Race Census Aff – mags compiled by Lenny Brahin Jaden Lessnick Jillian Gordners Brian Roche 1AC

Withdrawing from the state fails, but alliances within the state are key

The milieu of the Red Guard, the Brown Berets, and the Black Panthers was one of an enchanted solidarity against capitalism. Since the economic system was prone to crisis, Alex Hing of the Guard told Asian students at UCLA in 1970 that Asians must prepare for its eventuality. Since Asians formed only a small population in the United States, and since "most Asians don't know the front end from the back end of a gun," an alliance with the oppressed working class seemed the only avenue for the "survival of Asians."46 If ethnicity was not sufficient in tactical terms for survival, in strategic terms to bind around ethnicity would make it hard to be critical of "Uncle Charleys" like Dr. S. I. Hayakawa (president of San Francisco State University) and of the KMT. Jack Wong of Chinatown said that Hayakawa's obdurate stand against the students of color during the 1968 strike was "just another instance of a yellow man being used by the whites."47 A critique of the Asian right from within the Asian community facilitated Panther David Hilliard's comment that "we can run Hayakawa not only off this campus, but we can run him back to imperialistic Japan. Because the man ain't got no motherfucking power. He's a bootlicker." Not only could Hilliard make this statement thanks to the opening afforded by the Red Guard's critique of Hayakawa, but also thanks to his own use of Kim Il Sung's call to combat imperialism and the "ideological degeneration" among the oppressed peoples.48 The Guard produced a space for the left to undertake a clear distinction between an antiracist nationalism and one that protected the right from any criticism on the grounds of national assertion. But, as many people have said in retrospect, the Guard failed to create a mass base, mainly perhaps due to the tendency to see itself as an army, but also because of the tendency amongst the Chinese Americans to withdraw from engagement with the state (in New York and in San Francisco, the Asian left had to deal with the military formations of the police as well as those of the Asian bourgeoisie, such as the Flying Dragons and the White Shadows).49

Efforts from the bottom up such as lobbying can effectively alter the state’s categorization of individuals

Kertzer and Arel, 2 - * PhD, Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University **PhD, Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada (David and Dominique, “Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses,” 2002)//jml

Bottom-up efforts to influence census categories Ever since censuses began, state efforts to pigeon-hole each individual into a single category of identity, and then conceive of the whole population as divisible into these units, have faced resistance. The people so categorized have struggled both to change the categories and to change their distribution across them. Indeed, one of the most important of the topics we probe in this book is the evolution of the locus of power over the construction of identity categories in the census. Who actually decides what categories and what principles are to be employed in generating these collective identities? Are we correct in thinking that there has been a major shift from census categories decided from on high to those crafted through a complex and messy process of political struggle, involving interest groups formed from the people being categorized? The history of the US census suggests that such a shift has taken place. Whether this observation holds comparatively cries out for research. In the case of the Soviet Union, the evolution of the locus of power over the construction of identities can best be seen as a boomerang cycle. The initial census categories, in the 1920s and 1930s, were shaped to a remarkable extent by national elites and scholars sympathetic to nationality claims (Hirsch 1997). Subsequent debate over the categories was frozen for many years by Party fiat. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the democratizing conditions in several post-Soviet states has once again made their first independent censuses (particularly in Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltics) the political battleground that it has proven to be in so many other countries. Even when the determination of census categories remained in the hands of imperial bureaucrats in Eastern Europe and in various overseas colonies, a great deal of popular agitation was aroused. Parties and movements acting in the name of ethnic groups sought to convince putative members of the group to register as such. In Austrian Bohemia, for instance, Czech parties campaigned to have people of Czech descent claim “Czech” as Umgangsprache, and when the tide began to turn favorably to the Czech language in certain urban areas, German parties began their own campaign in favor of claiming “German” (Arel, this volume). Another enlightening case concerns Imperial India, where the British went to great lengths to categorize the colonized along a variety of markers, revolving around the fundamental category (in their eyes) of caste. By the time of the 1931 census, as Cohn recounts, the political significance of this process of assigning identities to the Indian population had become so pronounced that some groups organized to promote certain responses to the census-takers questions. A flyer, entitled “Remember! Census Operations Have Begun” (see below), distributed just before the census by one such group in Lahore, entreated the local population to make particular responses (Cohn 1987: 249). This makes the census far closer, in many ways, to a political campaign than to a technical exercise in counting. The activists involved in the agitation generally believe that the identities they are promoting are primordial, and therefore not a matter of choice. Yet they are concerned that many of their co-ethnics are not fully aware of their own “true” identity, and so must be reminded of their roots. Often, however, people targeted by such campaigning are well aware of their roots, but do not share the backward-looking premise of the nationalist groups. In Belgium, in the post-war period, parents of Flemish mother tongue in Brussels were more interested in claiming French than Flemish as their language on the census, to the despair of Flemish nationalist groups. The parents were motivated by their interest in sending their children to French schools, a desire which they knew would be facilitated by the statistical “finding” of a greater proportion of “French-speakers” in their district (Arel, forthcoming). Statistical realists have decried this confusion between a plebiscite and a census (Lévy 1960). Yet, since identity is subjective and contingent upon social and political factors, one wonders whether it would not be more fruitful to view the census -or, at least, the identity questions of a census – as a type of plebiscite (Labbé 2000). In many Western countries, efforts to alter the use of ethnic and racial categorization involve not only lobbying respondents to place themselves in one category or another, but lobbying the designers of the census to alter the categories used. Lieberson (1993: 29–30), deliberately overstating the matter, has argued that now “each ethnic group has the potential ability to control its own enumeration – in the sense of a veto on how it is defined, classified and described. However, each group has no veto power over other groups. ” He argues that these ethnic lobbying groups present their case as a matter of basic morality and, in so far as they are in a position to bring unfavorable publicity to politicians, are a potent force where such matters are concerned. One of the most significant examples of this process comes from the United States. In 1970, in response to the urgings of various ethnic lobbying groups, the census bureau introduced a question asking a sample of respondents if they were of “Hispanic” origin. Those who answered positively were then asked if they fit into one of five categories (Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, Other Spanish). This effort led to many criticisms, which were taken up by the US Commission on Civil Rights in 1974. Their report, provocatively titled “Counting the Forgotten, ” blasted the Census Bureau for a poorly conceived effort at counting Hispanics. It urged them to include a newly revised question to be asked of every individual on the 1980 census, which would be “responsive to the needs of the Spanish-speaking background population. ” The following year, the Census Bureau formed a special advisory committee on the Spanish origin population, having a year earlier established such a committee on the “Black Population. ” By 1976, political logic had led inevitably to the formation of a third advisory committee, this one devoted to the Asian and Pacific Island population (Conk 1987: 177–78). Controversy has continued to surround the design of these ethnic and racial identity questions. For our purposes, however, what is most notable is the role of the census in the invention and legitimization of such categories of collective identity as “Hispanic”. Census politics undoubtedly has a strong emotional dimension, for it matters a great deal to many people that the groups they identify with are granted official recognition. As Geertz stated in his classic article (1963), “The peoples of the new states are simultaneously animated by two powerful, thoroughly interdependent, yet distinct and often actually opposed motives – the desire to be recognized as responsible agents whose wishes, acts, hopes, and opinions 'matter,' and the desire to build an efficient, dynamic modern state. ” The historical record has since demonstrated that the desire for such recognition can be as potent among groups in the “old” states as well. Yet the instrumental dimension of census politics may be just as important since, in the age of the modern state as a provider of social and economic benefits, group recognition in the census entails group entitlement to certain rights. Group-differentiated social programs may be directed to certain cities depending on the proportion of their ethnic population. Cross tabulations, with nationality, language, or race as one of the variables, can be used to suggest how some groups lag behind others on certain indicators, leading to demands for further remedial policies by the state.

The struggle for political change through the law allows us to continue the fight for social justice

Prashad 2011 (vijay, director of the international studies program at trinity college, everyone was kung fu fighting: afro-asian connections and the myth of cultural purity, project muse, LB)

There are no massive implications to be drawn from all this, except to say that the polycultural view of the world exists in the gut instincts of many people such as Q-Unique. Scholars are under some obligation to raise this instinct to philosophy, to use this instinct to criticize the diversity model of multiculturalism and replace it with the antiracist one of polyculturalism. Culture cannot be bounded and people cannot be asked to respect "culture" as if it were a thing without history and complexity. Social interaction and struggle produce cultural worlds, and these are in constant, fraught, formation. Our cultures are linked in more ways than we could catalogue, and it is from these linkages that we hope our politics will be energized. The Third World may be in distress where the will of the national liberation movements has put the tendency to anti-imperialism in crisis, and the Third World within the United States where the dynamic of the color-blind and of the desire to make small, individual gains over social transformation has overrun society. Nevertheless, the struggle is on, both in places like Kerala and Vietnam, but also within the United States, as the Black Radical Congress greets the Asian Left Forum, the Forum of Indian Leftists, and the League of Filipino Students (among others), and as all of them join together in the dynamic against corporations, perhaps someday to become an antiimperialist dynamic. History is made in struggle, and our enchanted memory of the past perhaps helps our fights over social justice today and makes it possible to move into a fresh tomorrow. To remember Bruce Lee as I do, staring at a poster of him circa 1974, is not to wane into nostalgia for the past. My Bruce is alive, alongside all the other contemporary icons of polycultural strife. 

The census is an example of Governmentality, an attempt to know the population to render it more governable

Barnard-Wills, 12 - PhD in Politics of surveillance (David, Surveillance and Identity: Discourse, Subjectivity and the State, 2012, 51-54, Google Books)

Applicability to Surveillance Governmentality is inherently concerned with surveillance. predicated upon knowledge and visibility of the population. Surveillance is traceable to the governmental imperative to `know the population`. Detailed knowledge of the population is required before appropriate management strategies can be constructed. The need to consider characteristic forms of visibility and ways of seeing of particular regimes also fits well with surveillance theory, encompassing both the technological limits of possibility and organisational structures and drives to surveillance. We are in a strong position to ask what forms of seeing (including surveillance) are necessary forthe operation of a particular political regime. Govemmentality supports an awareness ofthe importance of data based forms of surveillance. This arises from studies on the development of the census. The census is a critical response to the necessity of knowing the population before appropriate strategies can be applied. In a real sense. the census creates citizens (David Lyon 2007:30). This perspective reveals the importance of databases. lists. records. files and the like for creating subjectivities and identities. The methods. practice and history of statistics is intimately linked with the state. developing out of the need to conduct censuses and analyse the data they produced. This parallels the way Cartography maps the extent of the territory. and constitutes the nation state as geographically bounded entity (Joyce 2003: l 5). Governmentality reveals the political incentives that drive the production ofa seemingly objective and autonomous scientific method. The governmentality model breaks down the centralised state model of surveillance. Instead demonstrating the multiplicity of actors involved in government. This is useful for negotiating the contested role of the state in surveillance theory. Following govemmentality. it is unsurprising that there are myriad surveillance actors beyond the state. This fits well with the arguments for the heterogeneity of surveillance emerging from the surveillant assemblage, that ‘rather than exemplifying Orwell’s totalitarian state-centred Oceana, this assemblage operates across both state and extra-state institutions’ (Haggerty & Ericson 2000:6l0). In addition to a multiplicity of actors, governance makes uses of a multiplicity of strategies. Therefore this theoretical perspective can incorporate many surveillance theories such as social sorting or simple panoptic machines as particular strategies of governance without having to accept the sociological tendency to believe we reside in an electronic panopticon, or maximum surveillance society. Neither does govemmentality preclude the exercise of sovereign or disciplinary strategies within a govemmental framework, rather - according to Dean; all three are fundamental to modem fomis of authority (Dean 20l0:30). Instead of seeking an axiomatic explanation of surveillant power, this triad allows for nuance in detennining which forms of power are in play at a specific surveillance site. Haggerty has written about the way that surveillance intersects with govemmental problematisations. As a general technology that can be used for a wide range of govemmental projects. surveillance can serve utopian aims in itself, but also facilitate the knowledge production required to properly understand the scope and nature of social problems. He identifies a `zeitgeist where citizens and ofiicials now assume that greater surveillance is the preferred response to an array of political problems’ (Haggerty 2009). He shows how surveillance is implicated in all the steps of a problematisation. Problems come to our awareness when initial activists find a way to visualise an issue as a problem. This draws upon evidence and oflicial forms of knowledge to produce a claim to being an accurate account that is acceptable to (and understandable by) authorities. This privileges certain types of knowledge over others. In attempting to understand a problem, authorities draw upon various surveillance systems, often finding in the process that current systems are lacking. and do not produce sufficient knowledge. This can act as a drive for further surveillance systems. Surveillance practices themselves can be the form of the response to political problems and even other fonns of response have to be monitored to ascertain their efficacy. Finally, surveillance itself can be seen as a social problem by other activists (Haggerty 2009). This shows the fundamental importance of making use of the concept of problematisations in regard to surveillance and identity. Govemmentality is sensitive to the issues of identity and identification, which we have already seen are central to surveillance politics. We can see why the common practice of identifying citizens emerges, driven by the governmental need to have knowledge of the population. Rose`s ‘securitization of identity’ model emerges from governance. He suggests the need to ‘identify the specific loci and practices within which conduct has been problematised in ways which have led to the introduction of new techniques of identification’ (Rose l999:24l- 2). He notes the emergence, at a number of sites and practices of ‘problems of the individualisation of the citizen to which securitization of identity can appear as a solution`. These sites are dispersed and disorganised, and they act as ‘switch points’ which must be passed by an individual, if that individual is to be able to access circuits and flows of` benefits and services - the benefits of` liberty. Technologies such as ID cards. presented at a border. or when applying for work, operate as a surveillant cheek on entitlement to access social goods. Linked to this is the tension in the analytics of government between the individual and the collective. In terms of` its development. pastoral power is associated with individualisation whilst the ‘population’ is collectivising. This has interesting parallels with the way the individual involved in social sorting is collectivised through their categorisation. but is individualised through the cross cutting nature of` those categories, and the sheer volume of information tied to that individual. Dodge and Kitchen have argued for the salience of identification codes in the governance of` society, whilst their account is perhaps more panoptic than govemmental. they suggest the application and automatic processing of digital identification codes are key to evolving forms of contemporary govemmentality (Dodge & Kitchin 2004). Scepticism towards general theories of ‘social control’ is combined with the construction of` subjects as active social agents, capable of resistance, avoidance or subversion. This allows an analysis ofthe politics ol`surveillance and practices of resistance. although Haggerty wams that this would require breaking with Rosc`s perspective that there is no such thing as ‘the governed`(Haggerty 2006:40- l ). He suggests that:

The census exterts a control over the production of racial categories and forces people to fit within “official government categories”

Kertzer and Arel, 2 - * PhD, Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University **PhD, Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada (David and Dominique, “Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses,” 2002)//jml

As a product of the ideology of colonial and modern states, the project of dividing populations into separable categories of collective identity in- evitably intersected with the division of populations into racial categories. The two efforts share a common logic, a kind of categorical imperative, in which people must be assigned to a category and to one category alone. The history of racial thinking is a history of cultural categorization, of seizing on certain physical characteristics and inventing a biological cat- egory for those people who manifest them. In devising “racial” categories, imperial census-makers used names from the existing repertoire of cultural and geographical markers, but the categories themselves reflected the perception of the European rulers rather than that of the natives. Anderson (1991: 165–6) writes that few recognized themselves under the early “racial” labels of “Malay,” “Javanese,” “Sakai,” “Banjarese,” etc. in the 1911 Indonesian census. In the same vein, Hirschman (1987: 567) argues that the “Malay,” “Chinese,” and “Indian” categories in the Malaysian census were much broader than socially understood. That these categories reflected subjec- tive values is hardly distinctive. Identities being by definition subjectively determined, their conceptual representation in any census can only re- flect subjective processes. What distinguished colonial from non-colonial censuses, however, was that the formulation of categories in the colonies was unilaterally done by the ruling officials, while European categories of cultural nationality and language were already being negotiated, to some extent, with social groups. Even more significant was the belief, fundamental to a racist concep- tion of the world, that racial categories were rank ordered according to aptitude. Imperial races, unlike colonial ones, were fit to rule, while Census, identity formation, and political power 11 certain colonial races were better equipped to assist the colonial project than others. Such a conception of group categories was initially foreign to the natives in most areas. In Rwanda and Burundi, for instance, the Belgian colonial state ruled through the minority Tutsi, in keeping with the widespread colonial practice of indirect rule. The Belgians legitimized Tutsi dominance by creating a racial distinction making the Tutsi superior Africans, due to an alleged “Hamitic” origin, while the Hutus were rele- gated to the bottom of the racial scale. What was new was not the naming itself, since the colonial categories of Tutsi and Hutus overlapped with pre-existing ones, “but rather the colonial policy of indirect rule and the racist ideology associated with it. It was those factors that crystallized the categories and erected them against each other.” (Uvin, this volume.) It is the United States, however, that has the longest continuous history of placing its entire population into mutually exclusive racial categories based on pseudo-scientific theories of race. As Nobles shows in her chap- ter in this volume, the categories and criteria have evolved over time, with categories once thought natural – such as that of “mulatto” – eventually being regarded as not only unscientific but morally reprehensible. In so- cieties such as the United States, where the ideology of racial categoriza- tion has had tremendous social and political consequences, the census is a cauldron of racial construction. By pigeon-holing people into official governmental categories, the census gives a legitimacy to the categories and to this mode of thinking about people. Moreover, in so far as the census is presented as an instrument of scientific inquiry, racial catego- rization in censuses provides an aura of scientific legitimacy for the racial project as well.

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