Three important notes about this file

Use of Ballot Bad

They rely on a juridical concept of power. They hold whites responsible, call for a win & a loss…

McWhorter 5 [Ladelle, Prof. of Philosophy and Women's Studies, University of Richmond, Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol 31 nos 5–6, 2005, p. 533–556 //liam]

In the growing body of literature that makes up what has in recent years come to be called ‘Whiteness Studies’, observations like the following are commonplace: ‘Whiteness has, at least within the modern era and within Western societies, tended to be constructed as a norm, an unchanging and unproblematic location, a position from which all other identities come to be marked by their difference’ (Bonnett, 1996: 146).1 According to Whiteness Studies theorists, the white race functions not so much as a race, one among many, as, at times at least, the race – the real human race – and, at other times, no race, simply the healthy, mature norm of human existence as opposed to all those other groups of people who are somehow off-white, off-track, more or less deviant. Whiteness, the racial norm in Western industrial societies, is at one and the same time the exemplar of human being and the unmarked selfsame over against the racially marked other(s).2¶ This understanding of whiteness emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s as race scholars in the USA and the UK began to treat white identity as an epistemic object, in contrast to many earlier race theorists who studied non-whites primarily.3 By taking whiteness as an object of study, these scholars problematized the status of the white race as an unmarked norm and exposed the racism implicit in its having that status. Thus, it seemed, these new race theorists had discovered a potentially very powerful tool for dismantling racism. Revealing the ways in which whiteness functions as a racial norm, they began to denaturalize it and thereby rob it of some of its power to order thought and practice. Their scholarship was and is, deliberately and unapologetically, deeply engaged political activism. Feminist sociologist Ruth Frankenberg articulates this confluence of theory and practice well when she writes: ‘Naming whiteness and white people helps dislodge the claims of both to rightful dominance’ (Frankenberg, 1993: 234).¶ While readers of the work of Michel Foucault may well be struck by the deep affinities between Foucaultian genealogy, counter-memory, and counter-attack on the one hand and Whiteness Studies’ denaturalization of heretofore largely unquestioned racial categories on the other, surprisingly most writers in the Whiteness Studies movement seem all but unaware of Foucault’s analytics of biopower and his descriptions of normalization.4 Their repeated observation that whiteness functions as a norm and their close analyses of its unmarked status come not out of an awareness of Foucaultian genealogy but rather out of sociological studies of institutional racism like Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (1994). Their work sounds like Foucault’s at times, but if they are moving toward an analysis that is like his in some ways, it is from a starting point that is radically different. In this paper I will argue that, in part because of the limitations imposed by that different starting point, Whiteness Studies theorists typically miss their mark both naalytically and politically. Their major problem lies in the fact that they still work within what Foucault calls a juridical conception of power, a conception that simply does not capture the ways in which power operates in modern industrialized societies, especially in relation to the so obviously bio-political phenomenon of racial oppression.
Their juridical model of power leads to useless action

Campbell 98 [David, (Yes The Same Campbell,) Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle in England. http://calliope.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/v002/2.1r_campbell.html //liam]
With her own rhetorical virtuosity and acute philosophical acumen, Butler sets out to interrogate the assumptions behind key arguments concerned with hate speech and the strategies to counter it. In so doing, she begins from a particular position sympathetic to those worried by hate speech in order to make a specific point that diverges from their normal position: That words wound seems incontestably true, and that hateful, racist, misogynist, homophobic speech should be vehemently countered seems incontrovertibly right. But does understanding from where speech derives its power to wound alter our conception of what it might mean to counter that wounding power? Do we accept the notion that injurious speech is attributable to a singular subject and act? If we accept such a juridical constraint on thought - the grammatical requirements of accountability - as a point of departure, what is lost from the political analysis of injury? Indeed, when political discourse is collapsed into juridical discourse, the meaning of political opposition runs the risk of being reduced to the act of prosecution (50). The collapse into juridical discourse, backed by the power of the state or specific agents of the state, is obvious in the scenes above, and Butler's anxiety about the minimalization of political opposition - particularly in the first case, where the dubious nature of the 'offence' diverts attention from racism more generally - appears fully justified. The question is, however, whether the nonjuridical and nonstate forms of agency and resistance Butler places her faith in are up to the task set for them. Let's leave that concern to hang for a bit. Let us first ask how it is that the dominant modes of dealing with hate speech appear universally juridical? In answering that question, Butler demonstrates well the way in which critically interpretative thought can combine a series of theoretical assumptions to demonstrate the limitations of prevalent discourses and alternative possibilities. In so doing, Excitable Speech is a powerful statement in response to those who would maintain that arguments imbued with the idea of a "modernity without foundations" (161) evacuate ethico-political concerns from our horizon. Those who argue that hate speech demands juridical responses assert that not only does the speech communicate, but that it constitutes an injurious act. This presumes that not only does speech act, but that "it acts upon the addressee in an injurious way" (16). This argumentation is, in Butler's eyes, based upon a "sovereign conceit" whereby speech wields a sovereign power, acts as an imperative, and embodies a causative understanding of representation. In this manner, hate speech constitutes its subjects as injured victims unable to respond themselves and in need of the law's intervention to restrict if not censor the offending words, and punish the speaker: This idealization of the speech act as a sovereign action (whether positive or negative) appears linked with the idealization of sovereign state power or, rather, with the imagined and forceful voice of that power. It is as if the proper power of the state has been expropriated, delegated to its citizens, and the state then rememerges as a neutral instrument to which we seek recourse to protects as from other citizens, who have become revived emblems of a (lost) sovereign power (82). Two elements of this are paradoxical. First, the sovereign conceit embedded in conventional renderings of hate speech comes at a time when understanding power in sovereign terms is becoming (if at all ever possible) even more difficult. Thus the juridical response to hate speech helps deal with an onto-political problem: "The constraints of legal language emerge to put an end to this particular historical anxiety [the problematisation of sovereignty], for the law requires that we resituate power in the language of injury, that we accord injury the status of an act and trace that act to the specific conduct of a subject" (78). The second, which stems from this, is that (to use Butler's own admittedly hyperbolic formulation) "the state produces hate speech." By this she means not that the state is the sovereign subject from which the various slurs emanate, but that within the frame of the juridical account of hate speech "the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publicly acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain the line of consequential demarcation" (77). The sovereign conceit of the juridical argument thus linguistically resurrects the sovereign subject at the very moment it seems most vulnerable, and reaffirms the sovereign state and its power in relation to that subject at the very moment its phantasmatic condition is most apparent. The danger is that the resultant extension of state power will be turned against the social movements that sought legal redress in the first place (24)

Using experience to establish the validity of knowledge makes politics and scholarship exclusionary, not emancipatory. Instead of making the personal political, this framework makes the political only personal.

Scott 92 [Joan, School of Social Science at Brown, “Multiculturalism and the politics of identity,” October v 61 Summer p. 17-18 //liam]

There is nothing wrong, on the face of it, with teaching individuals about how to behave decently in relation to others and about how to empathize with each other's pain. The problem is that difficult analyses of how history and social standing, privilege, and subordination are involved in personal behavior entirely drop out. Chandra Mohanty puts it this way: There has been an erosion of the politics of collectivity through the reformulation of race and difference in individualistic terms. The 1960s and '70s slogan "the personal is political" has been recrafted in the 1980s as "the political is personal." In other words, all politics is collapsed into the personal, and questions of individual behaviors, attitudes, and life-styles stand in for political analysis of the social. Individual political struggles are seen as the only relevant and legit-imate form of political struggle.5 Paradoxically, individuals then generalize their perceptions and claim to speak for a whole group, but the groups are also conceived as unitary and autonomous. This individualizing, personalizing conception has also been be-hind some of the recent identity politics of minorities; indeed it gave rise to the intolerant, doctrinaire behavior that was dubbed, initially by its internal critics, "political correctness." It is particularly in the notion of "experience" that one sees this operating. In much current usage of "experience," references to structure and history are implied but not made explicit; instead, personal testimony of oppression re-places analysis, and this testimony comes to stand for the experience of the whole group. The fact of belonging to an identity group is taken as authority enough for one's speech; the direct experience of a group or culture-that is, membership in it-becomes the only test of true knowledge. The exclusionary implications of this are twofold: all those not of the group are denied even intellectual access to it, and those within the group whose experiences or interpretations do not conform to the established terms of iden-tity must either suppress their views or drop out. An appeal to "experience" of this kind forecloses discussion and criticism and turns politics into a policing operation: the borders of identity are patrolled for signs of nonconformity; the test of membership in a group becomes less one's willingness to endorse certain principles and engage in specific political actions, less one's positioning in specific relationships of power, than one's ability to use the prescribed languages that are taken as signs that one is inherently "of" the group. That all of this isn't recognized as a highly political process that produces identities is troubling indeed, especially because it so closely mimics the politics of the powerful, naturalizing and deeming as discernably objective facts the prerequisites for inclusion in any group.