Three important notes about this file

**AT AFF ANSWERS**

AT Race=Emancipatory

There is no neutral pre-discursive race which pre-exists their invocation; rather, the aff’s invocation of the conceptual imagery of race calls it into being – the aff’s speech act is the central cause in the dialectic between academic knowledge and the segmentation of society into distinct categories.  This thwarts all hope of an emancipatory politics. 

Darder, and Torress, 04 [Antonia, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo, Associate prof of latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race:  Racism after multiculturalism, p. 12 //liam]

 

While we argue against attributing explanatory or descriptive value to “race,” we do not mean to suggest that races have no social reality—they do. This fiction of “race” is produced in the real world, thus serving to legitimate it and give it conceptual meaning and social life. At its core, the effort to transmute the concept of “race” into an objective reality is limited and, as Appiah (cited in Postal 2002) concludes, a morally dangerous proposition. Hence, there is no need for a distinct (critical) theory of “race”; instead, what is required is an earnest endeavor to theorize the specious concept with its illusory Status out of existence and renew our commitment to the interrogation of racism as an ideology of social exclusion (Miles and Brown 2003). In other words, if “race” is real, it is so only because it has been rendered meaningful by the actions and beliefs of the powerful, who retain the myth in order to protect their own political-economic interests. “Race” as a social construct of resistance comes into play only later as racialized populations and their advocates embrace the concept in reverse to struggle against material conditions of domination and exploitation. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the essentialism inherent in the original epistemological intent of “race” is preserved. At its core, the effort to transmute the concept of “race” into an emancipatory category is a limited and unwise undertaking. Thus, it is high time we disrupt the continued use of a dubious concept that cannot help but render our theorizing ambiguous and problematic. In its simplest terms, this ambiguity is most visible in the inconsistent, with which the term “race” is applied—sometimes meaning ethnicity, at other times referring to culture or ancestry. More often than not, “terms used for race are seldom defined and race is frequently employed in a routine and uncritical manner to represent ill-defined social and cultural factors” (Williams 1994). This explains why in all the w ritings on “race” there is so little substantive theorizing about the construct itself. The category of “race” is thus suspect with respect to its analytical utility. If “race” is socially constructed and its origins clearly steeped in an ideology of exclusion, domination, exploitation, even genocide, why should we continue to make sense of people’s lives based on the legacy of a pseudoscientific distortion from a previous era? Is not racism—as an ideology that exists within a structure of class differentiation and exploitation—. rather than “race,” the concept that merits our attention, particularly in these perilous times of global upheaval?

AT Our Ethic O/W

The effects of the aff’s politics are far from benign – despite the affirmative’s best intentions, they can only further entrench racism – by deploying the conceptual imagery of distinct races towards the ends of emancipation, the aff re-inforces the idea that race is real, salient, and explanatory.  Unfortunately, it is this very conception that underpins racism itself. 

Darder, and Torress, 04 [Antonia, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo, Associate prof of latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race:  Racism after multiculturalism, p. 32-4 //liam]

 

Having recognized the relative distinctiveness of the political and academic space in northwest Europe and then having occupied that space, one can view those social relations defined in Britain and the United States as “race relations” from another point of view, for there is no public or academic reference to the existence of “race relations” in contem porary France or Germany. It then becomes possible to pose questions that seem not to be posed from within these intimately interlinked social and historical contexts. What kinds of social relations are signified as “race relations”? Why is the idea of “race” employed in everyday life to refer only to Certain groups of people and only to certain social Situations? And why do social scientists unquestioningly import everyday meanings into their reasoning and theoretical frameworks in defining “race” and “race relations” as a particular field of study? What does it mean for an academic to claim, for example, that “race” is a factor in de termining the structure of social inequality, or that “race” and gender are interlinked forms of oppression? What is intended and what might be the consequences of asserting as an academic that “race matters”? These are the kinds of questions that Miles has been posing since the 1980s (e.g., Miles 1982, 1984, 1989), influenced in part by the French theorist Guillaumin (1972, 1995). The answers to these questions lead to the conclusion that one should follow the example of biological and genetic scientists and refuse to attribute analytical status to the idea of “race” within the social sciences and thereby refuse to use it as a descrip tive and explanatory concept. The reasoning can be summarized as follows (cf. Miles 1982, 22—43; 1993, 47—49). First, the idea of “race” is used to effect reification within sociological analysis insofar as the outcome of an often complex social process is explained as the consequence of something named “race” rather than of the social process itself. Consider the publication of The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnsteifl and Charles Murray (1994) and the authors’ com mon assertion that “race” determines academic performance and life chances. The assertion can be supported with statistical evidence that demonstrates that, in comparison with “black people,” “white people” are more likely to achieve top grades in school and to enter leading universities in the United States. The determining processes are extremely complex, including among other things parental class position and active and passive racialized stereotyping and exclusion in the classroom and beyond. The effects of these processes are all mediated via a prior racial ized categorization into a “black-white” dichotomy that is employed in everyday social relations. Hence, it is not “race” that determines academic performance: rather academic performance is determined by the interplay of social processes, one of which is premised on the articulation of racism to effect and legitimate exclusion. Indeed, given the nineteenthcentury meanings of “race,” this form of reification invites the possibility of explaining academic performance as the outcome of some quality within the body of those racialized as “black.”) 3 Second, when academics who choose to Write about “race relations” seek to speak to a wider audience (an activity which we believe to be fully justified) or when their writings are utilized by nonacademics, their use unwittingly legitimates and reinforces everyday beliefs that the human species is constituted by a number of different “races,” each of which is characterized by a particular combination of real or imagined physical features or marks and cultural practices. When West seeks to persuade the “American public” that “Race Matters,” there is no doubt that he himself does not believe in the existence of biologically defined “races.” But he cannot control the meanings attributed to his claim on the part of those who identify differences in skin color for example, as marks designating the existence of “blacks” and “whites” as discrete “races.” Unintentionally, his writing may thus come to serve as a legitimation not only of a belief in the existence of “race” as a biological phenomenon but also of racism itself. He could avoid this outcome by breaking with the “race relations” paradigm. Third, as a result of reification and the interplay between academic and commonsense discourses, the use of “race” as an analytical concept can incorporate into the discourse of antiracism a notion that has been central to the evolution of racism. Antiracist activities promote the idea that “races” really exist as biological categories of people. Thus, while challenging the legitimation of unequal treatment and the stereotyping implicit and explicit in racism, the reproduction within antiracist campaigns of the idea that there are real biological differences creating groups of human beings sustains in the public consciousness the ideological pre condition for stereotyping and unequal treatment. In other words, use of the idea of “race” provides one of the conditions for the reproduction of racism within the discourse and practice of antiracism. For these reasons, the idea of “race” should not be employed as an analytical category within the social sciences. It follows that the object of study should not be described as “race relations.” To reiterate, while we reject the “race relations” problematic for the analysis of racism, we do not reject the concept of racism. Rather, we critique the “race relations” problematic in order to recognize the existence of a plurality of histori cally specific racisms, not all of which explicitly employ the idea of “race.” In contrast, the “race relations” paradigm refers exclusively to either “black-white” social relations or to social relations between “people of color” and “white people.” This allows for only one racism, the racism of “whites,” which has as its object and victim “people of color” (e.g., Essed 1991).

 

AT Mills

Mill’s theory misses the boat- millions of white people live below the poverty line

Cole 9 (Mike Cole, Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln, UK, “Critical Race Theory comes to the UK : A Marxist response”, Ethnicities 2009 9: 246)

Mills (1997: 37) acknowledges that not ‘all whites are better off than all nonwhites, but . . . as a statistical generalization, the objective life chances of whites are significantly better’. While this is, of course, true, we should not lose sight of the life chances of millions of working-class white people. To take poverty as one example, in the US, while it is the case that the number of black people living below the poverty line is some three times that of whites, this still leaves over 16 million ‘white but not Hispanic’ people living in poverty in the US (US Census Bureau, 2007). This is indicative of a society predicated on racialized capitalism, rather than indicative of a white supremacist society. While the US is witnessing the effects of the DEBATE Downloaded from NRD with massively disproportionate effects on black people and other people of colour, white people are also affected. The outsourcing by US corporations of millions of better-paying jobs outside the country, the class warfare against unions, which has led to a steep decline in the percentage of US workers, affects white workers too. The loss to US urban neighbourhoods of virtually their entire economic manufacturing and industrial employment creates unemployment for white workers as well, and neo - liberal social policies cut the job training programmes, welfare and public housing of whites as well as blacks and other people of colour. In the UK, there are similar indicators of a society underpinned by rampant racism, with black people currently twice as poor as whites, and those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin over three times as poor as whites (Platt, 2007). Once again, however, this still leaves some 12 million poor white people in the UK, who are, like their American counterparts, on the receiving end of global neoliberal capitalism.
Focus on whiteness theory obscures non color coded racism

Cole, 9 (Mike Cole, Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln, UK, “Critical Race Theory comes to the UK : A Marxist response”, Ethnicities 2009 9: 246)

Mills acknowledges that there were/are what he refers to as ‘“borderline” Europeans’ – ‘the Irish, Slavs, Mediterraneans, and above all, of course, Jews’ (Mills, 1997: 78–9), and that there also existed ‘intra-European varieties of “racism”’ (Mills, 1997: 79; see also Perea et al., 2007). However, he argues that, while there remains some recognition of such distinctions ‘in popular culture’ – he gives examples of an ‘“Italian” waitress’ in the TV series Cheers, calling a WASP character ‘Whitey’ and a discussion in a 1992 movie about whether Italians are really white (Mills, 1997: 79) – he relegates such distinctions primarily to history.6 While Mills is prepared to ‘fuzzify’ racial categories with respect to ‘shifting criteria prescribed by the evolving Racial Contract’, and to acknowledge the existence of ‘off-white’ people at certain historical periods, he maintains that his categorization – ‘white/nonwhite, person/subperson’ – ‘seems to me to map the essential features of the racial polity accurately, to carve the social reality at its ontological joints’ (Mills, 1997: 78–81). It is my view that this does not address current reality. The characteristics signified vary historically and, although they have usually been visible somatic features, other non-visible (alleged and real) biological features have also been signified. I would like to make a couple of amendments to Miles’ position.7 First, I would want to add ‘and cultural’ after, ‘biological’. Second, the common dictionary definition of ‘somatic’ is ‘pertaining to the body’, and, given the fact that people can be racialized on grounds of symbols (e.g. the hijab), I would also want this to be recognized in any discussion of social collectivities and the construction of racialization (Cole, 2008b). In contemporary Britain, there continues to be non-colour-coded racism directed at the Irish (e.g. Mac an Ghaill, 2000) and at Roma Gypsy Traveller communities (e.g. Puxon, 2005). There is also Islamophobia and xeno-racism.

***Derogratory Language K***

Derogatory language is never emancipatory- it retrenches police oppression and aggression- turns case

Martinot and Sexton 03- *prof at San Francisco State University**PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, Director, African American Studies at UC Irvine (Steve and Jared, “The Avant-garde of white supremacy,” http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/avantguard.htm//MGD)

Spectacle is a form of camouflage. It does not conceal anything; it simply renders it unrecognizable. One looks at it and does not see it. It appears in disguise. Harris, for example, looks at acquiescence and cannot see it. Camouflage is a relationship between the one dissimulating their appearance and the one who is fooled, who looks and cannot see. Like racialization as a system of meanings assigned to the body, police spectacle is itself the form of appearance of this banality. Their endless assault reflects the idea that race is a social envelope, a system of social categorization dropped over the heads of people like clothes. Police impunity serves to distinguish between the racial uniform itself and the elsewhere that mandates it. They constitute the distinction between those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom it goes without saying. Police spectacle is not the effect of the racial uniform; rather, it is the police uniform that is producing re-racialization. Nothing better exemplifies this distinction than the structure of derogatory language. Derogatory terms do not mean; they assault. Their intention is not to communicate but to harm. Thus they are not discursive signs or linguistic statements but modes of aggression. They express a structure of power and domination, a hierarchy that contextualizes them and gives them their force. As gestures of assault they reflect their users status as a member of the dominant group. The derogatory term does more than speak; it silences. That ability to silence derives from the fact that, in turning its hegemonic position to account, it turns the racialized other into a language for whiteness itself. Those situated lower on the hierarchy have no viable means of defending themselves. This, in effect, renders the derogation unanswerable in its own terms. The derogatory term obtrudes with a small daily violence whose form is gratuitous, without motivation in the situation in which it is used, and whose content is to render that situation dominated by white supremacy. If it sits at the heart of the language of racism it is because it is banal and everyday even while symbolizing racism’s utmost violence, the verbal form of its genocidal trajectory. Those who use derogatory terms repeatedly are putting themselves in a continual state of aggression; turning their objective complicity with a structured relation of white supremacist dominance into an active investment or affirmation. Such modes of assault demonstrate a specific obsession with those denigrated that characterizes the socius of white supremacy, its demands for allegiance, its conditions of membership, its residence in viciousness. Because it is gratuitous and unanswerable, the derogatory term grants itself impunity, reiterates of the excess at the core of each racist event without calling its ethics into question. The prevalence of derogatory terms in US conversation goes unnoticed, seen simply on the margin of common sense, as opposed to an index of white supremacy. It is a small matter, when set against such things as, for instance, the legal codes of Jim Crow or the government’s assassination of Fred Hampton. Yet derogation comes in many different forms—as stories, aphorisms, discourses, legal statutes, political practices, etc. The repetition of derogation becomes the performance of white supremacist identity, over and over again. The derogatory term occupies the very center of the structure of white supremacy.