1AC VERSION 1.0
This year’s resolution provides the perfect opportunity to justify a political action centered on the discussion of RACE as surveillance mechanisms funded by the federal government and carried out by local law enforcement agents have disproportionately targeted public dissent of racialized injustice. We offer a TOPICAL discursive performance to speak out through the 1AC and start our protest with
OBSERVATION ONE: RACISM ABOUNDS
white supremacy is the UNAMED political system that guides the modern world. It is not seen as political yet serves as the background against which other systems we see as political are highlighted. What is needed is a GLOBAL THEORETICAL framework for situating discussion of race and white racism that CHALLENGE white political philosophy. We must recognize the POLITICAL SYSTEM of WHITE SUPREMACY
Mills, 97--Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University(Charles W., Racial Contract, p. 1)//AK
White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with Plato and Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironically, the most important political system of recent global history-the system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a political system at all. It is just taken for granted; it is the background against which other systems, which we are to see as political are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along. Philosophy has remained remarkably untouched by the debates over multiculturalism, canon reform, and ethnic diversity racking the academy; both demographically and conceptually, it is one of the "whitest" of the humanities. Blacks, for example, constitute only about 1 percent of philosophers in North American universities-a hundred or so people out of more than ten thousand-and there are even fewer Latino, Asian American, and Native American philosophers! Surely this underrepresentation itself stands in need of an explanation, and in my opinion it can be traced in part to a conceptual array and a standard repertoire of concerns whose abstractness typically elides, rather than genuinely includes, the experience of racial minorities. Since (white) women have the demographic advantage of numbers, there are of course far more female philosophers in the profession than nonwhite philosophers (though still not proportionate to women's percentage of the population), and they have made far greater progress in developing alternative conceptualizations. Those African American philosophers who do work in moral and political theory tend either to produce general work indistinguishable from that of their white peers or to focus on local issues (affirmative action, the black "underclass") or historical figures (W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke) in a way that does not aggressively engage the broader debate. What is needed is a global theoretical framework for situating discussions of race and white racism, and thereby challenging the assumptions of white political philosophy, which would correspond to feminist theorists' articulation of the centrality of gender, patriarchy, and sexism to traditional moral and political theory. What is needed, in other words, is a recognition that racism (or, as I will argue, global white supremacy) is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties. The notion of the Racial Contract is, I suggest, one possible way of making this connection with mainstream theory, since it uses the vocabulary and apparatus already developed for contractarianism to map this unacknowledged system. Contract talk is, after all, the political lingua franca of our times.
THAT UNAMED SYSTEM OF WHITE SUPREMACY IS SERVED UP THROUGH OUR SYSTEM OF SURVEILLANCE
Racial equality victories are BITTERSWEET with “SILENT COVENANTS” that disguise the pernicious disease of white supremacy with the cloak of race neutrality while criminal justice policies justify EXCESSIVE SURVEILLANCE in the name of crime control that really serves the ongoing exclusion of Blacks from civic life and the PERSISTENT CONDEMNATION of Blackness.
Heitzeg 15 (Nancy A. Professor of Sociology & Critical Studies of Race and Ethnicity at St. Catherine University. “On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964: Persistent White Supremacy, Relentless Anti-Blackness, And The Limits Of The Law” Hamline University's School of Law's Journal of Public Law and Policy Volume 36 Issue 1 Article 3 http://digitalcommons.hamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=jplp 7/18/15
The Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) is often used as the benchmark for chronicling the start of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. 39 The Court’s unanimous rejection of Plessy’s “separate but equal” provided a new Federal framework with which to challenge Jim Crow segregation on the state and local levels. It offered the back drop for the Montgomery bus boycott, the resistance in Birmingham, Bloody Sunday, the voter registration drives of Freedom Summer, and ultimately, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Right Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and the 24th Amendment to the Constitution.40While there was hope again that the law itself could be pressed into the service of racial equality, those victories now seem bittersweet. Bell argues that the Brown decision and the ensuing Federal legislation were “silent covenants” of interest-convergence, where “perceived self-interest of whites rather than the racial injustices suffered by Blacks have been the major motivation in racial-remediation policies.” 41 Judge Robert L. Carter, one of the attorneys who argued Brown goes further, “. . .the fundamental vice was not legally enforced racial segregation itself; this was a mere by- product, a symptom of the greater and more pernicious disease -white supremacy.”42 Legally supported segregation was uprooted without dislodging either white supremacy or anti-Blackness, now cloaked in race-neutral rhetoric of “color-blindness”. The “color-blind” Constitution and the race-neutral requirement of Federal Civil Rights legislation now serves as convenient cover for the persistence of institutionalized racism. Racially coded but race-neutral rhetoric is widely used in debates over welfare reform, affirmative action, and particularly “law and order” criminal justice policy; 43 in all these cases, the coded racial sub-text reads clearly, and the resultant policies, while purportedly “race neutral,” have resulted in disproportionate harm to people of color, especially African Americans. While race is now widely the text/subtext of political debate, systemic racism still remains largely absent from either political discourse or policy debates of all sorts, including those related to criminal injustice. In the Post-Civil Rights Era, there has been a corresponding shift from de jure racism codified explicitly into the law and legal systems to a de facto racism where people of color, especially African Americans, are subject to unequal protection of the laws, excessive surveillance, police terror, extreme segregation, a brutal and biased death penalty, and neo-slave labor via incarceration all in the name of “crime control.” 44 “Law and order” criminal justice policies are all guided by thinly coded appeals to white fears of high crime neighborhoods, “crack epidemics,” gang proliferation, juvenile super – predators, urban unrest, school violence, and more. In all these case, the sub-text reads clearly — fear of brown and especially Black people. As before, law, policing and punishment are central to the ongoing exclusion of Blacks from civic life. Post slavery, the criminalizing narrative was a cultural feature of on-going efforts at oppression; from convict lease/plantain prison farms to the contemporary prison industrial complex the control of black bodies for profit has been furthered by the criminal justice system. “Slave Codes” become Black Codes and now Black Codes become gang legislation, three-strikes and the War on Drugs in the persistent condemnation of Blackness. 46 As before, the criminal legal system is the primary mechanism for undoing the promised protections of Federal Civil Rights legislation and constitutes again, the major affront to the fulfillment of the 13th, 14th and 25th Amendments. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with a population of 2.3 million behind bars that constitutes 25% of the world’s prisoners. 47 The increased rate of incarceration can be traced to the War on Drugs and the rise of lengthy mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug crimes and other felonies. These policies have proliferated, not in response to crime rate or any empirical data that indicates their effectiveness, due to newfound sources of profit for prisons. 48 As Brewer and Heitzeg (2008) observe: 45 The prison industrial complex is a self-perpetuating machine where the vast profits (e.g. cheap labor, private and public supply and construction contracts, job creation, continued media profits from exaggerated crime reporting and crime/punishment as entertainment) and perceived political benefits (e.g. reduced unemployment rates, “get tough on crime” and public safety rhetoric, funding increases for police, and criminal justice system agencies and professionals) lead to policies that are additionally designed to insure an endless supply of “clients” for the criminal justice system (e.g. enhanced police presence in poor neighborhoods and communities of color; racial profiling; decreased funding for public education combined with zero-tolerance policies and increased rates of expulsion for students of color; increased rates of adult certification for juvenile offenders; mandatory minimum and “three-strikes” sentencing; draconian conditions of incarceration and a reduction of prison services that contribute to the likelihood of “recidivism”; “collateral consequences”-such as felony disenfranchisement, prohibitions on welfare receipt, public housing, gun ownership, voting and political participation, employment- that nearly guarantee continued participation in “crime” and return to the prison industrial complex following initial release.) The 13th Amendment claim of abolition remains unfulfilled, as the neo- slavery of the prison industrial complex becomes the current vehicle for controlling Black bodies for political and economic gain. The trend towards mass incarceration is marred by racial disparity. While 1 in 35 adults is under correctional supervision and 1 in every 100 adults is in prison, 1 in every 36 Latino adults ,1 in every 15 black men, 1 in every 100 black women, and 1 in 9 black 49 men ages 20 to 34 are incarcerated.50 Despite no statistic differences in rates of offending, approximately 50% of all prisoners are black, 30% are white, and 20% are Latino;.51 These disparities are indicative of differential enforcement practices rather than an differences in criminal participation. This is particularly true of drug crimes, which account for the bulk of the increased prison population. Even though Blacks and whites use and sell drugs comparable rates, African Americans are anywhere from 3 to 10 times more likely to be arrested, and additionally likely to receive harsher sentences than their white counterparts.
52
Racism makes all forms of violence inevitable, it must be rejected in every instance.
Memmi 2k - MEMMI Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris Albert-; RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is “the truly capital sin.”fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.