Perm BlockRespectability DA - Black Rage Article in ‘14In response to these three primary black tropes, another controlling image emerges—the figure of black social conservatism through the

image of black respectability, characterized by Don Lemon, Bill Cosby, and as deployed by black institutions such as the church and the

NAACP. Black respectability, as defined by Scholar Kali N. Gross, functions as a resistance to negative norms of blackness . Her work focuses specifically on the phenomenon of black respectability in the academy by thinking through black academics’ desires to craft images of blackness that are different from the ones that are circulated in the media, African Americans adopt a "politics of respectability. Claiming respectability through manners and morality furnished an avenue for African Americans to assert the will and agency to redefine themselves outside the prevailing racist discourses” (Gross 15-17).

Circulating an image of black respectability does not disrupt negative feelings of blackness,

in fact the circulation of a black respectable image, serves to further reinforce systemic

controls based on white supremacy, classist, sexist, and abletist notions of black people . The ramifications of this split are dangerous; it disallows black people with the most f inancial and political resources to align themselves with black communities who bear the brunt of oppressive regimes of power every single day. The split functions to keep black folks fighting each other when the fight is actually being waged against black people on the outside . The attacks on black people are characterized by the slow erosion of civil right gains made by movement foremothers and fathers during the tumultuous mid-century civil rights and Black Nationalist era. Specifically I am speaking to the institutional changes that have nearly destroyed affirmative action, key parts of the 1965 voting right act, and

any all-social welfare systems. Instead black respectable outrage looks like Don Lemon furthering white supremacist-neoliberal aims by telling black people how to fix the problem of blackness he states: "Black people, if you really want to fix the problem, here's just five things that you should think about doing," Lemon continued. Those five things, he said, were hiking up their pants, finishing school, not using the n-word, taking care of their communities and not having children out of wedlock.” (Fung 1) Lemon’s comments are blaming all of the insidious terrors of white supremacy on black people instead of critiquing the

institutionalizing techniques of neoliberalism as played out on the bodies of black folk. Outside of black internal fighting this era of

neoliberalism is marked by a pervasive anti-black racism that is rooted in claims by whites of reverse racism,

substantiated by technologies of diversity, and so-called color blind politics that are operating in such a way that maintains our delicate race, classed, gendered and abletist social order through the discourse of

post raciality. All of these things have worked to render our ability to struggle impossible .

Calmness DA – Their advo of analysis justifies white supremacist violence. It creates a sphere where Whiteness is allowed to exist and morph against the stream of Black Scholarship and Academic Radicalism, like Mari Matsuda and her view of “Angry Black People” defending the Black and White Binary, and her theories to decenter Blackness. I

Debate Slavery DA – Farley in ‘05 Anthony P. Farley Boston College Law School, Anthony.Farley@bc.edu (Anthony P. Farley. "Perfecting Slavery." Loyola University Chicago Law

Journal 36, (2005): 225-256.)Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. White-over-black is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with post-modernity or after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is neosegregation. White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black

is slavery. All of it is white-over-black, only white-over-black, and that continually. The story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows down before its master of its own free will. That is the moment in which the slave accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself unfree.3 When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down before its master when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the field of law hoping for an answer. The slave’s free choice, the slave’s leap of faith, can only be taken under conditions of legal equality. Only after emancipation and legal equality, only after rights, can the slave perfect itself as a slave. Bourgeois legality is the condition wherein equals are said to enter the commons of reason4 or the kingdom of ends5 or the New England town meeting of the soul to discuss universalizable principles, to discuss equality and freedom. Much is made of these meetings, these struggles for law, these festivals of the universal. Commons, kingdom, town meeting, there are many mansions in the house of law, but the law does not forget its father, as Maria Grahn-Farley observes: To wake from slavery is to see that everything must go, every law room,7 every great house, every plantation, all of it, everything. Requests for equality and freedom will always fail. Why? Because the fact of need itself means that the request will fail. The request for equality and freedom, for rights, will fail whether the request is granted or denied. The request is produced through an injury .8 T he initial injury is the marking of bodies for less—less respect, less land, less freedom, less education, less. The mark must be made on the flesh because that is where we start from. Childhood is where we begin and, under conditions of hierarchy, that childhood is already marked. The mark organizes, orients, and differentiates our otherwise common flesh. The mark is race, the mark is gender, the mark is class, the mark is. The mark is all there is to the reality of those essences—race, gender, class, and so on—that are said to precede existence. The mark is a system.9 Property and law follows the mark. And so it goes. There is a pleasure in hierarchy. We begin with an education in our hierarchies. We begin with childhood and childhood begins with education. To be exact, education begins our childhood. We are called by race, by gender, by class, and so on. Our education cultivates our desire in the direction of our hierarchies. If we are successful, we acquire an orientation that enables us to locate ourselves and our bodies vis-à-vis all the other bodies that inhabit our institutional spaces. We follow the call and move in the generally expected way. White-over-black is an orientation, a pleasure, a desire that enables us to find our place, therefore our way, in our institutional spaces. This is why no one ever need ask for equality and freedom. This is why the fact of need means that the request will fail. The request for rights—for equality—will always fail because there are always ambiguities. To be marked for less, to be marked as less than zero, to be marked as a negative attractor, is to be in the situation of the slave. The slave is not called. The slave is not free. The slave is called to follow the calling that is not a calling. The slave is trained to be an object; the slave is trained, in other words, to not be. The slave is death. Death is the end of ambiguity. To be in the situation of the slave is to have all the ambiguities organized against you. But there are always ambiguities, one is always free. How, then, are the ambiguities organized? How is freedom ended? The slave must choose the end of ambiguity, the end of freedom, objecthood. The slave must freely choose death. This the slave can only do under conditions of freedom that present it with a choice. The perfect slave gives up the ghost and commends its everlasting spirit to its master. The slave’s final and perfect prayer is a legal prayer for equal rights. The texts of law, like the manifest content of a dream, perhaps of wolves, may tell a certain story or an uncertain story. The certainty or uncertainty of the story is of absolutely no consequence. The story, the law, the wolves’ table manners, do not matter. The story, the law, the story of law, the dream of wolves,10 however, represents a disguised or latent wish that does matter. The wish is a matter of life or death.

1.) Conditionality renders oppressed bodies invisible through an emphasis on White Debate and historicity

Yancy ‘05 [George, professor at Duquesne University, “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol, 19, No. 4, 2005. JSTOR]I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a profound source of knowledge connected to my “raced” body. Hence, I wrote from

a place of lived embodied experience, a site of exposure. In philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to “expose” is a weak argument , a fallacy, or someone’s inferior reasoning power. The embodied self is bracketed and deemed irrelevant to theory, superfluous and cumbersome in one’s search for truth. It is best, or so we

are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white philosopher/author presumes to speak for all of “us” without the slightest mention of his or her raced identity. Self-consciously writing as white male philosopher, Crispin Sartwell oberseves: “Left to my own devices. I disappear as an author. That is the whiteness of my authorship. This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. But such an authorship and authority is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self- forgetting or apparent transcendence of the mundane and the particular, and the pleasure of power expressed in the “comprehension” of a range of materials (1998, 6).” To theorize the black body one must “to turn the [black] body as the radix for interpreting racial experiences or the social performances of whiteness can

become objects of critical reflection. In this paper, my objective is to describe and theorize situations where the black body’s subjectivity,

its lived reality, is reduced to instantiations of the white imaginary resulting in what I refer to as “the phenomenological return of the black body.” These instantiations are embedded within and evolve out of the complex of social and historical interstices of whites efforts at self-construction through complex acts of erasure vis-à-vis Black people. These acts of self-

construction, however, are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has noted,

“Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [Black]

demotion along a scale of human value (Snead 1994, 4).” How I understand and theorize the body relates to the fact that the body- in this case, the Black Body, - is capable of undergoing to a socio-historical process of “phenomenological return” vis-à-vis white embodiment. The body’s meaning- whether phenotypically white or black- its ontology, its

modalities of aesthetic performance, its comportment, its “raciated” reproduction, is in constant contestation. The hermeneutics of

the body, how it is understood, how it is “seen” its “truth” is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction. “ The body” is positioned by historical practices and discourses. The body is codified as this or that in terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological interests that are grounded within further power- laden social processes . The historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of its “being” as lived and meant within interstices of social semiotics . Hence, a.) the body is less of a thing/being than a shifting/changing historical meaning that is a subject to cultural configuration/reconfiguration. The point here is to interrogate the black body as a fixed and material

truth that pre-exists its relations with the world and with others; b.) The body’s meaning is fundamentally symbolic (McDowell 2001, 301), and its meaning is congealed through symbolic repetition and iteration that emits certain signs and presupposes certain

norms; and c.) the body is a battlefield, one that is fought over again and again across particular historical moments and within particular social spaces . “In other words, the concept of the body provides only the illusion of self-evidence, facticity, ‘thereness’ for something fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular social groups”

(301). On this score, it is not only the “black body” that defies the ontic fixity projected upon it through the white gaze and hence through epitome of whiteness, but the white body is also fundamentally symbolic, requiring demystification of its status as norm, the paragon of beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint, and nobility. In other words, given the three suppositions above, both the black body and the white body lend themselves to processes of interpretive fracture and to strategies of interrogating and removing the veneer of their alleged objectivity.

Hooks in ’92 [ Amazed the first time I read in history classes that white slave-owners (men, women, and children) punished enslaved black people for looking, I wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze had informed black parenting· and· black· spectatorship. The politics of slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze. Connecting this strategy of domination to that used by grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up, I was pained to think that there was no absolute difference between whites who had oppressed black people and ourselves. Years later, reading Michel Foucault, I thought again about these connections, about the ways power as domination -reproduces itself in -different locations employing similar apparatuses, '

strategies, and mechanisms of control. Since I knew as a child that the dominating power adults exercised over me and over my gaze was never so absolute that I did not dare to look, to sneak a peep, to stare dangerously, I knew that the slaves had looked, that all attempts to repress our black peoples' right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to

change reality." Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate

one's gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the

possibility of agency . In much of his work, Michel Foucault insists on describing domination in terms of ”relations of power" as part of an effort to challenge the assumption that “power is a system of domination which controls everything and which leaves no room for freedom. " Emphatically stating that in all relations of power "there is necessarily the possibility of resistance," he invites the critical thinker to search those margins, gaps, and locations on and through the body where agency can be found. Stuart Hall calls for recognition of our agency as black spectators in his essay "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation." Speaking against the construction of white representations of blackness as totalizing, Hall says of white presence: "The error is not to conceptualize this 'presence' in terms of power, but to locate that power as wholly external to Us – as extrinsic force, whose influence can be thrown off like the serpent sheds its skin. What Franz Fanon reminds us, in Black Skin, White Masks, is how power is inside as well as outside: ... the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the Other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self. This "look,” from - so to speak-the place of the Other, fixes us, not only in its violence, hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of its desire. Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see. The "gaze" has been and is a site of resistance for' colonized black people globally . Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that "looks" to document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating "awareness" politicizes "looking" relations—one learns to look a certain way' in order to resist.