Three important notes about this file

2NC O/V

Their method of performance constructs monolithic interpretations of African American identity and papers over alternative viewpoints

This reductionist conception of identity is doomed to failure- while it resonates with those who already share similar viewpoints, it alienates those the performance is trying to persuade who don’t already agree with their viewpoints- that’s McClendon and Clarke
Don’t buy into their claims that they should win because they were first to perform

This shields their arguments from scrutiny and promotes a lack of accountability

There’s no inherent reason to prefer performance-that’s Clarke

2NC – Appropriation Turn

Turn: Appropriation

Shannon Sullivan, Penn State University, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2004. P. 301-2

While a white/Anglo person’s learning Spanish can begin to balance the relationship of power and knowledge between white/Anglo and Latino worlds, it also can have the opposite effect of increasing the hegemony of the white world. This occurs when white people learn a language other than Standard American Language—Spanish, African American Language, or otherwise—precisely to dominate the world that speaks that language. Certainly this happened during times of colonialist conquest, but it also continues today as business corporations and advertising firms in the United States learn (bits of) African American Language and Spanish to better market products that promise the “exoticism” of Blackness and the “spiciness” of Latino culture. (Standard, middleclass whiteness is so unhip nowadays, as Yancy notes [Yancy 2004, 276].) It also can happen in less insidious ways, however, such as when white people learn another language to (try to) break out of their white solipsism. Even in these well-intentioned instances, the protection provided to minority races by white people’s ignorance of their languages can be eroded once white people begin to understand and speak them.

2NC – White Fill In

Turn: Opens space for white hegemony

Shannon Sullivan, Penn State University, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2004, p. 302

This point was brought home to me when a Latina friend and philosopher explained that she did not want white/Anglo people to learn Spanish because their knowledge would intrude on the Spanish/Latina world that she and other Spanish-speaking philosophers are able to create in the midst of white/Anglodominated conferences.2 Opening up her world to white/Anglo philosophers tends to result in the destruction of a valuable point of resistance to white racism. Because of the dominance of white people in philosophy in the United States, she frequently is forced to travel to white worlds and wants to preserve a small space that is relatively free of white people and the issues of race and racism that their presence inevitably (though not necessarily deliberately) produces.

Inclusion Calls Turn Case

The call for more inclusion and tolerance risks a façade of change that reproduces the structures they criticize.

Zizek 97 [Slavoj Žižek, bearded Slovenian, 1997 “Repeating Lenin,” http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm //liam]

One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx's thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT to succumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility: "what can one do against the global capital?"), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space — it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who "really want to do something to help people" get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) — they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity2: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!".

AT Language First

A) Debate about social and political structures in favor of discussions on the minutia of terminology. While language matters, material forces are an important structuring factor in the way language plays in our negotiation of reality. To assume that it is all about language misses important structural conditions of racism which they cannot access.

Best & Kellner 91 [Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, UT-Austin, 1991, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, p. 259-60 //liam]

Postmodern theorists do not do social theory per se, but rather eclectically combine fragments of sociological analysis, literary and cultural readings, historical theorizations, and philosophical critiques. They tend to privilege cultural and philosophical analysis over social theory and thereby fail to confront the most decisive determinants of our social world. Yet we believe - against much postmodern theory - that the project of social theory itself continues to be a valuable one. Just as individuals need cognitive maps of their cities to negotiate their spatial environment, they also need maps of their society to intelligently analyze, discuss, and intervene in social processes. For us, social theories provide mappings of contemporary society: its organization; its constitutive social relations, practices, discourses, and institutions; its integrated and interdependent features; its conflictual and fragmenting features; and its structures of power and modes of oppression and domination. Social theories analyze how these elements fit together to constitute specific societies, and how societies work or fail to function
B) Language is a constant negotiation. We understand that language is never static nor is meaning ever closed off. We still have to try to communicate ideasOur framing represents our best attempt to communicate with the imperfect system we have.

Biesecker 89 [Barbara Biesecker, professor of communication at UGA, 1989 “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Differance,” in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol 22., No. 2 //liam]

But what about this diffirance? Why should rhetorical critics struggle with this complicated internal division that is said to inhabit all writing, structure all speech, and scandalize all texts? What is so critical about this seemingly critical difference? In his essay "differance" Derrida provides a possible answer: "Differance is what makes the movement of signification possible . . . ." The play of differance, as Derrida puts it, is "the possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual system and process in general:"

What we note as differance will thus be the movement of play that "produces" (and not by something that is simply an activity) these differences, these effects of difference. This does not mean that the differance which produces differences is before them in a simple and in itself unmodified and indifferent present. Differance is the nonfull, nonsimple "origin"; it is the structured and differing origin of differences.22

To repeat, differance makes signification possible. Only to the extent that we are able to differ, as in spatial distinction or relation to an other, and to defer, as in temporalizing or delay, are we able to produce anything. ''Differance" is, as Derrida puts it, "the formation of form." Here we do well to look a bit closer at an essay in which Derrida provides an extensive structural description of differance and then proceeds to discuss at even greater length its enabling power. In "Linguistics and Grammatology" he says, [differance] does not depend on any sensible plentitude, audible or viable, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a thing-present outside of all plentitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign . . . concept or operation, motor or sensory. This differance is therefore not more sensible than intelligible and it permits the articulation of signs among themselves the same abstract order ... or between two orders of expression. It permits the articulation of speech and writing—in the colloquial sense—as it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, then between signifier and signified, expression and content, etc.

Derrida's differance is, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out, the name for "the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience"; all writing in the narrow sense, like all speech, marks the play of this productive non-identity." Differance, Derrida writes, is the structural condition which makes it possible for us to perform any act.