Three important notes about this file

AT: This Space is Already Political

Turn: The assertion that there is no space outside the political is the dangerous precursor to facism that will ultimately make debate MORE exclusive

Rufo and Atchison, 2011

(Ken Rufo, Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of Georgia, Jarrod Atchison, Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of Georgia, Review of Communication, Vol. 11, No. 3, July 2011, pp. 193 215)

As we have seen, the functional consequence of our field’s imprecise use of the citizen, and of attempts like those of Asen’s to rectify and enhance our understanding of citizenship are in danger of eclipsing the private and subsuming it under the public, of theoretically producing subjectivity as defined by its citizenship, of thinking of citizenship as an inescapable conceptual inclusion in the political, while at the same time maintaining a totalizing obviousness of the political that lacks any specificity other than its overarching encroachment. There is nothing wrong with public engagement, with practicing one’s citizenship, in being political; but there is something wrong, and even dangerous, in producing theory that excludes its own outside in the name of ending exclusions. ‘‘Citizenship is, ’’ as Fletcher (2009) reminds us, ‘‘dangerous ... Its danger ought not to lead to abandonment but to vigilance’’ (p. 234). There are some bridges that should not be built over and over again without question, and some connections that are more coercive than liberating. The circulation of political discourses has swelled such that we might as well harken to circulation’s roots: the political as circus, the big top under which all things political happen. There is a point at which circulation becomes bound by the political, its loose ends and outliers tied together like those bundles of rods that served as the symbol of Roman power and as an inspiration to the Italian fascists, the fasces; and the moment at which circus gives way to fasces rests very much on the pivot of how we conceptualize and enact citizen and citizenship. On the one hand, we see in our field a casual and imprecise use of the term citizen, one that has grown in popularity and that often aligns the citizen as an agent outside of the state, even as it yearns to prompt somehow their more robust inclusion. On the other hand, we have a discourse theory of citizenship that sees all citizens as always and already incorporated into the body politic. While the first use-pattern envisions a citizen semantically distinct and normatively obligated to be political, the latter sees the citizen as ontologically coterminous with the political as such. Either path would have us arrive at the same destination, a destination of an excessive political, even a fascist political loosely construed, and a destination we should be approaching with far more caution and vigilance than we as a discipline are now. Our hope is that this paper will encourage others to consider the trends of our field and our community anew, and to consider the dangers of this excess and extremity rather than focus so heavily on those tragic consequences that flow primarily from one’s exclusion from an imagined, ideal political order. We should begin to inquire into a way of living, a being-with of community that is, strictly speaking, not political.

***Post Racialism K***

The struggle of 21st century politics is not a struggle oriented around race; rather, it is the very concept of race which has come to inhibit and constrain radical politics. The affirmative’s deployment of the concept of race as the organizational focus of political struggle is a smokescreen which obscures the dynamics of oppression – the very deployment of race as a concept itself is the lynchpin of racialized oppression.
Darder and Torress 4 [Antonia Darder, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo Torress, Associate prof of latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race: Racism after multiculturalism, p. 1-2 //liam]

Over a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk proclaimed one of his most cited dictums: "The problem of the 20th Century i:s the problem of the color line" (1989, 10). In this book we echo his sentiment, but with a radical twist. The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of "race"-an ideology that has served well to successfully obscure and disguise class interests behind the smokescreen of multiculturalism, diversity, difference, and more recently, whiteness. Whether the terms of analysis are "race," " racial identity," "race consciousness," or "political race," the category of "race" and its many derivatives function as the lynchpin of racism, which " forbids its objects to be other than members of a race" (Fields 2001, 49). As Barbara Fields has noted with respect to African Americans, Afro-Americans themselves have fought successively for different ways of naming themselves as people . ... Each name, once accepted into the general public vocabulary, has simply become a variant word for Afro Americans' race. A sense of peoplehood, nationhood, or comradeship in struggle may be available to others; but, for persons of African descent, all reduces to race, a life sentence for them and their issue in perpetuity. (50) To radically shift directions and speak "against race," as Paul Gilroy (2000) suggests, or "after race" as we attempt to do here, is to uncompromisingly refuse to accept or legitimate any longer the perpetual racialized demarcations of "raced" (Guinier and Torres 2002) or "problem" (Du Bois 1989) populations. Our intention is to contest the notion that the color of a person's skin, and all it has historically come to signify within the sociological, political, or popular imagination, should continue to function as such. We seek to shatter dubious claims that essentialize the responses of populations, whether they exist as objects or subjects of racism; and by so doing, acknowledge the complexity of the world in which we negotiate our daily existence today. To be clear, we are not arguing in the tradition of the color-blind conservatives or political pundits who would have us believe that the structures and practices that have formidably embedded racism as a way of life for centuries in the United States and around the world have been undone and that the problem of racism has been ameliorated. Our position, in fact, is diametrically opposed to this argument. Instead, the political force of our analysis is anchored in the centrality of "race" as an ideology and racism as a powerful, structuring, hegemonic force in the world today. We argue that we must disconnect from "race" as it has been constructed in the past, and contend fully with the impact of "race" as ideology on the lives of all people-but most importantly on the Lives of those who have been enslaved, colonized, or marked for genocide in the course of world history.

Specifically, they see the world in black and white: the affirmative’s paradigmatic citation of the white/black binary makes redress of the multiple intersections of oppression impossible– the affirmative’s simplistic analysis of racism as predominantly an issue that affects African-Americans negates the reality of other people of color.
Alcoff 3 [LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF, Syracuse University Department of Philosophy, LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACK–WHITE BINARY The Journal of Ethics 7: 5–27 //liam]

The discourse of social justice in regard to issues involving race has been dominated in the U.S. by what many theorists name the "black/white paradigm," which operates to govern racial classifications and racial politics in the U.S., most clearly in the formulation of civil rights law but also in more informal arenas of discussion. Juan Perea defines this paradigm as the conception that race in America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two constituent racial groups, the Black and White ... In addition, the paradigm dictates that all other racial identities and groups in the United States are best understood through the Black/White binary paradigm.5 He argues that this paradigm operates even in recent anti-racist theory such as that produced by Andrew Hacker, Cornel West, and Toni Morrison, though it is even clearer in works by liberals such as Nathan Glazer. Openly espousing this view, Mary Francis Berry, former chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, has stated that the U.S. is comprised of "three nations, one Black, one White, and one in which people strive to be something other than Black to avoid the sting of White Supremacy."6 To understand race in this way is to assume that racial discrimination operates exclusively through anti-black racism. Others can be affected by racism, on this view, but the dominance of the black/white paradigm works to interpret all other effects as "collateral damage" ultimately caused by the same phenomena, in both economic and psychological terms, in which the given other, whether Latino/a, Asian American, or something else, is placed in the category of "black" or "close to black." In other words, there is basically one form of racism, and one continuum of racial identity, along which all groups will be placed. The black/white paradigm can be understood either descriptively or prescriptively (or both): as making a descriptive claim about the fundamental nature of racializations and racisms in the U.S., or as prescribing how race shall operate and thus enforcing the applicability of the black/white paradigm.7 Several Latino/a and Asian American theorists, such as Elaine Kim, Gary Okihiro, Elizabeth Martinez, Juan Perea, Frank Wu, Dana Takagi, and community activists such as Bong Hwan Kim have argued that the black/white paradigm is not adequate, certainly not sufficient, to explain racial realities in the U.S. They have thus contested its claim to descriptive adequacy, and argued that the hegemony of the black/white paradigm in racial thinking has had many deleterious effects for Latino/as and Asian Americans.8 In this paper, I will summarize and discuss what I consider the strongest of these arguments and then develop two further arguments. It is important to stress that the black/white paradigm does have some descriptive reach, as I shall discuss, even though it is inadequate when taken as the whole story of racism. Asian Americans and Latino/as are often categorized and treated in ways that reflect the fact that they have been positioned as either "near black" or "near white," but this is not nearly adequate to understanding their ideological representation or political treatment in the U.S. One might also argue that, although the black/white paradigm is not descriptively adequate to the complexity and plurality of racialized identities, it yet operates with prescriptive force to organize these complexities into its bipolar schema. Critics, however, have contested both the claim of descriptive adequacy as well as prescriptive efficacy. That is, the paradigm does not operate with effective hegemony as a prescriptive force. I believe these arguments will show that continuing to theorize race in the U.S. as operating exclusively through the black/white paradigm is actually disadvantageous for all people of color in the U.S., and in many respects for whites as well (or at least for white union households and the white poor).

Their view of power and white privilege as “norms” that are possessed ignores the process of the constitution of identity. There is no coherent way for non-blacks to participate in their movement because they can’t just ‘take off’ their knapsack of privileges. This perpetuates exclusions and guarantees the failure of their movement.

McWhorter 5 (Ladelle McWhorter, University of Richmond, “Where do white people come from? A Foucaultian critique of Whiteness Studies,” Philosophy Social Criticism 2005 31: 533 //liam )

It is true then that, as the Whiteness Studies theorists so often say, whiteness is a norm. But the assertion by itself, no matter how often repeated, does very little to further analysis. Placing race – and of course whiteness – in the context of the development of biopower gives a much clearer picture of what it means to say whiteness is a norm and indicates some important directions for further study. Once that context is supplied, the work of historians like Allen, Roediger, and Saxton can help explain why it is whiteness (rather than Saxonness, for example) that functions as the racial norm in the USA. Like Whiteness Studies theorists, Foucault meant for his work to have political effects, to disrupt power formations and make new configurations possible. Looking back on the publication of Discipline and Punish, he had this to say to an interviewer: When the book came out, different readers – in particular, correctional officers, social workers, and so on – delivered this peculiar judgment: ‘The book is paralyzing. It may contain some correct observations, but even so it has clear limits, because it impedes us; it prevents us from going on with our activity.’ My reply is that this very reaction proves that the work was successful, that it functioned just as I intended. It shows that people read it as an experience that changed them, that prevented them from always being the same or from having the same relation with things, with others, that they had before reading it. (Foucault, 2000: 245–6) Unable to continue with ‘business as usual’, people are forced to think critically and make deliberate choices. Power relays are disrupted, which at least opens the possibility that power networks will be realigned and come to function in different ways. Effects like this are what Whiteness Studies theorists aim for as well. They hope their work will bring white people up short, make it difficult for them to continue to function unthinkingly within a white supremacist social system, and make it possible for them to imagine and create different ways of living. Whiteness Studies is less effective at this kind of political intervention than Foucault’s work is, however, and far less effective than it might yet be if it took Foucault’s analytics of power and account of normalization seriously. The problem lies, I believe, in Whiteness theorists’ failure to critique the conception of power that they have inherited from traditional Western political theory. By holding on to a conception of power that insists upon the primacy of a sovereign subject and uncritically deploys economic metaphors of possession and distribution, Whiteness Studies impedes its own efforts to account for the political production of racial subjects and works against its own explicitly stated agenda, i.e., dethroning white subjectivity. I will spend the rest of this essay showing how the conception of power that Foucault critiques still operates in Whiteness Studies. As good students of Omi and Winant, Whiteness Studies theorists believe that racism operates much of the time without the consent or to be responsible for racism; they still believe that racism originates in subjectivity, not in structures or institutions or practices. This belief is implicit in their search for a psychological account of racism’s persistence. The account offered in virtually every Whiteness Studies theorist’s work can be summed up in two words: white privilege. The story goes that white people exercise power not so much by exercising their capacity to harm non-white people but by exercising the privileges that hundreds of years of racism have put in place for them. They are in fact deploying racist power, but they do not see it as such because to them it seems that they are simply claiming for themselves the goods to which they are entitled, and they have a deep investment in being able to continue to do so. Across the very different social analyses that Whiteness Studies theorists put forth and across their very pronounced disagreements over political strategy, this concept of white privilege stretches; it, like the claim that whiteness functions as a norm, unites theorists who otherwise have very little in common. My contention is that wherever we see the concept of white privilege operating, we can be sure the conception of power that is also operating is the traditional juridical conception that construes power as the possession of a preexistent subject. No thorough overview of Whiteness Studies ever omits reference to Peggy McIntosh’s article ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’ (1989). Although McIntosh’s article is tentative and limited to description at a very basic, individualistic level, it popularized the notion that white people possess (like tools in a knapsack) something called ‘white privilege’.11 McIntosh lists 46 of these ‘unearned assets’ (McIntosh, 1988: 1), including such disparate ‘tools’ as: (3) ‘If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live’; (5) ‘I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed’; (21) ‘I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group’; (22) ‘I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion’; (33) ‘I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing, or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race’; and (41) ‘I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me’ (McIntosh, 1988: 5–9). One could spend a lot of time critiquing this list and pointing out various problems with it, but what is important here is the focus on privilege itself. McIntosh claims that racism persists because white people use tools that non-white people have not been given. If we want to eliminate racist exercises of power, white people have to divest themselves of those tools. Clearly this sort of analysis can never lead to an account of the production and maintenance of white subjectivities within racist regimes of power – unless all we mean by ‘white subjectivity’ is a generic subject plus a knapsack full of white privileges, a knapsack that the generic subject can jettison without seriously altering its own composition. But that is surely not what the thesis of the social construction of white identity amounts to. So why do Whiteness theorists hang onto this terminology? Why does the concept of white privilege appear in virtually every Whiteness Studies book and article? Lisa Heldke and Peg O’Connor are among the few writers who expend any effort at all trying to justify their use of the concept of white privilege. According to them, the analytic value of the term ‘privilege’ lies in its ability to play the opposite role to ‘oppression’. Everyone generally agrees that there is such a thing as racial oppression and that the members of some races are oppressed, but what of the races that are not oppressed? Heldke and O’Connor write: ‘Some will argue that domination is the companion concept of oppression; they assert that if you are not a member of a particular oppressed group, then you are automatically a dominator’ (Heldke and O’Connor, 2004: 299). They dislike the term ‘domination’, however, because it ‘presupposes that a group or an individual exercises power over another group in very obvious and overt ways’ (ibid.); in other words, it runs counter to the apparent fact that, as analyses like Omi and Winant’s make clear, racism does not operate in obvious and overt ways (at least not by the lights of most white people) and many white people are not aware of its functioning at all. Heldke and O’Connor’s analysis continues: . . . oppression has many different faces; it is created in all kinds of social practices, structures, and institutions. In many instances of oppression, we may not be able to point to any person or group of persons who are actively engaged in dominating the oppressed group . . . We need a companion concept that has as many different faces as does oppression. The concept of privilege will fill the bill; its multiple aspects allow us to describe and understand the roles that different ‘unoppressed’ groups play in the maintenance of oppressive systems. (Heldke and O’Connor, 2004: 299) In sum, within racist societies there are three kinds of people; there are oppressed people (those without much power), dominators (those with power who intend to oppress others), and people who exercise privilege (those with power who do not intend to oppress others but do so anyway). If we hang onto a conception of power that makes it the property of a pre-constituted subjectivity and do not posit that third group, we cannot explain how racism can continue to exist if most people are not avowed racists. We will need a psychological theory to explain the persistence of racism. In other words, if we hang onto a traditional juridical conception of power, we will remain stuck where race theorists were stuck 30 years ago. I contend that the pervasiveness of the term ‘white privilege’ is testament to how deeply and profoundly stuck race theorists typically still are.