without coercion. I am also referring to a new understanding of membership in society that is based on a different notion of rights, one that is not confined to the nation-state, and to a new politics of membership based on ideas around reciprocity, solidarity and multiplicity. Some examples of these democratic openings could be found in states such as California and Illinois, for instance, where the Latino migrant movement and its allies have won driver’s licenses for undocumented migrants. Moreover, several university systems have granted in-state tuition to the undocumented, and most recently New York City

has joined San Francisco and New Haven in extending municipal IDs to this sector of the population (de Graauw 2014). Such policies are small victories in a Gramscian war of position by grassroots activists. Withstanding these important victories, the authoritarian turn and statism may still be perceived as an omnipresent and omnipotent phenomenon that presents a sort of crisis for migrant activists and for Left social movements more broadly. While certainly presenting a set of challenges, it also presents opportunities. Bruff (2012), a critical sociologist using key aspects of Poulantzas’s framework, argues that “authoritarian neoliberalism is simultaneously strengthening and weakening the state as the latter reconfigures into a less open and therefore more fragile polity” (114). Along similar lines,

I want to point to the dialectical strengthening-weakening of the state and also make clear that authoritarian statism has created opportunities just as it has created challenges. For instance, the expanding police power of the homeland security state is a product of authoritarian statism in which a strong executive office has emerged over the last thirty years. Executive power has been used to provide discretionary funds for migration control, and for surveillance programs that are outside of the normative framework of a liberal constitutional democracy. This is also an opportunity for the migrant movement and its organizations, such as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and others, to pressure the executive to use its power to stop deportations, which resulted in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA), before a federal judge in Texas put an injunction against the program. There is the dialectical strengthening-weakening of the state as there is also the dialectic of victories-losses facing the migrant movement. While such policies, before the injunction, could have brought about relief from deportation for some sectors of the undocumented population, they have come at a cost. To win over moderate elected officials, a sector of the migrant movement that I have described elsewhere as immigration reformers has adopted a discourse that does not challenge the fundamentally antidemocratic and repressive nature of authoritarian police projects such as Secure Communities (Gonzales 2014). Immigration

reformers have relied on arguments about public safety, about undocumented students being Americans in every way except legally and so on. Such an accommodationist discourse may be necessary for winning votes in certain instances to roll back a coercive policy in specific circumstances. Modest victories, however, come at a price and represent both small victories and defeat for the oppositional sectors of the migrant movement that seek more far reaching transformation and justice. They also represent defeat for they reinforce the rationale for having the homeland security state in the first place and obfuscate the structural forces displacing people on a global scale. Most critically the accommodationist discourse of immigration reformers does not challenge the authoritarian and anti-democratic nature of the homeland security state. This leaves immigration reformers struggling for moderate reforms that under the best of circumstances win a precarious legality for undocumented migrants. It is often a legality so precarious that, as in the case of DAPA, a federal judge was able to stop it even after hundreds of thousands of people had come forward to qualify for such a status. But this precarious situation is also a testament to the organizational and political weakness of oppositional migrant activists who could not muster the strength to make their vision of the world a reality. Precarious legality is a new type of political subjectivity brought about by a game of perpetual compromise by the immigration reformers and state forces in the context of the authoritarian turn. I develop this term based on the work of anthropologist Mole (2010), who writes about precarizzazione (precarious-ization) or precarious subjects, to refer to a new generation of workers in Italy who are subject to precarious working conditions characterized by subcontracted work and anxiety over the future. There is nothing inherently Italian about this condition. We have precarious workers in the United States to be sure, but we

now see the emergence of a precarious legality for which migrant workers are having to settle. It is a precarious, liminal form of legality that as many as seven million undocumented migrants will find themselves in under DACA and DAPA – even if the injunction is lifted. Although better than being undocumented in most cases, the status such programs offer is the thinnest form of protection from deportation and detention. Precarious legality comes with a constant

psychological state of anxiety over the possibility of securing a stable status that is constantly in danger of being revoked. This type of precarious legality leads to the forging of a neoliberal subject, who is both a stable and rightless worker preferred by neoliberals like Friedman. For instance in a lecture on immigration, Friedman (2009) asked the audience to consider the following: “Mexicans immigrating over the border is a good thing! It is a good thing for the illegal immigrants, it is a good thing for the United States, it is a good thing for the citizens of the country. But it is only good so long as it’s illegal! That is an interesting paradox to think about: make it legal and it’s no good. Why? Because as

long as it’s illegal, the people who come in do not quality for welfare, they don’t qualify for Social Security.” As soon as it becomes legal, according to Friedman, it becomes a public charge on society. Friedman’s logic is one that prefers access to a highly exploitable and dependable labor force but wishes to see such a labor force in a state of perpetual rightlessness. Precarious

legality is not the exact same thing as illegality; it does provide a temporary layer of protection from immediate deportation in most cases. However, we must not lose sight that it is the product of the compromise between the logics of neoliberalism’s desire for exploitable labor, neoconservatism’s yearning to conserve the privileges of whiteness, and immigration reformers’ demands for “legalization.” It would be a mistake to think of the authoritarian turn and of the capitalist state, for that matter, as being one of complete domination without consent and resistance among popular sectors. On the contrary, the

capitalist state emerged through a series of compromises, and the working classes and socially excluded populations have made real gains through movements to create change. In fact, DACA and DAPA, as precarious and liminal as they may be, represent compromises brought about by the power of the migrant movement and its allies within the context of a highly divided and dysfunctional US Congress. A shift in the balance of forces in Congress must take place to pass “immigration reform,” but it would be naive to think that by simply changing Congress the balance of forces between the parties would be enough to surmount precarious legality. Poulantzas (1978) was clear that “action of the popular masses within the state is a necessary condition of its transformation, but is not itself a sufficient condition” (143). Indeed,

without an autonomous pole of leadership, political direction, and power from

below, the migrant movement does not have a fighting chance to go beyond precarious legality. Autonomous political action is necessary to create the shift in the cultural and ideological terrain that made the authoritarian turn and authoritarian statism possible. Having the capacity to shift to the debate from the bottom up will require a new conception of the world and a new strategy for organizing that takes into the account the dialectical strengthening-weakening of state power and social movements.

Their attempt to create a collective movement around minoritized difference becomes a practice space for the state and civil society to use the academy as a system of representation and recognition that destroys any revolutionary potential latent in the 1AC. Their performance becomes a site of pleasure for the audience that uses debate as a space to valorize and integrate the 1AC into violent systems of power. Ferguson’12 (Roderick A. Ferguson is the co-director of the Racialized Body research cluster at UIC. Prior to his appointment there, he was professor of race and critical theory in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, serving as chair of the department from 2009 to 2012. In the fall of 2013, he was the Old Dominion Visiting Faculty for the Council of the Humanities and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. In 2004, he was Scholar in Residence for the “Queer Locations” Seminar at the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute in Irvine, California. From 2007 to 2010, he was associate editor of the American Studies Association’s flagship journal American

Quarterly. “Reorder of Things : The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference” 2012. Pgs. 11-14)NAE The student movements of the sixties and seventies represent both a portion and a disruption of this genealogy. They point to an academic moment that helped to rearticulate the nature of state and capital, a moment in which truth as the ideal of the university and the mediator of state and civil society was joined by difference in general, and minoritized difference in particular. Moreover, the academy became the “training ground” for state and capital’s engagement with minority difference as a site of representation and meaning. A historical and theoretical reconsideration of the interdisciplinary fields means displacing the economic and its thesis that the academy is a mere reflection or derivation of political economy. In terms of this narrative of rejection and derivation, we are the inheritors of a philosopher’s deception, the children of a ruse. The extent to which we accept the academy and things academic as the designs of the economic is the measure of our dependence on this trick secured through a rhetoric of impotence and remove. The modern Western academy was created as the repository and guarantor of national culture as well as a cultivator and innovator of political economy. As such, the academy is an archive of sorts, whose technologies— or so the theory goes— are constantly refined to acquire the latest innovation. As an archiving institution, the academy is— to use Derrida’s description of the archive—“ institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional. An

economic archive in this double sense: it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion, that is to say in making the law (nomos) or in making people respect the law.” 25 The academy has always been an economic domain; that is, it has simultaneously determined who gets admitted while establishing the rules for membership and participation. In the context of the post– World War II United States, the American academy can be read as a record of the shifts and contradictions of political economy. Indeed, with the admission of women and people of color into predominantly white academic settings, the economic character of the American academy did not simply vanish. The academy would begin to put, keep in reserve, and save minoritized subjects and knowledges in an archival fashion, that is, by devising ways to make those subjects and knowledges respect power and its “laws.” Put differently, the ethnic and women’s studies movements applied pressures on the archival conventions of the academy in an effort to stretch those conventions so that previously excluded subjects might enjoy membership. But it also meant that those subjects would fall under new and revised laws. As a distinct archival economy, the American academy would help inform the archival agendas of state and capital— how best to institute new peoples, new knowledges, and cultures and at the same time discipline and exclude those subjects according to a new order. This was the moment in which power would hone its own archival economy, producing formulas for the incorporation rather than the absolute repudiation of difference, all the while refining and perfecting its practices of exclusion and regulation. This is the time when power would restyle its archival propensities by dreaming up ways to affirm difference and keep it in hand. Ethnic studies and women’s studies movements were the prototypical resources of incorporative and archival systems of power that re invented themselves because of civil rights and liberation movements of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Part of the signature achievements of these affirmative modes of power was to make the pursuit of recognition and legitimacy into formidable horizons of pleasure, insinuating themselves into radical politics, trying to convince insurgents that “your dreams are also mine.” By excavating the social movements, we may be able to chart the emergence of this new kind of archival economy that

transformed academic, political, economic, and social life from the late sixties and beyond. More over, focusing on the social movements and the denominations of interdisciplinary forms that emerged from them might allow us to produce a counterarchive detailing the ways in which power worked through the “recognition” of minoritized histories, cultures, and experiences and how power used that “recognition” to resecure its status. The histories of interdisciplinary engagements with forms of difference represent a conflicted and contradictory negotiation with this horizon of power. Seen this way, we must entrust the interdisciplines with a new charge, that of assessing power’s archival techniques and maneuvers. As Self-Portrait 2000 suggests, the involution of marginal differences and the development of the interdisciplines, broadly conceived, denoted the elaboration of power rather than the confirmation that our “liberty” had been secured. We

must make it our business to critically deploy those modes of difference that have become part of power’s trick and devise ways to use them otherwise. The influence that the student movements had on institutional life within the United States points to a need to assess the streams of the academy within political economy. If state and particularly capital needed the academy to reorient their sensibilities toward the affirmation of difference— that is, to complete the constitutional project of the United States and begin to resolve the contradictions of social exclusion— then it also meant that the academy became the laboratory for the revalorization of modes of difference. This changing set of representations, the institutions that organized themselves around that set, and the modes of power that were compelled by and productive of those transformations are what we are calling the interdisciplines. The interdisciplines were an ensemble of institutions and techniques that offered positivities to populations and constituencies that had been denied institutional claims to agency. Hence,

the interdisciplines connoted a new form of biopower organized around the affirmation, recognition, and legitimacy of minoritized life. To offset their possibility for future ruptures, power made legitimacy and recognition into grand enticements. In doing so, they would become power’s newest techniques for the taking of difference. What the students often offered as radical critiques of institutional belonging would be turned into various institutions’ confirmation.

The AFF’s civil rights normalizes racialized terror and domestic warfare and redirects insurgency and enfolds it into the coordinates of White Being. Their weaponization of liberal black figures against black radicalism in order to dismiss radical politics by breaking this AFF against black teams is white violence disavowed through the language of black culpability! This derailment is an indepdent disad to their performance that you can vote on. Goonan and Rodriguez 16 [Casey, ed. of True Leap Press, and Dylan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, “Policing and the Violence of White Being: An Interview with Dylan Rodríguez,” The Black Scholar, September 12, http://centerforartandthought.org/work/contributor/dylan-rodriguez] The US white-supremacist state operates today through a different set of discourses and cultural structures than in previous epochs. Your work interrogates such shifts at a level of depth and nuance that is of particular importance for emergent struggles against racist state violence. “Multiculturalist white supremacy,” “post-racial liberal optimism,” “white academic raciality”—such terms are utilized throughout your work to interrogate a myriad of theoretical and historical conundrums that define the post-Civil Rights era, particularly in regards to racial violence and subjectivity. Can you, in very broad Casey Goonan:

strokes, lay out what you are trying to accomplish with these interventions in the discourses, practices, and forms of embodiment that so violently delimit the possibilities for radical social change in the United States? Dylan Rodríguez: The aftermath of American apartheid’s formal abolition has been overwhelmed by a grand national-cultural

“Civil Rights” as the vessel of fully actualized gendered-racial citizenship. This fraud has, in various ways, facilitated rather than interrupted the full, horrific exercise of a domestic war-waging regime. For the sake of momentary simplicity, we can think about it along these lines: the half-century narrative of Civil Rights victory rests on an always-fragile but persistent common sense—the idea that national political culture (“America”) and the spirit of law and statecraft (let’s call this “The Dream”) endorse formal racial equality. Bound by this narrative-political context, the racist state’s mechanics shift and multiply to rearticulate a condition of normalized racist violence that is condoned or even applauded by the institutionalized regimes of Civil Rights. (It is not difficult to see how the NAACP, JACL, LULAC, Lambda, NOW, Urban League and other like-minded organizations condone or applaud domestic racial war, so long as it is directed at the correct targets: gang members, drug dealers, “violent criminals,” terrorists, etc.). In other words, the contemporary crisis of racist state violence is not reducible to “police brutality” and homicidal policing, or even the structuring asymmetries of incarceration: it is also a primary derivative of the Civil Rights regime. This regime is in some ways inseparable from the emergence of post-1960s technologies of criminalization that resonate with—rather than offend—the (defrauded) dream of vindicated Civil Rights citizenship. After all, the racial/racist state is still being called upon to legislate, protect, and serve the Civil Rights Citizen, even as it is the subject of militant vindication of

demands for reform that will align it with the Civil Rights versions of America and The Dream. This is the contradiction that yields more and more layers of gendered racist

The widespread, Black-populated and Black-led resistance and revolt that is responding to legally-sanctioned racist police killings should therefore be interpreted as a complex form of insurgency. It is, in significant part, a strike against the respectable, nonscandalous, legitimated forms of policing that have constituted the everyday racist truth of post-Civil Rights nation-building. This insurgency is also, then, a critique of the Civil Rights regime’s complicity in that fifty-year process of national-racial reconstruction. So the racist state has metastasized in the last half century, and created new infrastructures and protocols of civil and social death (the industrialized, militarized policing and criminalization complexes) as well as proto-genocidal methods of targeted, utterly normalized suffering, misery, and physiological vulnerability for peoples on the other side of White Being (the paradigm and methodology of human being that we have inherited as universal, unquestioned, and godlike—here I’m referencing Sylvia Wynter’s lifework, of course). I’m thinking, among so many other things, of the levees in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, strategic ecological disruption of indigenous lifeways throughout the hemisphere and in Native Hawaii, redirection and isolation of toxic water to the poorest, Blackest, and Brownest of places, and the seemingly endless continuity of legalized police assassinations of ordinary (and asymmetrically poor, Black, and Brown) people that stretches back as far as modern policing has existed. So, if shit is this statecraft in the post-optimist’s Age of Obama.

bad—and it’s so, so stunningly clear that it is almost always worse than we want to believe it is—what is the historical responsibility borne by people who differently inherit and

I am against “unity”—militantly so—and full of desire for radical community (militantly so). At the risk of making the case too bluntly: we experience and condone banal liberal calls to unity (which are often depressingly nationalist or patriotic) so incessantly that they are inescapable inhabit this condition?

(e.g. those stupid fucking French flag colors that folks superimposed on their Facebook profile pictures after the street attacks in Paris, which was like global advertising for White Lives Matter; or the absurd compulsion to insist that one is not “anti-police” when mourning yet another life destroyed by the full force of the police apparatus—because

These are concessions to a form of political life (which is to say a particular genre of human life—White Being) that cannot be tolerated as such, if some of us expect to live or see others live. I think such concessions must be critically exposed for what they are: disciplinary exercises in assimilating different peoples’ political dreams to the conformities of White Being. At the very same time—and this is the hard part—these critical gestures have to somehow participate in creating possibilities for collective exercises of radical, it’s never just one or two or five racist cops, it’s what protects and enables them).

creative, political-cultural genius that demystify White Being and embolden (or even productively weaponize) other insurgent practices and methodologies of human life. This is difficult, scary, and beautiful work. And if more people don’t attempt to engage in it, we know who will be the first to disappear.