Tournament: UMKC | Round: | Opponent: | Judge:
TO MANY TIMES IN TODAYS SOCIETY THE PROBLEMS OF THOES WHO REALLY MATTER ARE OVER LOOKED TO TALK ABOUT THINGS THAT ONLY KEEP AMERICA AND AMERICAS PROJECTION OF WHITNESS ALIVE. THOSE OF US WHO STRIVE TO RID THE WORLD OF EVIL ARE STOPPED BY THOSE WHO FEEL THAT THEIR STATUS AS SECOND CLASS CITIZENS IN AMERICA TODAY IS THEIR RIGHTFUL ONE. WE START OFF BY IDENTIFYING THE WHITNESS IN WHICH WE INTEND TO DESTROY.
PILCHER, SPRING, 2002 {Janet K.Ph.D., Interim Dean for the College of Professional Studies at the University of West Florida.Advancing Women in Leadership: Intersections On the BorderCrossings of Black Women’s Standpoints http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/spring2002/PILCH~18.HTM}
Whiteness is not about skin color or race. Instead it is about position, oppression, and power. Frankenberg defines 'whiteness' as a location of structural advantage, of race privilege. 'Whiteness' has also been described as a standpoint, a place from which white people look at themselves, others, and society. Our professor exposed, disrupted and interrogated whiteness in our qualitative research class. She experienced resistance (voiced and silently) from students immediately when she introduced African-American women as the focus of the class. This class was powerful because members were forced to examine their own 'whiteness' (including black members of the class whose 'whiteness' stemmed from their level of education). After looking at individual 'whiteness', the need for change was recognized. This realization brought with it much resistance as well as resentment. Despite the anger expressed, particularly by white males in the class, and the fear surely felt by black women, our professor forged ahead by continuing to cross boundaries never experienced by most (if any) of the students in any other academic or professional setting. Her sincere interest in the lives of black women was the first step in interrupting whiteness. She was successful because of her ethic of care and respect, which was communicated in the first session and throughout the semester. Students who entered our classroom left changed no matter how hard they resisted it.
WE INTEND TO MAKE EVERY PERSON IN THIS DEBATE ROUND THAT PROJECTS WHITNESS UNCOMFORTABLE. WE WILL NOT CONFINE OURSELVES TO DEBATE ABOUT ANYTHING OTHER THAN WHAT WE WISH TO DISCUSS, WHATS THE USE OF ANYTYPE OF ENERGY IF THE MOJORITY OF BLACK PEOPLE CAN’T AFFORD IT. THEREFORE, WE ADVOCATE FOR THE SEPARATE LAND AND TERRITORY FOR THE DECENDANTS OF AFRICAN SLAVES IN THE CONTENINTAL UNITED STATES ANYTHING LESS WILL NOT BE ACCPTED.
Wilderson III, former member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, 2008 [Frank B., Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid South End Press, pg. 407-411] heyo
The claim of “balance and fair play” forecloses upon, not only the modest argument that the practices of the Cabrillo Student Senate are racist and illegitimate, but it also forecloses upon the more extended, comprehensive, and antagonistic argument that Cabrillo itself is racist ad illegitimate. And what do we mean by Cabrillo? The White people who constitute its fantasies of pleasure and its discourse of legitimacy. The generous “We.”
So, let’s bust “We” wide open and start at the end: White people are guilty until proven innocent. Fuck the compositional moves of substantiation and supporting evidence: I was at a conference in West Oakland last week where a thousand Black folks substantiated it a thousand different ways. You’re free to go to West Oakland, find them, talk to them, get all the proof you need. You can drive three hours to the mountains, so you sure as hell can cut the time in half to drive to the inner city. Knock on any door. Anyone who knows 20 to 30 black folks, intimately—and if you don’t know 12 then you’re not living in America, you’re living in White America—knows the statement to be true. White people are guilty until proven innocent. White are guilty of being friends with each other, of standing up for their rights, of pledging allegiance to the flag, of reproducing concepts like fairness, meritocracy, balance, standards, norms, harmony between the races. Most of all, Whites are guilty of wanting stability and reform.
White people, like Mr. Harold and those in the English Division, are guilty of asking themselves the question, How can we maintain the maximum amount of order (liberals at Cabrillo use euphemisms like peace, harmony, stability), with the minimum amount of change, while presenting ourselves—if but only to ourselves—as having the best of all possible intentions. Good people. Good intentions. White people are the only species, human or otherwise, capable of transforming the dross of good intentions into the gold of grand intentions, and naming it “change.”
These passive revolutions, fire and brimstone conflicts over which institutional reform is better than the other one, provide a smoke screen—a diversionary play of interlocutions—that keep real and necessary antagonisms at bay. White people are thus able to go home each night, perhaps a little wounded, but feeling better for having made Cabrillo a better place…for everyone…
Before such hubris at high places makes us all a little too giddy, let me offer a cautionary note: it’s scientifically impossible to manufacture shinola out of shit. But White liberals keep on trying and end up spending a lifetime not knowing shit from shinola. Because White people love their jobs, they love their institutions, they love their country, most of all they love each other. And every Black or Brown body that doesn’t love the things you love is a threat to your love for each other. A threat to your fantasy space, your terrain of shared pleasures.
Passive revolutions have a way of incorporating Black and Brown bodies to either term of the debate. What choice does one have? The third (possible, but always unspoken) term of the debate, White people are guilty of structuring debates which reproduce the institution and the institution reproduces America and America is always and everywhere a bad thing—this term is never on the tale, because the level of abstraction is too high for White liberals. They’ve got too much at stake: their friends, their family, their way of life. Let’s keep it all at eye level, where Whites can keep on eye on everything. So the Black body is incorporated. Because to be unincorporated is to say that what White liberals find valuable I have no use for. This, of course, is anti-institutional and shows a lack of breeding, not to mention a lack of gratitude for all the noblesse oblige which has been extended to the person of color to begin with. “We will incorporate colored folks into our fold, whenever possible and at our own pace, provided they’re team players, speak highly of us, pretend to care what we’re thinking, are highly qualified, blah, blah, blah…but, and this is key, we won’t entertain the rancor which shits on our fantasy space. We’ve killed too many Indians, worked too many Chinese and Chicano fingers to the bone, set in motion the incarcerated genocide of too many Black folks, and we’ve spent too much time at the beach, or in our gardens, or hiking in the woods, or patting each other on the literary back, or teaching Shakespeare and the Greeks, or drinking together to honor our dead at retirement parties (“Hell, Jerry White, let’s throw a party for Joe White and Jane White who gave Cabrillo the best White years of their silly White lives, that we might all continue to do the same White thing.” “Sounds good to me, Jack White. Say, you’re a genius! Did you think of this party idea all on your own?” “No, Jerry White, we’ve been doing it for years, makes us feel important. Without these parties we might actually be confronted by our political impotence, our collective spinelessness, our insatiable appetite for gossip and administrative minutia, our fear of a Black Nation, out lack of will.” “Whew! Jack White, we sound pathetic. We’d better throw that party pronto!” “White you are, Jerry.” “Jack White, you old fart, you, you’re still a genius, heh, heh, heh.”) too much time White-bonding in an effort to forget how hard we killed and to forget how many bones we walk across each day just to get from our bedrooms to Cabrillo…too, too much for one of you coloreds to come in here and be so ungrateful as to tell us the very terms of our precious debates are specious.”
But specious they are, as evidenced by recent uproar in the Adjunct vs. Minority Hire debates, or whether or not English 100 students should be “normed.” The very terms of the debate suture discussions around White entitlement, when White entitlement is an odious idea. White are entitled to betray other Whites, nothing else… Beyond that you’re not entitled to anything. So how could you possibly be entitled to decide who should pass and who should fail? How could you possibly be entitled to determining where the sign-up sheet for Diversity Day buses will or will not be placed, and how funds should be allocated?
Okay…so some of you want to hire a “minority” as long as s/he’s “well mannered and won’t stab us in the back after s/he’s in our sacred house;” and some of you want to hire an adjunct (Jill or Jeffery White) because, “What the hell—they’ve been around as long as Jack, Joe, Jerry, and Jane White, and shucks fair is fair, especially if you’re entitled.” And entitlement is a synonym for Whiteness. But there’s only one job, because for years you’ve complained about the gate, while breathing collective (meaning White) sighs of relief that it was there to protect you from the hordes. (Somewhere down the street in Watsonville an immigrant is deciding whether to give his daughter or his wife up for the boss to fuck that he might have a job picking your fruit. Somewhere up the road in Oakland a teen is going to San Quentin for writing graffiti on a wall. And you’re in here trying to be “fair” to each other, while promoting diversity—whatever that means. By the time you’ve arrived at a compromise over norming or faculty hires—your efforts to “enlighten” whoever doesn’t die in the fields or fall from the earth into prison—the sista has been raped and the brotha busted. But then you’ve had a difficult day as well.) So, do what you always do. Hire the most qualified candidate. Here are some questions and guidelines to speed the search committee on its way and make everyone feel entitled.
The struggle of Black people in America goes ignored everyday no more will we talk about anything other than what is beneficial to our lives.
Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
There is something organic to black positionality that makes it essential to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of "absolute dereliction" (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society's many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons.
Addressing Anti-Blackness is a prioiri – scandalizes ethicality and sets the stage for all violnece
Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2003 (Frank B. III “Chapter One: The Ruse of Analogy” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,) GG
Two tensions are at work here. One operates under the labor of ethical dilemmas “simple enough one has only not to be a nigger.” This, I submit, is the essence of being for the White and non-Black position: ontology scaled down to a global common denominator. The other tension is found in the impossibility of ethical dilemmas for the Black: “I am,” Fanon writes, “a slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own appearance.” Being can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness; and slavery then as niggerness. The visual field, “my own appearance,” is the cut, the mechanism that elaborates the division between the non-niggerness and slavery, the difference between the living and the dead. Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become existentially present through some struggle for/of/through recognition, Blacks cannot attain the plane of recognition (West 82). Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain that the violence that has positioned and repetitively re-positions the Black as a void of historical movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of oppression, like the “little family quarrels” which for Fanon exemplify the Jewish Holocaust. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, “wiped out [his/her] metaphysics…his [her] customs and sources on which they are based” (BSWM 110). Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmenn) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them.¶ This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black within an infinite and indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject. As such, “the black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110) or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity
State action and institutional ethics makes anti-blackness worse the Constitution of America allows for the discrimination of the Black body. This is not a political movement but more of a Social revolution.
Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2003 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Strucure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 15-16) GG
Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today’s Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the State has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black President aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on “solid” ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to “facts,” the “historical record,” and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science, history, and/or public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of “work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way: no slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a positionality against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews it coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy, but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.
THE LAW IS A TOOL OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DOMINATION THAT REINFORCE EUROPEAN CULTURAL HEGEMONY
Kenneth B. Nunn Spring, 1997, Law and Inequality, ARTICLE: Law as a Eurocentric Enterprise, Nunn is Professor of Law, University of Florida College of Law, VI. Law, Ideology and the Politics of Eurocentricity
Contesting Eurocentricity is primarily a cultural struggle. It calls for the creation of a separate cultural base that values and responds to a different cultural logic than does Eurocentricity. Aime Cesaire, the great West Indian Pan-Africanist, understood the importance of the cultural struggle and its potential:
Any political and social regime that suppresses the self-determination of a people, must, at the same time, kill the creative power of the people...Wherever there is colonization, the entire people have been emptied of their culture and their creativity... It is certain, then, that the elements that structure the cultural life of a colonized people [must also] retard or degenerate the work of the colonial regime.
Eurocentric law and its legal structures - legislative bodies, courts, bar associations, law schools, etc. - limit the political program that African-centered cultural activists can undertake. African-centered political activity is circumscribed in part because of a reason I have already discussed: law's limited ability to address issues of concern to African-centered people. More significantly, law limits responses to Eurocentricity through its effects on those who would use it to accomplish change.
First, the law accomplishes ideological work as it embraces Eurocentric cultural styles and celebrates European historical traditions. The law and legal institutions, through the artful use of ritual and authority, uphold the legitimacy of European dominance. The constant self-congratulatory references to the majesty of the law, the continual praise of European thinkers, the unconscious reliance on European traditions, values and ways of thinking, all become unremarkable and expected. The law operates as a key component in a vast and mainly invisible signifying system in support of white supremacy. The law is even more capable of structuring thought because its masquerade that it is fair, even-handed, and impartial is rarely contested. Consequently, the law works as an effective "tool for psychological and ideological enslavement."
Our framework for this debate is who best performs a disruption of the whiteness that maintains white supremacy enroute to the liberation of the oppressed. Adding fuel to the fire course on which America continues to spiral on the path to destruction.
This is not a matter of if’s, and’s, or but’s about the movement to free Black people. We will succeed every step of the way. We will not be stopped nor compromised. BLACK PEOPLE WILL PREVAIL IN THE WORLD
Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi ’75 Former leader of Libya, black freedom fighter. Excerpt from The Green Book. (Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi , . 0. <http://www.mathaba.net/gci/theory/gb.htm>.)
The latest age of slavery has been the enslavement of Blacks by White people. The memory of this age will persist in the thinking of Black people until they have vindicated themselves. This tragic and historic event, the resulting bitter feeling, and the yearning or the vindication of a whole race, constitute a psychological motivation of Black people to vengeance and triumph that cannot be disregarded. In addition, the inevitable cycle of social history, which includes the Yellow people's domination of the world when it marched from Asia, and the White people's carrying out a wide-ranging colonialist movement covering all the continents of the world, is now giving way to the re-emergence of Black people. Black people are now in a very backward social situation, but such backwardness works to bring about their numerical superiority because their low standard of living has shielded them from methods of birth control and family planning. Also, their old social traditions place no limit on marriages, leading to their accelerated growth. The population of other races has decreased because of birth control, restrictions on marriage, and constant occupation in work, unlike the Blacks, who tend to be less obsessive about work in a climate which is continuously hot.
A BLACK NATION IS GOOD FOR EVERYONE AND THERE CAN BE NO COMPROMISE
Ture African People’s Revolutionary Party & HAMILTON Prof of Political Sci. @ Columbia U. 1967
Kwame-formerly known as Stokley Charmicheal & Charles-; BLACK POWER: The Politics of Liberation; reprinted in 1992 with new afterwords by the Author; p xv-xviii.
This book is about why, where and in what manner black people in America must get themselves together. It is about black people taking care of business-the business of and for black people. The stakes are really very simple: if we fail to do this, we face continued subjection to white society that has no intention of giving up willingly or easily its position of priority and authority. If we succeed, we will exercise control over our lives, politically, economically and physically. We will also contribute to the development of a viable larger society; in terms of ultimate social benefit, there is nothing unilateral about the movement to free black people.
We present no pat formulas in this book for ending racism. We do not offer a blueprint; we cannot set any time tables for freedom. This is not a handbook for the working organizer; it will not tell him exactly how to proceed in day-today decision-making. If we tried to do any of those things, our book would be useless and literally dead within a year or two. For the rules are being changed constantly. Black communities are using different means, including armed rebellion, to achieve their ends. Out of these various experiments come programs. This is our experience: programs do not come out of the minds of any one person or two people such as ourselves, but out of day-to-day work, out of interaction between organizers and the communities in which they work.
Therefore our aim is to offer a framework. We are calling here for broad experimentation in accordance with the concept of Black Power, and we will suggest certain guidelines, certain specific examples of such experiments. We start with the assumption that in order to get the right answers, one must pose the right questions. In order to find effective solutions, one must formulate the problem correctly. One must start from premises rooted in truth and reality rather than myth.
In addition, we aim to define and encourage a new consciousness among black people which will make it possible for us to proceed toward those answers and those solutions. This consciousness, which will be defined more fully in Chapter II, might be called a sense of peoplehood: pride, rather than shame, in blackness, and an attitude of brotherly, communal responsibility among all black people for one another.
To ask the right questions, to encourage a new consciousness and to suggest new forms which express it: these are the basic purposes of our book. It follows that there are statements in this book which most whites and some black people would prefer not to hear. The whole question of race is one that America would much rather not face honestly and squarely. To some, it is embarrassing; to others, it is inconvenient; to still others, it is confusing. But for black Americans, to know it and tell it like it is and then to act on that knowledge should be neither embarrassing nor inconvenient nor confusing. Those responses are luxuries for people with time to spare, who feel no particular sense of urgency about the need to solve certain serious social problems. Black people in America have no time to play nice, polite parlor games-especially when the lives of their children are at stake. Some white Americans can afford to speak softly, tread lightly, employ the soft-sell and put-off. They own society. For black people to adopt their methods of relieving our oppression is ludicrous. We blacks must respond in our own way, on our own terms, in a manner which fits our temperaments. The definitions of ourselves, the roles we pursue, the goals we seek are our responsibility.
It is crystal clear that the society is capable of and willing to reward those individuals who do not forcefully condemn it-to reward them with prestige, status and material benefits. But these crumbs of co-optation should be rejected. The over-riding, all-important fact is that as a people, we have absolutely nothing to lose by refusing to play such games.
Camus and Sartre have asked: Can a man condemn himself? Can whites, particularly liberal whites, condemn themselves? Can they stop blaming blacks and start blaming their own system? Are they capable of the shame which might become a revolutionary emotion? We-black people-have found that they usually cannot condemn themselves; therefore black Americans must do it. (We also offer, in Chapter III of this book, our ideas of what whites can do
We claim no rights from the United States of America except the right to damages, reparations due Us for the grievous injuries sustained by Our ancestors and Ourselves by reason of United States lawlessness.
WE DEMAND THE FOLLOWING THINGS WE ARE DONE ASKING:
- We want freedom. We want a full and complete freedom. We want every black man and woman to have the freedom to accept or reject being separated from the slave master's children and establish a land of their own. We want our people in America whose parents or grandparents were descendants from slaves, to be allowed to establish a separate state or territory of their own on this continent. We believe that our former slave masters are obligated to provide such land and that the area must be fertile and minerally rich. We believe that our former slave masters are obligated to maintain and supply our needs in this separate territory for the next 20 to 25 years
until we are able to produce and supply our own needs. Since we cannot get along with them in peace and equality, after giving them 400 years of our sweat and blood and receiving in return some of the worst treatment human beings have ever experienced, we believe our contributions to this land and the suffering forced upon us by white America, justifies our demand for complete separation of our own.
2. We want freedom for all black men and women now under death sentence in innumerable prisons in the North as well as the South. We want freedom for all black people held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails. We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people. We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality.
3. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else. We know that the above plan for the solution of the black and white conflict is the best and only answer to the problem between two people.