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AT: Colorblindness

The alternative is not a form of colorblindness – it simply uses class analysis as a conceptual tool to explain how intersecting modes of oppression, including racism, occur

McLaren et al., 4 – Distinguished Professor, Critical Studies, Chapman University (Peter and Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2, April, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2004.00060.x/full)//SY

Contrary to what many have claimed, Marxist theory does not relegate categories of ‘difference’ to the conceptual mausoleum; rather, it has sought to reanimate these categories by interrogating how they are refracted through material relations of power and privilege and linked to relations of production. Moreover, it has emphasized and insisted that the wider political and economic system in which they are embedded needs to be thoroughly understood in all its complexity. Indeed, Marx made clear how constructions of race and ethnicity ‘are implicated in the circulation process of variable capital.’ To the extent that ‘gender, race, and ethnicity are all understood as social constructions rather than as essentialist categories’ the effect of exploring their insertion into the ‘circulation of variable capital (including positioning within the internal heterogeneity of collective labor and hence, within the division of labor and the class system)’ must be interpreted as a ‘powerful force reconstructing them in distinctly capitalist ways’ (Harvey, 2000, p. 106). Unlike contemporary narratives which tend to focus on one or another form of oppression, the irrefragable power of historical materialism resides in its ability to reveal (1) how forms of oppression based on categories of difference do not possess relative autonomy from class relations but rather constitute the ways in which oppression is lived/experienced within a class-based system; and (2) how all forms of social oppression function within an overarching capitalist system. This framework must be further distinguished from those that invoke the terms ‘classism’ and/or ‘class elitism’ to (ostensibly) foreground the idea that ‘class matters’ (cf. hooks, 2000) since we agree with Gimenez (2001, p. 24) that ‘class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression.’ Rather, class denotes ‘exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the means of production.’ To marginalize such a conceptualization of class is to conflate an individual's objective location in the intersection of structures of inequality with people's subjective understandings of who they really are based on their ‘experiences.’ Another caveat. In making such a claim, we are not renouncing the concept of experience. On the contrary, we believe it is imperative to retain the category of lived experience as a reference point in light of misguided post-Marxist critiques which imply that all forms of Marxian class analysis are dismissive of subjectivity. We are not, however, advocating the uncritical fetishization of ‘experience’ that tends to assume that experience somehow guarantees the authenticity of knowledge and which often treats experience as self-explanatory, transparent, and solely individual. Rather, we advance a framework that seeks to make connections between seemingly isolated situations and/or particular experiences by exploring how they are constituted in, and circumscribed by, broader historical and social circumstances. Experiential understandings, in and of themselves, are suspect because, dialectically, they constitute a unity of opposites—they are at once unique, specific, and personal, but also thoroughly partial, social, and the products of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing (Gimenez, 2001). In this sense, a rich description of immediate experience in terms of consciousness of a particular form of oppression (racial or otherwise) can be an appropriate and indispensable point of departure. Such an understanding, however, can easily become an isolated ‘difference’ prison unless it transcends the immediate perceived point of oppression, confronts the social system in which it is rooted, and expands into a complex and multifaceted analysis (of forms of social mediation) that is capable of mapping out the general organization of social relations. That, however, requires a broad class-based approach. Having a concept of class helps us to see the network of social relations constituting an overall social organization which both implicates and cuts through racialization/ethnicization and gender …[a] radical political economy [class] perspective emphasizing exploitation, dispossession and survival takes the issues of … diversity [and difference] beyond questions of conscious identity such as culture and ideology, or of a paradigm of homogeneity and heterogeneity … or of ethical imperatives with respect to the ‘other’. (Bannerji, 2000, pp. 7, 19) A radical political economy framework is crucial since various ‘culturalist’ perspectives seem to diminish the role of political economy and class forces in shaping the edifice of ‘the social’—including the shifting constellations and meanings of ‘difference.’ Furthermore, none of the ‘differences’ valorized in culturalist narratives alone, and certainly not ‘race’ by itself can explain the massive transformation of the structure of capitalism in recent years. We agree with Meyerson (2000) that ‘race’ is not an adequate explanatory category on its own and that the use of ‘race’ as a descriptive or analytical category has serious consequences for the way in which social life is presumed to be constituted and organized. The category of ‘race’—the conceptual framework that the oppressed often employ to interpret their experiences of inequality ‘often clouds the concrete reality of class, and blurs the actual structure of power and privilege.’ In this regard, ‘race’ is all too often a ‘barrier to understanding the central role of class in shaping personal and collective outcomes within a capitalist society’ (Marable, 1995, pp. 8, 226). In many ways, the use of ‘race’ has become an analytical trap precisely when it has been employed in antiseptic isolation from the messy terrain of historical and material relations. This, of course, does not imply that we ignore racism and racial oppression; rather, an analytical shift from ‘race’ to a plural conceptualization of ‘racisms’ and their historical articulations is necessary (cf. McLaren & Torres, 1999). However, it is important to note that ‘race’ doesn’t explain racism and forms of racial oppression. Those relations are best understood within the context of class rule, as Bannerji, Kovel, Marable and Meyerson imply—but that compels us to forge a conceptual shift in theorizing, which entails (among other things) moving beyond the ideology of ‘difference’ and ‘race’ as the dominant prisms for understanding exploitation and oppression. We are aware of some potential implications for white Marxist criticalists to unwittingly support racist practices in their criticisms of ‘race-first’ positions articulated in the social sciences. In those instances, white criticalists wrongly go on ‘high alert’ in placing theorists of color under special surveillance for downplaying an analysis of capitalism and class. These activities on the part of white criticalists must be condemned, as must be efforts to stress class analysis primarily as a means of creating a white vanguard position in the struggle against capitalism. Our position is one that attempts to link practices of racial oppression to the central, totalizing dynamics of capitalist society in order to resist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy more fully.7 We have argued that it is virtually impossible to conceptualize class without attending to the forms and contents of difference, but we insist that this does not imply that class struggle is now outdated by the politics of difference. As Jameson (1998, p. 136) notes, we are now in the midst of returning to the ‘most fundamental form of class struggle’ in light of current global conditions. Today's climate suggests that class struggle is ‘not yet a thing of the past’ and that those who seek to undermine its centrality are not only ‘morally callous’ and ‘seriously out of touch with reality’ but also largely blind to the ‘needs of the large mass of people who are barely surviving capital's newly-honed mechanisms of globalized greed’ (Harvey, 1998, pp. 7–9). In our view, a more comprehensive and politically useful understanding of the contemporary historical juncture necessitates foregrounding class analysis and the primacy of the working class as the fundamental agent of change.8 This does not render as ‘secondary’ the concerns of those marginalized by race, ethnicity, etc. as is routinely charged by post-Marxists. It is often assumed that foregrounding capitalist social relations necessarily undermines the importance of attending to ‘difference’ and/or trivializes struggles against racism, etc., in favor of an abstractly defined class-based politics typically identified as ‘white.’ Yet, such formulations rest on a bizarre but generally unspoken logic that assumes that racial and ethnic ‘minorities’ are only conjuncturally related to the working class. This stance is patently absurd since the concept of the ‘working class’ is undoubtedly comprised of men and women of different races, ethnicities, etc. (Mitter, 1997). A good deal of post-Marxist critique is subtly racist (not to mention essentialist) insofar as it implies that ‘people of color’ could not possibly be concerned with issues beyond those related to their ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’‘difference.’ This posits ‘people of color’ as single-minded, one-dimensional caricatures and assumes that their working lives are less crucial to their self-understanding (and survival) than is the case with their ‘white male’ counterparts.9 It also ignores ‘the fact that class is an ineradicable dimension of everybody's lives’ (Gimenez, 2001, p. 2) and that social oppression is much more than tangentially linked to class background and the exploitative relations of production. On this topic, Meyerson (2000) is worth quoting at length: Marxism properly interpreted emphasizes the primacy of class in a number of senses. One of course is the primacy of the working class as a revolutionary agent—a primacy which does not render women and people of color ‘secondary.’ This view assumes that ‘working class’ means white—this division between a white working class and all the others, whose identity (along with a corresponding social theory to explain that identity) is thereby viewed as either primarily one of gender and race or hybrid …[T]he primacy of class means … that building a multiracial, multi-gendered international working-class organization or organizations should be the goal of any revolutionary movement so that the primacy of class puts the fight against racism and sexism at the center. The intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of class analysis for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender, and class oppression. Oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not. The cohesiveness of this position suggests that forms of exploitation and oppression are related internally to the extent that they are located in the same totality—one which is currently defined by capitalist class rule. Capitalism is an overarching totality that is, unfortunately, becoming increasingly invisible in post-Marxist ‘discursive’ narratives that valorize ‘difference’ as a primary explanatory construct.

Perm

Only the alternative can effectively restructure institutions away from Islamophobia – there’s no net benefit to the perm and the idea that class is just another “ism” that you can should talk about misses the mark

Ledwith 13 (Sean, Lecturer in History and Politics at York College, reviewing Deepa Kumar’s book, Kumar is an Associate Professor at Rutgers, 1/10/13, Counterfire, “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire,” http://www.counterfire.org/articles/book-reviews/16226-islamophobia-and-the-politics-of-empire, JHR)

The history of capitalism is also the history of racism. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx drew attention to how this mode of production systematically divided the oppressed as one of its principal means of survival. In his exile in Britain, he noted how anti-Irish sentiment was intentionally generated by the ruling elite as an ideological weapon to be used to divide and rule the working class: The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the rulingnation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.[1] Later waves of Jewish, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and East European migrants would similarly be subjected to vicious discrimination and stereotyping, as the capitalist class sought out new victims for targeted racism. Deepa Kumar’s Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire is a comprehensive study of the system’s most recent choice of political scapegoat for its failings; the world’s one billion Muslims. Taking her cue from the ‘red scare’ persecution of the American left in the aftermath of World War One, she labels this latest phase of capitalist paranoia, ‘the green scare’. The title indicates the materialist nature of her analysis of this issue. Islamophobia is best understood as the ideological response of a series of Western empires starting with the Crusader kingdoms of feudal Europe, right up to the exercise of Obama’s so-called soft power today: ‘anti-Muslim racism has been primarily a tool of the elite in various societies’ (p.3). The starting point for her analysis is, unsurprisingly, the 9/11 attacks. She recounts how on that infamous day a colleague at her university in New Jersey shouted at her, ‘Are you happy?’, assuming that her South Asian appearance indicated she must have supported the bombers (p.1). Later the same day, a checkout clerk insisted she apologise for the attacks before he served her. With impressive presence of mind, she asked if he was equally willing to apologise for the Oklahoma City bombing six years earlier, carried out by Christian fundamentalist, Timothy McVeigh! The daily reality of this form of ignorance faced by Muslims is her launch-pad for a wide-ranging and incisive historical survey of how the West has distorted and suppressed the real story of its interaction with Islam over fourteen centuries. More specifically, Kumar explains how the US since 9/11 has manufactured a ‘War on Terror’ as an ideological device for legitimating its global hegemony. US foreign policy since 9/11 has partly been informed by a group of neo-con historians who have devised a simplistic narrative of inevitable conflict between Islam and the West stretching back to the origins of the faith in the seventh century CE. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisationsis the best known of these accounts. Books such as this were ‘the ideological basis for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as domestic attacks on Muslims and Arabs’ (p.130). Kumar dissects the myth of a long-running religious struggle between ‘East’ and ‘West’ by highlighting how both geographical regions have witnessed the flourishing of apparently ‘alien’ cultures within them. The most advanced civilisation in the West for several centuries was the Islamic Umayyad dynasty in Spain. The latter was crucially responsible for the translation and study of classical texts from antiquity that contributed to the Renaissance in the early modern period: ‘Intellectually, Europe owes a debt of gratitude to scholars in the Near East’ (p.13).

The book then recounts how the rise of capitalism in the early modern era enabled Europe to overtake the Islamic states of the Middle East, so that, by the nineteenth century, the Western powers were encroaching on the territories of retreating Muslim powers such as the Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Algeria. This phase of colonial expansion gave rise to another phase of Islamophobic prejudice defined by the concept of ‘Orientalism’ (p.29). Western scholars devised this to manufacture an image of the Eastern cultures as intrinsically depraved, misogynistic and corrupt; conveniently necessitating the intervention of  ‘civilised’ European armies to drag such places out of barbarism. The pretext for the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan by the West is only the most recent manifestation of this ideological smokescreen.

By the end of World War Two, the US was in position to replace the European states as both the dominant global enforcer of capital and also as the epicentre of myth-making about Islam. Kumar highlights the pivotal meeting between President Roosevelt and Saudi Arabia’s King Saud on a US warship in the Mediterranean in 1945. At that point the deal was struck that Washington would protect the semi-feudal Gulf states in exchange for generous oil concessions for American companies (p.63). In addition, the US would offer economic and military support to these states as its bulwark against Russian influence in the Middle East. The latter was apparent by the resurgent left in the region as substantial Communist Parties emerged in countries such as Egypt, Iraq and Iran. The US cynically used Islamist organisations to undermine the growth of these parties and of the wider secular left in the region. This calculated manipulation of radical Islamic groups climaxed with US support for Bin Laden and the Mujahedeen during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Similarly, the Reagan administration had no reservations about covert supply of weapons to Khomeini’s Iran as means of funding right-wing rebels in Central America. The US attitude to Islam in this post-WW2 period was therefore motivated by real politick; ‘Islamists were not always seen as enemies’ (p.64). Muslim leaders and organisations could be useful externally as a means of curtailing Russian influence in the Middle East, or internally as a means of thwarting the development of the secular left in Arab states. This strategy was radically altered by the 9/11 attacks. The fall of the USSR in the early 1990s had been a double-edged sword for American foreign policy. It left the US as the undisputed global superpower but also created the need to locate a new external foe which could be presented as the justification for further expansion. Even before 9/11, neo-con commentators had been speculating that Islam would fit the bill; ‘Like communism during the Cold War, Islam is a threat to the West,’ wrote Daniel Pipes (quoted on p.177). This drive to demonise Islam was also fuelled by the growing influence in the US State Department of Zionist voices. Defeat in Vietnam had convinced American policy-makers that reliable client-states around the world had to be identified that could act as proxies for US interests. Israel’s supporters eagerly seized the opportunity to present the Zionist state as a willing watchdog for Washington in the Middle East. Part of this packaging of Israel as ‘an unsinkable aircraft carrier’ would be a caricature of Islam as an alien threat to Western culture. From the Six Day War in 1967 to the present, Israel has been conjoined to US policy in the region partly under the cover of resisting Islamic fundamentalism. One of the ironies of this alliance was that the initial target of Israeli subversion was the secular Palestinian left of the PLO. One of the best insights of this book is the little known fact that part of this subversive campaign was actual support for the embryonic Islamist movement that would evolve into Hamas: ‘When the Israeli state recognised and formally licensed the Mujamma (the forerunner of Hamas) in 1978, the logic was simple - the Islamists’ hostility to the secular left made them useful. Some have argued that Israel even funded these forces’ (p.122).Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza last November therefore represented a classic example of blowback; a capitalist state cultivating an opposition movement to hurt one enemy only for that movement to develop into even more formidable enemy. Another valuable feature of the book is the way in which it further undermines the rapidly declining myth that Obama represents some more enlightened form of American leadership. As Kumar puts it: ‘Liberal Islamophobia may be rhetorically gentler than conservative Islamophobia ... but it is nonetheless racist and imperialist in that it takes for granted the white man’s burden ... self-determination does not enter their framework - and benevolent supremacy remains supreme’ (p.133). In contrast to the disastrous full-scale wars of the Bush Jr. era, Obama’s strategy for hegemony in the Middle East deploys ‘air strikes, drone attacks, and counterterrorism and special operations forces as well as cyber warfare’ (p.135). In domestic policy as well, the Obama administration only represents a change in style not substance regarding America’s Islamic minority. Kumar describes the appalling case of Fahad Hashmi, a Muslim US citizen and graduate student who is currently serving a fifteen-year sentence in a Colorado prison. Hashmi’s crime ‘was that he had allowed an acquaintance to stay in his London apartment … who was carrying items that would later be delivered to al Qaeda ... by the government’s logic, Hashmi should have smelt a rat...’ (p.149). This manufactured Islamic threat provides the US security services with a smokescreen to attack civil liberties: ‘Of the fourteen thousand Americans murdered in 2011, not one death was the product of Muslim terror plots’, Kumar points out (p.153). She goes on to note that ‘fifteen times the number of Americans who were killed on 9/11 die each year because they don’t have health insurance’. The book covers a broad canvas so inevitably certain aspects of this issue are explored in greater depth than others. Kumar could have stressed the relevance of an explicitly Marxist approach to racism more, but she is particularly insightful on the close links between the State Department, neo-con historians and Zionist pressure groups in the US. Overall, the book is a valuable weapon to counter the Islamophobic mentality that increasingly plagues Western societies; from the so-called ‘muscular liberalism’ of the French government that has banned the veil, to the homicidal delusions of Anders Breivik in Norway. She adopts a clear socialist perspective that the campaign against this prejudice ‘is in the interests of the vast majority … who have had trillions of dollars stolen from their health care, education, infrastructure and public transportation and funnelled into the death machine’ (p.199).

Critical education is ineffective if not centered on the antagonisms of capitalism – the aff inherently precludes necessary class analysis

McLaren et al., 4 – Distinguished Professor, Critical Studies, Chapman University (Peter, Gregory Martin, Ramin Farahmandpur, and Nathalia Jaramillo, “Teaching in and against the Empire: Critical Pedagogy as Revolutionary Praxis,” Teaching Education Quarterly, Winter, 139-141, http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ795238.pdf)//SY

Admitting that there exists no vulgate of critical pedagogy and that there are as many instantiations of critical pedagogy as there are theorists and practitioners, we nevertheless hold to the claim that its most poitical characteristics have been defanged and sterilized; crucial elements have been expurgated such that it redounds most heavily to the advantage of the liberal capitalist state and its bourgeois cadre of educational reformers. What precisely has been coarsened has been those elements dealing with critical pedagogy’s critique of political economy, those aspects of it that challenge the social relations of production and class society (McLaren, 2000, 2003; McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2000, 2002). Whilst there has been a concerted attempt to redress material inequality it needs to be acknowledged that, as admirable as this has been, such a move has always been undertaken within the precinct of capitalism itself. That is, even within the work of many leading exponents of critical pedagogy, there is rarely a challenge to the capitalist state, a push, if you will, to transform it into a socialist one. The viruliferous attacks on leftist academics as ‘enemies of civilization’ by quislings and admirers of the current Bush administration clearly have not helped to strengthen the political resolve of critical educators in potentially taking an anti-capitalist position. We need to think about the extent of this dilemma: If the most anti-capitalist strands of critical pedagogy offer the strongest challenge to the existing status quo offered by U.S, progressive educationalists, then why does critical pedagogy not constitute a more vibrant and robust presence in schools of education, most particularly in teacher education programs? If leading education journals are reluctant to publish articles by those exponents of critical pedagogy who directly challenge the existence of capitalist social relations, then what does this tell us about the hegemony of the educational establishment as well as the state of the educational left? When teacher education programs with decidedly social justice agendas do deal with the critical educational tradition, even when they studiously prepare their teachers within the context of anti-racist and anti-sexist frameworks, they almost invariably exclude unvarnished critiques of the capitalist state by Marxist scholars. Whilst we remain depressingly exercised by this dilemma we cannot within the space of this article sufficiently explore more than a few of its ramifications. Drawing upon our own experiences as products of teacher educational institutions as well as practitioner/scholars within them, we wish to begin by identifying the central dilemma that we have perceived with respect to critical pedagogy: its bowdlerization, vulgarization and domestication. Frankly, should we find this dilemma all that surprising in professional schools of education within the academy given that so many of them are, after all, decidedly conservative institutions? Many (but of course not all) educators who work in the field of teacher education are frequently given over to blaming teachers for the so-called decline in student achievement and within such institutions control over teachers exists in the case of teacher competency tests, certification, and exams. Too often excluded from consideration is the notion that education can be a vehicle for social transformation, as a way of addressing larger social contradictions and antagonisms. There is a certain sense, then, in which current domesticated incarnations of critical pedagogy validate education as something that must be sensitive to the needs of the poor and exploited classes in such a way that actually precludes the possibility that those needs can be met. Resolving the challenges facing capitalist democracy can only be made more difficult when you are not even permitted to restate them in terms of class struggle. We are not saying that critical educators are silkily deft at obfuscation or deception. In most instances, critical educators are more than likely not even aware of the contractions that undercut their objectives. We are simply arguing that, despite the best intentions of critical educators, critical pedagogy can indeed serve to rehabilitate the very class hierarchies that it was originally set up to challenge, if not roundly to depose. Indeed, much of critical pedagogy has already been subsumed into pro-capitalist common sense, co-opted through a professional patronage to the state. In fact, it may serve unwittingly to defend the bourgeois state by legitimating a commitment to diversity without sufficiently affirming diversity through the necessary development of explicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist, and antiimperialist curriculum. Deflecting questions about how class and racial formations are linked to current social relations of production and the interpellating strategies of the ideological state apparatus, critical pedagogy in its currently watered-down like a rum and coke in a cheap roadside bar, and depotentiated forms actually serves to delimit the debate over liberal capitalist democracy rather than expand it (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2000). This is not a call for a formulaic Marxism that is box trained and fed on a diet of dogma and doxa and deformations of Marx’s dialectical theory, but an approach that centers educational reform within the reigning political antagonism of age: the contradiction between labor and capital.