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

Wilderson

Perm

Dialogue between oppressed groups is productive

Vague notions of "Eastern" religion and philosophy, as well as a variety of Orientalist assumptions, were far more important to the formation of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam than anything coming out of Africa. And Rastafarians drew many of their ideas from South Asians, from vegetarianism to marijuana, which was introduced into Jamaica by Indians. Major black movements like Garveyism and the African Blood Brotherhood are also the products of global developments. We won't understand these movements until we see them as part of a dialogue with Irish nationalists from the Easter Rebellion, Russian and Jewish émigrés from the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, and Asian socialists like India's M.N. Roy and Japan's Sen Katayama. Indeed, I'm not sure we can even limit ourselves to Earth. How do we make sense of musicians Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Lee "Scratch" Perry or, for that matter, the Nation of Islam, when we consider the fact that space travel and notions of intergalactic exchange constitute a key source of their ideas? So-called "mixed race" children are not the only ones with a claim to multiple heritages. All of us are inheritors of European, African, Native American, and Asian pasts, even if we can't exactly trace our bloodlines to these continents. To some people that's a dangerous concept. Too many Europeans don't want to acknowledge that Africans helped create so-called Western civilization, that they are both indebted to and descendants of those they enslaved. They don't want to see the world as One—a tiny little globe where people and cultures are always on the move, where nothing stays still no matter how many times we name it. To acknowledge our polycultural heritage and cultural dynamism is not to give up our black identity. It does mean expanding our definition of blackness, taking our history more seriously, and looking at the rich diversity within us with new eyes.

At: ontology

Polyculturalism is an effective method to destabilize categories of whiteness – the affirmation of difference and individualism is critical

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)

This "racism with a distance" ignores our mulatto history, the long waves of linkage that tie people together in ways we tend to forget. Can we think of "Indian food" (that imputed essence of the Indian subcontinent), for example, without the tomato (that fruit first harvested among the Amerindians)? Are not the Maya, then, part of contemporary "Indian culture"? Is this desire for cultural discreteness part of the bourgeois nationalist (and bourgeois diasporic) nostalgia for authenticity?5 In search of our mulatto history, there is no end to the kinds of strange connections one can find. Of course, these links are only "strange" if we take for granted the preconceived boundaries between peoples, if we forget that the notion of Africa andAsia, for instance, is very modern and that people have created cross-fertilized histories for millennia without concern for modern geography. The linguistic ties across the Indian Ocean, for example, obviate any attempt to say that Gujarat and Tanzania are disconnected places: Swahili is the ultimate illustration [End Page 52] of our mulatto history, or what historian Robin Kelley so nicely called our "polycultural" history.6 Bloodlines, biologists now show us, are not pure, and those sociobiologists who persist in the search for a biologically determined idea of race miss the mark by far.7 "So-called ‘mixed-race' children are not the only ones with a claim to multiple heritages. All of us, and I mean ALL of us," Kelley argues, "are the inheritors of European, African, Native American, and even Asian pasts, even if we can't exactly trace our blood lines to all of these continents."8 Embarrassed by biological racialism, many scholars turn to culture as the determinant for social formations (where communities constructed on biological terms now find the same boundaries intact, but as cultural ones). Of course centuries of racism have in reality produced racial communities, so that "race" is indeed a social fact today. But cultural formations are not as discrete as is often assumed, a revelation that gives rise to notions such as hybrid, which retains within it ideas of purity and origins (two things melded together).9 Rejecting the posture of racism with a distance, Kelley argues that our various nominated cultures "have never been easily identifiable, secure in their boundaries, or clear to all people who live in or outside our skin. We were multi-ethnic and polycultural from the get go."10 The theory of the polycultural does not mean that we reinvent humanism without ethnicity, but that we acknowledge that our notion of cultural community should not be built inside the high walls of parochialism and ethnonationalism. The framework of polyculturalism uncouples the notions of origins and authenticity from that of culture. Culture is a process (that may sometimes be seen as a thing), which has no identifiable origin, and therefore no cultural actor can, in good faith, claim proprietary interest in what is claimed to be his or her authentic culture. "All the culture to be had is culture in the making," notes anthropologist Gerd Baumann. "All cultural differences are acts of differentiation, and all cultural identities are acts of cultural identification."11 Multiculturalism tends toward a static view of history, with cultures already forged and with people enjoined to respect and tolerate each cultural world. Polyculturalism, on the other hand, offers a dynamic view of history, mainly because it argues for cultural complexity, and it suggests that our communities of the present are historically formed [End Page 53] and that these communities move between the dialectic of cultural presence and antiracism, between a demand for acknowledgment and for an obliteration of hierarchy. Bruce Lee's polycultural world sets in motion an antiracist ethos that destabilizes the pretense of superiority put in place by white supremacy. Polyculturalism accepts the existence of differences in cultural practice, but it forbids us to see culture as static and antiracist critique as impossible.

Blackness is not ontological – Black culture is both fluid and hybrid

Kelley 99 (robin, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA.From 2006 to 2011, he was Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC), Polycultural Me, http://www.utne.com/politics/the-people-in-me.aspx, LB)

Black people were polycultural from the get-go. Most of our ancestors came to these shores not as Africans, but as Ibo, Yoruba, Hausa, Kongo, Bambara, Mende, Mandingo, and so on. Some of our ancestors came as Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Irish, English, Italian. And more than a few of us, in North America as well as in the Caribbean and Latin America, have Asian and Native American roots. Our lines of biological descent are about as pure as O.J.'s blood sample, and our cultural lines of descent are about as mixed up as a pot of gumbo. What we know as "black culture" has always been fluid and hybrid. In Harlem in the late 1960s and 1970s, Nehru suits were as popular—and as "black"—as dashikis, and martial arts films placed Bruce Lee among a pantheon of black heroes that included Walt Frazier of the New York Knicks and Richard Rountree, who played John Shaft in blaxploitation cinema. How do we understand the zoot suit—or the conk—without the pachuco culture of Mexican American youth, or low riders in black communities without Chicanos? How can we discuss black visual artists in the interwar years without reference to the Mexican muralists, or the radical graphics tradition dating back to the late 19th century, or the Latin American artists influenced by surrealism?

Blackness is not skin deep – identity is a multiplicity

Webster 2k – Prof CSU Los Angeles, http://multiracial.com/site/index.php/2000/06/01/twenty-one-arguments-for-abolishing-racial-classification/, 6/26/15 BRoche

Reference to persons as members of a race derives from a practice of categorization according to certain anatomical attributes. However, so indefinite are these attributes, and so deeply flawed is this classification that social scientists should not be analyzing or explaining race, race relations, racial experiences, intelligences, poverty, inequality, and crime. Rather, they should be examining the inconsistencies in racial classification. For example, it could be noted that the selection of skin color, hair type, and facial form to demarcate races is inadequate. To form races, these anatomical attributes need to appear in a certain pattern. They do not. Black skin, curly hair, and thick lips do not identify "black people," for countless numbers of "black people" have nonblack skin, long hair, and thin lips. Second, there are no definitive advantages in choosing one anatomical attribute over another. The early racial classifiers focused on skin color, shape of skull, blood type, length of limbs, hair color and texture, and facial forms. Nevertheless, none of these attributes, or combinations of them, allows a definitive demarcation of races. Some of the persons assigned to different phenotypic races, that is, races defined according to anatomical attributes, may be assigned to the same race, when race is defined according to genetic attributes. Thus different biologists find different numbers of races, and some disdain the concept altogether.

Refuse the construction of race as legitimate – this creates divides in communities and only furthers oppression

Webster 2k – Prof CSU Los Angeles, http://multiracial.com/site/index.php/2000/06/01/twenty-one-arguments-for-abolishing-racial-classification/, 6/26/15 BRoche

Thomas' proposition – If men define a situation as real then it is real in its consequences – suggests that social phenomena that are subjectively "real," by this token, become an objective reality. This conclusion contains fallacies of ambiguity and equivocation. First, the concept "real" has perhaps the richest history of controversy in the writings of ancient, modern, and postmodernist philosophers. In the interest of clarity, no sociologist should cite Thomas' proposition without specifying the sense in which "real" is being used. Second, a close examination of the proposition would reveal that it is not clear to what "it" refers. What is "real" in its consequences- the defining, or the situation? Nevertheless, even if the logical problems in the proposition are ignored, the relevant follow-up would be an investigation of the conditions under which men define a situation as "real." Popular allusions to "reality" could be a result of lay persons being tutored within a realist theory of knowledge. This theory of knowledge, dominant in social sciences, proposes that words reflect things. Hence, to be valid, a classification or description needs no justification other than a claim on reality. However, the ascription of an ontologically representative status to concepts is roundly challenged by Richard Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and a host of critics of realist epistemology. Yet there is no need to embrace a postmodernist perspective in order to expose a specific effect of the realist claim. The notion that races are things in the real world, as argued by Philippe Rushton, provides an eternal foundation for "race relations" and an unending flow of explanations, since such relations unfold in political economic, cultural, psychological, and social structural contexts. Were "races" not taken as a "reality," their presence in public consciousness would be recognized as the result of continuing research on racism, past and present racial experiences, racial conditions, and race relations. However, let Thomas' proposition to be taken to mean: If social scientists define a phenomenon in a certain way, that definition has corresponding behavioral consequences. It would then be obvious that the social scientists who study and advocate policies on "race relations" are themselves the actors who give "race" social meaning and a "real" status. They then cite this status to justify the further production of "race relations." This production, as well as social scientists' collaboration with the Census Bureau's project of racial identification and enumeration, marks these scholars as perhaps unwitting agents of legislative racialization; it also indicates the interaction between social science research and government policies. In pursuit of electoral advantages, political representatives pander to the racialized divisions that "race relations" research generates and conserves. 2. The claim that race is a social construct begs the question. In society, every phenomenon is, by definition, a social construct. Why is it not said that race is an illogical construct? This refusal to notice the logical status of the race concept indicates that social scientists who endorse the racial paradigm only honorifically refer to "the social construction of race" in order to justify investigating the experiences of "black people" and "white people." Thus they themselves construct races, while claiming, in a positivist fashion, to be merely observing "the social construction of race." Advocates of social constructionism, to quote Anthony Appiah's comment on W.E.B. Dubois' vacillations on "race" ". . . lead us back into the now familiar move to substitute for the biological conception of race a sociohistorical one. And that, as we have seen, is simply to bury the biological conception below the surface, not to transcend it." (In My Father's House, p. 41). The claim that race is a social construct confirms its existence and facilitates the perennial study of "race relations." This confirmation preempts criticisms of the Census Bureau's request that citizens identify themselves racially and the Bureau's threat that to not state your race could lead to your community's loss of economic resources.

Conceptions of identity as fixed interprets identity onto a calculable grid of subjectivity – reformulations of our notions of identity are necessary

Koerner, 12 - Professor of Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley (Michelle, 2012, “Line of Escape: Gilles Deleuze’s Encounter with George Jackson” Genre, Volume 44, Number 2)//jml

In “The Case of Blackness” Moten (2008b: 187) perceptively remarks, “What is inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies.” What if we were to think of blackness as a name for an ontology of becoming? How might such a thinking transform our understanding of the relation of blackness to history and its specific capacity to “think [its] way out of the exclusionary constructions” of history and the thinking of history (Moten 2008a: 1744)? Existing ontologies tend to reduce blackness to a historical condition, a “lived experience,” and in doing so effectively eradicate its unruly character as a transformative force. Deleuze and Guattari, I think, offer a compelling way to think of this unruliness when they write, “What History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self- positing as concept, escapes History” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 110). To bring this relation between blackness and becoming further into the open — toward an affirmation of the unexpected insinuation of blackness signaled by the use of Jackson’s line as an “event in its becoming” — a few more words need be said about Deleuze’s method. The use of Jackson’s writing is just one instance of a procedure that we find repeated throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where we constantly encounter unexpected injections of quotations, names, and ideas lifted from other texts, lines that appear all of sudden as though propelled by their own force. One might say they are deployed rather than explained or interpreted; as such, they produce textual events that readers may choose to ignore or pick up and run with. Many names are proposed for this method — “schizoanalysis, micropolitics, pragmatics, diagrammatism, rhizomatics, cartography” (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006: 94) — but the crucial issue is to affirm an experimental practice that opposes itself to the interpretation of texts, proposing instead that we think of a book as “a little machine” and ask “what it functions with, in connection with what other things does it or does it not transmit intensities?” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 4).8 Studying how Soledad Brother functions in Deleuze’s books, connecting Jackson’s line to questions and historical issues that are not always explicitly addressed in those books, involves one in this action. And further, it opens new lines where the intensities transmitted in Jackson’s book make a claim on our own practice. This method can be seen as an effort to disrupt the hierarchical opposition between theory and practice and to challenge some of the major assumptions of Western Marxism. In an interview with Antonio Negri in the 1990s, Deleuze (1997: 171) clarifies that he and Guattari have “remained Marxists” in their concern to analyze the ways capitalism has developed but that their political philosophy makes three crucial distinctions with respect to more traditional theoretical approaches: first, a thinking of “war machines” as opposed to state theory; second, a “consideration of minorities rather than classes”; and finally, the study of social “lines of flight” rather than the interpretation and critique of social contradictions. Each of these distinctions, as we will see, resonates with Jackson’s political philosophy, but as the passage from Anti-Oedipus demonstrates, the concept of the “line of flight” emerges directly in connection to Deleuze and Guattari’s encounter with Soledad Brother. The concept affirms those social constructions that would neither be determined by preexisting structures nor caught in a dialectical contradiction. It names a force that is radically autonomous from existing ontologies, structures, and historical accounts. It is above all for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari insist that society be thought of not as a “structure” but as a “machine,” because such a concept enables the thinking of the movements, energies, and intensities (i.e., the lines of flight) that such machines transmit. The thinking of machines forces us not only to consider the social and historical labor involved in producing society but also the ongoing potentials of constructing new types of assemblages (agencement). One of the key adversaries of this machinic approach is “interpretation” and more specifically structuralist interpretations of society in terms of contradictions. According to Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987: 293), structuralism persisted in the “submission of the line to the point” and as a result produced a theory of subjectivity, and also an account of language and the unconscious, that could not think in terms of movement and construction. Defining lines only in relation to finite points (the subject, the signifier) produces a calculable grid, a structure that then appears as the hidden intelligibility of the system and of society generally. Louis Althusser’s account of the “ideological State apparatus” as the determining structure of subjectivity is perhaps the extreme expression of this gridlocked position (an example we will come back to in a later section). Opposed to this theoretical approach, diagrammatism (to invoke one of the terms given for this method) maps vectors that generate an open space and the potentials for giving consistency to the latter.9 In other words, rather than tracing the hidden structures of an intolerable system, Deleuze and Guattari’s method aims to map the ways out of it.

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