Three important notes about this file

AT Obama/ Multiculteralism

Their logic of multiculturalism is paternalistic- only serves to retrench racism

Rodriguez 09- PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, prof at UC Riverside (Dylan, “The Terms of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition,” Critical Sociology, vol. 36 no. 1 p. 151-173//MGD)

The ascendance of the Obama administration signifies this complex tension between universal (white) humanity, “non-white” subjection to logics of disposability/genocide, and multiculturalist empowerment in continuity with the violence of the white supremacist state. White supremacy is historically characterized by a periodic flexibility of phenotype (e.g. “first black president” as white supremacist nation-building’s moral/political vindication) that is already determined by the structural durability of the social logics of racial dominance/violence. Thus, To consider white supremacy as essential to American national formation (rather than an extremist deviation or incidental departure from it) inaugurates a deeper theorization of how this material logic of violence overdetermines the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that compose American white locality/globality and, crucially, generates the common sense indispensable to its ordering. It thus is within the confines of Homeland Security as white supremacist territoriality – a structure of feeling that organizes the cohesion of racial and spatial entitlement – that ‘multiculturalism’ is recognized as a fact of life, an empirical feature of the world that is inescapable and unavoidable, something to be tolerated, policed, and patriotically valorized at once and in turn. On the one hand, white locality is a site of existential identification that generates (and therefore corresponds to) a white supremacist materiality. As subjects (including ostensibly ‘non-white’ subjects) identify with this sentimental structure – a process that is not cleanly agential or altogether voluntary – they enter a relation of discomforting intimacy with embodied threats to their sense of the ‘local’. Those alien bodies and subjects, whose movement suggests the possibility of disruption and disarticulation, become objects of a discrete discursive labor as well as material/military endeavors. Most importantly, they become specified and particularized sites for white locality’s punitive performances: racialized punishment, capture, and discipline are entwined in the historical fabric of white supremacist social formations from conquest and chattel enslavement onward, and the emergence of white locality’s hypermobility has necessitated new technologies commensurate with the hyperpresence – actual and virtual – of white subjectivities. As white bodies and subjects exert the capacity to manifest authority and presence in places they both do and do not physically occupy (call the latter ‘absentee’ white supremacy for shorthand), the old relations of classical white supremacist apartheid are necessarily and persistently reinvented: racial subjection becomes a technology of inclusion that crucially accompanies – and is radically enhanced by – ongoing proliferations of racist state and state-sanctioned violence. Further, this logic of multiculturalist white supremacist inclusion does not exclusively rely on strategies of coercion or punishment to assimilate others – such as in the paradigmatic examples of bodily subjection that formed the institutional machinery of Native American boarding and mission schools (Adams 1995; Smith 2005), but instead builds upon the more plastic and sustainable platforms of consensus and collective identity formation. I do not mean to suggest that either consensus building or identity formation are benign projects of autonomous racial self-invention, somehow operating independently of the structuring relations of dominance that characterize a given social formation. Rather, I am arguing that the social technologies of white supremacy are, in this historical moment, not reducible to discrete arrangements of institutionalized (and state legitimated) violence or strategies of social exclusion (Da Silva 2007) but are significantly altered and innovated through the crises of bodily proximity that white locality bears to its alien (and even enemy) populations. It is in these moments of discomfort, when white locality is internally populated by alien others who have neither immigrated nor invaded the space, but have in multiple ways become occupied by the praxis of white locality construction, that logics of incorporation and inclusion become crucial to the historical project of white supremacist globality.

Wilderson- Ontological Death

Blackness is a condition of ontological death – a vocabulary to describe this loss doesn’t exist – the only way to break out of this structure is a complete destruction of civil society and the epistemological foundations it rests on.

Wilderson No Date [Frank, Ass. Prof of African American Studies UC-Irvine “Afro Pessimism” http://uc-ipc.com/members/2008/06/23/afro-pessimism/ //liam]
Afro-Pessimism theorizes Blackness as a position of accumulation and fungibility (Saidiya Hartman); as condition—or relation—of ontological death; rather than celebrate it as an identity of cultural plenitude. One of the guiding questions of my engagement with Afro-Pessimism is: How are the political stakes of analysis and aesthetics raised and altered if we theorize the structural relation between Blacks and Humanity as an antagonism (an irreconcilable encounter) as opposed to a conflict? The following question was asked on a graduate student exam for a Critical Theory Seminar, entitled “Sentient Objects and the Crisis of Critical Theory,” that I taught Fall Quarter 2006. Question: Why are the theorists under consideration [in this seminar] called “Afro-Pessimists,” and what characteristics do they have in common? “Afro-Pessimists are framed as such…because they theorize an antagonism, rather than a conflict—i.e. they perform a kind of ‘work of understanding’ rather than that of liberation, refusing to posit seemingly untenable solutions to the problems they raise.” “[The Afro-Pessimists argue] that violence toward the black person happens gratuitously, hence without former transgression, and the even if the means of repression change (plantation was replaced by prison, etc.), that doesn’t change the structure of the repression itself. Finally (and this is important in terms of the self-definition of the white person), a lot of repression happens on the level of representation, which then infiltrates the unconscious of both the black and the white person…Since these structures are ontological, they cannot be resolved (there is no way of changing this unless the world as we know it comes an end…); this is why the [Afro-Pessimist relational-schema] would be seen as the only true antagonism (while other repressive relations like class and gender would take place on the level of conflict—they can be resolved, hence they are not ontological).” “[The Afro-Pessimists] work toward delineating a relation rather than focus on a cultural object.” “Something that all the Afro-Pessimists seem to agree upon regarding social death are notions of kinship (or lack there of), the absence of time and space to describe blackness…There is no grammar of suffering to describe their loss because the loss cannot be named.” “[The Afro-Pessimists] theorize the workings of civil society as contiguous with slavery, and discuss the following as bearing witness to this contiguity: the inability of the slave (or the being-for-the-captor) to translate space into place and time into event; the fact that the slave remains subject to gratuitous violence (rather than violence contingent on transgression); the natal alienation and social death of the slave.” “[T]he Afro-Pessimists all seek to…stage a metacritique of the current discourse identified as “critical theory” by excavating an antagonism that exceeds it; to recognize this antagonism Jared, Frank, Taehyung forces a mode of death that expels subjecthood and forces objecthood [upon Blacks].” “For Fanon, the solution to the black presence in the white world is not to retrieve and celebrate our African heritage, as was one of the goals of the Negritude project. For Fanon, a revolution that would destroy civil society, as we know it would be a more adequate response. I think the Afro-Pessimist such as Hartman, Spillers, and Marriott would argue there is no place for the black, only prosthetics, techniques which give the illusion of a relationality in the world.” Like the work of Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, David Marriott, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Joy James, and others, my poetry, creative prose, scholarly work, and film production are predicated on the notion that slavery did not end in 1865; the United States simply made adjustments to the force of Black resistance without diminishing the centrality of Black captivity to the stability and coherence of civil society.