1NC – Stick Up

1NC – Normal
 1NC – Thesis (Normal)
This is a stick up.
Moten and Harney ’13 (Fred Moten, Moten is professor of performance studies at New York University, Stefano Harney, Harney
is Professor of Strategic Management Education at Singapore Management University, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study,
2013) \\EG

“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from
us. Tis is the only possible relationship to the American university today. Tis may be true of universities
everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United
States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.
In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse
its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of –
this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university. Worry about the university. Tis is the
injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald
Graf. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive
intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the
subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary
as it is unwelcome. Te university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all
that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university,
into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the
revolution is still black, still strong. What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing
the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the work
of the university. Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of that onto-/auto-encyclopedic circle of the state” that Jacques
Derrida calls the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor
enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters. Te university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or
as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it. It is not teaching that holds this social capacity, but something that
produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective
orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the
prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and
journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate students to
mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the
consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened. Te moment of
teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually one should not teach for food. If
the stage persists,
there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the stage is
surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the
sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it
with having the “determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.” “Have the courage to use your own
intelligence.” Butwhat would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call “the beyond of teaching” is
precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance? And what of those minorities who
refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond (that which is beyond “the beyond of teaching”), as if they will not be
subjects, as if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching,
will see them as waste. But their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of
the enlightenment. Te waste lives for those moments beyond teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase –
unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower of the enlightenment truly better than this? Perhaps
the biopower of the enlightenment knows this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must. But
even as it
depends on these moles, these refugees, it will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional.
And one may be given one last chance to be pragmatic – why
steal when one can have it all, they will ask. But if one
hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the
underground of the university, into the Undercommons – this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act.
And it is at the same time, the only possible act. In that undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus
research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualisation of research. Toenter this space is to inhabit the ruptural
and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal,
queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back,
where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons. What the beyond of teaching is really about is not
fnishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a
radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection , because one does not possess
the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative
torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the prophecy in the
organization of the act of teaching. Te prophecy that predicts its own organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the
prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of
the undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the
negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. Te
undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood. As Fredric Jameson reminds us, the university depends
upon “Enlightenment-type critiques and demystifcation of belief and committed ideology, in order to clear the ground for unobstructed
planning and ‘development.’” Tis is the weakness of the university, the lapse in its homeland security. It needs labor power for this
“enlightenmenttype critique,” but, somehow, labor always escapes. Te
premature subjects of the undercommons took the
call seriously, or had to be serious about the call. Tey were not clear about planning, too mystical, too
full of belief. And yet this labor force cannot reproduce itself, it must be reproduced. Te university works for
the day when it will be able to rid itself, like capital in general, of the trouble of labor. It will then be able to reproduce a labor force that
understands itself as not only unnecessary but dangerous to the development of capitalism. Much pedagogy and scholarship is already
dedicated in this direction. Students must come to see themselves as the problem, which, counter to the complaints of restorationist critics of
the university, is precisely what it means to be a customer, to take on the burden of realisation and always necessarily be inadequate to it.
Later, these students will be able to see themselves properly as obstacles to society, or perhaps, with lifelong learning, students will return
having successfully diagnosed themselves as the problem. Still, the dream of an undiferentiated labor that knows itself as superfuous is
interrupted precisely by the labor of clearing away the burning roadblocks of ideology. While it is better that this police function be in the hands
of the few, it still raises labor as diference, labor as the development of other labor, and therefore labor as a source of wealth. And although the
enlightenment-type critique, as we suggest below, informs on, kisses the cheek of, any autonomous development as a result of this diference in
labor, there is a break in the wall here, a shallow place in the river, a place to land under the rocks. Te
university still needs this
clandestine labor to prepare this undiferentiated labor force, whose increasing specialisation and managerialist
tendencies, again contra the restorationists, represent precisely the successful integration of the division of labor with the universe of exchange
that commands restorationist loyalty. Introducing this labor upon labor, and providing the space for its
development, creates risks. Like the colonial police force recruited unwittingly from guerrilla
neighborhoods, university labor may harbor refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways. But there are
good reasons for the university to be confident that such elements will be exposed or forced underground. Precautions have been
taken, book lists have been drawn up, teaching observations conducted, invitations to contribute made.
Yet against these precautions stands the immanence of transcendence, the necessary deregulation and
the possibilities of criminality and fugitivity that labor upon labor requires. Maroon communities of composition
teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies
historically black college sociologists,
departments, closed-down flm programs, visaexpired Yemeni student newspaper editors,
and feminist engineers. And what will the university say of them? It will say they are unprofessional. Tis
is not an arbitrary charge. It is the charge against the more than professional. How do those who exceed
the profession, who exceed and by exceeding escape, how do those maroons problematize themselves,
problematize the university, force the university to consider them a problem, a danger? Te undercommons is
not, in short, the kind of fanciful communities of whimsy invoked by Bill Readings at the end of his book. Te undercommons, its
maroons, are always at war, always in hiding.
1NC – Song
 1NC – Thesis (Song)
This is your motherfuckin' time nigga, you ready? (Huh bro?)
You sho' you ready? (fuckin' right nigga what?!)

Fuck that mask we don't need no mask

They know who we is anyway!

What we gon' do, is go in here, handle our business

Take everything and break out

You feelin' me?

Well let's let them niggas have it

This is a stick, up, MC's lay it down

We got the clout in this bitch so don't be fuckin' around

Got the rap game locked, spittin' what they feelin'

Makin' all the money, got 'em say we racketeering

Y'all fearing No Limit, black owned and operated

Uncle Tom's and Lil' Sambo's get annihilated

Y'all ain't tolerated, 'cause only soldiers ride with T-R-U

On the Tank full of lyricists, hustlers, and gorillas

Killers, and we do what we gotta do to make it happen

All action, all cappin', fuck yappin'

Mappin', out the industry, gon' blow this joint

And take the royalties, the publishin' and all the points right with us
It's the Black Prince and the Biggest Mama

Shootin' sparks from the top of the Billboard charts

Watch out now, don't nobody move, 'cause you gon' lose

Then we takin' everything, 'cause we brought the right tools

Give it up, give it up, or get fucked up

It's gon' happen point blank range, so don't even duck

We lust to bust, turnin' bitches to dust

Always your ass if you don't give it up

Give it up, give it up, or get fucked up

It's gon' happen point blank range, so don't even duck

We lust to bust, turnin' bitches to dust

Always your ass if you don't give it up

Black Prince in this bitch with the Biggest Mom of 'em all

Out of sight, when we unite, like killers and George

Slowly, unlock the safe on the wall

Stop disrespectin' the pistol I'm pointin' at y'all

Buck buck! Get down, get on your face or get handled

Bitch keep still 'fore I make an example

Cut up that fuckin' remake, and give me that sample

Give me the fuckin' recoup, you 'sposed to be payin' me!

Bag the loot then, cover the camera

Snatch a fuckin' hostage then run out with the manager

Fuck it, gotta have my paper, fortune and fame

Lay it down so the bitches won't forget my name!

Listen close motherfucker

If you don't meet my demands, this nigga gon' suffer

This ain't no fucking game, and ain't none of this funny

If you want this nigga to live, then gimme your company!

Give it up, give it up, or get fucked up

It's gon' happen point blank range, so don't even duck

We lust to bust, turnin' bitches to dust

Always your ass if you don't give it up

(From “The Stick Up” by Mystikal)

Moten and Harney ’13 (Fred Moten, Moten is professor of performance studies at New York University, Stefano Harney, Harney
is Professor of Strategic Management Education at Singapore Management University, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study,
2013) \\EG

“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from
us. Tis is the only possible relationship to the American university today. Tis may be true of universities
everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United
States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.
In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse
its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of –
this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university. Worry about the university. Tis is the
injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald
Graf. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive
intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the
subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary
as it is unwelcome. Te university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all
that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university,
into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the
revolution is still black, still strong. What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing
the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the work
of the university. Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of that onto-/auto-encyclopedic circle of the state” that Jacques
Derrida calls the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor
enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters. Te university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or
as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it. It is not teaching that holds this social capacity, but something that
produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective
orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the
prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and
journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate students to
mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the
consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened. Te moment of
teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually one should not teach for food. If
the stage persists,
there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the stage is
surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the
sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it
with having the “determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.” “Have the courage to use your own
intelligence.” Butwhat would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call “the beyond of teaching” is
precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance? And what of those minorities who
refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond (that which is beyond “the beyond of teaching”), as if they will not be
subjects, as if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching,
will see them as waste. But their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of
the enlightenment. Te waste lives for those moments beyond teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase –
unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower of the enlightenment truly better than this? Perhaps
the biopower of the enlightenment knows this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must. But
even as it
depends on these moles, these refugees, it will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional.
And one may be given one last chance to be pragmatic – why steal when one can have it all, they will ask. But if one
hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the
underground of the university, into the Undercommons – this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act.
And it is at the same time, the only possible act. In that undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus
research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualisation of research. Toenter this space is to inhabit the ruptural
and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal,
queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back,
where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons. What the beyond of teaching is really about is not
fnishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a
radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection , because one does not possess
the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative
torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the prophecy in the
organization of the act of teaching. Te prophecy that predicts its own organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the
prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of
the undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the
negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. Te
undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood. As Fredric Jameson reminds us, the university depends
upon “Enlightenment-type critiques and demystifcation of belief and committed ideology, in order to clear the ground for unobstructed
planning and ‘development.’” Tis is the weakness of the university, the lapse in its homeland security. It needs labor power for this
“enlightenmenttype critique,” but, somehow, labor always escapes. Te
premature subjects of the undercommons took the
call seriously, or had to be serious about the call. Tey were not clear about planning, too mystical, too
full of belief. And yet this labor force cannot reproduce itself, it must be reproduced. Te university works for
the day when it will be able to rid itself, like capital in general, of the trouble of labor. It will then be able to reproduce a labor force that
understands itself as not only unnecessary but dangerous to the development of capitalism. Much pedagogy and scholarship is already
dedicated in this direction. Students must come to see themselves as the problem, which, counter to the complaints of restorationist critics of
the university, is precisely what it means to be a customer, to take on the burden of realisation and always necessarily be inadequate to it.
Later, these students will be able to see themselves properly as obstacles to society, or perhaps, with lifelong learning, students will return
having successfully diagnosed themselves as the problem. Still, the dream of an undiferentiated labor that knows itself as superfuous is
interrupted precisely by the labor of clearing away the burning roadblocks of ideology. While it is better that this police function be in the hands
of the few, it still raises labor as diference, labor as the development of other labor, and therefore labor as a source of wealth. And although the
enlightenment-type critique, as we suggest below, informs on, kisses the cheek of, any autonomous development as a result of this diference in
labor, there is a break in the wall here, a shallow place in the river, a place to land under the rocks. Te university still needs this
clandestine labor to prepare this undiferentiated labor force, whose increasing specialisation and managerialist
tendencies, again contra the restorationists, represent precisely the successful integration of the division of labor with the universe of exchange
that commands restorationist loyalty. Introducing this labor upon labor, and providing the space for its
development, creates risks. Like the colonial police force recruited unwittingly from guerrilla
neighborhoods, university labor may harbor refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways. But there are
good reasons for the university to be confident that such elements will be exposed or forced underground. Precautions have been
taken, book lists have been drawn up, teaching observations conducted, invitations to contribute made.
Yet against these precautions stands the immanence of transcendence, the necessary deregulation and
the possibilities of criminality and fugitivity that labor upon labor requires. Maroon communities of composition
teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies
departments, closed-down flm programs, visaexpired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists,
and feminist engineers. And what will the university say of them? It will say they are unprofessional. Tis
is not an arbitrary charge. It is the charge against the more than professional. How do those who exceed
the profession, who exceed and by exceeding escape, how do those maroons problematize themselves,
problematize the university, force the university to consider them a problem, a danger? Te undercommons is
not, in short, the kind of fanciful communities of whimsy invoked by Bill Readings at the end of his book. Te undercommons, its
maroons, are always at war, always in hiding.
 1NC – Redaction
Text: We annotate and redact the 1ac.
[REDACTED 1AC]
The CP is mutually exclusive– the perm would have to sever out of the performance of
the 1ac. (a) That makes the aff a moving target and moots pre-round prep. (b) It’s also
a tool of white fluidity and tricksterism designed to capture the revolutionary
potential of black radicalism by junior partners who weaponize their non-white status
against black people.
The CP solves the aff—The orthographies of an antiblack world require new modes of
writing and making-sensible. We read to conceive ideas that have never been
conceived before. Within this artistic contract, Black annotation and redaction
comprise ways of imagining otherwise which are the foundation for resistance.
Sharpe ’16 (Christina Sharpe, Associate Professor at Tufts University, 2016, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being) \\EG
Annotate: To add notes to, furnish with notes (a literary work or author). An annotation is metadata
(e.g. a comment, explanation, presentational markup) attached to text, image, or other data. Often
annotations refer to a specific part of the original data. —OED Online Redaction: a: The action of bringing or putting into a
definite form; (now) spec. the working or drafting of source material into a distinct, esp. written, form.
Usu. with into, (occas.) to. b: The action or process of revising or editing text, esp. in preparation for publication;
(also) an act of editorial revision. Obs. The action of driving back; resistance, reaction. —OED Online I point to these
practices of Black annotation and Black redaction as more examples of wake work. The orthographies
of the wake require new modes of writing, new modes of making-sensible. Redaction comes to us most
familiarly through those blacked-out “sensitive lines” in certain government documents that contain information
we are not allowed to read. Steve McQueen’s film End Credits (2012) consists of six hours of images and voiceover of the redacted
FBI files of Paul Robeson. As I watched and listened, it again became clear to me that so much of Black intramural life and social
and political work is redacted, made invisible to the present and future, subtended by plantation logics,
detached optics, and brutal architectures. There is, in the Black diaspora (and I include the Continent here because of
colonial histories and presents and trans*migration) a long history of Black life, of Black lives being annotated and
redacted. There is, as well, continuous resistance to and disruption of those violent annotations and
redactions. A 2015 conference on Black portraiture has the subtitle Imaging the Body and Re-Staging Histories. Each time I read that
word imaging I read it doubly. That is, I read the word as imaging, “to make a representation of the
external form of,” and also as imagining, “to form a mental image or concept of; to suppose or assume;
the ability to form mental images of things that either are not physically present or have never been
conceived or created by others.”12 If we understand portraiture to be both the “art of creating portraits” (image and text) and
“graphic and detailed description,” how might we understand a variety of forms of contemporary Black public
image-making in and as refusals to accede to the optics, the disciplines, and the deathly demands of the
antiblack worlds in which we live, work, and struggle to make visible (to ourselves, if not to others) all kinds of
Black pasts, presents, and possible futures? Much of the work of Black imaging and the work that those images do out in the
world has been about such imaginings of the fullness of Black life. In Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, Richard Powell (2008, xv)
writes that “a significant segment of black portraiture stands apart from the rest of the genre, and not only because of the historical and social
realities of racism. Rather, the difference often lies in the artistic contract between the portrayer and
portrayed; conscious or unconscious negotiations that invest black subjects with social capital.” While
Powell speaks here of Black artists and subjects’ negotiated and reciprocal imaginings, I want to think about those portraits outside of our own
imaging and imagining in which, to borrow from Huey Copeland (2013), we seem “bound to appear.” There is a long history and present of
resistance to, disruption and refashioning of images of blackness and Black people. There
is a long history and present of
imaging and imagining blackness and Black selves otherwise, in excess of the containment of the long
and brutal history of the violent annotations of Black being: what Spillers, for example, called the hieroglyphics of the
flesh; a history that is “the crisis of referentiality, the fictions of personhood, and the gap or incommensurability between the proper name and
the form of existence that it signifies” (Hartman 2014). I
am thinking here, ushering here, into the gap, Black
annotation together with Black redaction, not as opposites, but as trans*verse and coextensive ways
to imagine otherwise. Put another way, I want to think annotation in relation to the dysgraphia and the orthography of the wake; in
relation to those photographs of Black people in distress that appear so regularly in our lives, whether the image of that suffering Black person
comes from quotidian or extraordinary disasters, the photos of them often hit in the register of abandonment. The photographs do this even,
or even especially, when they purport to “humanize” Black people—that is, they purport to make manifest “humanity” that we already know to
be present.13 To be clear, just as I am not interested in rescuing the term girl (see “The Ship”), I
am not interested in rescuing
Black being(s) for the category of the “Human,” misunderstood as “Man,” or for the languages of
development. Both of those languages and the material conditions that they re/produce continue to produce our fast
and slow deaths. I am interested in ways of seeing and imagining responses to the terror visited on
Black life and the ways we inhabit it, are inhabited by it, and refuse it. I am interested in the ways we
live in and despite that terror. By considering that relationship between imaging and imagining in the
registers of Black annotation and Black redaction, I want to think about what these images call forth.
And I want to think through what they call on us to do, think, feel in the wake of slavery—which is to say, in
an ongoing present of subjection and resistance. Annotation appears like that asterisk, which is itself an annotation
mark, that marks the trans*formation into ontological blackness. As photographs of Black people circulate as portraits
in a variety of publics, they are often accompanied by some sort of note or other metadata, whether that notation is in the photograph itself or
as a response to a dehumaning photograph, in
order that the image might travel with supplemental information
that marks injury and, then, more than injury. We know that, as far as images of Black people are concerned, in their
circulation they often don’t, in fact, do the imaging work that we expect of them. There are too many examples of this to name: from the
videotaped beating of Rodney King in 1991, to the murder of Oscar Grant, to the brutal murders of twenty-one trans women in the United
States as of November 2015, to all of the circulating images of and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, to
the ongoing deaths in transatlantic, trans-Mediterranean, and transcontinental crossings extending across the Black global diaspora. This is true
even though and when we find images of Black suffering in various publics framed in and as calls to action or calls to feel with and for. Most
often these images function as a hail to the non Black person in the Althusserian sense. That is, these images work to confirm the status,
location, and already held opinions within dominant ideology about those exhibitions of spectacular Black bodies whose meanings then remain
unchanged. We have been reminded by Hartman and many others that the repetition of the visual, discursive, state, and other quotidian and
extraordinary cruel and unusual violences enacted on Black people does not lead to a cessation of violence, nor does it, across or within
Such repetitions often work to solidify and make
communities, lead primarily to sympathy or something like empathy.
continuous the colonial project of violence. With that knowledge in mind, what kinds of ethical viewing
and reading practices must we employ, now, in the face of these onslaughts? What might practices of
Black annotation and Black redaction offer? What follows are three examples of what I am calling Black visual/textual
annotation and redaction. Redaction and annotation toward seeing and reading otherwise; toward reading
and seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame; toward seeing something beyond a
visuality that is, as Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011) argues, subtended by the logics of the administered plantation. In
“Home,” Toni Morrison (1998, 7) writes that she has consistently tried “to carve away the accretions of
deceit, blindness, ignorance, paralysis, and sheer malevolence embedded in raced language so that
other kinds of perception were not only available but were inevitable.” I am imagining that the work of
Black annotation and Black redaction is to enact the movement to that inevitable— a counter to
abandonment, another effort to try to look, to try to really see.14 I return, again, to the photograph of
the little girl with the word Ship affixed to her forehead (figure 2.5). This little girl was at the beginning of this work, and
she occupies its center. Shortly after that catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti on January 12, 2010, I entered the archive of photographs that had
emerged from it. It wasn’t the first time I had cautiously entered this archive, but on this occasion I was stopped by that photograph of a young
Black girl, ten years old at most. A third of the image is blurry. But on the right-hand side one can still make out grass and dirt, something black
that she is lying on, and, in the background, other things (a figure? a bundle of clothing? a cigarette? something else?). The
girl’s face is
clear; it’s what’s in focus. She is alive. Her eyes are open. She is lying on what looks like a black
stretcher; her head is on a cold pack, and you can make out that there is writing on that cold pack and some of the words, like instructions
for use and disposal. You can also read the words roll up and dispose and registered trademark . There’s some
debris on the stretcher. There are two uncovered wounds over the girl’s right eye and another smaller one under it. A piece of paper is
stuck to her bottom lip. She is wearing what seems to be a print cotton hospital gown. She is looking straight ahead of her, or directly
at, or past, the photographer’s camera. She looks to be in shock. Her big black eyes, with their lush eyelashes, look
glazed. Her look reaches out to me. Affixed to her forehead is that piece of transparent tape with the
word Ship written on it. What is the look in her eyes? What do I do with it? The first annotation was
that word Ship. What can one see beyond that word that threatens to block out everything else? When I
stumbled upon that image of this girl child with the word Ship taped to her forehead, it was the look in her eyes that stopped me. Then with its
coming into focus that word Ship threatened to obliterate everything and anything else I could see. What was it
doing there, I wondered? But I returned again and again to that photo and to her face to ask myself about the
look in her eyes. What was I being called to by and with her look at me and mine at her? Over the course of
the years since I first found that image of this girl, I returned to it repeatedly to try to account for what I saw or thought I might see. Where is
she looking? Who and what is she looking at or looking for? Who can look back? Does she know that there is a piece of tape on her forehead?
Does she know what that piece of tape says? She must be afraid. Does she know that she is already linked to a ship and that she is destined for
yet another one? Her eyes look back at me, like Delia’s eyes, like Drana’s.15 In a move that is counter to the way photographic redaction usually
works—where the eyes are covered and the rest of the face remains visible—here I include only Delia’s and Drana’s eyes. I performed my
own redaction of Agassiz’s ethnographic images in order to focus in on their eyes. I redact the images to
focus their individual and collective looks out and past the white people who claimed power over them
and the instrument by which they are being further subjected in ways they could never have imagined
or anticipated. I want to see their looks out and past and across time. Delia and Drana. In my look at them, I
register in their eyes an “I” and a “we” that is and are holding something in, holding on, and held, still.
Delia and Drana sitting there (still) and then standing there (still), and clothed and unclothed (still) and protected only by eyelashes (still).16 I
am reminded here, of the anagrammatical life of the word still for the enslaved and for all Black people
in slavery’s wake. Over the course of a paragraph in Beloved Morrison elaborates what still means for the heavily pregnant Sethe, who
at this point in her pregnancy “was walking on two feet meant for standing still . . . still, near a kettle; still at the churn; still, at the tub and
ironing board” (Morrison 1987, 29–30). I
am reminded here of still as it repeats in Brand’s Verso 55 (2015), marked as
it is there, with wonder at our survival and the residence time of the wake: “We felt pity for them, and affection
and love; they felt happy for us, we were still alive. Yes, we are still alive we said. And we had returned to thank them. You are still alive, they
said. Yes we are still alive. They looked at us like violet; like violet teas they drank us. We said here we are. They said, you are still alive. We said,
yes, yes we are still alive.” Delia and Drana, marked, still, because of the daguerreotype’s long exposure time, which required that one hold still
for long periods of time, and because they were of the ship yet not immediately off the ship like their fathers identified as Renty (Congo) and
Jack (Guinea). The
little girl who survives the 2010 Haitian earthquake is also a descendant of the ship and
she is marked still, and once again, for its hold. I looked again at that photo and I marked her youth, the diagonal scar that
cuts across the bridge of her nose and into her eyebrow, those extravagant eyelashes that curl back to the lid, the uncovered wounds, that bit
of paper on her lip, and a leaf on the gown and in her hair. “standing here in eyelashes, in/. . ./the brittle gnawed life we live,/I am held, and
held.” I
marked the violence of the quake that deposited that little girl there, injured, in this archive, and
the violence in the name of care of the placement of that taped word on her forehead, and then I kept
looking because that could not be all there was to see or say. I had to take care. (A different kind of care and a
different optic than the ones employed in the wake of the Zorgue, that ship called Care.) I was looking for more than the violence of the slave
ship, the migrant and refugee ship, the container ship, and the medical ship. I saw that leaf in her hair, and with it I
performed my own annotation that might open this image out into a life, however precarious, that was
always there.17 That leaf is stuck in her still neat braids. And I think: Somebody braided her hair before
that earthquake hit. She comes to us from the front pages of the New York Times, a December 10, 2014, article titled “Schools’ Discipline for Girls Differs by Race and Hue”
and with the caption “Mikia Hutchings, 12, whose writing on a wall at school led to a juvenile criminal case, and her lawyer, Michael J. Tafelski, waiting for a meeting held last month by a
Georgia state committee studying school discipline.”18 Writing is discovered on a school gym bathroom wall. Two middle school students are accused of vandalism: Mikia Hutchings, who is
Black, and her (unnamed in the article) white girlfriend. When Mikia’s family is alerted to the charges against her, they find it hard to believe she was involved in defacing school and personal
property. Then they report to the authorities that they cannot afford to pay the hundred-dollar “restitution” fee to the school and to the student whose sneakers were damaged. “While both
students were suspended from school for a few days, Mikia had to face a school disciplinary hearing and, a few weeks later, a visit by a uniformed officer from the local Sheriff ’s Department,
who served her grandmother with papers accusing Mikia of a trespassing misdemeanor and, potentially, a felony” (Vega 2014). Because her family is unable to pay the money, Mikia will be
made to pay a much larger price. “As part of an agreement with the state to have the charges dismissed in juvenile court, Mikia admitted to the allegations of criminal trespassing. Mikia, who
is African-American, spent her summer on probation, under a 7 p.m. curfew, and had to complete 16 hours of community service in addition to writing an apology letter to a student whose
sneakers were defaced in the incident. Her friend, who is white, was let go after her parents paid restitution” (Vega 2014). The article is sympathetic to Mikia. It tries to bring her into focus,
and yet she disappears in description. The introductory paragraph reads: “To hear Mikia Hutchings speak, one must lean in close, as her voice barely rises above a whisper. In report cards, her
teachers describe her as ‘very focused,’ someone who follows the rules and stays on task. So it was a surprise for her grandmother when Mikia, 12, and a friend got into trouble for writing
graffiti on the walls of a gym bathroom at Dutchtown Middle School in Henry County last year” (Vega 2014). See and hear Mikia Hutchings. She is a child, a young Black girl, just twelve years
old and slight. In the photograph she appears, captured, her lower back resting against a wall as she leans forward, beside a classroom door. She is wearing a gray-and-black horizontal-striped
shirt, black stretch pants, black boots with white turned-over cuffs, and a light blue insulated jacket with a hood and a white collar, trim, and white cuffs that echo the white cuffs on the boots.
She looks down and to the side, and the fingers of her left hand hold one finger of her right hand. (She holds herself, holds onto herself.) What is the look on her face? As she appears here, she
is physically overwhelmed by her white male legal representative, by the charges against her and all of the authority that has been summoned and is determined to discipline her. This
authority, the police, the courts, the school, and so on, would put her in cuffs; they have been summoned to transform this girl into a felon. As it abuts the modifier Black, “girl” here, again,
appears as the anagrammatical. “ ‘When a darker-skinned African-American female acts up, there’s a certain concern about their boyish aggressiveness,’ Dr. Hannon said, ‘that they don’t
know their place as a female, as a woman’” (Vega 2014). Mikia Hutchings is held, and in that holding once again “girl” is thrown into question. If we annotate and redact that first paragraph of
the New York Times article, we might find Mikia’s point of view. Through redaction we might hear what she has to say in her own defense in the midst of the ways she is made to appear only

Put another way, with our own Black annotations and Black redactions , we might locate a
to be made to disappear.

counter to the force of the state (care as force; “the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and
protection of someone or something”) that has landed her on the front page of the New York Times . With this
analytic we might begin to see and hear Mikia, whose sole offense was writing the word “Hi” on the wall while a young, Black
girl child without financial resources. That I am arguing for Mikia to come into sight should not be mistaken as an argument for representation
or representational politics. Rather, Black
annotation and Black redaction are ways to make Black life visible, if
only momentarily, through the optic of the door. Black annotation and redaction meet the Black
anagrammatical and the failure of words and concepts to hold in and on Black flesh. Think, now, of the
annotations and redactions of the second autopsies ordered by the families of the murdered and
commissioned in the wake of so many murders. The second autopsy performed on Michael Brown was
requested by his family and their legal team in order to show injury. In other words, that second autopsy was ordered to
show the harm done to Michael Brown, who was shot at least six times, including two times in the
head. As with Lamont Adams, the bullet wounds to Michael Brown’s hand suggested that he was in the
posture of surrender. By securing that second autopsy, his family tried to disrupt the dysgraphia that wrote a
version of events that was riven with antiblackness. It was not enough to see Michael Brown’s body uncovered in the street
for hours on a hot August day, his mother and stepfather prevented from going to his side. It was not enough to see his mother’s distress, to
see and hear her scream and fall into the arms of family members. It was not enough to see his distraught stepfather on the side of the road
with a makeshift sign declaring: “The police just murdered my son.” Not enough. And so his family added their own annotations; they tried to
come up with his body’s harms as seen through their eyes in order to contest that body that was drawn by antiblackness (figure 4.5). And, of
course, even then, it is not enough. It cannot be enough. They cannot recuperate his body. The constant production of Black death is and as
But just as the weather is always ripe for Black death, the singularity also
necessary returns us to the singularity.
produces Black resistances and refusals. Black redaction and Black annotation are ways of imagining
otherwise. I turn here to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1992). Daughters was produced over the course of ten years, and it emanated
from the politics and aesthetics that began with Dash’s work as part of the LA Rebellion, along with other filmmakers, like Charles Burnett and
Haile Gerima. When it was released in 1992, Daughters became the first film by an African American woman to get cinematic distribution in the
United States. It found an immediate audience with Black women, and at the same time it came to be seen by many other viewing audiences as
a foreign film because it did not deal in the familiar. It
was Dash and cinematographer Arthur Jafa’s aim to unmake
colonial optics that occupy and reproduce the retinal detachment that, then, reproduces the hold as
location and destination. That that is their aim is clear from the first shot of the film, which takes place on a boat. In that opening
scene we are introduced to Viola Peazant; Mr. Snead, the photographer she has hired to document the migration of her family; her long-gone
cousin Yellow Mary; and Yellow Mary’s lover Trula. Mr. Snead shows Yellow Mary and Trula the kaleidoscope he has brought with him. He
explains the word’s etymology as “Kalos . . . Beautiful. Eidos . . . Form. Skopein . . . [to see]” (Dash 1992, 82). As he speaks, Yellow Mary looks at
Trula through the kaleidoscope, and Viola explains to Mr. Snead that the slave trade, the importation of “fresh Africans,” continued “back off
these islands” for many years after it was banned (Dash 1992, 84). This
scene establishes for the audience its entrance into
a complex visual scene as it interrogates established knowledges: the time when slavery ended, what
the archives don’t record. The photographer with his optical equipment, the conversations they have
on the boat, and the deliberate way the characters look at and away from each other prepare the audience for something formally
beautiful and something that challenges their assumed viewing habits. The slowing down of some of the shots from twenty-
four to sixteen frames per second is also a reconfiguration of ways of seeing, and in those instances when the film slows down, an additional
space is created for the audience to enter into the scene. Dash (1992, 16, 25) says that she “was told over and over again that there was no
market for the film. The distributors talked about the spectacular look of the film and the images and story being so different and thought-
provoking, yet the consistent response was that there was ‘no market’ for this type of film.”
 1NC – Surrender
Text: We redact [TEAM] as speaking subjects in defense of the 1ac. We imagine Black
people speak the 1ac while [TEAM] silently show support in the back.
The CP is mutually exclusive– the perm would have to sever out of the performance of
the 1ac. (a) That makes the aff a moving target and moots pre-round prep. (b) It’s also
a tool of white fluidity and tricksterism designed to capture the revolutionary
potential of black radicalism by junior partners who weaponize their non-white status
against black people.
Non-black debaters cannot represent Black interests—surrender to Blackness. The CP
solves the aff—surrender is the best revolutionary praxis in an antiblack world.
Brady and Murillo ’14 (Nicholas Brady, an activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He is a former debater and currently is a
head coach for the James Baldwin Debate Society, the only collegiate debate team housed in an African-American Studies department. He was
also a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a doctoral student at the University of California-
Irvine Culture and Theory program, John Murillo III, PhD student in the English department at Brown University, and a graduate of the
University of California, Irvine, with bachelor’s degrees in Cognitive Science and English. His research interests are broad, and include extensive
engagements with and within: Black Studies–particularly Afro-Pessimism–Narrative Theory; Theoretical Physics; Astrophysics; Cosmology; and
Neuroscience, 26 January 2014, “Black Imperative: A Forum on Solidarity in the Age of Coalition”,
https://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/black-imperative-a-forum-on-solidarity-in-the-age-of-coalition/) \\EG

“Surrender to blackness.” A grammatical imperative . Grammatical because syntactically it marks a

command to or demand of a generalized addressee: “(Everyone) surrender to blackness.” Grammatical
because the black flesh scarred and tattooed by these illegible hieroglyphics enunciates at the level of
symbolic and ontological world orders: “Surrender to blackness” is a command at the level of the
foundations of thought and being themselves; grammatical. Imperative because if there is any hope for
a revolutionary praxis along any lines—race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability—it must centralize,
which is to say look in the face of, which is to say begin to the work of real love for, the blackness
[preposition] which “an authentic upheaval might be born.” #BlackPowerYellowPeril failed to recognize this imperative
as legible, let alone heed and meet its command/demand. Created by Suey Park (@suey_park), the hashtag sought to draw from and build
upon the accomplishments of Black womyn activists on twitter and tumblr who have long mobilized to generate productive and revolutionary
interjections into the world’s violently antiblack discourses (see, for example, #solidarityisforwhitewomen, and #blackmaleprivilege) through
extended, communal commentary, usually in direct opposition to the censoring strictures of any kind of respectability politics. Discussions
about and within the hashtag can be found here, here, here, here(though this is very hasty, a bit shortsighted, and still not doing much more
than glancing at, as opposed to engaging blackness), and here. But broadly, the intentions of the hashtag are founded upon a belief in the
possibility of solidarity/coalition politics between Blacks and Asians, seeking to challenge persistent “tensions” between the communities for
the sake of a common struggle against ‘white supremacy.’ For
those nonblack participants, the drive toward solidarity
represents a purely innocent and unquestioned, unquestionable, desire. All critiques of Asian antiblackness are
rendered as derailing the move toward solidarity, for they are to bring up the obvious – clearly we are all human, we make mistakes, but to
continuously bring up the “mistakes” and never “move on” is to foreclose the possibility of solidarity. And
what a wonderful thing
the blacks of the conversation were foreclosing – this solidarity thing. What a wonderful thing others
were offering to us and we simply would not take. And yet, the unthought question remains: have you truly earned
the right to act in solidarity, to form solidarity, to even believe in solidarity? And what is this solidarity
thing we all hold near and dear to our hearts? Have we ever experienced it or do we simply have
images we have transformed into memories of a solidarity that never existed? I know Black people and
Asian people have worked together in the past, but have we ever formed a solid whole? And who is to blame
for the fact that we have never had solidarity? The hashtag implies that both “sides” play an equal part in the failure to form solidarity. In the
face of this, confessing our sins to each other forms the moment where we can form emotional bonds: “see, you were as racist as I, and how
unfortunate it is that we let old whitey come between us. Never again will whitey make us part.” This is the logic behind much of the Asian
confessing – white supremacy duped us into being antiblack racists – and also fed into the backlash aimed at blacks – “stop playing oppression
olympics, that’s what whitey wants.” It must be foregrounded here that antiblackness cannot be simplified as “anti-black racism” and it is a
singularity with no equivalent force – “anti-Asian” racism is not the flipside of antiblackness nor is orientalism or islamophobia. Antiblackness
predates white supremacy by at least 300 years (and much more than that depending on how we trace our history) and we
can
understand antiblackness as the general tethering of the very concept of life to the ontological and
unspeakable, unthinkable force of black death. That statement is a place to begin to define
antiblackness, it is not the end for this force weaves itself in infinite variety throughout all corners of
the globe, forming globe into world. This is not simply about the little racist microaggressions that
people listed in their tweets, this is about a global force that the world – not simply whites – bond over
and form their lives inside of and through. What #BlackPowerYellowPeril revealed, however, is that the underside of coalition
politics remains a violent and virulent antiblackness. As blacks— John Murillo III (@writedarkmatter), New Black School (@newblackschool),
Nicholas Brady (@nubluez_nick), and others—raised questions and comments in the spirit of that singular imperative—“Surrender to
blackness”—antiblackness emerged in the violence of the response levied against it; one need only visit the hashtag to bear witness. From
outright refusals to engage the antiblackness central to the histories and politics of nonblack communities of color, to denials of the
foundational, global, and singular nature of antiblackness, and to the repeated calls to police and remove this disruptive blackness and its
imperative from the conversation, antiblackness exploded onto the scene. All of this in the name of “coalition.” Thisis because
“coalition” politics and possibilities are fetishized, not loved. The fetish denies the necessary recognition
of antiblackness at coalition’s heart, and that antiblackness left unattended renders the imperative
illegible. It is a fetishization, then, of antiblackness. The fetish object at the heart of the coalition has
always been black flesh – a fetishization where pleasure and terror meet to create the bonds of
solidarity people so desire. Here, we open a forum on how the hashtag embodies this fetish, the distinction between fetish and love
that must be made in excess of the hashtag and ones like it, and the absolute imperativeness of the imperative. Instead of fetishizing
the object, you must surrender to blackness.
 1NC – Black Feminism
Text: We redact [TEAM] as speaking subjects in defense of the 1ac. We imagine Black
women speak the 1ac while [TEAM] silently show support in the back.
The CP is mutually exclusive– the perm would have to sever out of the performance of
the 1ac. (a) That makes the aff a moving target and moots pre-round prep. (b) It’s also
a tool of white fluidity and tricksterism designed to capture the revolutionary
potential of black radicalism by junior partners who weaponize their non-white status
against black people.
The CP solves the aff—radical Black feminism is the best political strategy for global
change and provides the best metric for understanding dynamic power relations in
contemporary society.
McDuffie ’12 (Erik McDuffie, McDuffie is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2012, pp. 1-30, “"For
full freedom of . . . colored women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States . . .": Black Women Radicals and the Practice of a Black Women's
International”, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/496135/pdf) \\EG

Audley “queen mother” moore was ecstatic. Organizers of the All African Women’s Conference, a militant anticolonial, Pan-African women’s
group, invited the seventy-three-year-old, New York City–based African American activist to address the gathering held in Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania, on July 26, 1972. Moore had attained an iconic stature as a revered, elder black nationalist amongst young black militants. This
reputation was well earned. Moore was a life-long Garveyite and leading personality in the Harlem Communist Party (CPUSA) during the 1930s
and 1940s. However, after the CPUSA endured internal storms and external buffeting after 1945, she departed and reinvented herself into a
radical black nationalist who embraced all things “African.” But she never abandoned Marxism. In the ensuing years, she adopted an
idiosyncratic politics combining black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, Third Worldism, Marxism, and feminism, with special concern
for the rights and freedom of black women in the United States and across the African diaspora. She was the founder of the modern reparation
movement and a progenitor of Black Power of the 1960s. She tutored Malcolm X and staunchly supported early Black Power leader Robert F.
Williams. Internationally, she earned the respect of notable African heads of state. These included Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Tanzanian
president Julius Nyerere. Years before it became chic, Moore wore long African-print dresses, amulets, and necklaces. Given her tenacious
support for black self-determination and wide international political networks, she stands as a major figure in twentieth-century black
nationalism, Communism, and Pan-Africanism.1 A powerful speaker, Queen Mother Moore opened her address,
“Africa for the Africans, At Home and Aboard,” with a warm greeting to conference delegates. She declared: “I have
the honor to convey sisterly greetings to you from thousands of your sisters in the United States of
America who are conscious of their African heritage and are here with you in love and in spirit.”
Praising the African woman as the “mother of civilization,” she lauded black women for their beauty,
creativity, and brilliance. At the same time, she called attention to their sufferance under slavery, colonialism, imperialism,
neocolonialism, and global white supremacy. Emphasizing the importance of forging political coalitions between
African-descended women across the diaspora, she stated that African American women stood in
revolutionary solidarity with their “sisters in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Guinea-Bissau, and all
freedom fighters under the domination of the colonialists.” Without question, her call for building
transnational political solidarities between African-descended women worldwide cohered with the
Pan-African, anticolonial, anticapitalist, and feminist objectives of the All African Women’s Conference. 2
Despite her international prominence in black nationalist, Pan-African, and communist organizations,
the growing body of scholarship on “black internationalism” has largely erased the transnational
political practice of black women radicals like Queen Mother Moore who pursued their work in the Communist Left and
Black Left during the early- and mid-twentieth century.3 As the literary scholar Carole Boyce Davies observes: “Black women have
become sisters outside of the black radical intellectual tradition.”4 The erasure of black women radicals
from narratives of black internationalism is curious given that several women had attained
international reputations as leaders, community activists, and thinkers within the Black Left and CPUSA during the Old Left
period, bookended by the Russian Revolution in 1917 and by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinist atrocities in 1956. 5
These women include Queen Mother Moore, Trinidad-born Communist Party leader Claudia Jones,
bohemian world traveler Louise Thompson Patterson, civil rights activist Esther Cooper Jackson, and
others.6 Decades ahead of their time, they forged Black Left feminism, a pathbreaking feminism that
centers working-class women by combining black nationalist and American Communist Party (CPUSA)
positions on race, gender, and class with black women radicals’ own lived experiences. Black Left
feminists formulated a theory of “triple oppression.” Emphasizing the connections among racial,
gender, and class oppression, the theory posited that the eradication of one form of oppression
requires the concurrent dismantling of all systems of oppression. This conceptual framework, now
referred to by feminist scholars as intersectionality, is most commonly associated with black feminist
organizations of the 1970s such as the Third World Women’s Alliance and the Combahee River
Collective.7 In this article, I am concerned with recovering the transnational political practice of black
women of the Old Left. The historians Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins’s recent definition of black
internationalism is a useful starting point for explicating the transnational politics of the women discussed here: “At the core of black
internationalism is the ideal of universal emancipation, unbounded by national, imperial, continental or
oceanic boundaries—or even by racial ones.”8 While black women radicals adhered to these positions,
they also transcended them by proffering their own variant of black internationalism. Black Left feminists’ key
intervention to black internationalism rested in their practice of what I call a “black women’s international.” Black women radicals never
explicitly used this term. But through
their migrations, public speaking, journalism, activism, and overseas
travel, we can see how they formulated and practiced an insurgent gendered vision of black
internationalism in response to retrogressive practices embodied in slavery, capitalism, colonialism,
and imperialism and their own lived experiences. They did not simply add gender to the discussion of
internationalism. Instead, they rethought black internationalism by moving black women from the
margins to the center in discussions in the Communist Left about black self-determination, women’s rights,
trade unionism, peace, decolonization, and democracy. 9 For Black Left feminists, black women in the
United States and across the diaspora represented the vanguard for transformative change globally
due to their locations at the interstices of multiple oppressions. These conclusions presaged the black socialist feminist
transnationalism articulated in the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977, arguably one of the most significant black and U.S. feminist
manifestos of the twentieth century. Like the Combahee River Collective, Black Left feminists charged that realizing
black women’s
liberation would actualize the full freedom for all people since black women’s freedom would require
the dismantlement of all forms of human oppression.10 Another important component of Black Left feminists’ global
vision was their belief in the necessity of forging transnational political solidarities with women of color and white women leftists from around
the world. For these reasons, Black Left feminists were constantly on the move, both domestically and internationally.11 Excavating the history
of the “black women’s international” does more than simply tell an interesting—albeit largely unknown—story about the transnational political
practices of black women radicals of the Old Left. Rather, their
global visions require us to rethink and dispense with the
masculinist scholarly framings of black internationalism. Historically, black women have been central to building
internationally focused protest movements that understood black women’s status as a barometer to measure democracy around the world.
Tracing the practice of the “black women’s international” provides a genealogy for twentieth-century
black women’s transnational praxis and black feminist knowledge production. Black Left feminists played an
important role in nurturing the global visions of black feminists of the 1970s. These exchanges highlight the connections between twentieth
century black feminist generations that scholars and activists themselves have not always readily acknowledged. The
dynamic history
of the “black women’s international” elucidates the complex ways black women have confronted and
negotiated power and marginalization, as well as citizenship and disenfranchisement, in the United
States and globally during the twentieth century, with implications for understanding and transforming
our contemporary world.12
2NC – Stick Up
2NC – Solvency
 2NC – Hostage-Taking
We take your aff hostage and refuse to negotiate—that’s necessary to implode the
system.
Baudrillard ‘76 (Jean Baudrillard, Professor of Sociology and Philosophy at Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, Symbolic Exchange and
Death, 1976) \\EG

We will not destroy the system by a direct, dialectical revolution of the economic or political infrastructure. Everything produced by
contradiction, by the relation of forces, or by energy in general, will only feed back into the mechanism and give it impetus, following a circular
distortion similar to a Moebius strip. We
will never defeat it by following its own logic of energy, calculation,
reason and revolution, history and power, or some finality or counter-finality. The worst violence at this
level has no purchase , and will only backfire against itself. We will never defeat the system on the plane of the real: the
worst error of all our revolutionary strategies is to believe that we will put an end to the system on the plane of the real: this is their imaginary,
imposed on them by the system itself, living or surviving only by always leading those who attack the system to fight amongst each other on the
terrain of reality, which is always the reality of the system. This is where they throw all their energies, their imaginary violence, where an
implacable logic constantly turns back into the system. We have only to do it violence or counter-violence since it thrives on symbolic violence -
not in the degraded sense in which this formula has found fortune, as a violence 'of signs', from which the system draws strength, or with which
it 'masks' its material violence : symbolic violence is deduced from a logic of the symbolic (which has nothing to do with the sign or with
We
energy): reversal, the incessant reversibility of the counter-gift and, conversely, the seizing of power by the unilateral exercise of the gift .
must therefore displace everything into the sphere of the symbolic, where challenge, reversal and
overbidding are the law, so that we can respond to death only by an equal or superior death. There is no
question here of real violence or force, the only question concerns the challenge and the logic of the symbolic. If
domination comes from the system's retention of the exclusivity of the gift without counter-gift - the
gift of work which can only be responded to by destruction or sacrifice , if not in consumption, which is only a spiral
of the system of surplus-gratification without result, therefore a spiral of surplus-domination, a gift of media and messages to which , due to the
monopoly of the code , nothing is allowed to retort ; the gift, everywhere and at every instant, of the social, of the protection agency, security,
- then the only solution is to
gratification and the solicitation of the social from which nothing is any longer permitted to escape
turn the principle of its power back against the system itself: the impossibility of responding or
retorting. To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death.
Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe
for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of
death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide
in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide So hostages are taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial
plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of the victims is ruled out , the hostage is the substitute , the alter-ego of the
The
'terrorist' - the hostage's death for the terrorist's. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same sacrificial act.
stakes are death without any possibility of negotiation , and therefore return to an inevitable
overbidding. Of course , they attempt to deploy the whole system of negotiation, and the terrorists themselves
often enter into this exchange scenario in terms of this calculated equivalence (the hostages' lives against some ransom or liberation, or indeed
for the prestige of the operation alone). From
this perspective, taking hostages is not original at all, it simply
creates an unforeseen and selective relation of forces which can be resolved either by traditional
violence or by negotiation. It is a tactical action. There is something else at stake, however, as we clearly saw at The Hague
over the course of ten days of incredible negotiations: no-one knew what could be negotiated, nor could they agree on terms, nor on the
possible equivalences of the exchange. Or again, even if they were formulated, the 'terrorists' demands amounted to a radical denial of
negotiation. It is precisely here that everything is played out, for with the impossibility of all negotiation we pass into the symbolic order, which
(the system itself lives solely by negotiation, even if this takes
is ignorant of this type of calculation and exchange
place in the equilibrium of violence).  The system can only respond to this irruption of the symbolic (the
most serious thing to befall it, basically the only 'revolution')  by the real, physical death of the terrorists.
This, however, is its defeat, since their death was their stake, so that by bringing about their deaths the system has merely impaled itself on its
own violence without really responding to the challenge that was thrown to it. Because the system can easily compute every death, even war
atrocities, but cannot compute the death-challenge or symbolic death, since this death has no calculable equivalent, it opens up an inexpiable
overbidding by other means than a death in exchange. Nothing corresponds to death except death. Which is precisely what happens in this
case: the system itself is driven to suicide in return, which suicide is manifest in its disarray and defeat.
However infinitesimal in terms of relations of forces it might be, the colossal apparatus of power is eliminated in this
situation where (the very excess of its) derision is turned back against itself. The police and the army, all the
institutions and mobilised violence of power whether individually or massed together, can do nothing
against this lowly but symbolic death. For this death draws it onto a plane where there is no longer any
response possible for it (hence the sudden structural liquefaction of power in '68, not because it was less strong, but because of the
simple symbolic displacement operated by the students' practices) . The system can only die in exchange, defeat itself to lift the challenge. Its
death at this instant is a symbolic response, but a death which wears it out . The challenge has the efficiency of a murderer Every society apart
from ours knows that, or used to know it. Ours is in the process of rediscovering it. The routes of symbolic effectiveness are those of an
alternative politics. Thus the dying ascetic challenges God ever to give him the equivalent of this death. God does all he can to give him this
equivalent 'a hundred times over' , in the form of prestige , of spiritual power, indeed of global hegemony But the ascetic's secret dream is to
attain such an extent of mortification that even God would be unable either to take up the challenge , or to absorb the debt . He will then have
triumphed over God, and become God himself. That is why the ascetic is always close to heresy and sacrilege, and as such condemned by the
Church , whose function it is merely to preserve God from this symbolic face-to-face, to protect Him from this mortal challenge where He is
summoned to die, to sacrifice Himself in order to take up the challenge of the mortified ascetic. The Church will have had this role for all time,
avoiding this type of catastrophic confrontation (catastrophic primarily for the Church) and substituting a rule-bound exchange of penitences
and gratifications, the impressario of a system of equivalences between God and men. The same situation exists in our relation to the system of
power All these institutions, all these social, economic, political and psychological mediations, are there so that no-one ever has the
opportunity to issue[s] this symbolic challenge, this challenge to the death, the irreversible gift which, like the absolute mortification of the
. It is no longer necessary that the
ascetic, brings about a victory over all power, however powerful its authority may be
possibility of this direct symbolic confrontation ever takes place. And this is the source of our profound
boredom. This is why taking hostages and other similar acts rekindle some fascination: they are at once
an exorbitant mirror for the system of its own repressive violence, and the model of a symbolic violence which is
always forbidden it, the only violence it cannot exert : its own de
 2NC – Black Terrorism (Long)
The only way out of a world structured through antiblackness, is an end to the White
World itself. If we are engaging in this war then resistance needs an “unspoken
dynamic”, a form of guerrilla linguistics, an undercommon communication. A stick-up
artist is any decentralized vigilante willing to rupture the system of semiotics through
a project of total disorder. To transfigure the symbolic stakes of this academic space,
Black terrorism steals in an act of fugitivity and gratuitous freedom. In the age of
Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon. The only choice we will have is to
fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to.
Gillespie ’17 (John Gillespie, PhD Student at UC Irvine, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, 2017, Propter Nos,
https://uci.academia.edu/JohnGillespie) \\EG

Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory that prescribes solutions
to the analysis in the conclusion of their work. However, one finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a
prophetic vision, a pulsing pessimist hope for the “end of the World.” For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its
colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way out is an end to the White World.
White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of
white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical
imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward
blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only through
black vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the spectacle of gratuitous freedom
is made visible. It is somewhere in this structural antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility of the World, and on the
other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its disorientation, that we found the language to say the unsayable and do the
undoable. As Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular present non-Black academics with
more than an intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism
that we don’t talk about…which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s calling for the end of the world…it wants the death of
everyone else in the same way that we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through AfroPessimism and be who one was
on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-Pessimism.17 If we are engaging in a war in which the
symbolic value, the semiotics of this World itself, positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of diversity, of
life itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a space where “words don’t go”— a
form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the
conversation is blackened, and the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to excavate insurgent
dictions still lost in the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is
death personified, then what might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we
recognized the inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness of that
death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard writes, “When global
power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery,
and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational
transfer?”19 Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics used by those who are facing globalized White
Being with asymmetrical technologies of terror, violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to
rupture the system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one to
the “desert of the [Black] Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon the semiotic system.20 Black
terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates the death embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable
the possibility of a radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized ontoepistemic deployment
of violence, and if violent insurgency is necessary, then the
decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to
counter the terror of White Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood as counter-
terror terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life. We only have the power to end the World through death. As
Baudrillard writes, “The radical difference is that the terrorist, while they have at their disposal weapons that are the system’s own, possess a
further lethal weapon: their own deaths.”21 The United States has an international military force, a storehouse of nuclear arms, and the
capacity, within their police state alone, to “terrorize” not just one block in Baltimore, but the whole entire world. Black terrorism is what
happens when we heed the Afro-Pessimist call that “A living death is as much a death as it is a living,”22 it is what happens when we take
seriously the unsayable in Afro-Pessimism. Black Terrorism is (non)ontological fugitivity that disavows any need to focus on social life— black
terrorism steals black death itself from White Being. It is for this reason that Baudrillard speaks to his own White Being and
the specter of terror when he says: When Western culture sees all of its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very
worst way. Our death is an extinction, an annihilation. Herein lies our poverty. When a singularity throws its own death into
the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, its dies its own natural death. This is an immense game of double or
quits. In committing suicide, the singularity suicides the other at the same time — we might say that the terrorist acts
literally ‘suicided’ the West. A death for a death, then, but transfigured by the symbolic stakes. ‘We have already
devastated our world, what more do you want?’ says Muray. But precisely, we have devastated this world, it still has to be
destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not at all the same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going
to be able to do the second.23 We are the others. Tasked with the (un)fortunate task of ending White hyper-realism,
the White World, and White Being. Well aware that if White Fascism continues the project of black annihilation, the only
choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to. But, ultimately, we must
remember the words of Huey Newton: “[T]he first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”24 In the age of
Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon.25 The disavowal of the lives of refugees is White Being attempting to
reconcile the “NationState” simulation with the free track and flow of bodies it’s been attempting to murder; the deportation of undocumented
immigrants in conjunction with the materialization of borders is White Being attempting to secure its linguistic and economic integrity; the
rise of the private prison and the militarization of the police force is White Being attempting to innovate
the system of enslavement and necropolitics for the 21st Century; the plundering of indigenous land and bodies is White Being
attempting to finish off the project of genocide; the disregard for the Earth is White Being ensuring the Anthropocene will also be the
Apocalypse. Trump is a reinvigoration, a call to arms, for White Being, and White
Being can only be “destroyed symbolically.”
Black terrorism transfigures the symbolic stakes because it steals away that condition of White Being’s
possibility in a kind of fugitivity that is a zero-transformation into Blackness. This being said, we all know that the only
thing that follows the absolute loss of hope is this Black Spring, this Neo-Fanonian violence, this blackened terroristic situational transfer. In
Baudrillard’s words, in the Age of Trump, let us remember the gift of immorality, “Terrorism
is immoral. The World Trade
Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself
immoral. So, let us be immoral…”26
 2NC – Black Terrorism (Short)
To transfigure the symbolic stakes of this academic space, Black terrorism steals in an
act of fugitivity and gratuitous freedom.
Gillespie ’17 (John Gillespie, PhD Student at UC Irvine, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, 2017, Propter Nos,
https://uci.academia.edu/JohnGillespie) \\EG

Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory that prescribes solutions
to the analysis in the conclusion of their work. However, one finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a
prophetic vision, a pulsing pessimist hope for the “end of the World.” For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its
colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way out is an end to the White World.
White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of
white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical
imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward
blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only through
black vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the spectacle of gratuitous freedom
is made visible. It is somewhere in this structural antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility of the World, and on the
other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its disorientation, that we found the language to say the unsayable and do the
undoable. As Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular present non-Black academics with
more than an intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism
that we don’t talk about…which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s calling for the end of the world…it wants the death of
everyone else in the same way that we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through AfroPessimism and be who one was
on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-Pessimism.17 If we are engaging in a war in which the
symbolic value, the semiotics of this World itself, positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of diversity, of
life itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a space where “words don’t go”— a
form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the
conversation is blackened, and the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to excavate insurgent
dictions still lost in the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is
death personified, then what might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we
recognized the inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness of that
death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard writes, “When global
power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery,
and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational
transfer?”19 Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics used by those who are facing globalized White
Being with asymmetrical technologies of terror, violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to
rupture the system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one to
the “desert of the [Black] Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon the semiotic system.20 Black
terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates the death embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable
the possibility of a radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized ontoepistemic deployment
of violence, and if violent insurgency is necessary, then the decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to
counter the terror of White Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood as counter-
terror terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life. We only have the power to end the World through death. As
Baudrillard writes, “The radical difference is that the terrorist, while they have at their disposal weapons that are the system’s own, possess a
further lethal weapon: their own deaths.”21 The United States has an international military force, a storehouse of nuclear arms, and the
capacity, within their police state alone, to “terrorize” not just one block in Baltimore, but the whole entire world. Black terrorism is what
happens when we heed the Afro-Pessimist call that “A living death is as much a death as it is a living,”22 it is what happens when we take
seriously the unsayable in Afro-Pessimism. Black Terrorism is (non)ontological fugitivity that disavows any need to focus on social life— black
terrorism steals black death itself from White Being. It is for this reason that Baudrillard speaks to his own White Being and
the specter of terror when he says: When Western culture sees all of its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very
worst way. Our death is an extinction, an annihilation. Herein lies our poverty. When a singularity throws its own death into
the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, its dies its own natural death. This is an immense game of double or
quits. In committing suicide, the singularity suicides the other at the same time — we might say that the terrorist acts
literally ‘suicided’ the West. A death for a death, then, but transfigured by the symbolic stakes. ‘We have already
devastated our world, what more do you want?’ says Muray. But precisely, we have devastated this world, it still has to be
destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not at all the same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going
to be able to do the second.23 We are the others. Tasked with the (un)fortunate task of ending White hyper-realism,
the White World, and White Being. Well aware that if White Fascism continues the project of black annihilation, the only
choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to. But, ultimately, we must
remember the words of Huey Newton: “[T]he first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”24 In the age of
Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon.25 The disavowal of the lives of refugees is White Being attempting to
reconcile the “NationState” simulation with the free track and flow of bodies it’s been attempting to murder; the deportation of undocumented
immigrants in conjunction with the materialization of borders is White Being attempting to secure its linguistic and economic integrity; the
rise of the private prison and the militarization of the police force is White Being attempting to innovate
the system of enslavement and necropolitics for the 21st Century; the plundering of indigenous land and bodies is White Being
attempting to finish off the project of genocide; the disregard for the Earth is White Being ensuring the Anthropocene will also be the
Apocalypse. Trump is a reinvigoration, a call to arms, for White Being, and White
Being can only be “destroyed symbolically.”
Black terrorism transfigures the symbolic stakes because it steals away that condition of White Being’s
possibility in a kind of fugitivity that is a zero-transformation into Blackness. This being said, we all know that the only
thing that follows the absolute loss of hope is this Black Spring, this Neo-Fanonian violence, this blackened terroristic situational transfer. In
Baudrillard’s words, in the Age of Trump, let us remember the gift of immorality, “Terrorism
is immoral. The World Trade
Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself
immoral. So, let us be immoral…”26
 2NC – White Stealing (Long)
In a world where Black culture is constantly stolen by White people, it is necessary to
start stealing that culture back. If a white person accuses you of stealing block them
keep it moving—stealing from white people is the best option.
Mack ’17 (Bunny Mack, Writer on all things gender, justice, race, and relationships, “The Solution To Cultural Appropriation is More
Stealing”, 27 October 2017, Medium, https://medium.com/@mckensiemack/the-solution-to-cultural-appropriation-is-more-stealing-
33cdda487259)

People steal culture every day. Brown people put on makeup to look like Black people. White people put on Halloween
costumes to look like South Asian people(not to be confused with tan people who are def going to get skin cancer in a few days).
Ashy makeup companies release makeup in brown shades to be like Rihanna. I mean, I could go on and on and on. And it’s not like we
don’t know what’s happening. We’ve seen hundreds of articles about people who put on cultures and
identities to make money and look interesting when really issa trap cause they are in fact boring as hell. If you’re like me,
you’ve probably reached your limit of trying to tell WABs (weak ass bitches) to stop appropriating culture. You probably feel like
giving up. Well I’m here to tell you that giving up is not the answer! No. Stealing is the answer.
“McKensie are you telling me to start stealing other people’s cultures since they are forever stealing
mine?” Yup! That is exactly what the fuck I am telling you to do right now. But let’s get specific, dear one. I am telling you to
steal.. from white people. That’s right. The most dominant group on the racialized hierachy of our country (right after Asian women
cause they are fucking killing it right now and make more than white women #haha) are white people. And since white people refuse
to stop stealing our culture and continue to provide models for lighter skinned Brown people to also follow in the footsteps of poppa
white man and steal the cultures of Black people and Native people they are not, it’s time we started stealing from them. “So
you’re saying I should go to River (insert rich white people neighborhood name) and start muffing the hell out of rich, white people and taking
their belongings?” No, no, no. Hold up, hun. I’m not saying that exactly but hey, if you wanna, go for it! Just
don’t caught. Cause in
our country making a white person feel bad about themselves can get you at least 10–15 if you’re Black,
and 5–10 if you’re Mexican so don’t go overboard. What I am saying though is that since white brands want to make money
stealing Black vernacular or gain followers by imitating Chola culture, it’s only fair that we steal their shit (that they
probably stole from us in the first place anyway because get real). So, here’s how you do it: If you see a video of a white person
giving a really inspirational speech on Twitter or on Facebook, write down some real shit that they say.
This should take no longer than two seconds because we are talking about the whites, am I right? Then take those ‘quotes’ and sell
them on t-shirts making sure to note that the person that actually said it was in fact you. If you see a funny
tweet that a white person has written, go to Facebook and Instagram and make a post about it. Make up some flim flammy fake ass story about
how you came up with the thought you’ve shared being sure to make it clear that you definitely did not steal it from a white person which you
absolutely did do which is great because that is what the fuck you should definitely be doing #teehee. Also, if a lot of people like it, be sure to
follow through with step one so that you can make money off that hilarious shit. It is your intellectual property after all! Now, I
know what you’re thinking. What if a white person makes a stink and claims that you’ve stolen your work. No worry, fam! We have the perfect
solution for that as well. If
that white person accuses you of stealing: Block they ass and keep it moving!
Stealing from white people is the best option. Just try it for 30 days and if in 30 days you’re not fully satisfied with the
intellectual property you’ve called your own and made money off of, then you’re not doing it right. Enjoy!
 2NC – White Stealing (Short)
Stealing from White people is your ethical imperative.
Mack ’17 (Bunny Mack, Writer on all things gender, justice, race, and relationships, “The Solution To Cultural Appropriation is More
Stealing”, 27 October 2017, Medium, https://medium.com/@mckensiemack/the-solution-to-cultural-appropriation-is-more-stealing-
33cdda487259)

People steal culture every day. Brown people put on makeup to look like Black people. White people put on Halloween
costumes to look like South Asian people(not to be confused with tan people who are def going to get skin cancer in a few days).
Ashy makeup companies release makeup in brown shades to be like Rihanna. I mean, I could go on and on and on. And it’s not like we
don’t know what’s happening. We’ve seen hundreds of articles about people who put on cultures and
identities to make money and look interesting when really issa trap cause they are in fact boring as hell. If you’re like me,
you’ve probably reached your limit of trying to tell WABs (weak ass bitches) to stop appropriating culture. You probably feel like
giving up. Well I’m here to tell you that giving up is not the answer! No. Stealing is the answer.
“McKensie are you telling me to start stealing other people’s cultures since they are forever stealing
mine?” Yup! That is exactly what the fuck I am telling you to do right now. But let’s get specific, dear one. I am telling you to
steal.. from white people. That’s right. The most dominant group on the racialized hierachy of our country (right after Asian women
cause they are fucking killing it right now and make more than white women #haha) are white people. And since white people refuse
to stop stealing our culture and continue to provide models for lighter skinned Brown people to also follow in the footsteps of poppa
white man and steal the cultures of Black people and Native people they are not, it’s time we started stealing from them. “So
you’re saying I should go to River (insert rich white people neighborhood name) and start muffing the hell out of rich, white people and taking
their belongings?” No, no, no. Hold up, hun. I’m not saying that exactly but hey, if you wanna, go for it! Just
don’t caught. Cause in
our country making a white person feel bad about themselves can get you at least 10–15 if you’re Black,
and 5–10 if you’re Mexican so don’t go overboard. What I am saying though is that since white brands want to make money
stealing Black vernacular or gain followers by imitating Chola culture, it’s only fair that we steal their shit (that they
probably stole from us in the first place anyway because get real). So, here’s how you do it: If you see a video of a white person
giving a really inspirational speech on Twitter or on Facebook, write down some real shit that they say.
This should take no longer than two seconds because we are talking about the whites, am I right? Then take those ‘quotes’ and sell
them on t-shirts making sure to note that the person that actually said it was in fact you. If you see a funny
tweet that a white person has written, go to Facebook and Instagram and make a post about it. Make up some flim flammy fake ass story about
how you came up with the thought you’ve shared being sure to make it clear that you definitely did not steal it from a white person which you
absolutely did do which is great because that is what the fuck you should definitely be doing #teehee. Also, if a lot of people like it, be sure to
follow through with step one so that you can make money off that hilarious shit. It is your intellectual property after all! Now, I
know what you’re thinking. What if a white person makes a stink and claims that you’ve stolen your work. No worry, fam! We have the perfect
solution for that as well. If
that white person accuses you of stealing: Block they ass and keep it moving!
Stealing from white people is the best option. Just try it for 30 days and if in 30 days you’re not fully satisfied with the
intellectual property you’ve called your own and made money off of, then you’re not doing it right. Enjoy!
 2NC – Feminism
Radical Black feminism is the best political strategy for global change and provides the
best metric for understanding dynamic power relations in contemporary society.
McDuffie ’12 (Erik McDuffie, McDuffie is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2012, pp. 1-30, “"For
full freedom of . . . colored women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States . . .": Black Women Radicals and the Practice of a Black Women's
International”, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/496135/pdf) \\EG

Audley “queen mother” moore was ecstatic. Organizers of the All African Women’s Conference, a militant anticolonial, Pan-African women’s
group, invited the seventy-three-year-old, New York City–based African American activist to address the gathering held in Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania, on July 26, 1972. Moore had attained an iconic stature as a revered, elder black nationalist amongst young black militants. This
reputation was well earned. Moore was a life-long Garveyite and leading personality in the Harlem Communist Party (CPUSA) during the 1930s
and 1940s. However, after the CPUSA endured internal storms and external buffeting after 1945, she departed and reinvented herself into a
radical black nationalist who embraced all things “African.” But she never abandoned Marxism. In the ensuing years, she adopted an
idiosyncratic politics combining black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, Third Worldism, Marxism, and feminism, with special concern
for the rights and freedom of black women in the United States and across the African diaspora. She was the founder of the modern reparation
movement and a progenitor of Black Power of the 1960s. She tutored Malcolm X and staunchly supported early Black Power leader Robert F.
Williams. Internationally, she earned the respect of notable African heads of state. These included Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Tanzanian
president Julius Nyerere. Years before it became chic, Moore wore long African-print dresses, amulets, and necklaces. Given her tenacious
support for black self-determination and wide international political networks, she stands as a major figure in twentieth-century black
nationalism, Communism, and Pan-Africanism.1 A powerful speaker, Queen Mother Moore opened her address,
“Africa for the Africans, At Home and Aboard,” with a warm greeting to conference delegates. She declared: “I have
the honor to convey sisterly greetings to you from thousands of your sisters in the United States of
America who are conscious of their African heritage and are here with you in love and in spirit.”
Praising the African woman as the “mother of civilization,” she lauded black women for their beauty,
creativity, and brilliance. At the same time, she called attention to their sufferance under slavery, colonialism, imperialism,
neocolonialism, and global white supremacy. Emphasizing the importance of forging political coalitions between
African-descended women across the diaspora, she stated that African American women stood in
revolutionary solidarity with their “sisters in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Guinea-Bissau, and all
freedom fighters under the domination of the colonialists.” Without question, her call for building
transnational political solidarities between African-descended women worldwide cohered with the
Pan-African, anticolonial, anticapitalist, and feminist objectives of the All African Women’s Conference. 2
Despite her international prominence in black nationalist, Pan-African, and communist organizations,
the growing body of scholarship on “black internationalism” has largely erased the transnational
political practice of black women radicals like Queen Mother Moore who pursued their work in the Communist Left and
Black Left during the early- and mid-twentieth century.3 As the literary scholar Carole Boyce Davies observes: “Black women have
become sisters outside of the black radical intellectual tradition.”4 The erasure of black women radicals
from narratives of black internationalism is curious given that several women had attained
international reputations as leaders, community activists, and thinkers within the Black Left and CPUSA during the Old Left
period, bookended by the Russian Revolution in 1917 and by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinist atrocities in 1956. 5
These women include Queen Mother Moore, Trinidad-born Communist Party leader Claudia Jones,
bohemian world traveler Louise Thompson Patterson, civil rights activist Esther Cooper Jackson, and
others.6 Decades ahead of their time, they forged Black Left feminism, a pathbreaking feminism that
centers working-class women by combining black nationalist and American Communist Party (CPUSA)
positions on race, gender, and class with black women radicals’ own lived experiences. Black Left
feminists formulated a theory of “triple oppression.” Emphasizing the connections among racial,
gender, and class oppression, the theory posited that the eradication of one form of oppression
requires the concurrent dismantling of all systems of oppression. This conceptual framework, now
referred to by feminist scholars as intersectionality, is most commonly associated with black feminist
organizations of the 1970s such as the Third World Women’s Alliance and the Combahee River
Collective.7 In this article, I am concerned with recovering the transnational political practice of black
women of the Old Left. The historians Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins’s recent definition of black
internationalism is a useful starting point for explicating the transnational politics of the women discussed here: “At the core of black
internationalism is the ideal of universal emancipation, unbounded by national, imperial, continental or
oceanic boundaries—or even by racial ones.”8 While black women radicals adhered to these positions,
they also transcended them by proffering their own variant of black internationalism. Black Left feminists’ key
intervention to black internationalism rested in their practice of what I call a “black women’s international.” Black women radicals never
explicitly used this term. But through
their migrations, public speaking, journalism, activism, and overseas
travel, we can see how they formulated and practiced an insurgent gendered vision of black
internationalism in response to retrogressive practices embodied in slavery, capitalism, colonialism,
and imperialism and their own lived experiences. They did not simply add gender to the discussion of
internationalism. Instead, they rethought black internationalism by moving black women from the
margins to the center in discussions in the Communist Left about black self-determination, women’s rights,
trade unionism, peace, decolonization, and democracy. 9 For Black Left feminists, black women in the
United States and across the diaspora represented the vanguard for transformative change globally
due to their locations at the interstices of multiple oppressions. These conclusions presaged the black socialist feminist
transnationalism articulated in the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977, arguably one of the most significant black and U.S. feminist
manifestos of the twentieth century. Like the Combahee River Collective, Black Left feminists charged that realizing
black women’s
liberation would actualize the full freedom for all people since black women’s freedom would require
the dismantlement of all forms of human oppression.10 Another important component of Black Left feminists’ global
vision was their belief in the necessity of forging transnational political solidarities with women of color and white women leftists from around
the world. For these reasons, Black Left feminists were constantly on the move, both domestically and internationally.11 Excavating the history
of the “black women’s international” does more than simply tell an interesting—albeit largely unknown—story about the transnational political
practices of black women radicals of the Old Left. Rather, their
global visions require us to rethink and dispense with the
masculinist scholarly framings of black internationalism. Historically, black women have been central to building
internationally focused protest movements that understood black women’s status as a barometer to measure democracy around the world.
Tracing the practice of the “black women’s international” provides a genealogy for twentieth-century
black women’s transnational praxis and black feminist knowledge production. Black Left feminists played an
important role in nurturing the global visions of black feminists of the 1970s. These exchanges highlight the connections between twentieth
century black feminist generations that scholars and activists themselves have not always readily acknowledged. The
dynamic history
of the “black women’s international” elucidates the complex ways black women have confronted and
negotiated power and marginalization, as well as citizenship and disenfranchisement, in the United
States and globally during the twentieth century, with implications for understanding and transforming
our contemporary world.12

The CP’s Black feminist organization and knowledge-making understands exploitation

in a global context and utilizes the best vehicle to realize Black women’s freedom,
through the international Left.
McDuffie ’12 (Erik McDuffie, McDuffie is an Associate Professor in the Department of African AmericanStudies at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2012, pp. 1-30, “"For
full freedom of . . . colored women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States . . .": Black Women Radicals and the Practice of a Black Women's
International”, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/496135/pdf) \\EG
Throughout the entire Old Left period, public
speaking and journalism were an important medium through which
black women radicals attempted to build a “black women’s international.” While their transnational politics
evolved and matured over time in response to local and global events, as well as with their own lived experiences, two key positions remained
constant: first, black women constituted key agents in the struggle for transformative social change globally;
second, forging transnational political solidarities with women around the world sincerely committed to
racial equality, internationalism, women’s rights, and economic justice was essential for realizing black
women’s freedom and democracy. This position was evident from the earliest days of black women’s involvement in the
Communist Left. Beginning in the early 1920s, Grace P. Campbell, the first black women to officially join the Communist Party,
articulated the “black women’s international” in her public speaking. Reared in Washington, D.C., she came to New
York, where she emerged prior to World War I as a nationally renowned social worker for her advocacy on the behalf of poor, single black
mothers in Harlem. Due to her encounters with these women , her associations with a group of diasporan
radicals in Harlem, and own lived experiences, she came to appreciate the multiple oppressions facing
black working women. This growing awareness radicalized her. She joined the Socialist Party and then
the African Blood Brotherhood, a revolutionary nationalist group that was initially independent of the
Communist Party. She then enlisted in the Communist Party.27 Like black women radicals in the coming years, Campbell was deeply
impressed with the newly formed Soviet Union and the special promise she believed it offered to black people, particularly women. She
gained a reputation in Harlem as a well-known street corner speaker who denounced capitalism,
racism, and imperialism and championed women’s rights and the Soviet Union. For example, at a leftist rally in
Harlem in 1921, a government informant reported: “[She] devoted about twenty minutes condemning all other forms of government but the
Soviet, which she claims is the only hope of the workingman.”28 Convinced that socialism was essential to improving black
women’s status, Campbell “conduct[ed] an active campaign [in generating interest in socialism] among the colored women,” reported
another government agent.29 Her alleged remarks suggest that she saw the Soviet Union as an ally for black
women and that building coalitions with radical women around the world was essential for realizing
black women’s freedom. Writings by black women radicals from the 1930s onward extended Grace Campbell’s concern for
the status of multiply oppressed black women, understood their exploitation in a global context, and
saw the international Left as the best vehicle to realize black women’s full freedom. Moreover, they
consciously formulated their ideas in response to a prevailing tendency in the Communist Left that
understood women as universally white and oppressed and articulated black liberation in masculinist terms.30 Arguably the
most sophisticated of these works during the Depression years was Esther Cooper’s master’s thesis of 1940, “The Negro Woman Domestic
Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism.” The thesis remains the most thorough sociological study on the labor conditions of African American
female household workers and their efforts to unionize. Reared in a politically active, middle-class family in Arlington, Virginia, Cooper wrote
the thesis while earning her masters in sociology at the historically black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her disgust with the
exploitation of black women domestics and her nascent leftist politics, which eventually led her to join the Communist Party, prompted her to
write the thesis. The study was a key part of her early intellectual foundation, helping to set the stage for her staunch support for civil rights,
social justice, internationalism, and radical democracy with special concern for African American women, which were trademarks of her life’s
work.31 The thesis’ main argument asserted that “the problems faced by Negro women domestic workers [were] responsive to amelioration
through trade union organizations.” Cooper discussed how domestic labor exploited black women household laborers as blacks, women, and
workers and rendered their labor invisible to the mainstream trade union movement. Framing black women domestics as the most vulnerable
and exploited women and workers in the U.S. political economy, society would collapse, she insisted, if was not for the backbreaking, low-paid,
and undervalued household labor performed by black women. She added that white housewives enjoyed a degree of freedom from the daily
drudgery of housework and childcare by employing black women to perform this labor. Despite their marginal status, she rejected the
mainstream American labor movement’s position that black domestic workers were “unorganizable.” Such claims “have been proven false,”
she argued, by the success in organizing domestic workers in Western Europe and, above all, the Soviet Union. In stark contrast to the United
States, she pointed out that in the Soviet Union “the social standing of domestic workers is equal to any other worker.” Resembling other black
women radicals’ admiration for the Soviet Union and Soviet women’s enhanced rights, Cooper also viewed the Soviet Union as a model for
freeing black women.32
2NC – UQ
 2NC – UQ (Long)
Increasing polarization in the political sphere has put forth signs of the end times.
Inside debate, there is an ongoing war against the void of antiblackness versus calls
for rhetorical unity and stasis. Blackness is intrinsic to modernity because it is
necessary for the construction of the Subject—it names and creates the forms that
comprise modern grammar. Nothing short of fracturing the spatiotemporal
understandings of the world and debate will address the totality of antiblack violence.
the radical force of Blackness and the “afterlife of slavery” lie at the turn of thought—
announcing the End of the World as we know it.
Kelsie ’19 (Amber Kelsie, Department of Communications at Wake Forest University, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 52, Number 1, 2019,
pp. 63-70, “Blackened Debate at the End of the World”, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/721920) \\EG

We are haunted by the specter of civil war. Liberal and conservative politicians and commentators openly express
anxiety about the possibility of outright hostilities and the “unravelling [of ] our national fabric” (Gambino 2017).
Increasing polarization, identity politics that destroys persuasion, an atmosphere of conspiracy regarding the deep
state or foreign puppet masters, apparent disenchantment with institutions, general mistrust in electoral politics, a gridlocked and
weak congress, and open skirmishes between white nationalist and antifascists are put forth as signs of
the end times (see, e.g., Blight 2017; Wright 2017; DeGroot 2018; Smith 2018). The looming crisis of the end of politics that
everywhere drives the nostalgic desire for a return to a normalcy and civility invites us to rethink debate and
to pose a different question that does not seek to redeem a past that never was and continues to come at too high a cost for the wretched of
the earth. Rather than “make debate great again,” I’d like to sit with the vertigo so as to consider debate’s (im)possible
outside. Such a quest for a horizon that is before-after-immanent to the End (of politics or history or the world) will require that we rethink
the spatiotemporal coordinates of the entire liberal project that secures the parameters of debate as the
dialectical and agonistic contestation of the possible. My central interlocutor here will be blackness: that (non-)ontological
constitutive outside of the modern grammar that is relegated to the realm of absolute necessity, negativity, incapacity, and pathology that
subtends the political and the rhetorical. As that which is always already outside the World/History, blackness
provides an
anoriginary nonplace from which to think crisis and a politics of actualizing the impossible. Imminent
civil war is an interesting but unsurprising anxiety ; it is unsurprising because the U.S. Civil War informs so much of the
popular narrative of the United States and its ethical position that confirms the progressive nature of time, and because liberal sovereignty was
always a war waged against civil war.1 And it is interesting because the Greeks referred to civil war as “stasis.” Today standing, state, and
stability are also meanings of stasis, as it emerges from histemi. Stasis
then doubles both as sovereignty and as
sovereignty’s undoing and evokes a constant permanence of war even in peace. Stasis in rhetorical studies takes
on the meaning of “issue” and serves as a hermeneutic for coming to consensus on the point of contention from which debate proceeds. Stasis
here also means standing in the sense that there is some “ground” in the form of prior consensus on the nature of the disagreement.2 The
somewhat paradoxical relationship between consensus and dissensus found in stasis speaks to a kind of
disavowal of ungroundedness that precedes even the point from which to begin speaking . Must one have a
presupposed potentiality for a common ground to be able to proceed in argument? Refusing this disavowal of groundlessness as it emerges in
contemporary figurations of agonistic debate might enable us to more accurately think of rhetoric in its
modern inflection as the presupposition of a ground as a war against its own void via antiblackness. The
inversion of Clausewitz’s proposition is salient: rhetoric is the continuation of war by other means; rhetoric as a
mode of war in an effort to ontologize itself against its groundless outside.3 The (im)possible is always at
stake in debate since rhetoric regards the contingent as its necessary presupposition. According to Dilip
Gaonkar, this “key, but largely unnoticed, assumption in contemporary rhetorical theory” finds its basis in Aristotle’s response to Plato’s charge
of the unspecifiability of rhetoric (2004, 5). Instead of freeing us to reflect explicitly on the nature of contingency, Aristotle’s domestication of
rhetoric by placing rhetoric within the domain of the “contingent, yet probable” has prompted most rhetorical scholars to forgo consideration
of contingency in favor of the thematic of probability: doxa, constraints, norms, ideology. Contingency in these schemas tends to be considered
as a property ascribed to statements, propositions, and rhetorical acts—to the ontic world that constitutes the context of the rhetor—rather
than as a mode of the subject or the singular encounter that constitutes a rhetorical situation. The
possibility of rhetorical
dialectic, that exigency that provides the opportunity for agonistic argument that can be sublated into
judgment, animates historical progress and places debate as the ground for civic life. In the liberal
understanding of contemporary debate, contingency takes on an interior spatial dimension as the possible content
through a disavowal of the contingency of debate’s outside that is rendered impossible. To say that debate is
impossible is then to beckon to war on the horizon. It is to recognize the state of emergency as the end
of the state of debate. The historical legacy of the U.S. Civil War will not let us end it there however, because blackness haunts even
civil war, and threatens stasis in both its senses with incoherence. To leave raciality by the wayside is to repeat the endless disavowal that what
we are threatened with is civil war and not race war. It is to still recuperate this World though the dialectical resolution that can adjust
antagonism to agonism. It is to wage liberal sovereignty’s war against civil war all over again. Polite
discussions that acknowledge
racial terror only so as to explain away racial violence as the unique domain of extremists maintain a
sense of white innocence that not only individuates a structural condition, but also pathologizes and
prohibits black utterance (especially when that utterance might take on the form of rage) by adjusting the impossible
demands of blackness back to the acceptable terms of debate. Within such discussions, blackness can
only appear as an afterthought, as what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms the affectable I or outer-determined rather than self-
determined subject in the onto-epistemological modern text (da Silva 2007). Raciality is intrinsic to modernity because it is
necessary for the construction of the Subject—it names the materialization of the spatiotemporal forms
that make the modern grammar. It creates the grounds for the self-determined subject. For da Silva,
nothing short of a fracturing of the spatiotemporal formal principles of understanding that subtend
historical and scientific knowledge will redress the totality of racial violence, especially as it concerns black folk. Let us then
take seriously Du Bois’s insight into the actual U.S. Civil War that animates so many antiblack pathologies today: that it was the black slaves, not Lincoln nor the Union, who won the war;
and that it was the slaves, and not the South, who ultimately lost. For it was in the chaos and crisis of civil war that fugitivity realized freedom only to have it snatched away in Reconstruction:
“The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. . . . Democracy died save in the hearts of black folk” (Du Bois 1935, 30). In Black Reconstruction,
we are gifted a tale of the violence of antiblack dialectic and the potential of black fugitivity. The common narrative that the North fought a war to end slavery and to preserve the Union
figures the U.S. Civil War as a political battle concerning sovereignty and succession, or in the radical imagination as a battle for the future of capital between an industrial North and a pastoral
planter economy in the South. For Du Bois this cannot be the whole or even essential part of the story, as both narratives naturalize the position of the slave and her nominal emancipation as
derivative rather than active. In Du Bois’s account, black liberation was never the terms on which the war was fought; the war was fought over competing concerns to limit the competition
that black people posed to whites, both as slave labor and as free labor. The North for its part desired neither the abolition of slavery nor its expansion into the western territories. Northerners
desired a resolution to an untenable status quo thrown into disequilibrium by competing visions for how best to subjugate the black population to secure the white settlerist way of life. It was
not until the slaves, through the waging of the General Strike, showed the North the way to win the war that Lincoln reluctantly issued the Emancipation Proclamation (Du Bois 1935, 82). The
General Strike was the moment in which the impossible was actualized, through an incisive refusal to continue under the terms presented: “This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was
a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps a half million people. They wanted to stop the economy of the plantation
system, and to do that they left the plantations” (Du Bois 1935, 68). Significantly, Du Bois’s analysis of the Civil War extends beyond the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865 to the end of
Reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow in 1878. The democracy to come was quickly sealed off in the compromises made between the North and the South that we call Reconstruction.
Here debate, both as contestation on common ground and as the resolution to war, could only re-elaborate black suffering through nominal emancipation. In Reconstruction we witness how
the bargain was struck for a newly transformed American whiteness produced through the sublation of the “Southern way of life” (the fantasy of which still animates grievances on the Right),

The reinstantiation of master-slave relationships in confederate amnesty, black codes, the

but against black life.

Thirteenth Amendment, vagrancy laws, convict leasing, extralegal terror, and the ongoing sentimental
and material expropriation of total value from the slave that sustains global capital constitutes the
emergence of the “afterlife of slavery” that characterizes our present (Hartman 1997). Du Bois’s analysis disrupts the
spatiotemporal coordinates of the political to think the (im)possibility of black politics and liberation. To think with and through blackness
means that we cannot think the Civil War as a demarcated event distinct from Reconstruction and Jim Crow, or think the stasis of contestation
between the divisions of a polity.
We must abandon the liberal notion of progress that “accumulates . . .
[and] . . . captures” black suffering in the name of securing an antiblack future as well as the appeal of
universality and particularity which spatially “arrests Blackness’s creative potential” (Dillon 2013, 42; da Silva
2014, 84). According to da Silva, “such an understanding of total value [of slavery for the creation of the World] requires a suspension of the
view that all there is is in Time and Space . . . the
radical force of Blackness lies at the turn of thought—that is,
Blackness knowing and studying announces the End of the World as we know it” (2014, 84, emphasis mine). Da
Silva joins a growing number of black scholars in many different disciplinary homes thinking through the metaphysics of blackness as that which
is ungrounded and ontologically null with respect to the modern onto-epistemological paradigm.4 In
the World that ontologizes
antiblackness and racial capitalism, the calculus of racial terror exceeds and makes possible recognition
through the reduction of blackness to the figure of the Slave. The middle passage here is metonymic,
naming the production of anagrammatical blackness through the ongoing logistic of being captured and
shipped, that reduces blackness from body to flesh, “that zero degree of social conceptualization that
does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse” (Sharpe 2016; Spillers 1987, 67). Such a proposition returns
raciality, specifically blackness and antiblackness, to the analysis of what grounds debate’s (im)possibility. What would it mean to think debate
as a praxis of the impossible? To think a blackened debate not as the presupposition of a ground through approximation to an antiblack human
genre of Man, the Subject or the transparent I, but as Harney and Moten say, “jurisgenerative black social life” (2017, 15)? We would need to
rethink the cherished terms of rhetoric itself. We might think debate not as dialectic that both precedes and proceeds from stasis, but as the
refusal of “the call to order” that opens up black forms of life, even as form is placed under erasure (Halberstam 2013, 9). From this vantage
point of blackness, which is not really a vantage point at all, but a being out of place and time, of Being under erasure in the condition of mutual
dispossession, we might begin to sketch other visions that deactivate rhetoric’s ontologizing premises, to hold for a moment, in the hold and in
the wake, not grounded but oceanic movement, decay and life, where even dead things become something else. It is here and happening all
the time in the marooned spaces of the world. In studying debate’s (im)possibility, we might theorize at the End of the World as a praxis
oriented toward its abolition.

Black life is lived in a white hyper-reality, inside a constituted white fiction that
establishes Blackness as a symbol of death. This hyper-realism is the paradigm
whereby consciousness is unable to distinguish between the fictions created by White
Being and the Real, to permit Black death to be subsumed in every encounter with the
World. In a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange, Blackness gives birth to the
economy of signification that structures humanity. As such, white symbolism is
everything.
Gillespie ’17 (John Gillespie, PhD Student at UC Irvine, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, 2017, Propter Nos,
https://uci.academia.edu/JohnGillespie) \\EG

Black life is lived in a white hyper-reality. By this I mean, black life is lived inside a constituted white
fiction which concretizes itself as fact. Black life is a life lived in non-existence; blackness “exists” as a symbol of
death that is, but is not. Blackness “exists” only insofar as White Being structures it onto a map of anti-black
violence.4 Achille Mbembe corroborates this in his Critique of Black Reason, stating: Racism consists, most of all, in substituting
what is with something else, with another reality. It has the power to distort the real and to fix affect, but it is also a form of psychic
derangement, the mechanism through which the repressed suddenly surfaces. When the racist sees the Black person, he does not see that the
Black person is not there, does not exist, and is just a sign of a pathological fixation on the absence of a relationship. We must therefore
consider race as being both beside and beyond being.5 The
reality that replaces that which is is a white hyper-reality.
This white hyperrealism fixes blackness as “a sign of a pathological fixation.” White hyper-realism is the
paradigm whereby consciousness is unable to distinguish between the fictions created by White Being
and the Real. It is this fact that permits black death to be subsumed in simulations by each and every
(analytic) encounter with Whiteness and the World. Questions like, “Can the Black suffer?” and “Is it capable for the Black to
be wronged?” arise due to the inability to access a grammar of suffering to communicate a harm that has never ended, a harm that can never
end without ending the World itself. It is for this reason that viral videos of black death, more than opening the possibility for liberal notions of
justice, seem to suture the relationship between the mythical and the real that perpetuates itself through the reification of black trauma. Black
death, more than deconstructing the ontics of the Human, seems to extend its hyper-reality. Black death
makes it harder to
distinguish white fictions from any sense of real harm being done to human flesh. The Black is meant to
experience its death over and over and over again; and the World itself recycles all its fictions-as-the-Real. Put differently,
the White World subjects the Black to perpetual, gratuitous violence, and then uses that violence as
evidence to further suggest that the Black is not Human. For how can a Human endure such a thing? The experience of
gratuitous violence secures the semiotics of the white hyper-reality. White Disneyland stays intact. Blackness exists at the nexus of
fact and fiction, possibility and (non)value, inclusion and exclusion. Blackness is trapped even in saying it’s trapped because the “trapped-ness”
of the Black extends to locations where the diction and syntax of White “words don’t go.”6 The Black does not have the grammar to speak
against where and how it is trapped since Blackness can only articulate itself through the semiotics of Whiteness. That White Being continues to
center black death as the matrix of possibility for its hyper-realist structure indexes the promise of death insofar that White Being is promised
futurity. The Black was rendered fungible through the conjunction of the political and the libidinal
economy of the anti-Black world. Blackness gave birth to the commodity and the economy of
signification that structures the cartography of the Human’s coordinates. This could be said to be a still birth,
insofar as the nature of Black life in a white hyper-reality is conducted on a plane that guarantees natal alienation,
social, and ontological death. The Black body lives to die; the specter of death shadows it everywhere.
What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what
“structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the
representational process” that structures “ the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive
statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact,
in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the
Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and
understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that
operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our orderspecific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to
whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal
value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “[I] am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)
…”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of
semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates
the entire World. White
Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that
has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing
between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the
antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity. 11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then
Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator.
The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the
language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that
Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is,
paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal
positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only
through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of
this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all
to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If
black death
centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-
outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what
orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death
became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being?

In a world structured by a negative categorical imperative, “above all, don’t be black”,

the only way out is an end to the White World itself. If we are engaging in this war
then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic”, a form of guerrilla linguistics, an
undercommon communication. In the age of Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches
its horizon. The only choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but
because we have to.
Gillespie ’17 (John Gillespie, PhD Student at UC Irvine, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, 2017, Propter Nos,
https://uci.academia.edu/JohnGillespie) \\EG
Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory that prescribes solutions
to the analysis in the conclusion of their work. However, one finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a
prophetic vision, a pulsing pessimist hope for the “end of the World.” For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its
colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way out is an end to the White World.
White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of
white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical
imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward
blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only through
black vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the spectacle of gratuitous freedom
is made visible. It is somewhere in this structural antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility of the World, and on the
other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its disorientation, that we found the language to say the unsayable and do the
undoable. As Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular present non-Black academics with
more than an intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism
that we don’t talk about…which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s calling for the end of the world…it wants the death of
everyone else in the same way that we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through AfroPessimism and be who one was
on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-Pessimism.17 If we are engaging in a war in which the
symbolic value, the semiotics of this World itself, positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of diversity, of
life itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a space where “words don’t go”— a
form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the
conversation is blackened, and the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to excavate insurgent
dictions still lost in the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is
death personified, then what might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we
recognized the inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness of that
death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard writes, “When global
power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery,
and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational
transfer?”19 Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics used by those who are facing globalized White
Being with asymmetrical technologies of terror, violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to
rupture the system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one to
the “desert of the [Black] Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon the semiotic system.20 Black
terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates the death embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable
the possibility of a radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized ontoepistemic deployment
of violence, and if violent insurgency is necessary, then the decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to
counter the terror of White Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood as counter-
terror terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life. We only have the power to end the World through death. As
Baudrillard writes, “The radical difference is that the terrorist, while they have at their disposal weapons that are the system’s own, possess a
further lethal weapon: their own deaths.”21 The United States has an international military force, a storehouse of nuclear arms, and the
capacity, within their police state alone, to “terrorize” not just one block in Baltimore, but the whole entire world. Black terrorism is what
happens when we heed the Afro-Pessimist call that “A living death is as much a death as it is a living,”22 it is what happens when we take
seriously the unsayable in Afro-Pessimism. Black Terrorism is (non)ontological fugitivity that disavows any need to focus on social life— black
terrorism steals black death itself from White Being. It is for this reason that Baudrillard speaks to his own White Being and
the specter of terror when he says: When Western culture sees all of its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very
worst way. Our death is an extinction, an annihilation. Herein lies our poverty. When
a singularity throws its own death into
the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, its dies its own natural death. This is an immense game of double or
quits. In committing suicide, the singularity suicides the other at the same time — we might say that the terrorist acts
literally ‘suicided’ the West. A death for a death, then, but transfigured by the symbolic stakes. ‘We have already
devastated our world, what more do you want?’ says Muray. But precisely, we have devastated this world, it still has to be
destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not at all the same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going
to be able to do the second.23 We are the others. Tasked with the (un)fortunate task of ending White hyper-realism,
the White World, and White Being. Well aware that if White Fascism continues the project of black annihilation, the only
choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to. But, ultimately, we must
remember the words of Huey Newton: “[T]he first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”24 In the age of
Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon.25 The disavowal of the lives of refugees is White Being attempting to
reconcile the “NationState” simulation with the free track and flow of bodies it’s been attempting to murder; the deportation of undocumented
immigrants in conjunction with the materialization of borders is White Being attempting to secure its linguistic and economic integrity; the
rise of the private prison and the militarization of the police force is White Being attempting to innovate
the system of enslavement and necropolitics for the 21st Century; the plundering of indigenous land and bodies is White Being
attempting to finish off the project of genocide; the disregard for the Earth is White Being ensuring the Anthropocene will also be the
Apocalypse. Trump is a reinvigoration, a call to arms, for White Being, and White
Being can only be “destroyed symbolically.”
Black terrorism transfigures the symbolic stakes because it steals away that condition of White Being’s
possibility in a kind of fugitivity that is a zero-transformation into Blackness. This being said, we all know that the only
thing that follows the absolute loss of hope is this Black Spring, this Neo-Fanonian violence, this blackened terroristic situational transfer. In
Baudrillard’s words, in the Age of Trump, let us remember the gift of immorality, “Terrorism
is immoral. The World Trade
Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself
immoral. So, let us be immoral…”26
 2NC – UQ (Short)
Blackness structures a permanent war in and outside debate.
Kelsie ’19 (Amber Kelsie, Department of Communications at Wake Forest University, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 52, Number 1, 2019,
pp. 63-70, “Blackened Debate at the End of the World”, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/721920) \\EG

We are haunted by the specter of civil war. Liberal and conservative politicians and commentators openly express
anxiety about the possibility of outright hostilities and the “unravelling [of ] our national fabric” (Gambino 2017).
Increasing polarization, identity politics that destroys persuasion, an atmosphere of conspiracy regarding the deep
state or foreign puppet masters, apparent disenchantment with institutions, general mistrust in electoral politics, a gridlocked and
weak congress, and open skirmishes between white nationalist and antifascists are put forth as signs of
the end times (see, e.g., Blight 2017; Wright 2017; DeGroot 2018; Smith 2018). The looming crisis of the end of politics that
everywhere drives the nostalgic desire for a return to a normalcy and civility invites us to rethink debate and
to pose a different question that does not seek to redeem a past that never was and continues to come at too high a cost for the wretched of
the earth. Rather than “make debate great again,” I’d like to sit with the vertigo so as to consider debate’s (im)possible
outside. Such a quest for a horizon that is before-after-immanent to the End (of politics or history or the world) will require that we rethink
the spatiotemporal coordinates of the entire liberal project that secures the parameters of debate as the
dialectical and agonistic contestation of the possible. My central interlocutor here will be blackness: that (non-)ontological
constitutive outside of the modern grammar that is relegated to the realm of absolute necessity, negativity, incapacity, and pathology that
subtends the political and the rhetorical. As that which is always already outside the World/History, blackness
provides an
anoriginary nonplace from which to think crisis and a politics of actualizing the impossible. Imminent
civil war is an interesting but unsurprising anxiety ; it is unsurprising because the U.S. Civil War informs so much of the
popular narrative of the United States and its ethical position that confirms the progressive nature of time, and because liberal sovereignty was
always a war waged against civil war.1 And it is interesting because the Greeks referred to civil war as “stasis.” Today standing, state, and
stability are also meanings of stasis, as it emerges from histemi. Stasis
then doubles both as sovereignty and as
sovereignty’s undoing and evokes a constant permanence of war even in peace. Stasis in rhetorical studies takes
on the meaning of “issue” and serves as a hermeneutic for coming to consensus on the point of contention from which debate proceeds. Stasis
here also means standing in the sense that there is some “ground” in the form of prior consensus on the nature of the disagreement.2 The
somewhat paradoxical relationship between consensus and dissensus found in stasis speaks to a kind of
disavowal of ungroundedness that precedes even the point from which to begin speaking . Must one have a
presupposed potentiality for a common ground to be able to proceed in argument? Refusing this disavowal of groundlessness as it emerges in
contemporary figurations of agonistic debate might enable us to more accurately think of rhetoric in its
modern inflection as the presupposition of a ground as a war against its own void via antiblackness. The
inversion of Clausewitz’s proposition is salient: rhetoric is the continuation of war by other means; rhetoric as a
mode of war in an effort to ontologize itself against its groundless outside.3 The (im)possible is always at
stake in debate since rhetoric regards the contingent as its necessary presupposition. According to Dilip
Gaonkar, this “key, but largely unnoticed, assumption in contemporary rhetorical theory” finds its basis in Aristotle’s response to Plato’s charge
of the unspecifiability of rhetoric (2004, 5). Instead of freeing us to reflect explicitly on the nature of contingency, Aristotle’s domestication of
rhetoric by placing rhetoric within the domain of the “contingent, yet probable” has prompted most rhetorical scholars to forgo consideration
of contingency in favor of the thematic of probability: doxa, constraints, norms, ideology. Contingency in these schemas tends to be considered
as a property ascribed to statements, propositions, and rhetorical acts—to the ontic world that constitutes the context of the rhetor—rather
than as a mode of the subject or the singular encounter that constitutes a rhetorical situation. The
possibility of rhetorical
dialectic, that exigency that provides the opportunity for agonistic argument that can be sublated into
judgment, animates historical progress and places debate as the ground for civic life. In the liberal
understanding of contemporary debate, contingency takes on an interior spatial dimension as the possible content
through a disavowal of the contingency of debate’s outside that is rendered impossible. To say that debate is
impossible is then to beckon to war on the horizon. It is to recognize the state of emergency as the end
of the state of debate. The historical legacy of the U.S. Civil War will not let us end it there however, because blackness haunts even
civil war, and threatens stasis in both its senses with incoherence. To leave raciality by the wayside is to repeat the endless disavowal that what
we are threatened with is civil war and not race war. It is to still recuperate this World though the dialectical resolution that can adjust
antagonism to agonism. It is to wage liberal sovereignty’s war against civil war all over again. Polite
discussions that acknowledge
racial terror only so as to explain away racial violence as the unique domain of extremists maintain a
sense of white innocence that not only individuates a structural condition, but also pathologizes and
prohibits black utterance (especially when that utterance might take on the form of rage) by adjusting the impossible
demands of blackness back to the acceptable terms of debate. Within such discussions, blackness can
only appear as an afterthought, as what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms the affectable I or outer-determined rather than self-
determined subject in the onto-epistemological modern text (da Silva 2007). Raciality is intrinsic to modernity because it is
necessary for the construction of the Subject—it names the materialization of the spatiotemporal forms
that make the modern grammar. It creates the grounds for the self-determined subject. For da Silva,
nothing short of a fracturing of the spatiotemporal formal principles of understanding that subtend
historical and scientific knowledge will redress the totality of racial violence, especially as it concerns black folk. Let us then
take seriously Du Bois’s insight into the actual U.S. Civil War that animates so many antiblack pathologies today: that it was the black slaves, not Lincoln nor the Union, who won the war;
and that it was the slaves, and not the South, who ultimately lost. For it was in the chaos and crisis of civil war that fugitivity realized freedom only to have it snatched away in Reconstruction:
“The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. . . . Democracy died save in the hearts of black folk” (Du Bois 1935, 30). In Black Reconstruction,
we are gifted a tale of the violence of antiblack dialectic and the potential of black fugitivity. The common narrative that the North fought a war to end slavery and to preserve the Union
figures the U.S. Civil War as a political battle concerning sovereignty and succession, or in the radical imagination as a battle for the future of capital between an industrial North and a pastoral
planter economy in the South. For Du Bois this cannot be the whole or even essential part of the story, as both narratives naturalize the position of the slave and her nominal emancipation as
derivative rather than active. In Du Bois’s account, black liberation was never the terms on which the war was fought; the war was fought over competing concerns to limit the competition
that black people posed to whites, both as slave labor and as free labor. The North for its part desired neither the abolition of slavery nor its expansion into the western territories. Northerners
desired a resolution to an untenable status quo thrown into disequilibrium by competing visions for how best to subjugate the black population to secure the white settlerist way of life. It was
not until the slaves, through the waging of the General Strike, showed the North the way to win the war that Lincoln reluctantly issued the Emancipation Proclamation (Du Bois 1935, 82). The
General Strike was the moment in which the impossible was actualized, through an incisive refusal to continue under the terms presented: “This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was
a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps a half million people. They wanted to stop the economy of the plantation
system, and to do that they left the plantations” (Du Bois 1935, 68). Significantly, Du Bois’s analysis of the Civil War extends beyond the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865 to the end of
Reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow in 1878. The democracy to come was quickly sealed off in the compromises made between the North and the South that we call Reconstruction.
Here debate, both as contestation on common ground and as the resolution to war, could only re-elaborate black suffering through nominal emancipation. In Reconstruction we witness how
the bargain was struck for a newly transformed American whiteness produced through the sublation of the “Southern way of life” (the fantasy of which still animates grievances on the Right),

The reinstantiation of master-slave relationships in confederate amnesty, black codes, the

but against black life.

Thirteenth Amendment, vagrancy laws, convict leasing, extralegal terror, and the ongoing sentimental
and material expropriation of total value from the slave that sustains global capital constitutes the
emergence of the “afterlife of slavery” that characterizes our present (Hartman 1997). Du Bois’s analysis disrupts the
spatiotemporal coordinates of the political to think the (im)possibility of black politics and liberation. To think with and through blackness
means that we cannot think the Civil War as a demarcated event distinct from Reconstruction and Jim Crow, or think the stasis of contestation
between the divisions of a polity.
We must abandon the liberal notion of progress that “accumulates . . .
[and] . . . captures” black suffering in the name of securing an antiblack future as well as the appeal of
universality and particularity which spatially “arrests Blackness’s creative potential” (Dillon 2013, 42; da Silva
2014, 84). According to da Silva, “such an understanding of total value [of slavery for the creation of the World] requires a suspension of the
view that all there is is in Time and Space . . . the
radical force of Blackness lies at the turn of thought—that is,
Blackness knowing and studying announces the End of the World as we know it” (2014, 84, emphasis mine). Da
Silva joins a growing number of black scholars in many different disciplinary homes thinking through the metaphysics of blackness as that which
is ungrounded and ontologically null with respect to the modern onto-epistemological paradigm.4 In
the World that ontologizes
antiblackness and racial capitalism, the calculus of racial terror exceeds and makes possible recognition
through the reduction of blackness to the figure of the Slave. The middle passage here is metonymic,
naming the production of anagrammatical blackness through the ongoing logistic of being captured and
shipped, that reduces blackness from body to flesh, “that zero degree of social conceptualization that
does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse” (Sharpe 2016; Spillers 1987, 67). Such a proposition returns
raciality, specifically blackness and antiblackness, to the analysis of what grounds debate’s (im)possibility. What would it mean to think debate
as a praxis of the impossible? To think a blackened debate not as the presupposition of a ground through approximation to an antiblack human
genre of Man, the Subject or the transparent I, but as Harney and Moten say, “jurisgenerative black social life” (2017, 15)? We would need to
rethink the cherished terms of rhetoric itself. We might think debate not as dialectic that both precedes and proceeds from stasis, but as the
refusal of “the call to order” that opens up black forms of life, even as form is placed under erasure (Halberstam 2013, 9). From this vantage
point of blackness, which is not really a vantage point at all, but a being out of place and time, of Being under erasure in the condition of mutual
dispossession, we might begin to sketch other visions that deactivate rhetoric’s ontologizing premises, to hold for a moment, in the hold and in
the wake, not grounded but oceanic movement, decay and life, where even dead things become something else. It is here and happening all
the time in the marooned spaces of the world. In studying debate’s (im)possibility, we might theorize at the End of the World as a praxis
oriented toward its abolition.

In the age of Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon. The only choice we
will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to.
Gillespie ’17 (John Gillespie, PhD Student at UC Irvine, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, 2017, Propter Nos,
https://uci.academia.edu/JohnGillespie) \\EG

Afro-Pessimist thinkers, in favor of a diagnostic analysis, tend to veer away from the tradition of critical social theory that prescribes solutions
to the analysis in the conclusion of their work. However, one finds throughout Afro-Pessimist literature a battle cry, a
prophetic vision, a pulsing pessimist hope for the “end of the World.” For if Whiteness ended Worlds through its
colonial simulations and violent transmutations of Africans into Blacks, then the only way out is an end to the White World.
White Being is irredeemable, and so is the World it fosters. Sexton says, “In a world structured by the twin axioms of
white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical
imperative—‘above all, don’t be black’—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward
blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that ‘resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human.’”16 It’s only through
black vigilance that the simulacra of White Being is made clear and the spectacle of gratuitous freedom
is made visible. It is somewhere in this structural antagonism, that on the one hand conditions the possibility of the World, and on the
other hand conditions the possibility of its end, its limitations, its disorientation, that we found the language to say the unsayable and do the
undoable. As Frank Wilderson reminds us: Black Studies in general and Afro-Pessimism in particular present non-Black academics with
more than an intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem. The reason is because there’s an aspect of Afro-Pessimism
that we don’t talk about…which is that were you to follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s calling for the end of the world…it wants the death of
everyone else in the same way that we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through AfroPessimism and be who one was
on the other side of that. That’s the unspoken dynamic of Afro-Pessimism.17 If we are engaging in a war in which the
symbolic value, the semiotics of this World itself, positions “the Black as death personified, the White as personification of diversity, of
life itself,”18 then resistance needs an “unspoken dynamic.” It needs a space where “words don’t go”— a
form of guerrilla linguistics, a submarined syntax, an undercommon communication. Perhaps, here, where the
conversation is blackened, and the theory is phobogenic, and the journal is Propter Nos, we can allow ourselves to excavate insurgent
dictions still lost in the lingua franca of White Being, but full of the specter of black terror, black disorientation. If the Black is
death personified, then what might happen if we weaponized our death? What might happen if we
recognized the inevitability of that death? What if we began to think that the non-uniqueness of that
death was an opening towards the “end of Humanity?” In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard writes, “When global
power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery,
and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational
transfer?”19 Terrorism consists of the militaristic tactics used by those who are facing globalized White
Being with asymmetrical technologies of terror, violence, intimidation and war. A terrorist is any armed vigilante willing to
rupture the system of semiotics through an equally cofounding semiotic. A semiotic that returns one to
the “desert of the [Black] Real”—where a “project of total disorder” is unleashed upon the semiotic system.20 Black
terrorism is a violence that re-appropriates the death embedded in the Black’s ontological incapacity in order to enable
the possibility of a radical capacity—gratuitous freedom. White Being itself is a decentralized ontoepistemic deployment
of violence, and if violent insurgency is necessary, then the decentralized approach of the black terrorist is necessary to
counter the terror of White Being. This being said, black terrorism is perhaps better understood as counter-
terror terrorism. We do not have the power to end the World with life. We only have the power to end the World through death. As
Baudrillard writes, “The radical difference is that the terrorist, while they have at their disposal weapons that are the system’s own, possess a
further lethal weapon: their own deaths.”21 The United States has an international military force, a storehouse of nuclear arms, and the
capacity, within their police state alone, to “terrorize” not just one block in Baltimore, but the whole entire world. Black terrorism is what
happens when we heed the Afro-Pessimist call that “A living death is as much a death as it is a living,”22 it is what happens when we take
seriously the unsayable in Afro-Pessimism. Black Terrorism is (non)ontological fugitivity that disavows any need to focus on social life— black
terrorism steals black death itself from White Being. It is for this reason that Baudrillard speaks to his own White Being and
the specter of terror when he says: When Western culture sees all of its values extinguished one by one, it turns inward on itself in the very
worst way. Our death is an extinction, an annihilation. Herein lies our poverty. When a singularity throws its own death into
the ring, it escapes this slow extermination, its dies its own natural death. This is an immense game of double or
quits. In committing suicide, the singularity suicides the other at the same time — we might say that the terrorist acts
literally ‘suicided’ the West. A death for a death, then, but transfigured by the symbolic stakes. ‘We have already
devastated our world, what more do you want?’ says Muray. But precisely, we have devastated this world, it still has to be
destroyed. Destroyed symbolically. This is not at all the same undertaking. And though we did the first part, only others are going
to be able to do the second.23 We are the others. Tasked with the (un)fortunate task of ending White hyper-realism,
the White World, and White Being. Well aware that if White Fascism continues the project of black annihilation, the only
choice we will have is to fight. Not because we want to, but because we have to. But, ultimately, we must
remember the words of Huey Newton: “[T]he first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”24 In the age of
Trump, the perfection of slavery reaches its horizon.25 The disavowal of the lives of refugees is White Being attempting to
reconcile the “NationState” simulation with the free track and flow of bodies it’s been attempting to murder; the deportation of undocumented
immigrants in conjunction with the materialization of borders is White Being attempting to secure its linguistic and economic integrity; the
rise of the private prison and the militarization of the police force is White Being attempting to innovate
the system of enslavement and necropolitics for the 21st Century; the plundering of indigenous land and bodies is White Being
attempting to finish off the project of genocide; the disregard for the Earth is White Being ensuring the Anthropocene will also be the
Apocalypse. Trump is a reinvigoration, a call to arms, for White Being, and White
Being can only be “destroyed symbolically.”
Black terrorism transfigures the symbolic stakes because it steals away that condition of White Being’s
possibility in a kind of fugitivity that is a zero-transformation into Blackness. This being said, we all know that the only
thing that follows the absolute loss of hope is this Black Spring, this Neo-Fanonian violence, this blackened terroristic situational transfer. In
Baudrillard’s words, in the Age of Trump, let us remember the gift of immorality, “Terrorism
is immoral. The World Trade
Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself
immoral. So, let us be immoral…”26

In a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange, Black life is lived in a white hyper-

reality, inside a constituted white fiction that establishes Blackness as a symbol of
death.
Gillespie ’17 (John Gillespie, PhD Student at UC Irvine, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, 2017, Propter Nos,
https://uci.academia.edu/JohnGillespie) \\EG

Black life is lived in a white hyper-reality. By this I mean, black life is lived inside a constituted white
fiction which concretizes itself as fact. Black life is a life lived in non-existence; blackness “exists” as a symbol of
death that is, but is not. Blackness “exists” only insofar as White Being structures it onto a map of anti-black
violence.4 Achille Mbembe corroborates this in his Critique of Black Reason, stating: Racism consists, most of all, in substituting
what is with something else, with another reality. It has the power to distort the real and to fix affect, but it is also a form of psychic
derangement, the mechanism through which the repressed suddenly surfaces. When the racist sees the Black person, he does not see that the
Black person is not there, does not exist, and is just a sign of a pathological fixation on the absence of a relationship. We must therefore
consider race as being both beside and beyond being.5 The
reality that replaces that which is is a white hyper-reality.
This white hyperrealism fixes blackness as “a sign of a pathological fixation.” White hyper-realism is the
paradigm whereby consciousness is unable to distinguish between the fictions created by White Being
and the Real. It is this fact that permits black death to be subsumed in simulations by each and every
(analytic) encounter with Whiteness and the World. Questions like, “Can the Black suffer?” and “Is it capable for the Black to
be wronged?” arise due to the inability to access a grammar of suffering to communicate a harm that has never ended, a harm that can never
end without ending the World itself. It is for this reason that viral videos of black death, more than opening the possibility for liberal notions of
justice, seem to suture the relationship between the mythical and the real that perpetuates itself through the reification of black trauma. Black
death, more than deconstructing the ontics of the Human, seems to extend its hyper-reality. Black death
makes it harder to
distinguish white fictions from any sense of real harm being done to human flesh. The Black is meant to
experience its death over and over and over again; and the World itself recycles all its fictions-as-the-Real. Put differently,
the White World subjects the Black to perpetual, gratuitous violence, and then uses that violence as
evidence to further suggest that the Black is not Human. For how can a Human endure such a thing? The experience of
gratuitous violence secures the semiotics of the white hyper-reality. White Disneyland stays intact. Blackness exists at the nexus of
fact and fiction, possibility and (non)value, inclusion and exclusion. Blackness is trapped even in saying it’s trapped because the “trapped-ness”
of the Black extends to locations where the diction and syntax of White “words don’t go.”6 The Black does not have the grammar to speak
against where and how it is trapped since Blackness can only articulate itself through the semiotics of Whiteness. That White Being continues to
center black death as the matrix of possibility for its hyper-realist structure indexes the promise of death insofar that White Being is promised
futurity. The Black was rendered fungible through the conjunction of the political and the libidinal
economy of the anti-Black world. Blackness gave birth to the commodity and the economy of
signification that structures the cartography of the Human’s coordinates. This could be said to be a still birth,
insofar as the nature of Black life in a white hyper-reality is conducted on a plane that guarantees natal alienation,
social, and ontological death. The Black body lives to die; the specter of death shadows it everywhere.
What matters crucially here, in our invocation of the hyper-real, is the importance of the Symbolic. The Symbolic is what
“structures the libidinal economy of civil society.”7 The Symbolic here is understood as “the
representational process” that structures “ the curriculum and order of knowledge” and/or “the descriptive
statement of the human” in our contemporary World.8 And in this World, white symbolism is everywhere. In fact,
in an anti-Black paradigm, white symbolism is everything. White symbolism over-determines itself as the
Symbolic itself, and denounces anything that challenges its genre-specific mode of knowing, seeing and
understanding the World. In other words, white symbolism holds a monopoly on the Symbolic in ways that
operate “lawlikely so within the terms of their/our orderspecific modes of adaptive cognition-for, truth-for.”9 There is no outside to
whiteness, to white semiotics, to white constructs of value and reality, to white structuring of libidinal
value. And for this reason, like Wilderson, “[I] am more interested in the symbolic value of Whiteness (and the absence of Blackness's value)
…”10 in a world of white hyper-reality. If Blackness is lived in the hyper-real, then there is a hyper-intensification—an overrepresentation—of
semiology that dictates the coercive violence of the Black’s (non)existence. The semiotics of White Being is the factitious fiction that simulates
the entire World. White
Being and black death are part of a globally blood-soaked symbolic exchange that
has extended itself over the terrain of the World to such an extent that there can be no distinguishing
between the Real and the Non-Real. White Being is that Being for whom ontological capacity exists, whereas the Black is the
antithesis to Being, that fleshly matter whose essence is incapacity. 11 If “language is the house of being,”12 as Heidegger puts it, then
Blackness is trapped at the very center of White Being. Dionne Brand puts it concisely when she writes, “We are people without a translator.
The language we use already contains our demise and any response contains that demise as each response emboldens and strengthens the
language it hopes to undermine.”13 This abject positionality was codified through a violence so epochal that
Modernity itself can be said to have been inaugurated through it. However, at the same time, “the center is,
paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.”14 That black death and anti-blackness exist in this liminal
positionality posits the impossible possibility of a rupture in the moment. For that which is inside the structure, only
through being outside the structure, enables the possibility of both sedimentation and disorientation. Jacques Derrida writes, “The function of
this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the structure— one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all
to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure.”15 If
black death
centers the structure, then it is somewhere in the perfection and expansion of this antagonism (the inside-
outside antagonism) that the cartography of gratuitous anti-Black violence is laid out. What might happen when what
orients the structure becomes insurgent, attacking the structure through that which centers its very Being? What might happen if black death
became weaponized in order to further limit the freeplay of the structure—the expansion of White Being?
 UQ – Black Feminism (Long)
Despite the international prominence of radical Black women, scholarship fo black
internationalism has erased the transnational political practices of these women.
Black women have become sisters outside of the black radical intellectual tradition.
McDuffie ’12 (Erik McDuffie, McDuffie is an Associate Professor in the Department of African AmericanStudies at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2012, pp. 1-30, “"For
full freedom of . . . colored women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States . . .": Black Women Radicals and the Practice of a Black Women's
International”, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/496135/pdf) \\EG

Audley “queen mother” moore was ecstatic. Organizers of the All African Women’s Conference, a militant anticolonial, Pan-African women’s
group, invited the seventy-three-year-old, New York City–based African American activist to address the gathering held in Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania, on July 26, 1972. Moore had attained an iconic stature as a revered, elder black nationalist amongst young black militants. This
reputation was well earned. Moore was a life-long Garveyite and leading personality in the Harlem Communist Party (CPUSA) during the 1930s
and 1940s. However, after the CPUSA endured internal storms and external buffeting after 1945, she departed and reinvented herself into a
radical black nationalist who embraced all things “African.” But she never abandoned Marxism. In the ensuing years, she adopted an
idiosyncratic politics combining black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, Third Worldism, Marxism, and feminism, with special concern
for the rights and freedom of black women in the United States and across the African diaspora. She was the founder of the modern reparation
movement and a progenitor of Black Power of the 1960s. She tutored Malcolm X and staunchly supported early Black Power leader Robert F.
Williams. Internationally, she earned the respect of notable African heads of state. These included Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Tanzanian
president Julius Nyerere. Years before it became chic, Moore wore long African-print dresses, amulets, and necklaces. Given her tenacious
support for black self-determination and wide international political networks, she
stands as a major figure in twentieth-
century black nationalism, Communism, and Pan-Africanism .1 A powerful speaker, Queen Mother
Moore opened her address, “Africa for the Africans, At Home and Aboard,” with a warm greeting to conference
delegates. She declared: “I have the honor to convey sisterly greetings to you from thousands of your
sisters in the United States of America who are conscious of their African heritage and are here with you
in love and in spirit.” Praising the African woman as the “mother of civilization,” she lauded black
women for their beauty, creativity, and brilliance. At the same time, she called attention to their sufferance under slavery,
colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and global white supremacy. Emphasizing the importance of forging political coalitions between
African-descended women across the diaspora, she stated that African American women stood in revolutionary solidarity with their “sisters in
South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Guinea-Bissau, and all freedom fighters under the domination of the colonialists.” Without question, her
call for building transnational political solidarities between African-descended women worldwide
cohered with the Pan-African, anticolonial, anticapitalist, and feminist objectives of the All African
Women’s Conference.2 Despite her international prominence in black nationalist, Pan-African, and
communist organizations, the growing body of scholarship on “black internationalism” has largely
erased the transnational political practice of black women radicals like Queen Mother Moore who pursued
their work in the Communist Left and Black Left during the early- and mid-twentieth century.3 As the literary scholar Carole Boyce Davies
observes: “Black women
have become sisters outside of the black radical intellectual tradition.”4 The
erasure of black women radicals from narratives of black internationalism is curious given that several
women had attained international reputations as leaders, community activists, and thinkers within the Black Left and
CPUSA during the Old Left period, bookended by the Russian Revolution in 1917 and by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of
Stalinist atrocities in 1956. 5 These
women include Queen Mother Moore, Trinidad-born Communist Party
leader Claudia Jones, bohemian world traveler Louise Thompson Patterson, civil rights activist Esther
Cooper Jackson, and others.6 Decades ahead of their time, they forged Black Left feminism, a
pathbreaking feminism that centers working-class women by combining black nationalist and American
Communist Party (CPUSA) positions on race, gender, and class with black women radicals’ own lived
experiences. Black Left feminists formulated a theory of “triple oppression.” Emphasizing the connections among racial, gender, and class
oppression, the theory posited that the eradication of one form of oppression requires the concurrent dismantling of all systems of oppression.
This conceptual framework, now referred to by feminist scholars as intersectionality, is most commonly associated with black feminist
organizations of the 1970s such as the Third World Women’s Alliance and the Combahee River Collective.7 In this article, I am concerned with
recovering the transnational political practice of black women of the Old Left. The historians Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che
Wilkins’s recent definition of black internationalism is a useful starting point for explicating the transnational politics of the women discussed
here: “At the core of black internationalism is the ideal of universal emancipation, unbounded by national, imperial, continental or oceanic
boundaries—or even by racial ones.”8 While black women radicals adhered to these positions, they also transcended them by proffering their
own variant of black internationalism.
 UQ – McDuffie (Short)
Black women have become sisters outside of the black radical intellectual tradition.
McDuffie ’12 (Erik McDuffie, McDuffie is an Associate Professor in the Department of African AmericanStudies at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2012, pp. 1-30, “"For
full freedom of . . . colored women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States . . .": Black Women Radicals and the Practice of a Black Women's
International”, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/496135/pdf) \\EG

Audley “queen mother” moore was ecstatic. Organizers of the All African Women’s Conference, a militant anticolonial, Pan-African women’s
group, invited the seventy-three-year-old, New York City–based African American activist to address the gathering held in Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania, on July 26, 1972. Moore had attained an iconic stature as a revered, elder black nationalist amongst young black militants. This
reputation was well earned. Moore was a life-long Garveyite and leading personality in the Harlem Communist Party (CPUSA) during the 1930s
and 1940s. However, after the CPUSA endured internal storms and external buffeting after 1945, she departed and reinvented herself into a
radical black nationalist who embraced all things “African.” But she never abandoned Marxism. In the ensuing years, she adopted an
idiosyncratic politics combining black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, Third Worldism, Marxism, and feminism, with special concern
for the rights and freedom of black women in the United States and across the African diaspora. She was the founder of the modern reparation
movement and a progenitor of Black Power of the 1960s. She tutored Malcolm X and staunchly supported early Black Power leader Robert F.
Williams. Internationally, she earned the respect of notable African heads of state. These included Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Tanzanian
president Julius Nyerere. Years before it became chic, Moore wore long African-print dresses, amulets, and necklaces. Given her tenacious
support for black self-determination and wide international political networks, she
stands as a major figure in twentieth-
century black nationalism, Communism, and Pan-Africanism .1 A powerful speaker, Queen Mother
Moore opened her address, “Africa for the Africans, At Home and Aboard,” with a warm greeting to conference
delegates. She declared: “I have the honor to convey sisterly greetings to you from thousands of your
sisters in the United States of America who are conscious of their African heritage and are here with you
in love and in spirit.” Praising the African woman as the “mother of civilization,” she lauded black
women for their beauty, creativity, and brilliance. At the same time, she called attention to their sufferance under slavery,
colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and global white supremacy. Emphasizing the importance of forging political coalitions between
African-descended women across the diaspora, she stated that African American women stood in revolutionary solidarity with their “sisters in
South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Guinea-Bissau, and all freedom fighters under the domination of the colonialists.” Without question, her
call for building transnational political solidarities between African-descended women worldwide
cohered with the Pan-African, anticolonial, anticapitalist, and feminist objectives of the All African
Women’s Conference.2 Despite her international prominence in black nationalist, Pan-African, and
communist organizations, the growing body of scholarship on “black internationalism” has largely
erased the transnational political practice of black women radicals like Queen Mother Moore who pursued
their work in the Communist Left and Black Left during the early- and mid-twentieth century.3 As the literary scholar Carole Boyce Davies
observes: “Black women
have become sisters outside of the black radical intellectual tradition.”4 The
erasure of black women radicals from narratives of black internationalism is curious given that several
women had attained international reputations as leaders, community activists, and thinkers within the Black Left and
CPUSA during the Old Left period, bookended by the Russian Revolution in 1917 and by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of
Stalinist atrocities in 1956. 5 These
women include Queen Mother Moore, Trinidad-born Communist Party
leader Claudia Jones, bohemian world traveler Louise Thompson Patterson, civil rights activist Esther
Cooper Jackson, and others.6 Decades ahead of their time, they forged Black Left feminism, a
pathbreaking feminism that centers working-class women by combining black nationalist and American
Communist Party (CPUSA) positions on race, gender, and class with black women radicals’ own lived
experiences. Black Left feminists formulated a theory of “triple oppression.” Emphasizing the connections among racial, gender, and class
oppression, the theory posited that the eradication of one form of oppression requires the concurrent dismantling of all systems of oppression.
This conceptual framework, now referred to by feminist scholars as intersectionality, is most commonly associated with black feminist
organizations of the 1970s such as the Third World Women’s Alliance and the Combahee River Collective.7 In this article, I am concerned with
recovering the transnational political practice of black women of the Old Left. The historians Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che
Wilkins’s recent definition of black internationalism is a useful starting point for explicating the transnational politics of the women discussed
here: “At the core of black internationalism is the ideal of universal emancipation, unbounded by national, imperial, continental or oceanic
boundaries—or even by racial ones.”8 While black women radicals adhered to these positions, they also transcended them by proffering their
own variant of black internationalism.
 UQ – Redaction (Long)
To hear the suppressed voices of Black people, one must lean in close because it
barely comes above a whisper. Think of the second autopsy of Michael Brown. It was
not enough to see his mother’s distress, to see and hear her scream and fall into the
arms of family members. It is not enough, it cannot be enough. They cannot
recuperate his body. The constant production of Black death is necessary and returns
us to the singularity. But just as the weather is always ripe for Black death, the
singularity also produces Black resistances and refusals.
Sharpe ’16 (Christina Sharpe, Associate Professor at Tufts University, 2016, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being) \\EG
She comes to us from the front pages of the New York Times, a December 10, 2014, article titled “Schools’
Discipline for Girls Differs by Race and Hue” and with the caption “Mikia Hutchings, 12, whose writing on a wall at
school led to a juvenile criminal case, and her lawyer, Michael J. Tafelski, waiting for a meeting held last month by a Georgia state
committee studying school discipline.”18 Writing is discovered on a school gym bathroom wall. Two middle school students are
accused of vandalism: Mikia Hutchings, who is Black, and her (unnamed in the article) white girlfriend. When
Mikia’s family is alerted to the charges against her, they find it hard to believe she was involved in defacing school and personal property.
Then they report to the authorities that they cannot afford to pay the hundred-dollar “restitution” fee to
the school and to the student whose sneakers were damaged. “While both students were suspended
from school for a few days, Mikia had to face a school disciplinary hearing and, a few weeks later, a visit by a
uniformed officer from the local Sheriff ’s Department, who served her grandmother with papers accusing Mikia of a trespassing
misdemeanor and, potentially, a felony” (Vega 2014). Because her family is unable to pay the money, Mikia will be made
to pay a much larger price. “As part of an agreement with the state to have the charges dismissed in juvenile court, Mikia
admitted to the allegations of criminal trespassing. Mikia, who is African-American, spent her summer on probation, under
a 7 p.m. curfew, and had to complete 16 hours of community service in addition to writing an apology letter to a student whose sneakers were
defaced in the incident. Her friend, who is white, was let go after her parents paid restitution” (Vega 2014). The
article is sympathetic to Mikia. It tries to bring her into focus, and yet she disappears in description. The
introductory paragraph reads: “To hear Mikia Hutchings speak, one must lean in close, as her voice barely rises
above a whisper. In report cards, her teachers describe her as ‘very focused,’ someone who follows the rules and stays on task. So it was
a surprise for her grandmother when Mikia, 12, and a friend got into trouble for writing graffiti on the walls of a gym bathroom at Dutchtown
Middle School in Henry County last year” (Vega 2014). See
and hear Mikia Hutchings. She is a child, a young Black girl,
just twelve years old and slight. In the photograph she appears, captured, her lower back resting against a
wall as she leans forward, beside a classroom door. She is wearing a gray-and-black horizontal-striped shirt, black stretch
pants, black boots with white turned-over cuffs, and a light blue insulated jacket with a hood and a white collar, trim, and white cuffs that echo
the white cuffs on the boots. She
looks down and to the side, and the fingers of her left hand hold one finger of
her right hand. (She holds herself, holds onto herself.) What is the look on her face? As she appears
here, she is physically overwhelmed by her white male legal representative, by the charges against her
and all of the authority that has been summoned and is determined to discipline her. This authority, the
police, the courts, the school, and so on, would put her in cuffs; they have been summoned to
transform this girl into a felon. As it abuts the modifier Black, “girl” here, again, appears as the
anagrammatical. “ ‘When a darker-skinned African-American female acts up, there’s a certain concern
about their boyish aggressiveness,’ Dr. Hannon said, ‘that they don’t know their place as a female, as a woman’” (Vega 2014).
Mikia Hutchings is held, and in that holding once again “girl” is thrown into question. If we annotate
and redact that first paragraph of the New York Times article, we might find Mikia’s point of view.
Through redaction we might hear what she has to say in her own defense in the midst of the ways she is
made to appear only to be made to disappear. Put another way, with our own Black annotations and Black
redactions, we might locate a counter to the force of the state (care as force; “the provision of what is necessary for
the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something”) that has landed her on the front page of the
New York Times. With this analytic we might begin to see and hear Mikia, whose sole offense was writing the word
“Hi” on the wall while a young, Black girl child without financial resources. That I am arguing for Mikia to come into sight should not be
mistaken as an argument for representation or representational politics. Rather, Black annotation and Black redaction are
ways to make Black life visible, if only momentarily, through the optic of the door. Black annotation and
redaction meet the Black anagrammatical and the failure of words and concepts to hold in and on Black
flesh. Think, now, of the annotations and redactions of the second autopsies ordered by the families of
the murdered and commissioned in the wake of so many murders. The second autopsy performed on
Michael Brown was requested by his family and their legal team in order to show injury. In other words, that second
autopsy was ordered to show the harm done to Michael Brown, who was shot at least six times,
including two times in the head. As with Lamont Adams, the bullet wounds to Michael Brown’s hand suggested
that he was in the posture of surrender. By securing that second autopsy, his family tried to disrupt the
dysgraphia that wrote a version of events that was riven with antiblackness. It was not enough to see Michael
Brown’s body uncovered in the street for hours on a hot August day, his mother and stepfather prevented from going to his side. It was not
enough to see his mother’s distress, to see and hear her scream and fall into the arms of family
members. It was not enough to see his distraught stepfather on the side of the road with a makeshift
sign declaring: “The police just murdered my son.” Not enough. And so his family added their own
annotations; they tried to come up with his body’s harms as seen through their eyes in order to contest
that body that was drawn by antiblackness (figure 4.5). And, of course, even then, it is not enough. It cannot be
enough. They cannot recuperate his body. The constant production of Black death is and as necessary
returns us to the singularity. But just as the weather is always ripe for Black death, the singularity also
produces Black resistances and refusals. Black redaction and Black annotation are ways of imagining
otherwise. I turn here to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1992). Daughters was produced over the course of ten years, and it emanated
from the politics and aesthetics that began with Dash’s work as part of the LA Rebellion, along with other filmmakers, like Charles Burnett and
Haile Gerima. When it was released in 1992, Daughters became the first film by an African American woman to get cinematic distribution in the
United States. It found an immediate audience with Black women, and at the same time it came to be seen by many other viewing audiences as
a foreign film because it did not deal in the familiar.
 UQ – Redaction (Short)
The constant production of Black death is necessary and returns us to the singularity.
But just as the weather is always ripe for Black death, the singularity also produces
Black resistances and refusals.
Sharpe ’16 (Christina Sharpe, Associate Professor at Tufts University, 2016, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being) \\EG
She comes to us from the front pages of the New York Times, a December 10, 2014, article titled “Schools’
Discipline for Girls Differs by Race and Hue” and with the caption “Mikia Hutchings, 12, whose writing on a wall at
school led to a juvenile criminal case, and her lawyer, Michael J. Tafelski, waiting for a meeting held last month by a Georgia state
committee studying school discipline.”18 Writing is discovered on a school gym bathroom wall. Two middle school students are
accused of vandalism: Mikia Hutchings, who is Black, and her (unnamed in the article) white girlfriend. When
Mikia’s family is alerted to the charges against her, they find it hard to believe she was involved in defacing school and personal property.
Then they report to the authorities that they cannot afford to pay the hundred-dollar “restitution” fee to
the school and to the student whose sneakers were damaged. “While both students were suspended
from school for a few days, Mikia had to face a school disciplinary hearing and, a few weeks later, a visit by a
uniformed officer from the local Sheriff ’s Department, who served her grandmother with papers accusing Mikia of a trespassing
misdemeanor and, potentially, a felony” (Vega 2014). Because her family is unable to pay the money, Mikia will be made
to pay a much larger price. “As part of an agreement with the state to have the charges dismissed in juvenile court, Mikia
admitted to the allegations of criminal trespassing. Mikia, who is African-American, spent her summer on probation, under
a 7 p.m. curfew, and had to complete 16 hours of community service in addition to writing an apology letter to a student whose sneakers were
defaced in the incident. Her friend, who is white, was let go after her parents paid restitution” (Vega 2014). The
article is sympathetic to Mikia. It tries to bring her into focus, and yet she disappears in description. The
introductory paragraph reads: “To hear Mikia Hutchings speak, one must lean in close, as her voice barely rises
above a whisper. In report cards, her teachers describe her as ‘very focused,’ someone who follows the rules and stays on task. So it was
a surprise for her grandmother when Mikia, 12, and a friend got into trouble for writing graffiti on the walls of a gym bathroom at Dutchtown
Middle School in Henry County last year” (Vega 2014). See
and hear Mikia Hutchings. She is a child, a young Black girl,
just twelve years old and slight. In the photograph she appears, captured, her lower back resting against a
wall as she leans forward, beside a classroom door. She is wearing a gray-and-black horizontal-striped shirt, black stretch
pants, black boots with white turned-over cuffs, and a light blue insulated jacket with a hood and a white collar, trim, and white cuffs that echo
the white cuffs on the boots. She looks down and to the side, and the fingers of her left hand hold one finger of
her right hand. (She holds herself, holds onto herself.) What is the look on her face? As she appears
here, she is physically overwhelmed by her white male legal representative, by the charges against her
and all of the authority that has been summoned and is determined to discipline her. This authority, the
police, the courts, the school, and so on, would put her in cuffs; they have been summoned to
transform this girl into a felon. As it abuts the modifier Black, “girl” here, again, appears as the
anagrammatical. “ ‘When a darker-skinned African-American female acts up, there’s a certain concern
about their boyish aggressiveness,’ Dr. Hannon said, ‘that they don’t know their place as a female, as a woman’” (Vega 2014).
Mikia Hutchings is held, and in that holding once again “girl” is thrown into question. If we annotate
and redact that first paragraph of the New York Times article, we might find Mikia’s point of view.
Through redaction we might hear what she has to say in her own defense in the midst of the ways she is
made to appear only to be made to disappear. Put another way, with our own Black annotations and Black
redactions, we might locate a counter to the force of the state (care as force; “the provision of what is necessary for
the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something”) that has landed her on the front page of the
New York Times. With this analytic we might begin to see and hear Mikia, whose sole offense was writing the word
“Hi” on the wall while a young, Black girl child without financial resources. That I am arguing for Mikia to come into sight should not be
mistaken as an argument for representation or representational politics. Rather, Black annotation and Black redaction are
ways to make Black life visible, if only momentarily, through the optic of the door. Black annotation and
redaction meet the Black anagrammatical and the failure of words and concepts to hold in and on Black
flesh. Think, now, of the annotations and redactions of the second autopsies ordered by the families of
the murdered and commissioned in the wake of so many murders. The second autopsy performed on
Michael Brown was requested by his family and their legal team in order to show injury. In other words, that second
autopsy was ordered to show the harm done to Michael Brown, who was shot at least six times,
including two times in the head. As with Lamont Adams, the bullet wounds to Michael Brown’s hand suggested
that he was in the posture of surrender. By securing that second autopsy, his family tried to disrupt the
dysgraphia that wrote a version of events that was riven with antiblackness. It was not enough to see Michael
Brown’s body uncovered in the street for hours on a hot August day, his mother and stepfather prevented from going to his side. It was not
enough to see his mother’s distress, to see and hear her scream and fall into the arms of family
members. It was not enough to see his distraught stepfather on the side of the road with a makeshift
sign declaring: “The police just murdered my son.” Not enough. And so his family added their own
annotations; they tried to come up with his body’s harms as seen through their eyes in order to contest
that body that was drawn by antiblackness (figure 4.5). And, of course, even then, it is not enough. It cannot be
enough. They cannot recuperate his body. The constant production of Black death is and as necessary
returns us to the singularity. But just as the weather is always ripe for Black death, the singularity also
produces Black resistances and refusals. Black redaction and Black annotation are ways of imagining
otherwise. I turn here to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1992). Daughters was produced over the course of ten years, and it emanated
from the politics and aesthetics that began with Dash’s work as part of the LA Rebellion, along with other filmmakers, like Charles Burnett and
Haile Gerima. When it was released in 1992, Daughters became the first film by an African American woman to get cinematic distribution in the
United States. It found an immediate audience with Black women, and at the same time it came to be seen by many other viewing audiences as
a foreign film because it did not deal in the familiar.
2NC – AT – FW
 AT – FW (Long)
Blackened Debate DA—Debate is structured by a permanent war against the void of
antiblackness. Calls for “predictability, stasis, and fairness” mirror a nostalgic logic
that desperately attempts to “make debate great again”. The Polite discussions of
their normative interp acknowledge racial terror only to explain away racial violence
to maintain a sense of white innocence that individuates a structural condition and
pathologizes Blackness by adjusting the impossible demands of Blackness back to the
acceptable terms of debate. Within such discussions, Blackness can only appear as an
afterthought, an meant only to be arrested by the framework police for its creativity.
Instead, endorse a model of Blackened debate to manifest “jurisgenerative social life”
and rethink how debate operates parasitically on Blackness.
Kelsie ’19 (Amber Kelsie, Department of Communications at Wake Forest University, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 52, Number 1, 2019,
pp. 63-70, “Blackened Debate at the End of the World”, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/721920) \\EG

We are haunted by the specter of civil war. Liberal and conservative politicians and commentators openly express
anxiety about the possibility of outright hostilities and the “unravelling [of ] our national fabric” (Gambino 2017).
Increasing polarization, identity politics that destroys persuasion, an atmosphere of conspiracy regarding the deep
state or foreign puppet masters, apparent disenchantment with institutions, general mistrust in electoral politics, a gridlocked and
weak congress, and open skirmishes between white nationalist and antifascists are put forth as signs of
the end times (see, e.g., Blight 2017; Wright 2017; DeGroot 2018; Smith 2018). The looming crisis of the end of politics that
everywhere drives the nostalgic desire for a return to a normalcy and civility invites us to rethink debate and
to pose a different question that does not seek to redeem a past that never was and continues to come at too high a cost for the wretched of
the earth. Rather than “make debate great again,” I’d like to sit with the vertigo so as to consider debate’s (im)possible
outside. Such a quest for a horizon that is before-after-immanent to the End (of politics or history or the world) will require that we rethink
the spatiotemporal coordinates of the entire liberal project that secures the parameters of debate as the
dialectical and agonistic contestation of the possible. My central interlocutor here will be blackness: that (non-)ontological
constitutive outside of the modern grammar that is relegated to the realm of absolute necessity, negativity, incapacity, and pathology that
subtends the political and the rhetorical. As that which is always already outside the World/History, blackness
provides an
anoriginary nonplace from which to think crisis and a politics of actualizing the impossible. Imminent
civil war is an interesting but unsurprising anxiety ; it is unsurprising because the U.S. Civil War informs so much of the
popular narrative of the United States and its ethical position that confirms the progressive nature of time, and because liberal sovereignty was
always a war waged against civil war.1 And it is interesting because the Greeks referred to civil war as “stasis.” Today standing, state, and
stability are also meanings of stasis, as it emerges from histemi. Stasis
then doubles both as sovereignty and as
sovereignty’s undoing and evokes a constant permanence of war even in peace. Stasis in rhetorical studies takes
on the meaning of “issue” and serves as a hermeneutic for coming to consensus on the point of contention from which debate proceeds. Stasis
here also means standing in the sense that there is some “ground” in the form of prior consensus on the nature of the disagreement.2 The
somewhat paradoxical relationship between consensus and dissensus found in stasis speaks to a kind of
disavowal of ungroundedness that precedes even the point from which to begin speaking . Must one have a
presupposed potentiality for a common ground to be able to proceed in argument? Refusing this disavowal of groundlessness as it emerges in
contemporary figurations of agonistic debate might enable us to more accurately think of rhetoric in its
modern inflection as the presupposition of a ground as a war against its own void via antiblackness. The
inversion of Clausewitz’s proposition is salient: rhetoric is the continuation of war by other means; rhetoric as a
mode of war in an effort to ontologize itself against its groundless outside.3 The (im)possible is always at
stake in debate since rhetoric regards the contingent as its necessary presupposition. According to Dilip
Gaonkar, this “key, but largely unnoticed, assumption in contemporary rhetorical theory” finds its basis in Aristotle’s response to Plato’s charge
of the unspecifiability of rhetoric (2004, 5). Instead of freeing us to reflect explicitly on the nature of contingency, Aristotle’s domestication of
rhetoric by placing rhetoric within the domain of the “contingent, yet probable” has prompted most rhetorical scholars to forgo consideration
of contingency in favor of the thematic of probability: doxa, constraints, norms, ideology. Contingency in these schemas tends to be considered
as a property ascribed to statements, propositions, and rhetorical acts—to the ontic world that constitutes the context of the rhetor—rather
than as a mode of the subject or the singular encounter that constitutes a rhetorical situation. The
possibility of rhetorical
dialectic, that exigency that provides the opportunity for agonistic argument that can be sublated into
judgment, animates historical progress and places debate as the ground for civic life. In the liberal
understanding of contemporary debate, contingency takes on an interior spatial dimension as the possible content
through a disavowal of the contingency of debate’s outside that is rendered impossible. To say that debate is
impossible is then to beckon to war on the horizon. It is to recognize the state of emergency as the end
of the state of debate. The historical legacy of the U.S. Civil War will not let us end it there however, because blackness haunts even
civil war, and threatens stasis in both its senses with incoherence. To leave raciality by the wayside is to repeat the endless disavowal that what
we are threatened with is civil war and not race war. It is to still recuperate this World though the dialectical resolution that can adjust
antagonism to agonism. It is to wage liberal sovereignty’s war against civil war all over again. Polite
discussions that acknowledge
racial terror only so as to explain away racial violence as the unique domain of extremists maintain a
sense of white innocence that not only individuates a structural condition, but also pathologizes and
prohibits black utterance (especially when that utterance might take on the form of rage) by adjusting
the impossible demands of blackness back to the acceptable terms of debate. Within such discussions,
blackness can only appear as an afterthought, as what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms the affectable I or outer-determined rather than self-determined
subject in the onto-epistemological modern text (da Silva 2007). Raciality is intrinsic to modernity because it is necessary for the construction of the Subject—it names the materialization of
the spatiotemporal forms that make the modern grammar. It creates the grounds for the self-determined subject. For da Silva, nothing short of a fracturing of the spatiotemporal formal
principles of understanding that subtend historical and scientific knowledge will redress the totality of racial violence, especially as it concerns black folk. Let us then take seriously Du Bois’s
insight into the actual U.S. Civil War that animates so many antiblack pathologies today: that it was the black slaves, not Lincoln nor the Union, who won the war; and that it was the slaves, and
not the South, who ultimately lost. For it was in the chaos and crisis of civil war that fugitivity realized freedom only to have it snatched away in Reconstruction: “The slave went free; stood a
brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. . . . Democracy died save in the hearts of black folk” (Du Bois 1935, 30). In Black Reconstruction, we are gifted a tale of the
violence of antiblack dialectic and the potential of black fugitivity. The common narrative that the North fought a war to end slavery and to preserve the Union figures the U.S. Civil War as a
political battle concerning sovereignty and succession, or in the radical imagination as a battle for the future of capital between an industrial North and a pastoral planter economy in the
South. For Du Bois this cannot be the whole or even essential part of the story, as both narratives naturalize the position of the slave and her nominal emancipation as derivative rather than
active. In Du Bois’s account, black liberation was never the terms on which the war was fought; the war was fought over competing concerns to limit the competition that black people posed
to whites, both as slave labor and as free labor. The North for its part desired neither the abolition of slavery nor its expansion into the western territories. Northerners desired a resolution to
an untenable status quo thrown into disequilibrium by competing visions for how best to subjugate the black population to secure the white settlerist way of life. It was not until the slaves,
through the waging of the General Strike, showed the North the way to win the war that Lincoln reluctantly issued the Emancipation Proclamation (Du Bois 1935, 82). The General Strike was
the moment in which the impossible was actualized, through an incisive refusal to continue under the terms presented: “This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide
basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps a half million people. They wanted to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do
that they left the plantations” (Du Bois 1935, 68). Significantly, Du Bois’s analysis of the Civil War extends beyond the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865 to the end of Reconstruction and the
beginning of Jim Crow in 1878. The democracy to come was quickly sealed off in the compromises made between the North and the South that we call Reconstruction. Here debate, both as
contestation on common ground and as the resolution to war, could only re-elaborate black suffering through nominal emancipation. In Reconstruction we witness how the bargain was struck
for a newly transformed American whiteness produced through the sublation of the “Southern way of life” (the fantasy of which still animates grievances on the Right), but against black life.
The reinstantiation of master-slave relationships in confederate amnesty, black codes, the Thirteenth Amendment, vagrancy laws, convict leasing, extralegal terror, and the ongoing
sentimental and material expropriation of total value from the slave that sustains global capital constitutes the emergence of the “afterlife of slavery” that characterizes our present (Hartman

. To think with and through

1997). Du Bois’s analysis disrupts the spatiotemporal coordinates of the political to think the (im)possibility of black politics and liberation

blackness means that we cannot think the Civil War as a demarcated event distinct from Reconstruction and
Jim Crow, or think the stasis of contestation between the divisions of a polity. We must abandon the
liberal notion of progress that “accumulates . . . [and] . . . captures” black suffering in the name of
securing an antiblack future as well as the appeal of universality and particularity which spatially
“arrests Blackness’s creative potential” (Dillon 2013, 42; da Silva 2014, 84). According to da Silva, “such an understanding of
total value [of slavery for the creation of the World] requires a suspension of the view that all there is is in Time and Space . . . the radical
force of Blackness lies at the turn of thought—that is, Blackness knowing and studying announces the
End of the World as we know it” (2014, 84, emphasis mine). Da Silva joins a growing number of black scholars in many different
disciplinary homes thinking through the metaphysics of blackness as that which is ungrounded and ontologically null with respect to the
modern onto-epistemological paradigm.4 In the World that ontologizes antiblackness and racial capitalism, the calculus of racial terror exceeds
and makes possible recognition through the reduction of blackness to the figure of the Slave. The middle passage here is metonymic, naming
the production of anagrammatical blackness through the ongoing logistic of being captured and shipped, that reduces blackness from body to
flesh, “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse” (Sharpe 2016; Spillers
1987, 67). Such a proposition returns raciality, specifically blackness and antiblackness, to the analysis of what grounds debate’s (im)possibility.
What would it mean to think debate as a praxis of the impossible? To think a blackened debate not as
the presupposition of a ground through approximation to an antiblack human genre of Man , the Subject or
the transparent I, but as Harney and Moten say, “jurisgenerative black social life” (2017, 15)? We would need to
rethink the cherished terms of rhetoric itself. We might think debate not as dialectic that both precedes
and proceeds from stasis, but as the refusal of “the call to order” that opens up black forms of life, even
as form is placed under erasure (Halberstam 2013, 9). From this vantage point of blackness, which is not really a
vantage point at all, but a being out of place and time, of Being under erasure in the condition of mutual dispossession, we might begin
to sketch other visions that deactivate rhetoric’s ontologizing premises, to hold for a moment, in the
hold and in the wake, not grounded but oceanic movement, decay and life, where even dead things become something else. It is
here and happening all the time in the marooned spaces of the world. In studying debate’s
(im)possibility, we might theorize at the End of the World as a praxis oriented toward its abolition.

[ ] Extermination DA—In an antiblack world defined by ontological rupture,

society employs a politic of obliteration to expose Blackness to unending abuse and to
reify Black fungibility. Black debaters have always owned nothing, so when the aff
steals, they claim nothing was stolen. Claims to rectify structural unfairness are met
with crickets, while a traditional debaters’ claims for “predictability, education, and
procedural fairness” are heard and acted upon. The elasticity of our radical
scholarship is interpolated and obliterated to maintain a perverse enjoyment of
debate’s normativity. And when the obliterated debater returns into view, framework
teams must vanquish and police us. Endorse our radical scholarship which can re-
orient our politics to a form of looking after and beyond, into a new way of being in
the world.
Brady ’13 (Nicholas Brady, Nicholas Brady is an activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He is former debater and currently a head
coach of the James Baldwin Debate Society, the only collegiate debate team housed in an African-American Studies department. He was also a
recent graduate of Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine
Culture and Theory program, 7 March 2013, “Looking for Azealia’s Harlem Shake, Or How We Mistake the Politics of Obliteration for
Appropriation”, https://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/looking-for-azealias-harlem-shake-or-how-we-mistake-the-politics-of-
obliteration-for-appropriation/) \\EG

As the meme exploded into virality, there was inevitable backlash from many disturbed by the obvious disconnect between the videos and the
actual culture of Harlem-shaking. Many
from Harlem testified against the dance, arguing that their homegrown
culture had been stolen and appropriated without proper credit being given. This is a current topic in
the larger historical theme of black culture stolen for the larger consumption of a general (read: white)
audience that is the very foundation of American and global popular culture. From blackface minstrelsy
to jazz and ever onward, it is through the black that the larger culture gains its coherence and vitality. In
that way, we can say that blackness is the life-force of the world, in more ways than one of course. It is with an eye to this history that my friend
Justin Jones challenged his fellow speakers on a panel on Hip Hop and Masculinity about the claim of appropriation in the case of the “Harlem
Shake” meme. He asked forcefully if we were making too much of this, if there were much better examples we were doing a disservice to by
putting all of our energy into this situation (to see more of this debate, click here). I could not agree more, albeit for some different reasons that
I will list out here. The first is my issue with the word appropriation. According to Oxford English Dictionary, the verb
appropriate means “to take for one’s own purpose, typically without the owner’s permission.” This
definition is simple, yet there is much packed into it. What does it mean to own a (piece of) culture? What does it
mean to take a (piece of) culture? The answer to these questions become muddy when we think about the Harlem shake itself. By
many accounts, the Harlem shake originated from a resident named “Al B” in 1981, often done in a state of inebriation. Al B has cited the
dance’s origins in ancient Egypt, stating because the mummies were all wrapped up all they could do was shake. Bracketing out a discussion of
the accuracy of such a legend, let us take Al B’s claim serious that he was channeling the spirit of Egyptian mummies. Does that the mean the
“Harlem Shake” is just an appropriation of Egyptian culture? Where is the origin of a dance, which is another way of asking: who owns the
dance? Appropriation depends on defining our relationship to objects through the lens of property
relations, so that an object is the property of a person or group. This relation is always already thorny, but is especially
cut by cultural objects. Cultural objects can certainly be commodified, but the issue of ownership is always
wrapped up in relations of power, privilege, and propriety. It is no coincidence that appropriate is also an adjective
meaning “proper”: property, appropriate, and the proper (propriety) all share the same latin root proprius meaning “to own.” If we cannot
properly delineate ownership for the cultural object, then it is open for the free use by any and
everyone. This, of course, props up particular relations of domination, coercion, and force, which will bring us to my second issue with the
concept of “appropriation.” If we are to talk about commodities and property in relation to culture, this should
swerve us face-first into the topic of slavery and specifically the “human commodity” known as the
slave. What is important to distinguish here is that the slave is not simply an “unpaid” or hyper-exploited worker, but a being open to infinite
desires of the master, including (and especially) the wanton violation of her body and gratuitous violence. The most horrifying to consider here
is that the very happiness of the slave was owned by the master – this means the master often forced the slave to perform songs on the auction
block, in the coffle to it, and for the slave to smile and laugh and joke in his/her presence (this is described as the “terror of pleasure” by Saidiya
Hartman in her magnum opus Scenes of Subjection). This
politics of appropriation can find its “origin” dispersed
among the performance of domination we know as the peculiar institution. What we have called
“appropriation” implies that black people own their culture and the master stole it from them. Yet, when
we let go of romantic terms our claim sounds like this: a piece of property owns a piece of property and was stolen by the citizen who owns
them both. How does a commodity own a commodity? How does the owner of that commodity steal a
commodity from his own property? If this sounds cruel, we must remember that property relations (ie the relation of
“people” owning things) is not natural, but produced in the development of liberalism that is founded within and
because of racial slavery. The master is the embodiment of the liberal subject, a being that can own things. The liberal subject is
defined as everything that the slave is not, ie the liberal subject owns slaves because the slave cannot
own anything. What is revealed in the terror of the peculiar institution is not that black people have no
culture, but it is that everything we did was owned by someone else. The relation of blackness to world has since
survived into the time we call “post-emancipation,” and can be traced in the historical development of popular culture, beginning with
minstelsy. Blackface minstelsy began in the age of slavery, most notably popularized by Thomas D. Rice’s performance of slave dances and
rhythms in songs like “Jump Jim Crowe” as well as his abolitionist performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Appropriation does not only imply
ownership, but also respect – a proper way of doing things – that is the very anti-thesis of the slave relation that forms the foundation of our
society’s relationship to blackness. It is not simply that slaves could not own property legally, but it is to say that
the ontological distinction that makes the propertied subject (and the very concept of property)
possible demands the slave to be vulnerable to a perpetual state of disrespect and violation. All this is
to say that the concept of appropriation mystifies what is actually happening when white people “steal”
black culture. Stealing implies a crime or a sense of wrongdoing or doing something improper. Yet the
very concept of the proper – as well as property – depends on the black to be radically open to
violation. So it is not improper to violate the black, it is in fact the definition of the proper itself. That Harlemites are demanding “props” is
indicative of this mystification, for the fact is that nothing was stolen. They never owned their own culture, in any sense.
They owned nothing, so nothing was stolen. But I am not really saying anything new here, and I doubt I am saying anything
they did not already know. Instead, I am laying the groundwork to think through another way of understanding the suffering they are testifying
to. It is not that something was stolen from them, but it is that their bodies were evacuated in the process of making Baauer’s “Harlem Shake.”
This is the grammar of obliteration, and to explicate this we should return to my original Google search for Azealia Banks’ remix.
You might remember that earlier I mentioned I clicked the link provided by Azealia Banks of her remix, only to find it had been taken down.
Banks posted the remix on soundcloud, but Baauer and his labelmate Diplo demanded it be taken down because it was an un-authorized remix.
Aside from the obvious rejoinder that the majority of soundcloud is unauthorized remixes, this episode reveals the difference of power that
negotiates the “open” space of the internet. We
have a white producer, who is accused of appropriating Harlem
culture, attacking a black female rapper born in Harlem of improperly using his “ intellectual property.”
Black claims to propriety are met with crickets, while a white man’s claim is heard and acted upon to the
detriment of Banks. Diplo took to twitter to begin the anti-Banks commentary, while Banks refused to back down. She made a music
video and posted it to youtube, ensuring that her fans would still have access to the song. The spat continued on twitter though, with Banks
inadvertently calling Baauer the “F-word.” This re-ignited a sleeping giant in Azealia Banks’ burgeoning career, which is her intramural relations
with the LGBT civil rights apparatus, as well as gay male media figures, that simultaneously support and police her. This conversation is deep
and necessary (for a much better handling of this topic, click here), yet for the purposes of this essay it is important to mention this because
much of the coverage of this “twitter beef” was to categorize this as “yet another Azealia Banks beef.” There is an almost universal consensus
that Banks starts and maintains beefs with producers, a storyline Baauer and Diplo cited and perpetuated to deflect attention away from their
own fault. Baauer and Diplo’s story is that Banks recorded a remix and they asked her to not post it because they decided to go into a different
direction. The different direction was to get Juicy J to record a remix and release that as the official remix. What this mystifies is what Banks
brought up: the fact that they came to Banks asking her to remix it initially and then, at the last second, after she had worked, mixed, prepared
a marketing strategy, aligned it with her own schedule, and shot a video, they decided they did not want her to go forward with it. So, Baauer
and Diplo decided that Banks’ life and career should take a backseat because they wanted another, more famous, black artist to remix their
song. Whatis happening here is a politics of obliteration. That Banks is thought to be replaceable by Juicy
J is emblematic of what so many black people in popular culture have attested to: the systemic belief in
the interchangeability of black entertainers. The thought here is that a black female rapper from Harlem can be replaced by a
black male rapper from Memphis, Tennessee. Baauer attempts to say that he thought Azealia Banks’ lyrics were only so-so and believed Juicy J
could do better. If this is not an example of a white man talking out of his ass, I am not sure what is. I do not need to get into the technical
aspects of rapping to say Azealia Banks could destroy any rapper who’s idea of a great song is, “Bands ‘a make her dance.” But this is not about
Juicy J, this is about Baauer and the meaning of blackness to his ability to produce music. For
him, black culture is not an other’s
thing made in specific contexts, but instead are loose, unowned resources of “cool” to be stretched,
interpolated, and sequenced into a dramatic product to produce his own name. Thus, the being of black
culture (its claims to place and time) are obliterated so that he may write himself into existence over the cleared
field. Saidiya Hartman writes, “The elasticity of blackness and its capacious affects enabled such flights and
becomings… The fungibility of the commodity, specifically its abstractness and immateriality, enabled
the black body to serve as the vehicle of self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment” (Hartman, 25). Thus,
Baauer is not simply emblematic of an internet-age, post-genre music culture, but is instead an example par excellance of
the white imagination using the black body as a vehicle for its own purposes . In other words, Baauer is not
(only) a thief, he is a master. What has surprised me is that in all the uproar about the “Harlem Shake” meme, in all this rage about
appropriation and disrespect, Azealia Banks’ actual violent relationship with Baauer has been completely
forgotten. I think that in the language of appropriation, we don’t have a way to connect the type of violent imagination it
takes to produce the “Harlem Shake” to his embodied relationship with Azealia Banks. Yet, it is in the circumstance of blackness
– whether the bodies of Azealia Banks and Juicy J or the melodic force of Plastic Time inspired by the Harlem Shake – that
white men like Baauer find their life-force, which they access through obliterating the being of the black
itself. It is in the obliteration of our ontological status that blackness opens up as a terrain for white
people and the greater society to live in and know themselves. And when the obliterated person returns
into view – when Banks protested Baauer’s plans – they must be vanquished and policed. Moreso than the sampling and
displacement of the tradition of the Harlem Shake, it is in his relation to Azealia Banks that we find the ultimate example of violence that we
should pay attention to and resist. Ourrage should be directed at the modes of obliteration that connect
“stealing” black culture to the violation of black bodies. Instead of looking for the proper owners of
culture, perhaps we can task ourselves with looking after those whose flesh is perpetual open to use,
abuse, and obliteration. This is not to cede the ground to critique and resist the arrogance of this society that feels anything Black
people produce is actually owned by them, but instead to turn our fight away from a demand to be included and
towards the very idea of ownership itself. This may re-orient our politics from a search for propriety, to
a form of looking after and beyond, into a new world, a new train of thought, and a new way of being in
the world and relating to one another. This form of “looking after” that Kara Keeling points us to in the epigraph might re-orient
our demands for respect and protection towards a radical interrogation of the world built on disrespecting and violating black bodies . In that
way, we can see the end of this world as the beginning of a world where we can be respected, where we
can protect and be protected, and when we can truly be.
 AT – FW (Short)
Blackened Debate DA—“Fairness, stasis, and education” are attempts to arrest Black
creative potential and truncate our visions for a Blackened debate community.
Kelsie ’19 (Amber Kelsie, Department of Communications at Wake Forest University, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 52, Number 1, 2019,
pp. 63-70, “Blackened Debate at the End of the World”, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/721920) \\EG

We are haunted by the specter of civil war. Liberal and conservative politicians and commentators openly express
anxiety about the possibility of outright hostilities and the “unravelling [of ] our national fabric” (Gambino 2017).
Increasing polarization, identity politics that destroys persuasion, an atmosphere of conspiracy regarding the deep
state or foreign puppet masters, apparent disenchantment with institutions, general mistrust in electoral politics, a gridlocked and
weak congress, and open skirmishes between white nationalist and antifascists are put forth as signs of
the end times (see, e.g., Blight 2017; Wright 2017; DeGroot 2018; Smith 2018). The looming crisis of the end of politics that
everywhere drives the nostalgic desire for a return to a normalcy and civility invites us to rethink debate and
to pose a different question that does not seek to redeem a past that never was and continues to come at too high a cost for the wretched of
the earth. Rather than “make debate great again,” I’d like to sit with the vertigo so as to consider debate’s (im)possible
outside. Such a quest for a horizon that is before-after-immanent to the End (of politics or history or the world) will require that we rethink
the spatiotemporal coordinates of the entire liberal project that secures the parameters of debate as the
dialectical and agonistic contestation of the possible. My central interlocutor here will be blackness: that (non-)ontological
constitutive outside of the modern grammar that is relegated to the realm of absolute necessity, negativity, incapacity, and pathology that
subtends the political and the rhetorical. As that which is always already outside the World/History, blackness
provides an
anoriginary nonplace from which to think crisis and a politics of actualizing the impossible. Imminent
civil war is an interesting but unsurprising anxiety ; it is unsurprising because the U.S. Civil War informs so much of the
popular narrative of the United States and its ethical position that confirms the progressive nature of time, and because liberal sovereignty was
always a war waged against civil war.1 And it is interesting because the Greeks referred to civil war as “stasis.” Today standing, state, and
stability are also meanings of stasis, as it emerges from histemi. Stasis
then doubles both as sovereignty and as
sovereignty’s undoing and evokes a constant permanence of war even in peace. Stasis in rhetorical studies takes
on the meaning of “issue” and serves as a hermeneutic for coming to consensus on the point of contention from which debate proceeds. Stasis
here also means standing in the sense that there is some “ground” in the form of prior consensus on the nature of the disagreement.2 The
somewhat paradoxical relationship between consensus and dissensus found in stasis speaks to a kind of
disavowal of ungroundedness that precedes even the point from which to begin speaking . Must one have a
presupposed potentiality for a common ground to be able to proceed in argument? Refusing this disavowal of groundlessness as it emerges in
contemporary figurations of agonistic debate might enable us to more accurately think of rhetoric in its
modern inflection as the presupposition of a ground as a war against its own void via antiblackness. The
inversion of Clausewitz’s proposition is salient: rhetoric is the continuation of war by other means; rhetoric as a
mode of war in an effort to ontologize itself against its groundless outside.3 The (im)possible is always at
stake in debate since rhetoric regards the contingent as its necessary presupposition. According to Dilip
Gaonkar, this “key, but largely unnoticed, assumption in contemporary rhetorical theory” finds its basis in Aristotle’s response to Plato’s charge
of the unspecifiability of rhetoric (2004, 5). Instead of freeing us to reflect explicitly on the nature of contingency, Aristotle’s domestication of
rhetoric by placing rhetoric within the domain of the “contingent, yet probable” has prompted most rhetorical scholars to forgo consideration
of contingency in favor of the thematic of probability: doxa, constraints, norms, ideology. Contingency in these schemas tends to be considered
as a property ascribed to statements, propositions, and rhetorical acts—to the ontic world that constitutes the context of the rhetor—rather
than as a mode of the subject or the singular encounter that constitutes a rhetorical situation. The
possibility of rhetorical
dialectic, that exigency that provides the opportunity for agonistic argument that can be sublated into
judgment, animates historical progress and places debate as the ground for civic life. In the liberal
understanding of contemporary debate, contingency takes on an interior spatial dimension as the possible content
through a disavowal of the contingency of debate’s outside that is rendered impossible. To say that debate is
impossible is then to beckon to war on the horizon. It is to recognize the state of emergency as the end
of the state of debate. The historical legacy of the U.S. Civil War will not let us end it there however, because blackness haunts even
civil war, and threatens stasis in both its senses with incoherence. To leave raciality by the wayside is to repeat the endless disavowal that what
we are threatened with is civil war and not race war. It is to still recuperate this World though the dialectical resolution that can adjust
antagonism to agonism. It is to wage liberal sovereignty’s war against civil war all over again. Polite
discussions that acknowledge
racial terror only so as to explain away racial violence as the unique domain of extremists maintain a
sense of white innocence that not only individuates a structural condition, but also pathologizes and
prohibits black utterance (especially when that utterance might take on the form of rage) by adjusting
the impossible demands of blackness back to the acceptable terms of debate. Within such discussions,
blackness can only appear as an afterthought, as what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms the affectable I or outer-determined rather than self-determined
subject in the onto-epistemological modern text (da Silva 2007). Raciality is intrinsic to modernity because it is necessary for the construction of the Subject—it names the materialization of
the spatiotemporal forms that make the modern grammar. It creates the grounds for the self-determined subject. For da Silva, nothing short of a fracturing of the spatiotemporal formal
principles of understanding that subtend historical and scientific knowledge will redress the totality of racial violence, especially as it concerns black folk. Let us then take seriously Du Bois’s
insight into the actual U.S. Civil War that animates so many antiblack pathologies today: that it was the black slaves, not Lincoln nor the Union, who won the war; and that it was the slaves, and
not the South, who ultimately lost. For it was in the chaos and crisis of civil war that fugitivity realized freedom only to have it snatched away in Reconstruction: “The slave went free; stood a
brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. . . . Democracy died save in the hearts of black folk” (Du Bois 1935, 30). In Black Reconstruction, we are gifted a tale of the
violence of antiblack dialectic and the potential of black fugitivity. The common narrative that the North fought a war to end slavery and to preserve the Union figures the U.S. Civil War as a
political battle concerning sovereignty and succession, or in the radical imagination as a battle for the future of capital between an industrial North and a pastoral planter economy in the
South. For Du Bois this cannot be the whole or even essential part of the story, as both narratives naturalize the position of the slave and her nominal emancipation as derivative rather than
active. In Du Bois’s account, black liberation was never the terms on which the war was fought; the war was fought over competing concerns to limit the competition that black people posed
to whites, both as slave labor and as free labor. The North for its part desired neither the abolition of slavery nor its expansion into the western territories. Northerners desired a resolution to
an untenable status quo thrown into disequilibrium by competing visions for how best to subjugate the black population to secure the white settlerist way of life. It was not until the slaves,
through the waging of the General Strike, showed the North the way to win the war that Lincoln reluctantly issued the Emancipation Proclamation (Du Bois 1935, 82). The General Strike was
the moment in which the impossible was actualized, through an incisive refusal to continue under the terms presented: “This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide
basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps a half million people. They wanted to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do
that they left the plantations” (Du Bois 1935, 68). Significantly, Du Bois’s analysis of the Civil War extends beyond the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865 to the end of Reconstruction and the
beginning of Jim Crow in 1878. The democracy to come was quickly sealed off in the compromises made between the North and the South that we call Reconstruction. Here debate, both as
contestation on common ground and as the resolution to war, could only re-elaborate black suffering through nominal emancipation. In Reconstruction we witness how the bargain was struck
for a newly transformed American whiteness produced through the sublation of the “Southern way of life” (the fantasy of which still animates grievances on the Right), but against black life.
The reinstantiation of master-slave relationships in confederate amnesty, black codes, the Thirteenth Amendment, vagrancy laws, convict leasing, extralegal terror, and the ongoing
sentimental and material expropriation of total value from the slave that sustains global capital constitutes the emergence of the “afterlife of slavery” that characterizes our present (Hartman

. To think with and through

1997). Du Bois’s analysis disrupts the spatiotemporal coordinates of the political to think the (im)possibility of black politics and liberation

blackness means that we cannot think the Civil War as a demarcated event distinct from Reconstruction and
Jim Crow, or think the stasis of contestation between the divisions of a polity. We must abandon the
liberal notion of progress that “accumulates . . . [and] . . . captures” black suffering in the name of
securing an antiblack future as well as the appeal of universality and particularity which spatially
“arrests Blackness’s creative potential” (Dillon 2013, 42; da Silva 2014, 84). According to da Silva, “such an understanding of
total value [of slavery for the creation of the World] requires a suspension of the view that all there is is in Time and Space . . . the radical
force of Blackness lies at the turn of thought—that is, Blackness knowing and studying announces the
End of the World as we know it” (2014, 84, emphasis mine). Da Silva joins a growing number of black scholars in many different
disciplinary homes thinking through the metaphysics of blackness as that which is ungrounded and ontologically null with respect to the
modern onto-epistemological paradigm.4 In the World that ontologizes antiblackness and racial capitalism, the calculus of racial terror exceeds
and makes possible recognition through the reduction of blackness to the figure of the Slave. The middle passage here is metonymic, naming
the production of anagrammatical blackness through the ongoing logistic of being captured and shipped, that reduces blackness from body to
flesh, “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse” (Sharpe 2016; Spillers
1987, 67). Such a proposition returns raciality, specifically blackness and antiblackness, to the analysis of what grounds debate’s (im)possibility.
What would it mean to think debate as a praxis of the impossible? To think a blackened debate not as
the presupposition of a ground through approximation to an antiblack human genre of Man , the Subject or
the transparent I, but as Harney and Moten say, “jurisgenerative black social life” (2017, 15)? We would need to
rethink the cherished terms of rhetoric itself. We might think debate not as dialectic that both precedes
and proceeds from stasis, but as the refusal of “the call to order” that opens up black forms of life, even
as form is placed under erasure (Halberstam 2013, 9). From this vantage point of blackness, which is not really a
vantage point at all, but a being out of place and time, of Being under erasure in the condition of mutual dispossession, we might begin
to sketch other visions that deactivate rhetoric’s ontologizing premises, to hold for a moment, in the
hold and in the wake, not grounded but oceanic movement, decay and life, where even dead things become something else. It is
here and happening all the time in the marooned spaces of the world. In studying debate’s
(im)possibility, we might theorize at the End of the World as a praxis oriented toward its abolition.
[ ] Extermination DA—They obliterate and police our scholarship.
Brady ’13 (Nicholas Brady, Nicholas Brady is an activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He is former debater and currently a head
coach of the James Baldwin Debate Society, the only collegiate debate team housed in an African-American Studies department. He was also a
recent graduate of Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine
Culture and Theory program, 7 March 2013, “Looking for Azealia’s Harlem Shake, Or How We Mistake the Politics of Obliteration for
Appropriation”, https://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/looking-for-azealias-harlem-shake-or-how-we-mistake-the-politics-of-
obliteration-for-appropriation/) \\EG

As the meme exploded into virality, there was inevitable backlash from many disturbed by the obvious disconnect between the videos and the
actual culture of Harlem-shaking. Many
from Harlem testified against the dance, arguing that their homegrown
culture had been stolen and appropriated without proper credit being given. This is a current topic in
the larger historical theme of black culture stolen for the larger consumption of a general (read: white)
audience that is the very foundation of American and global popular culture. From blackface minstrelsy
to jazz and ever onward, it is through the black that the larger culture gains its coherence and vitality. In
that way, we can say that blackness is the life-force of the world, in more ways than one of course. It is with an eye to this history that my friend
Justin Jones challenged his fellow speakers on a panel on Hip Hop and Masculinity about the claim of appropriation in the case of the “Harlem
Shake” meme. He asked forcefully if we were making too much of this, if there were much better examples we were doing a disservice to by
putting all of our energy into this situation (to see more of this debate, click here). I could not agree more, albeit for some different reasons that
I will list out here. The first is my issue with the word appropriation. According to Oxford English Dictionary, the verb
appropriate means “to take for one’s own purpose, typically without the owner’s permission.” This
definition is simple, yet there is much packed into it. What does it mean to own a (piece of) culture? What does it
mean to take a (piece of) culture? The answer to these questions become muddy when we think about the Harlem shake itself. By
many accounts, the Harlem shake originated from a resident named “Al B” in 1981, often done in a state of inebriation. Al B has cited the
dance’s origins in ancient Egypt, stating because the mummies were all wrapped up all they could do was shake. Bracketing out a discussion of
the accuracy of such a legend, let us take Al B’s claim serious that he was channeling the spirit of Egyptian mummies. Does that the mean the
“Harlem Shake” is just an appropriation of Egyptian culture? Where is the origin of a dance, which is another way of asking: who owns the
dance? Appropriation depends on defining our relationship to objects through the lens of property
relations, so that an object is the property of a person or group. This relation is always already thorny, but is especially
cut by cultural objects. Cultural objects can certainly be commodified, but the issue of ownership is always
wrapped up in relations of power, privilege, and propriety. It is no coincidence that appropriate is also an adjective
meaning “proper”: property, appropriate, and the proper (propriety) all share the same latin root proprius meaning “to own.” If we cannot
properly delineate ownership for the cultural object, then it is open for the free use by any and
everyone. This, of course, props up particular relations of domination, coercion, and force, which will bring us to my second issue with the
concept of “appropriation.” If we are to talk about commodities and property in relation to culture, this should
swerve us face-first into the topic of slavery and specifically the “human commodity” known as the
slave. What is important to distinguish here is that the slave is not simply an “unpaid” or hyper-exploited worker, but a being open to infinite
desires of the master, including (and especially) the wanton violation of her body and gratuitous violence. The most horrifying to consider here
is that the very happiness of the slave was owned by the master – this means the master often forced the slave to perform songs on the auction
block, in the coffle to it, and for the slave to smile and laugh and joke in his/her presence (this is described as the “terror of pleasure” by Saidiya
Hartman in her magnum opus Scenes of Subjection). This
politics of appropriation can find its “origin” dispersed
among the performance of domination we know as the peculiar institution. What we have called
“appropriation” implies that black people own their culture and the master stole it from them. Yet, when
we let go of romantic terms our claim sounds like this: a piece of property owns a piece of property and was stolen by the citizen who owns
them both. How does a commodity own a commodity? How does the owner of that commodity steal a
commodity from his own property? If this sounds cruel, we must remember that property relations (ie the relation of
“people” owning things) is not natural, but produced in the development of liberalism that is founded within and
because of racial slavery. The master is the embodiment of the liberal subject, a being that can own things. The liberal subject is
defined as everything that the slave is not, ie the liberal subject owns slaves because the slave cannot
own anything. What is revealed in the terror of the peculiar institution is not that black people have no
culture, but it is that everything we did was owned by someone else. The relation of blackness to world has since
survived into the time we call “post-emancipation,” and can be traced in the historical development of popular culture, beginning with
minstelsy. Blackface minstelsy began in the age of slavery, most notably popularized by Thomas D. Rice’s performance of slave dances and
rhythms in songs like “Jump Jim Crowe” as well as his abolitionist performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Appropriation does not only imply
ownership, but also respect – a proper way of doing things – that is the very anti-thesis of the slave relation that forms the foundation of our
society’s relationship to blackness. It is not simply that slaves could not own property legally, but it is to say that
the ontological distinction that makes the propertied subject (and the very concept of property)
possible demands the slave to be vulnerable to a perpetual state of disrespect and violation. All this is
to say that the concept of appropriation mystifies what is actually happening when white people “steal”
black culture. Stealing implies a crime or a sense of wrongdoing or doing something improper. Yet the
very concept of the proper – as well as property – depends on the black to be radically open to
violation. So it is not improper to violate the black, it is in fact the definition of the proper itself. That Harlemites are demanding “props” is
indicative of this mystification, for the fact is that nothing was stolen. They never owned their own culture, in any sense.
They owned nothing, so nothing was stolen. But I am not really saying anything new here, and I doubt I am saying anything
they did not already know. Instead, I am laying the groundwork to think through another way of understanding the suffering they are testifying
to. It is not that something was stolen from them, but it is that their bodies were evacuated in the process of making Baauer’s “Harlem Shake.”
This is the grammar of obliteration, and to explicate this we should return to my original Google search for Azealia Banks’ remix.
You might remember that earlier I mentioned I clicked the link provided by Azealia Banks of her remix, only to find it had been taken down.
Banks posted the remix on soundcloud, but Baauer and his labelmate Diplo demanded it be taken down because it was an un-authorized remix.
Aside from the obvious rejoinder that the majority of soundcloud is unauthorized remixes, this episode reveals the difference of power that
negotiates the “open” space of the internet. We
have a white producer, who is accused of appropriating Harlem
culture, attacking a black female rapper born in Harlem of improperly using his “ intellectual property.”
Black claims to propriety are met with crickets, while a white man’s claim is heard and acted upon to the
detriment of Banks. Diplo took to twitter to begin the anti-Banks commentary, while Banks refused to back down. She made a music
video and posted it to youtube, ensuring that her fans would still have access to the song. The spat continued on twitter though, with Banks
inadvertently calling Baauer the “F-word.” This re-ignited a sleeping giant in Azealia Banks’ burgeoning career, which is her intramural relations
with the LGBT civil rights apparatus, as well as gay male media figures, that simultaneously support and police her. This conversation is deep
and necessary (for a much better handling of this topic, click here), yet for the purposes of this essay it is important to mention this because
much of the coverage of this “twitter beef” was to categorize this as “yet another Azealia Banks beef.” There is an almost universal consensus
that Banks starts and maintains beefs with producers, a storyline Baauer and Diplo cited and perpetuated to deflect attention away from their
own fault. Baauer and Diplo’s story is that Banks recorded a remix and they asked her to not post it because they decided to go into a different
direction. The different direction was to get Juicy J to record a remix and release that as the official remix. What this mystifies is what Banks
brought up: the fact that they came to Banks asking her to remix it initially and then, at the last second, after she had worked, mixed, prepared
a marketing strategy, aligned it with her own schedule, and shot a video, they decided they did not want her to go forward with it. So, Baauer
and Diplo decided that Banks’ life and career should take a backseat because they wanted another, more famous, black artist to remix their
song. Whatis happening here is a politics of obliteration. That Banks is thought to be replaceable by Juicy
J is emblematic of what so many black people in popular culture have attested to: the systemic belief in
the interchangeability of black entertainers. The thought here is that a black female rapper from Harlem can be replaced by a
black male rapper from Memphis, Tennessee. Baauer attempts to say that he thought Azealia Banks’ lyrics were only so-so and believed Juicy J
could do better. If this is not an example of a white man talking out of his ass, I am not sure what is. I do not need to get into the technical
aspects of rapping to say Azealia Banks could destroy any rapper who’s idea of a great song is, “Bands ‘a make her dance.” But this is not about
Juicy J, this is about Baauer and the meaning of blackness to his ability to produce music. For
him, black culture is not an other’s
thing made in specific contexts, but instead are loose, unowned resources of “cool” to be stretched,
interpolated, and sequenced into a dramatic product to produce his own name. Thus, the being of black
culture (its claims to place and time) are obliterated so that he may write himself into existence over the cleared
field. Saidiya Hartman writes, “The elasticity of blackness and its capacious affects enabled such flights and
becomings… The fungibility of the commodity, specifically its abstractness and immateriality, enabled
the black body to serve as the vehicle of self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment” (Hartman, 25). Thus,
Baauer is not simply emblematic of an internet-age, post-genre music culture, but is instead an example par excellance of
the white imagination using the black body as a vehicle for its own purposes . In other words, Baauer is not
(only) a thief, he is a master. What has surprised me is that in all the uproar about the “Harlem Shake” meme, in all this rage about
appropriation and disrespect, Azealia Banks’ actual violent relationship with Baauer has been completely
forgotten. I think that in the language of appropriation, we don’t have a way to connect the type of violent imagination it
takes to produce the “Harlem Shake” to his embodied relationship with Azealia Banks. Yet, it is in the circumstance of blackness
– whether the bodies of Azealia Banks and Juicy J or the melodic force of Plastic Time inspired by the Harlem Shake – that
white men like Baauer find their life-force, which they access through obliterating the being of the black
itself. It is in the obliteration of our ontological status that blackness opens up as a terrain for white
people and the greater society to live in and know themselves. And when the obliterated person returns
into view – when Banks protested Baauer’s plans – they must be vanquished and policed. Moreso than the sampling and
displacement of the tradition of the Harlem Shake, it is in his relation to Azealia Banks that we find the ultimate example of violence that we
should pay attention to and resist. Ourrage should be directed at the modes of obliteration that connect
“stealing” black culture to the violation of black bodies. Instead of looking for the proper owners of
culture, perhaps we can task ourselves with looking after those whose flesh is perpetual open to use,
abuse, and obliteration. This is not to cede the ground to critique and resist the arrogance of this society that feels anything Black
people produce is actually owned by them, but instead to turn our fight away from a demand to be included and
towards the very idea of ownership itself. This may re-orient our politics from a search for propriety, to
a form of looking after and beyond, into a new world, a new train of thought, and a new way of being in
the world and relating to one another. This form of “looking after” that Kara Keeling points us to in the epigraph might re-orient
our demands for respect and protection towards a radical interrogation of the world built on disrespecting and violating black bodies . In that
way, we can see the end of this world as the beginning of a world where we can be respected, where we
can protect and be protected, and when we can truly be.
 AT – Burden of the Rejoinder
Blippy – high threshold
Polson – debate about debate
C/A FW offense
2NC – AT – Perm/Steal Back
 AT – Perm/Steal Back (Long)
Three answers:
1) Mutual exclusivity—this is a stick up, you can’t negotiate. The entire premise of
the CP is to steal from the aff without their consent and without intent to
return it. Any perm in this context doesn’t make sense. The perm is severance—
which is a voter since it turns the aff into a moving target which destroys
competitive equity, makes debating impossible, and destroys this activity’s
educational value.
2) Politics of Obliteration DA—Black culture is stolen to give coherence and vitality
to society’s culture. In an antiblack world defined by ontological rupture,
society employs a politic of obliteration to expose Blackness to unending abuse
and to reify Black fungibility. As such, their claims to “rightfully” own their aff
are a farce. Trying to steal back the aff is a liberal attempt to bolster the
master’s power and exterminate Black existence.
Brady ’13 (Nicholas Brady, Nicholas Brady is an activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He is former debater and currently a head
coach of the James Baldwin Debate Society, the only collegiate debate team housed in an African-American Studies department. He was also a
recent graduate of Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine
Culture and Theory program, 7 March 2013, “Looking for Azealia’s Harlem Shake, Or How We Mistake the Politics of Obliteration for
Appropriation”, https://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/looking-for-azealias-harlem-shake-or-how-we-mistake-the-politics-of-
obliteration-for-appropriation/) \\EG

As the meme exploded into virality, there was inevitable backlash from many disturbed by the obvious disconnect between the videos and the
actual culture of Harlem-shaking. Many
from Harlem testified against the dance, arguing that their homegrown
culture had been stolen and appropriated without proper credit being given. This is a current topic in
the larger historical theme of black culture stolen for the larger consumption of a general (read: white)
audience that is the very foundation of American and global popular culture. From blackface minstrelsy
to jazz and ever onward, it is through the black that the larger culture gains its coherence and vitality. In
that way, we can say that blackness is the life-force of the world, in more ways than one of course. It is with an eye to this history that my friend
Justin Jones challenged his fellow speakers on a panel on Hip Hop and Masculinity about the claim of appropriation in the case of the “Harlem
Shake” meme. He asked forcefully if we were making too much of this, if there were much better examples we were doing a disservice to by
putting all of our energy into this situation (to see more of this debate, click here). I could not agree more, albeit for some different reasons that
I will list out here. The first is my issue with the word appropriation. According to Oxford English Dictionary, the verb
appropriate means “to take for one’s own purpose, typically without the owner’s permission.” This
definition is simple, yet there is much packed into it. What does it mean to own a (piece of) culture? What does it
mean to take a (piece of) culture? The answer to these questions become muddy when we think about the Harlem shake itself. By
many accounts, the Harlem shake originated from a resident named “Al B” in 1981, often done in a state of inebriation. Al B has cited the
dance’s origins in ancient Egypt, stating because the mummies were all wrapped up all they could do was shake. Bracketing out a discussion of
the accuracy of such a legend, let us take Al B’s claim serious that he was channeling the spirit of Egyptian mummies. Does that the mean the
“Harlem Shake” is just an appropriation of Egyptian culture? Where is the origin of a dance, which is another way of asking: who owns the
dance? Appropriation depends on defining our relationship to objects through the lens of property
relations, so that an object is the property of a person or group. This relation is always already thorny, but is especially
cut by cultural objects. Cultural objects can certainly be commodified, but the issue of ownership is always
wrapped up in relations of power, privilege, and propriety. It is no coincidence that appropriate is also an adjective
meaning “proper”: property, appropriate, and the proper (propriety) all share the same latin root proprius meaning “to own.” If we cannot
properly delineate ownership for the cultural object, then it is open for the free use by any and
everyone. This, of course, props up particular relations of domination, coercion, and force, which will bring us to my second issue with the
concept of “appropriation.” If we are to talk about commodities and property in relation to culture, this should
swerve us face-first into the topic of slavery and specifically the “human commodity” known as the
slave. What is important to distinguish here is that the slave is not simply an “unpaid” or hyper-exploited worker, but a being open to infinite
desires of the master, including (and especially) the wanton violation of her body and gratuitous violence. The most horrifying to consider here
is that the very happiness of the slave was owned by the master – this means the master often forced the slave to perform songs on the auction
block, in the coffle to it, and for the slave to smile and laugh and joke in his/her presence (this is described as the “terror of pleasure” by Saidiya
Hartman in her magnum opus Scenes of Subjection). This
politics of appropriation can find its “origin” dispersed
among the performance of domination we know as the peculiar institution. What we have called
“appropriation” implies that black people own their culture and the master stole it from them. Yet, when
we let go of romantic terms our claim sounds like this: a piece of property owns a piece of property and was stolen by the citizen who owns
them both. How does a commodity own a commodity? How does the owner of that commodity steal a
commodity from his own property? If this sounds cruel, we must remember that property relations (ie the relation of
“people” owning things) is not natural, but produced in the development of liberalism that is founded within and
because of racial slavery. The master is the embodiment of the liberal subject, a being that can own things. The liberal subject is
defined as everything that the slave is not, ie the liberal subject owns slaves because the slave cannot
own anything. What is revealed in the terror of the peculiar institution is not that black people have no
culture, but it is that everything we did was owned by someone else. The relation of blackness to world has since
survived into the time we call “post-emancipation,” and can be traced in the historical development of popular culture, beginning with
minstelsy. Blackface minstelsy began in the age of slavery, most notably popularized by Thomas D. Rice’s performance of slave dances and
rhythms in songs like “Jump Jim Crowe” as well as his abolitionist performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Appropriation does not only imply
ownership, but also respect – a proper way of doing things – that is the very anti-thesis of the slave relation that forms the foundation of our
society’s relationship to blackness. It is not simply that slaves could not own property legally, but it is to say that
the ontological distinction that makes the propertied subject (and the very concept of property)
possible demands the slave to be vulnerable to a perpetual state of disrespect and violation. All this is
to say that the concept of appropriation mystifies what is actually happening when white people “steal”
black culture. Stealing implies a crime or a sense of wrongdoing or doing something improper. Yet the
very concept of the proper – as well as property – depends on the black to be radically open to
violation. So it is not improper to violate the black, it is in fact the definition of the proper itself. That Harlemites are demanding “props” is
indicative of this mystification, for the fact is that nothing was stolen. They never owned their own culture, in any sense.
They owned nothing, so nothing was stolen. But I am not really saying anything new here, and I doubt I am saying anything
they did not already know. Instead, I am laying the groundwork to think through another way of understanding the suffering they are testifying
to. It is not that something was stolen from them, but it is that their bodies were evacuated in the process of making Baauer’s “Harlem Shake.”
This is the grammar of obliteration, and to explicate this we should return to my original Google search for Azealia Banks’ remix.
You might remember that earlier I mentioned I clicked the link provided by Azealia Banks of her remix, only to find it had been taken down.
Banks posted the remix on soundcloud, but Baauer and his labelmate Diplo demanded it be taken down because it was an un-authorized remix.
Aside from the obvious rejoinder that the majority of soundcloud is unauthorized remixes, this episode reveals the difference of power that
negotiates the “open” space of the internet. We
have a white producer, who is accused of appropriating Harlem
culture, attacking a black female rapper born in Harlem of improperly using his “ intellectual property.”
Black claims to propriety are met with crickets, while a white man’s claim is heard and acted upon to the
detriment of Banks. Diplo took to twitter to begin the anti-Banks commentary, while Banks refused to back down. She made a music
video and posted it to youtube, ensuring that her fans would still have access to the song. The spat continued on twitter though, with Banks
inadvertently calling Baauer the “F-word.” This re-ignited a sleeping giant in Azealia Banks’ burgeoning career, which is her intramural relations
with the LGBT civil rights apparatus, as well as gay male media figures, that simultaneously support and police her. This conversation is deep
and necessary (for a much better handling of this topic, click here), yet for the purposes of this essay it is important to mention this because
much of the coverage of this “twitter beef” was to categorize this as “yet another Azealia Banks beef.” There is an almost universal consensus
that Banks starts and maintains beefs with producers, a storyline Baauer and Diplo cited and perpetuated to deflect attention away from their
own fault. Baauer and Diplo’s story is that Banks recorded a remix and they asked her to not post it because they decided to go into a different
direction. The different direction was to get Juicy J to record a remix and release that as the official remix. What this mystifies is what Banks
brought up: the fact that they came to Banks asking her to remix it initially and then, at the last second, after she had worked, mixed, prepared
a marketing strategy, aligned it with her own schedule, and shot a video, they decided they did not want her to go forward with it. So, Baauer
and Diplo decided that Banks’ life and career should take a backseat because they wanted another, more famous, black artist to remix their
song. Whatis happening here is a politics of obliteration. That Banks is thought to be replaceable by Juicy
J is emblematic of what so many black people in popular culture have attested to: the systemic belief in
the interchangeability of black entertainers. The thought here is that a black female rapper from Harlem can be replaced by a
black male rapper from Memphis, Tennessee. Baauer attempts to say that he thought Azealia Banks’ lyrics were only so-so and believed Juicy J
could do better. If this is not an example of a white man talking out of his ass, I am not sure what is. I do not need to get into the technical
aspects of rapping to say Azealia Banks could destroy any rapper who’s idea of a great song is, “Bands ‘a make her dance.” But this is not about
Juicy J, this is about Baauer and the meaning of blackness to his ability to produce music. For
him, black culture is not an other’s
thing made in specific contexts, but instead are loose, unowned resources of “cool” to be stretched,
interpolated, and sequenced into a dramatic product to produce his own name. Thus, the being of black
culture (its claims to place and time) are obliterated so that he may write himself into existence over the cleared
field. Saidiya Hartman writes, “The elasticity of blackness and its capacious affects enabled such flights and
becomings… The fungibility of the commodity, specifically its abstractness and immateriality, enabled
the black body to serve as the vehicle of self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment” (Hartman, 25). Thus,
Baauer is not simply emblematic of an internet-age, post-genre music culture, but is instead an example par excellance of
the white imagination using the black body as a vehicle for its own purposes . In other words, Baauer is not
(only) a thief, he is a master. What has surprised me is that in all the uproar about the “Harlem Shake” meme, in all this rage about
appropriation and disrespect, Azealia Banks’ actual violent relationship with Baauer has been completely
forgotten. I think that in the language of appropriation, we don’t have a way to connect the type of violent imagination it
takes to produce the “Harlem Shake” to his embodied relationship with Azealia Banks. Yet, it is in the circumstance of blackness
– whether the bodies of Azealia Banks and Juicy J or the melodic force of Plastic Time inspired by the Harlem Shake – that
white men like Baauer find their life-force, which they access through obliterating the being of the black
itself. It is in the obliteration of our ontological status that blackness opens up as a terrain for white
people and the greater society to live in and know themselves. And when the obliterated person returns
into view – when Banks protested Baauer’s plans – they must be vanquished and policed. Moreso than the sampling and
displacement of the tradition of the Harlem Shake, it is in his relation to Azealia Banks that we find the ultimate example of violence that we
should pay attention to and resist. Ourrage should be directed at the modes of obliteration that connect
“stealing” black culture to the violation of black bodies. Instead of looking for the proper owners of
culture, perhaps we can task ourselves with looking after those whose flesh is perpetual open to use,
abuse, and obliteration. This is not to cede the ground to critique and resist the arrogance of this society that feels anything Black
people produce is actually owned by them, but instead to turn our fight away from a demand to be included and
towards the very idea of ownership itself. This may re-orient our politics from a search for propriety, to
a form of looking after and beyond, into a new world, a new train of thought, and a new way of being in
the world and relating to one another. This form of “looking after” that Kara Keeling points us to in the epigraph might re-orient
our demands for respect and protection towards a radical interrogation of the world built on disrespecting and violating black bodies . In that
way, we can see the end of this world as the beginning of a world where we can be respected, where we
can protect and be protected, and when we can truly be.
 3) Economy of Gratitude DA—White people trying to take back the 1ac tries to
wedge white participation back into our politic. Don’t give them a perm—make
them let go and see their authority be destroyed. Get out of the way—they
must be willing to do what Black people tell them to do. We are supposed to be
grateful that they are willing to work with Black people. Don’t try to help, don’t
speak for us—we aren’t grateful. Don't get mad because you can't make
decisions in the process. Why do you need to?
Nopper ’03 (Tamara Nopper, Department of Sociology, Asian American Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania, “The White Anti-
Racist is an Oxymoron: An Open Letter to White Anti-Racists”, 2003, http://racetraitor.org/nopper.html) \\EG

However, this does not mean that white people who go around saying dumb things such as "I am not white! I am
a human being!" or, "I left whiteness and joined the human race," or my favorite, " I hate white people!
They're stupid" are not structurally white. Remember, whiteness is a structure of domination embedded in
our social relations, institutions, discourses, and practices. Don't tell me you're not white but then when
we go out in the street and the police don't bother you or people don't ask you if you're a prostitute , or if
people don't follow you and touch you at will, act like that does not make a difference in our lives. Basically, you can't
talk, or merely "unlearn" whiteness, as all of these annoying trainings for white people to "unlearn" racism will have you think.
Rather, white people need to be willing to have their very social position, their very relationship of
domination, their very authority, their very being...let go, perhaps even destroyed. I know this might
sound scary, but that is really not my concern. I am not interested in making white people , even those so-
called good-hearted anti-racist whites, comfortable about their position in struggles that shape my life in ways that it will never
shape theirs. I recently finished the biography of John Brown by DuBois. The biography was less of a biography and more of an interpretation by
DuBois about the now-legendary white abolitionist. Now while John Brown's practice was problematic in many ways--he still had to be in
control and he had fucked-up views that Blacks were still enslaved because they were too "servile" (a white supremacist sentiment)--what I
took from Brown's life was that he realized that moral
persuasion alone would not solve racial problems. That is, whites
cannot talk or just think through whiteness and structures of white supremacy. They must be
committed to either picking up arms for other people (and only firing when the people tell them so),
dying for other people, or just getting out of the way. In short, they must be willing to do what the
people most affected and marginalized by a situation tell them to do. Now I am sure that right now there are some
white people saying that other people cannot understand what is going on, that they do not have the critical analysis to figure stuff out, or that
non-white people have fucked up ideas. This is just white supremacist bullshit because it is rooted in the idea that non-white people have not
interpreted their experiences and cannot run things themselves. It also assumes that there are not internal conversations within communities--
which I do not think white people need to be privy to or participate in--in which people struggle out their own visions for society and how to go
about achieving them. In short, this perspective by whites that non-white people cannot be in control of our own destinies is rooted in a
paternally-racist approach to non-white people. Further, it is also rooted in the idea that white people are not racist or do not benefit from
racism. Rather, white people at meetings will often discuss how they feel "silenced" by non-whites, or that they
are being "put in their place." Let me make one thing clear: it is impossible for a non-white person to put a white person in her place. This is not
to say that non-white people cannot have a sexist or homophobic attitude towards a white person. But to say, or even hint at that as a "WHITE"
person someone is being put in their place--whoever says this just needs to shut the fuck up because that is some bull. It is impossible for
whiteness to be put in one's place, because that is a part of whiteness, the ability to take up space and feel a prerogative to do so. Further, the
idea that white people are being put into their place relies on the neo-conservative view of reverse racism that has characterized the backlash
against non-whites, especially Blacks, in the post-civil rights era. So when
you say these types of things you are actually
helping to reproduce a neo-conservative racial rhetoric which relies on the myth of the "threatened"
and "displaced" white person. Additionally, white activism, especially white anti-racism, is predicated on an
economy of gratitude. We are supposed to be grateful that a white person is willing to work with non-
white people. We are supposed to be grateful that you actually want to work with us and that you give
us your resources. I would like to know why you have those resources and others do not? And don't assume that just
because I have to ask you for resources that it does not hurt me, pain me even. Don't assume that when
you come into the space, that doesn't bother me. Don't assume that when you talk first, talk the most,
and talk the most often, that this doesn't hurt me. Don't assume that when I see you get the attention and accolades and
the book deals and the speaking engagements that this does not hurt me (because you profit off of pain). And don't assume that
when I see how grateful non-white people are to you for being there, for being a "good white" person
that this doesn't hurt me. And don't assume that when I get chastised by non-white people because I think your presence is
unnecessary that it does not hurt me. Because all of these things remind me of how powerless non-white people
are (albeit differently) in relation to white people. All of these gestures that you do reminds me of how
grateful I am supposed to be towards you because you actually (or supposedly) care about what is
happening to me. I am a bit resentful of economies of gratitude. Further, this structure of white supremacy known as
white anti-racism also impacts the larger social world because it still makes white people the most
valued people. Non-white people are forced to feel dependent and grateful to white people who will actually interact with us. We are
made to feel that we are inferior, incapable, that we really do need white people. And the sad thing is, that given
all of the resources that whiteness has and that white people get and control, there is an element of material truth in all of this, I am afraid.
But white people need to think of how their activism reproduces the actual structure of white supremacy some--
not all whites activists--profess to be about. This structure of white supremacy is not just in an activist space, it actually touches upon and
impinges on the lives of non-white people who may not be activists (in your sense) or who do not interact with you in activist worlds. But
consider what your presence means in a community that you decide to set up your community garden in, or your bookstore in, or your meeting
space in, or have your march in. What
does it mean when you decide that you want to be "with" the oppressed
and you end up displacing them? Just because you walk around with your dreadlocks, or decide that you will not wear expensive
clothes does not mean that your whiteness does not displace people in the spaces you decide to put yourself in. How do you help to bring more
forms of authority and control in a neighborhood, whether through increased rent and housing costs, more policing, or just the ways in which
your white bodies can make people feel, as a brilliant friend of mine once asked, "squatters in somebody else's project"? So what does this
mean for the future of white anti-racists? This might mean to first, figure out ways in which whiteness needs to die
as a social structure and as an identity in which you organize your anti-racist work. What this looks like in
practice may not be so clear but I will attempt to give some suggestions here. First, don't call us, we'll call you. If we need your
resources, we will contact you. But don't show up, flaunt your power in our faces and then get angry when we
resent the fact that you have so many resources we don't and that we are not grateful for this arrangement.
And don't get mad because you can't make decisions in the process. Why do you need to? Secondly, stop
speaking for us. We can talk for ourselves. Third, stop trying to point out internal contradictions in our communities, we know
what they are, we are struggling around them, and I really do not know how white people can be helpful to non- whites to clear these up.
Fourth, don't ever say some shit to me about how you feel silenced, marginalized, discriminated against, or put in your place. Period. Finally,
start thinking of what it would mean, in terms of actual structured social arrangements, for whiteness and white identity--even the white
antiracist kind (because there really is no redeemable or reformed white identity)--to be destroyed. In conclusion, I want to say to anyone who
thinks that this is too academic or abstract, I write as a non-white person, meaning that from my body, my person, I experience white
supremacy. I also draw my understanding of white supremacy from non-white people, many engaged in various struggles of activism, but most
importantly just to speak out and stay alive. They did not get accolades from many for speaking out but instead experienced constant threats
on their lives for just existing and doing the work that they did. Moreover, I want to know when a discussion of whiteness, white supremacy and
domination became seen as abstract and not rooted in the everyday concrete reality that we experience?
 AT – Perm/Steal Back (Short)
Three answers:
1) Mutual exclusivity—this is a stick up, you can’t negotiate. The entire premise of
the CP is to steal from the aff without their consent and without intent to
return it. Any perm in this context doesn’t make sense.
2) Politics of Obliteration DA—Trying to steal back the aff is a liberal attempt to
bolster the master’s power and exterminate Black existence.
Brady ’13 (Nicholas Brady, Nicholas Brady is an activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He is former debater and currently a head
coach of the James Baldwin Debate Society, the only collegiate debate team housed in an African-American Studies department. He was also a
recent graduate of Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and currently a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine
Culture and Theory program, 7 March 2013, “Looking for Azealia’s Harlem Shake, Or How We Mistake the Politics of Obliteration for
Appropriation”, https://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/looking-for-azealias-harlem-shake-or-how-we-mistake-the-politics-of-
obliteration-for-appropriation/) \\EG

As the meme exploded into virality, there was inevitable backlash from many disturbed by the obvious disconnect between the videos and the
actual culture of Harlem-shaking. Many
from Harlem testified against the dance, arguing that their homegrown
culture had been stolen and appropriated without proper credit being given. This is a current topic in
the larger historical theme of black culture stolen for the larger consumption of a general (read: white)
audience that is the very foundation of American and global popular culture. From blackface minstrelsy
to jazz and ever onward, it is through the black that the larger culture gains its coherence and vitality. In
that way, we can say that blackness is the life-force of the world, in more ways than one of course. It is with an eye to this history that my friend
Justin Jones challenged his fellow speakers on a panel on Hip Hop and Masculinity about the claim of appropriation in the case of the “Harlem
Shake” meme. He asked forcefully if we were making too much of this, if there were much better examples we were doing a disservice to by
putting all of our energy into this situation (to see more of this debate, click here). I could not agree more, albeit for some different reasons that
I will list out here. The first is my issue with the word appropriation. According to Oxford English Dictionary, the verb
appropriate means “to take for one’s own purpose, typically without the owner’s permission.” This
definition is simple, yet there is much packed into it. What does it mean to own a (piece of) culture? What does it
mean to take a (piece of) culture? The answer to these questions become muddy when we think about the Harlem shake itself. By
many accounts, the Harlem shake originated from a resident named “Al B” in 1981, often done in a state of inebriation. Al B has cited the
dance’s origins in ancient Egypt, stating because the mummies were all wrapped up all they could do was shake. Bracketing out a discussion of
the accuracy of such a legend, let us take Al B’s claim serious that he was channeling the spirit of Egyptian mummies. Does that the mean the
“Harlem Shake” is just an appropriation of Egyptian culture? Where is the origin of a dance, which is another way of asking: who owns the
dance? Appropriation depends on defining our relationship to objects through the lens of property
relations, so that an object is the property of a person or group. This relation is always already thorny, but is especially
cut by cultural objects. Cultural objects can certainly be commodified, but the issue of ownership is always
wrapped up in relations of power, privilege, and propriety. It is no coincidence that appropriate is also an adjective
meaning “proper”: property, appropriate, and the proper (propriety) all share the same latin root proprius meaning “to own.” If we cannot
properly delineate ownership for the cultural object, then it is open for the free use by any and
everyone. This, of course, props up particular relations of domination, coercion, and force, which will bring us to my second issue with the
concept of “appropriation.” If we are to talk about commodities and property in relation to culture, this should
swerve us face-first into the topic of slavery and specifically the “human commodity” known as the
slave. What is important to distinguish here is that the slave is not simply an “unpaid” or hyper-exploited worker, but a being open to infinite
desires of the master, including (and especially) the wanton violation of her body and gratuitous violence. The most horrifying to consider here
is that the very happiness of the slave was owned by the master – this means the master often forced the slave to perform songs on the auction
block, in the coffle to it, and for the slave to smile and laugh and joke in his/her presence (this is described as the “terror of pleasure” by Saidiya
Hartman in her magnum opus Scenes of Subjection). This
politics of appropriation can find its “origin” dispersed
among the performance of domination we know as the peculiar institution. What we have called
“appropriation” implies that black people own their culture and the master stole it from them. Yet, when
we let go of romantic terms our claim sounds like this: a piece of property owns a piece of property and was stolen by the citizen who owns
them both. How does a commodity own a commodity? How does the owner of that commodity steal a
commodity from his own property? If this sounds cruel, we must remember that property relations (ie the relation of
“people” owning things) is not natural, but produced in the development of liberalism that is founded within and
because of racial slavery. The master is the embodiment of the liberal subject, a being that can own things. The liberal subject is
defined as everything that the slave is not, ie the liberal subject owns slaves because the slave cannot
own anything. What is revealed in the terror of the peculiar institution is not that black people have no
culture, but it is that everything we did was owned by someone else. The relation of blackness to world has since
survived into the time we call “post-emancipation,” and can be traced in the historical development of popular culture, beginning with
minstelsy. Blackface minstelsy began in the age of slavery, most notably popularized by Thomas D. Rice’s performance of slave dances and
rhythms in songs like “Jump Jim Crowe” as well as his abolitionist performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Appropriation does not only imply
ownership, but also respect – a proper way of doing things – that is the very anti-thesis of the slave relation that forms the foundation of our
society’s relationship to blackness. It is not simply that slaves could not own property legally, but it is to say that
the ontological distinction that makes the propertied subject (and the very concept of property)
possible demands the slave to be vulnerable to a perpetual state of disrespect and violation. All this is
to say that the concept of appropriation mystifies what is actually happening when white people “steal”
black culture. Stealing implies a crime or a sense of wrongdoing or doing something improper. Yet the
very concept of the proper – as well as property – depends on the black to be radically open to
violation. So it is not improper to violate the black, it is in fact the definition of the proper itself. That Harlemites are demanding “props” is
indicative of this mystification, for the fact is that nothing was stolen. They never owned their own culture, in any sense.
They owned nothing, so nothing was stolen. But I am not really saying anything new here, and I doubt I am saying anything
they did not already know. Instead, I am laying the groundwork to think through another way of understanding the suffering they are testifying
to. It is not that something was stolen from them, but it is that their bodies were evacuated in the process of making Baauer’s “Harlem Shake.”
This is the grammar of obliteration, and to explicate this we should return to my original Google search for Azealia Banks’ remix.
You might remember that earlier I mentioned I clicked the link provided by Azealia Banks of her remix, only to find it had been taken down.
Banks posted the remix on soundcloud, but Baauer and his labelmate Diplo demanded it be taken down because it was an un-authorized remix.
Aside from the obvious rejoinder that the majority of soundcloud is unauthorized remixes, this episode reveals the difference of power that
negotiates the “open” space of the internet. We
have a white producer, who is accused of appropriating Harlem
culture, attacking a black female rapper born in Harlem of improperly using his “ intellectual property.”
Black claims to propriety are met with crickets, while a white man’s claim is heard and acted upon to the
detriment of Banks. Diplo took to twitter to begin the anti-Banks commentary, while Banks refused to back down. She made a music
video and posted it to youtube, ensuring that her fans would still have access to the song. The spat continued on twitter though, with Banks
inadvertently calling Baauer the “F-word.” This re-ignited a sleeping giant in Azealia Banks’ burgeoning career, which is her intramural relations
with the LGBT civil rights apparatus, as well as gay male media figures, that simultaneously support and police her. This conversation is deep
and necessary (for a much better handling of this topic, click here), yet for the purposes of this essay it is important to mention this because
much of the coverage of this “twitter beef” was to categorize this as “yet another Azealia Banks beef.” There is an almost universal consensus
that Banks starts and maintains beefs with producers, a storyline Baauer and Diplo cited and perpetuated to deflect attention away from their
own fault. Baauer and Diplo’s story is that Banks recorded a remix and they asked her to not post it because they decided to go into a different
direction. The different direction was to get Juicy J to record a remix and release that as the official remix. What this mystifies is what Banks
brought up: the fact that they came to Banks asking her to remix it initially and then, at the last second, after she had worked, mixed, prepared
a marketing strategy, aligned it with her own schedule, and shot a video, they decided they did not want her to go forward with it. So, Baauer
and Diplo decided that Banks’ life and career should take a backseat because they wanted another, more famous, black artist to remix their
song. Whatis happening here is a politics of obliteration. That Banks is thought to be replaceable by Juicy
J is emblematic of what so many black people in popular culture have attested to: the systemic belief in
the interchangeability of black entertainers. The thought here is that a black female rapper from Harlem can be replaced by a
black male rapper from Memphis, Tennessee. Baauer attempts to say that he thought Azealia Banks’ lyrics were only so-so and believed Juicy J
could do better. If this is not an example of a white man talking out of his ass, I am not sure what is. I do not need to get into the technical
aspects of rapping to say Azealia Banks could destroy any rapper who’s idea of a great song is, “Bands ‘a make her dance.” But this is not about
Juicy J, this is about Baauer and the meaning of blackness to his ability to produce music. For
him, black culture is not an other’s
thing made in specific contexts, but instead are loose, unowned resources of “cool” to be stretched,
interpolated, and sequenced into a dramatic product to produce his own name. Thus, the being of black
culture (its claims to place and time) are obliterated so that he may write himself into existence over the cleared
field. Saidiya Hartman writes, “The elasticity of blackness and its capacious affects enabled such flights and
becomings… The fungibility of the commodity, specifically its abstractness and immateriality, enabled
the black body to serve as the vehicle of self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment” (Hartman, 25). Thus,
Baauer is not simply emblematic of an internet-age, post-genre music culture, but is instead an example par excellance of
the white imagination using the black body as a vehicle for its own purposes . In other words, Baauer is not
(only) a thief, he is a master. What has surprised me is that in all the uproar about the “Harlem Shake” meme, in all this rage about
appropriation and disrespect, Azealia Banks’ actual violent relationship with Baauer has been completely
forgotten. I think that in the language of appropriation, we don’t have a way to connect the type of violent imagination it
takes to produce the “Harlem Shake” to his embodied relationship with Azealia Banks. Yet, it is in the circumstance of blackness
– whether the bodies of Azealia Banks and Juicy J or the melodic force of Plastic Time inspired by the Harlem Shake – that
white men like Baauer find their life-force, which they access through obliterating the being of the black
itself. It is in the obliteration of our ontological status that blackness opens up as a terrain for white
people and the greater society to live in and know themselves. And when the obliterated person returns
into view – when Banks protested Baauer’s plans – they must be vanquished and policed. Moreso than the sampling and
displacement of the tradition of the Harlem Shake, it is in his relation to Azealia Banks that we find the ultimate example of violence that we
should pay attention to and resist. Ourrage should be directed at the modes of obliteration that connect
“stealing” black culture to the violation of black bodies. Instead of looking for the proper owners of
culture, perhaps we can task ourselves with looking after those whose flesh is perpetual open to use,
abuse, and obliteration. This is not to cede the ground to critique and resist the arrogance of this society that feels anything Black
people produce is actually owned by them, but instead to turn our fight away from a demand to be included and
towards the very idea of ownership itself. This may re-orient our politics from a search for propriety, to
a form of looking after and beyond, into a new world, a new train of thought, and a new way of being in
the world and relating to one another. This form of “looking after” that Kara Keeling points us to in the epigraph might re-orient
our demands for respect and protection towards a radical interrogation of the world built on disrespecting and violating black bodies . In that
way, we can see the end of this world as the beginning of a world where we can be respected, where we
can protect and be protected, and when we can truly be.

3) Economy of Gratitude DA—White people trying to take back the 1ac tries to
wedge white participation back into our politic. Don’t give them a perm—make
them let go and see their authority be destroyed. Anything short of that
recreates an economy of white gratitude.
Nopper ’03 (Tamara Nopper, Department of Sociology, Asian American Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania, “The White Anti-
Racist is an Oxymoron: An Open Letter to White Anti-Racists”, 2003, http://racetraitor.org/nopper.html) \\EG

However, this does not mean that white people who go around saying dumb things such as "I am not white! I am
a human being!" or, "I left whiteness and joined the human race," or my favorite, " I hate white people!
They're stupid" are not structurally white. Remember, whiteness is a structure of domination embedded in
our social relations, institutions, discourses, and practices. Don't tell me you're not white but then when
we go out in the street and the police don't bother you or people don't ask you if you're a prostitute , or if
people don't follow you and touch you at will, act like that does not make a difference in our lives. Basically, you can't
talk, or merely "unlearn" whiteness, as all of these annoying trainings for white people to "unlearn" racism will have you think.
Rather, white people need to be willing to have their very social position, their very relationship of
domination, their very authority, their very being...let go, perhaps even destroyed. I know this might
sound scary, but that is really not my concern. I am not interested in making white people , even those so-
called good-hearted anti-racist whites, comfortable about their position in struggles that shape my life in ways that it will never
shape theirs. I recently finished the biography of John Brown by DuBois. The biography was less of a biography and more of an interpretation by
DuBois about the now-legendary white abolitionist. Now while John Brown's practice was problematic in many ways--he still had to be in
control and he had fucked-up views that Blacks were still enslaved because they were too "servile" (a white supremacist sentiment)--what I
took from Brown's life was that he realized that moral
persuasion alone would not solve racial problems. That is, whites
cannot talk or just think through whiteness and structures of white supremacy. They must be
committed to either picking up arms for other people (and only firing when the people tell them so),
dying for other people, or just getting out of the way. In short, they must be willing to do what the
people most affected and marginalized by a situation tell them to do. Now I am sure that right now there are some
white people saying that other people cannot understand what is going on, that they do not have the critical analysis to figure stuff out, or that
non-white people have fucked up ideas. This is just white supremacist bullshit because it is rooted in the idea that non-white people have not
interpreted their experiences and cannot run things themselves. It also assumes that there are not internal conversations within communities--
which I do not think white people need to be privy to or participate in--in which people struggle out their own visions for society and how to go
about achieving them. In short, this perspective by whites that non-white people cannot be in control of our own destinies is rooted in a
paternally-racist approach to non-white people. Further, it is also rooted in the idea that white people are not racist or do not benefit from
racism. Rather, white people at meetings will often discuss how they feel "silenced" by non-whites, or that they
are being "put in their place." Let me make one thing clear: it is impossible for a non-white person to put a white person in her place. This is not
to say that non-white people cannot have a sexist or homophobic attitude towards a white person. But to say, or even hint at that as a "WHITE"
person someone is being put in their place--whoever says this just needs to shut the fuck up because that is some bull. It is impossible for
whiteness to be put in one's place, because that is a part of whiteness, the ability to take up space and feel a prerogative to do so. Further, the
idea that white people are being put into their place relies on the neo-conservative view of reverse racism that has characterized the backlash
against non-whites, especially Blacks, in the post-civil rights era. So whenyou say these types of things you are actually
helping to reproduce a neo-conservative racial rhetoric which relies on the myth of the "threatened"
and "displaced" white person. Additionally, white activism, especially white anti-racism, is predicated on an
economy of gratitude. We are supposed to be grateful that a white person is willing to work with non-
white people. We are supposed to be grateful that you actually want to work with us and that you give
us your resources. I would like to know why you have those resources and others do not? And don't assume that just
because I have to ask you for resources that it does not hurt me, pain me even. Don't assume that when
you come into the space, that doesn't bother me. Don't assume that when you talk first, talk the most,
and talk the most often, that this doesn't hurt me. Don't assume that when I see you get the attention and accolades and
the book deals and the speaking engagements that this does not hurt me (because you profit off of pain). And don't assume that
when I see how grateful non-white people are to you for being there, for being a "good white" person
that this doesn't hurt me. And don't assume that when I get chastised by non-white people because I think your presence is
unnecessary that it does not hurt me. Because all of these things remind me of how powerless non-white people
are (albeit differently) in relation to white people. All of these gestures that you do reminds me of how
grateful I am supposed to be towards you because you actually (or supposedly) care about what is
happening to me. I am a bit resentful of economies of gratitude. Further, this structure of white supremacy known as
white anti-racism also impacts the larger social world because it still makes white people the most
valued people. Non-white people are forced to feel dependent and grateful to white people who will actually interact with us. We are
made to feel that we are inferior, incapable, that we really do need white people. And the sad thing is, that given
all of the resources that whiteness has and that white people get and control, there is an element of material truth in all of this, I am afraid.
But white people need to think of how their activism reproduces the actual structure of white supremacy some--
not all whites activists--profess to be about. This structure of white supremacy is not just in an activist space, it actually touches upon and
impinges on the lives of non-white people who may not be activists (in your sense) or who do not interact with you in activist worlds. But
consider what your presence means in a community that you decide to set up your community garden in, or your bookstore in, or your meeting
space in, or have your march in. What does it mean when you decide that you want to be "with" the oppressed
and you end up displacing them? Just because you walk around with your dreadlocks, or decide that you will not wear expensive
clothes does not mean that your whiteness does not displace people in the spaces you decide to put yourself in. How do you help to bring more
forms of authority and control in a neighborhood, whether through increased rent and housing costs, more policing, or just the ways in which
your white bodies can make people feel, as a brilliant friend of mine once asked, "squatters in somebody else's project"? So what does this
mean for the future of white anti-racists? This might mean to first, figure out ways in which whiteness needs to die
as a social structure and as an identity in which you organize your anti-racist work. What this looks like in
practice may not be so clear but I will attempt to give some suggestions here. First, don't call us, we'll call you. If we need your
resources, we will contact you. But don't show up, flaunt your power in our faces and then get angry when we
resent the fact that you have so many resources we don't and that we are not grateful for this arrangement.
And don't get mad because you can't make decisions in the process. Why do you need to? Secondly, stop
speaking for us. We can talk for ourselves. Third, stop trying to point out internal contradictions in our communities, we know
what they are, we are struggling around them, and I really do not know how white people can be helpful to non- whites to clear these up.
Fourth, don't ever say some shit to me about how you feel silenced, marginalized, discriminated against, or put in your place. Period. Finally,
start thinking of what it would mean, in terms of actual structured social arrangements, for whiteness and white identity--even the white
antiracist kind (because there really is no redeemable or reformed white identity)--to be destroyed. In conclusion, I want to say to anyone who
thinks that this is too academic or abstract, I write as a non-white person, meaning that from my body, my person, I experience white
supremacy. I also draw my understanding of white supremacy from non-white people, many engaged in various struggles of activism, but most
importantly just to speak out and stay alive. They did not get accolades from many for speaking out but instead experienced constant threats
on their lives for just existing and doing the work that they did. Moreover, I want to know when a discussion of whiteness, white supremacy and
domination became seen as abstract and not rooted in the everyday concrete reality that we experience?