Three important notes about this file

Ext: Monolothic

They reify whiteness- focusing the debate on whiteness makes it into a monolith, sustaining the narcissism that elevates whiteness to a spectacle

Ahmed ‘4 [Sara, University of London Race and Cultural studies, "Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism," Borderlands, Vol 3 No 2, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm //liam ]

3. Whiteness studies is after all deeply invested in producing anti-racist forms of knowledge and pedagogy. In other words, whiteness studies seeks to make whiteness visible insofar as that visibility is seen as contesting the forms of white privilege, which rests on the unmarked and the unremarkable ‘fact’ of being white. But in reading the texts that gather together in the emergence of a field, we can detect an anxiety about the status or function of this anti-racism. The anxiety is first an anxiety about what it means to transform whiteness studies into a field. If whiteness becomes a field of study, then there is clearly a risk that whiteness itself will be transformed into an object. Or if whiteness assumes integrity as an object of study, as being ‘something’ that we can track or follow across time and space, then whiteness would become a fetish, cut off from histories of production and circulation. Richard Dyer for instance admits to being disturbed by the very idea of what he calls white studies: ‘My blood runs cold at the thought that talking about whiteness could lead to the development of something called ‘White Studies’ (1997, 10). Or as Fine, Weis, Powell and Wong explain: ‘we worry that in our desire to create spaces to speak, intellectually or empirically, about whiteness, we may have reified whiteness as a fixed category of experience; that we have allowed it to be treated as a monolith, in the singular, as an "essential something"’ (1997, xi). 4. The risk of transforming whiteness into ‘an essential something’ might be a necessary risk, for sure. We have to choose whether it’s a risk worth taking. But the risk does not exist independently of other risks. The anxiety about transforming whiteness into ‘an essential something’ gets stuck to other anxieties about what whiteness studies might do. One of these anxieties is that whiteness studies will sustain whiteness at the centre of intellectual inquiry, however haunted by absence, lack and emptiness. As Ruth Frankenburg asks ‘why talk about whiteness, given the risk that by undertaking intellectual work on whiteness one might contribute to processes of recentering rather than decentering it, as well as reifying the term, and its "inhabitants"’ (1997, 1). 5. Another risk is that in centering on whiteness, whiteness studies might become a discourse of love, which would sustain the narcissism that elevates whiteness into a social and bodily ideal. The reading of whiteness as a form of narcissism is of course well established. The ‘whiteness’ of academic disciplines, including philosophy and anthropology has been subject to devastating critiques (see, for examples, Mills 1998; Asad 1973). For example, a postcolonial critique of anthropology would argue that the anthropological desire to know the other functioned as a form of narcissism: the other functioned as a mirror, a device to reflect the anthropological gaze back to itself, showing the white face of anthropology in the very display of the colour of difference. So if disciplines are in a way already about whiteness, showing the face of the white subject, then it follows that whiteness studies sustains the direction or orientation of this gaze, whilst removing the ‘detour’ provided by the reflection of the other. Whiteness studies could even become a spectacle of pure self-reflection, augmented by an insistence that whiteness ‘is an identity too’. Does whiteness studies function as a narcissism in which the loved object returns us to the subject as the origin of love? We do after all get attached to our objects of study, which might mean that whiteness studies could ‘get stuck’ on whiteness, as that which ‘gives itself’ to itself. Dyer talks about this risk when he admits to another fear: ‘I dread to think that paying attention to whiteness might lead to white people saying they need to get in touch with their whiteness’ (1997, 10). Whiteness studies would here be about white people learning to love their own whiteness, by transforming it into an object that could be loved.

Otherness Bad

Converting “difference” into “otherness” produces existential violence—negation of the other’s voice requires brutality and force to maintain a unified social order

Burke 7 [Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of New South Wales, 2007 “War as a Way of Being: Lebanon, 2006, Theory and Event,” 10:21, Muse //liam]

The conceptual template for such an image of national security state can be found in the work of Thomas Hobbes, with his influential conception of the political community as a tight unity of sovereign and people in which their bodies meld with his own to form a 'Leviathan', and which must be defended from enemies within and without. His image of effective security and sovereignty was one that was intolerant of internal difference and dissent, legitimating a strong state with coercive and exceptional powers to preserve order and sameness. This was a vision not merely of political order but of existential identity, set off against a range of existential others who were sources of threat, backwardness, instability or incongruity.29 It also, in a way set out with frightening clarity by the theorist Carl Schmitt and the philosopher Georg Hegel, exchanged internal unity, identity and harmony for permanent alienation from other such communities (states). Hegel presaged Schmitt's thought with his argument that individuality and the state are single moments of 'mind in its freedom' which 'has an infinitely negative relation to itself, and hence its essential character from its own point of view is its singleness': Individuality is awareness of one's existence as a unit in sharp distinction from others. It manifests itself here in the state as a relation to other states, each of which is autonomous vis-a-vis the others...this negative relation of the state to itself is embodied in the world as the relation of one state to another and as if the negative were something external.30 Schmitt is important both for understanding the way in which such alienation is seen as a definitive way of imagining and limiting political communities, and for understanding how such a rigid delineation is linked to the inevitability and perpetuation of war. Schmitt argued that the existence of a state 'presupposes the political', which must be understood through 'the specific political distinction...between friend and enemy'. The enemy is 'the other, the stranger; and it sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in an extreme case conflicts with him are possible'.31 The figure of the enemy is constitutive of the state as 'the specific entity of a people'.32 Without it society is not political and a people cannot be said to exist: Only the actual participants can correctly recognise, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict...to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence.33 Schmitt links this stark ontology to war when he states that the political is only authentic 'when a fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to the whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship...in its entirety the state as an organised political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction'.34 War, in short, is an existential condition: the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being is symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.35 Schmitt claims that his theory is not biased towards war as a choice ('It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military action...it neither favours war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism') but it is hard to accept his caveat at face value.36 When such a theory takes the form of a social discourse (which it does in a general form) such an ontology can only support, as a kind of originary ground, the basic Clausewitzian assumption that war can be a rational way of resolving political conflicts -- because the import of Schmitt's argument is that such 'political' conflicts are ultimately expressed through the possibility of war. As he says: 'to the enemy concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat'.37 Where Schmitt meets Clausewitz, as I explain further below, the existential and rationalistic ontologies of war join into a closed circle of mutual support and justification. This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the emergence of conflict can generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is conceived in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy; because the very existence of the other constitutes an unacceptable threat, rather than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted of Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and responsibility from policy and political discourse: our actions can be conceived as independent of the conflict or quarantined from critical enquiry, as necessities that achieve an instrumental purpose but do not contribute to a new and unpredictable causal chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of force -- which, by transporting a Newtonian category from the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks -- further encourages the resort to military violence. We ignore the complex history of a conflict, and thus the alternative paths to its resolution that such historical analysis might provide, by portraying conflict as fundamental and existential in nature; as possibly containable or exploitable, but always irresolvable. Dominant portrayals of the war on terror, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably examples of such ontologies in action.
Sole focus on racism in present times is counterproductive

McWhorter 8 [John, linguistics prof, 8—Stanford. senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Non-Fiction. PhD in linguistic June 5, 2008; “Racism in Retreat;” The Sun, http://www.nysun.com/opinion/racism-in-retreat/79355/ //liam]

His victory demonstrates the main platform of my race writing. The guiding question in everything I have ever written on race is: Why do so many people exaggerate about racism? This exaggeration is a nasty hangover from the sixties, and the place it has taken as a purported badge of intellectual and moral gravitas is a tire-block on coherent, constructive sociopolitical discussion. Here's a typical case for what passes as enlightenment. On my desk(top) is an article from last year's American Psychologist. The wisdom imparted? To be a person of color these days is to withstand an endless barrage of racist "microaggressions." Say to someone, "When I look at you, I don't see color" and you "deny their ethnic experiences." You do the same by saying, "As a woman, I know what you go through as a racial minority," as well as with hate speech such as "America is a melting pot." Other "microaggressions" include college buildings being all named after straight, white rich men (I'm not kidding about the straight part). This sort of thing will not do. Why channel mental energy into performance art of this kind? Some may mistake me as implying that it would be okay to stop talking about racism. But that interpretation is incorrect: I am stating that it would be okay to stop talking about racism. We need to be talking about serious activism focused on results. Those who suppose that the main meal in the aforementioned is to decry racism are not helping people. At this point, if racism was unattended to for 10 years, during that time it would play exactly the same kind of role it does in America now — elusive, marginal, and insignificant. Note that I did not say that there was no racism. There seems to be an assumption that when discussing racism, it is a sign of higher wisdom to neglect the issue of its degree. This assumption is neither logical nor productive. I reject it, and am pleased to see increasing numbers of black people doing same. Of course there is racism. The question is whether there is enough to matter. All evidence shows that there is not. No, the number of black men in prison is not counterevidence: black legislators were solidly behind the laws penalizing possession of crack more heavily than powder. In any case, to insist that we are hamstrung until every vestige of racism, bias, or inequity is gone indicates a grievous lack of confidence, which I hope any person of any history would reject. Anyone who intones that America remains permeated with racism is, in a word, lucky. They have not had the misfortune of living in a society riven by true sociological conflict, such as between Sunnis and Shiites, Hutus and Tutsis — or whites and blacks before the sixties. It'd be interesting to open up a discussion with a Darfurian about "microaggressions." To state that racism is no longer a serious problem in our country is neither ignorant nor cynical. Warnings that such a statement invites a racist backlash are, in 2008, melodramatic. They are based on no empirical evidence. Yet every time some stupid thing happens — some comedian says a word, some sniggering blockhead hangs a little noose, some study shows that white people tend to get slightly better car loans — we are taught that racism is still mother's milk in the U.S. of A. "Always just beneath the surface." Barack Obama's success is the most powerful argument against this way of thinking in the entire four decades since recreational underdoggism was mistaken as deep thought. A black man clinching the Democratic presidential nomination — and rather easily at that — indicates that racism is a lot further "beneath the surface" than it used to be. And if Mr. Obama ends up in the White House, then it might be time to admit that racism is less beneath the surface than all but fossilized.