Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr Note

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1ac—NWA

https://youtu.be/RcNAxtM3b0E

Starts at 0:30, pause/close the tab at 1:05

* tha police
Comin straight from the underground
Young * got it bad 'cause I'm brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority

* that *, 'cause I ain't tha one

For a punk * with a badge and a gun
To be beatin on, and thrown in jail
We could go toe to toe in the middle of a cell

*’in with me 'cause I'm a teenager

With a little bit of gold and a pager
Searchin my car, lookin for the product
Thinkin every * is sellin narcota

You'd rather see me in the pen…

When NWA stepped forward in 1988 to challenge the police and the state of militarized law enforcement, it was a radical act that revealed both historical knowledge and unbelievable foresight regarding militarized violence – that echoes the forms of brutality that are still being practiced in the surveillance, targeting and killing of black bodies. Our choice to begin the 1ac with a fugitive poetic is a way of reinterpreting and challenging the original police state, the plantation—it’s a performance that breaks down the existing power hierarchies that govern over the structures that control our role and identities in society

Browne 2012 – PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone; “Race and Surveillance” “Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies”; Google Book; https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=F8nhCfrUamEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA72&dq=race+and+surveillance+Simone+browne&ots=y_cvDcnYS0&sig=ZmhtR3WJI2mp_clVI6qwScZDZwQ#v=onepage&q=race%20and%20surveillance%20Simone%20browne&f=false; 7/5/15 || NDW)

According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be traced to the "simple accounts" of slave owners. Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves. One example involved the "General Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the Negro that what you say is the result of reflection." The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is "exercised through its invisibility," while imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its targets. Disciplinary power then operated on the enslaved as racialized surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to and that produced them as racial, and therefore enslave able, subjects. Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system, a system that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three "information technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes" when apprehended. This security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (black) illiteracy", a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts, became a part of the aparatus of surveillance, and the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place." For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for "a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: "sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception." Seth's, or Sall's, duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white parent) or a "Quadroon Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official with the first US federal census in 1790. I will retun to the census as a technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that required constant policing and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned "colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open." "Top eye" here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so as not to appear uppity To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken to." This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a "Technology of Whiteness".

NWA is uniquely positioned as a site to criticize the development of the plantation into the modern surveillance and prison system – it’s an act of aggression that disrupts the normality of white civil society. It is a fugitive art – it is both present on society but critiques it vehemently

McCann 2012 Contesting the Mark of Criminality: Race, Place, and the Prerogative of Violence in N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton , Critical Studies in Media Communication, 29:5, 367-386, DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2012.676194

The Political Violence of ‘‘Fuck Tha Police’’ ‘‘Fuck Tha Police’’ continues this critique{s} of law enforcement but raises the ante by centralizing police officers as the sole focus of N.W.A.’s mockery and violent fantasizing. No longer one of many in a series of potential enemies or the visual accompaniment of an otherwise a-political toast, law enforcement officers function as the quintessential villain in N.W.A.’s cultural universe. The track begins by establishing the satirical courtroom scene that will structure the entire song. In a reversal of the prevailing dynamics of law and order, the criminalized members of N.W.A. place the police on trial for their transgressions. The group delivers this opening portion over a soulful sample of brass horns, creating a sonic aesthetic reminiscent of 1950s and 1960s era crime shows (e.g., Dragnet), as if to parody such romantic narratives of law enforcement saving the day (N.W.A., 1988a). MC Ren begins by announcing, ‘‘Right about now, N.W.A. court is in full effect/Judge Dre presiding/In the case of N.W.A. vs. the Police Department;/Prosecuting attorneys are: MC Ren, Ice Cube, /And Eazy-motherfuckin’-E.’’ Apparently unfazed by his bailiff’s crass disregard for courtroom conduct, Dre ‘‘enters the courtroom’’ and declares, ‘‘Ice Cube, take the motherfuckin’ stand/Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth/ And nothin’ but the truth so help your black ass?’’ Cube responds with an affirmative, ‘‘You god damn right!’’ and lays into the incendiary verbiage that would light a cultural fuse: Fuck the police comin’ straight from the underground/A young nigga got it bad cause I’m brown/And not the other color so police think/They have the authority to kill a minority/Fuck that shit, cause I ain’t the one/For a punk motherfucker with a badge and a gun/To be beatin’ on, and thrown in jail/We can go toe to toe in the middle of a cell/Fuckin’ with me cause I’m a teenager/With a little bit of gold and a pager/Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product/Thinkin’ every nigga is sellin’ narcotics. Critiquing the prison-industrial complex was nothing new in black popular culture at the end of the twentieth century (see Ogbar, 2007; Public Enemy, 1988). However, after his initial take on law enforcement transgressions, Cube threatens to ‘‘Beat a police out of shape/And when I’m finished, bring the yellow tape/To tape off the scene of the slaughter.’’ Images of yellow tape typically mark scenes of ghastly crimes that heroic police officers intend to solve and prosecute. But in Cube’s hands, it Contesting the Mark of Criminality 375 Downloaded by [] at 11:24 08 July 2015 denotes a scene of righteous vengeance against those very officers. After he is done with the humiliated law enforcer, Cube brags, he ‘‘Still can’t swallow bread and water.’’ Not content with forthright acts of violence, Cube also desires to castrate the hypermasculine expression of state power by affixing homophobic epithets to routine search procedures. He raps, ‘‘I don’t know if they fags or what/Search a nigga down, and grabbin’ his nuts.’’ While such language is obviously alarming, we should also be cautious about dismissing this derogatory tirade too quickly, as the mark of criminality is infused with gendered politics. The public fantasy of the archetypical black male predator portrays African American men’s sexuality as something to be tamed, even exterminated (Hill Collins, 2005). Viewed as a threat to white civil society, black males are particularly problematic to white masculinity. Kobena Mercer (1997) writes that cultural discourses concerning African-American men are ‘‘acted out through white male rituals of racial aggression’’ (p. 290). Such acts of aggression manifest largely through the criminal justice system, as archetypes of violent black masculinity on a rampage function to rationalize enhanced surveillance and incarceration within primarily poor African-American communities (Jones, 2005). For example, George H.W. Bush won the White House in 1988 based in part on the now-infamous ‘‘Willie Horton Ad,’’ which capitalized on public fears of the fearsome black male predator on the hunt for a pure, white femininity (see Jamieson, 1993). While Toya Like and Jody Miller (2006) claim that young African-American females experience a disproportionate amount of sexual violence compared to other populations, the middle-class white American female remains the quintessential gendered victim. Stacy De Coster and Karen Heimer (2006) make the important observation that ‘‘marginalized masculinities’’ such as those of poor and working class black men often view crime and violence as ‘‘resources for achieving or demonstrating masculinity’’ (p. 141) absent more hegemonic modes of articulating gendered identity. D. Marvin Jones (2005) argues that rap music functions as one such resource, writing, These performances...are intended at a deep level as counternarratives, as resistance in the context of marginalized people attempting to represent themselves as potent, large, and in charge: predators rather than victims in a society where they have found themselves jobless, powerless, social victims languishing on street corners and in jails. (pp. 5859) Viewed through such a prism, Cube’s emasculation of law enforcement becomes something more than outright homophobia*although it certainly qualifies as such. Instead, it constitutes a parodic reversal of the gendered roles associated with the war on crime that had for far too long allowed his brethren to be humiliated, ‘‘spreadeagle,’’ by the likes of the LAPD. The lyric is a flawed but nonetheless salient attempt to appropriate the mark of criminality and recuperate masculinity that had been under threat of erasure since the days of slavery. N.W.A. also deploys the mark of criminality to fashion themselves as latter-day nationalist guerrillas defending their homeland from colonial invaders. Ren raps, ‘‘Fuck the police and Ren said it with authority/Because the niggaz on the street is a majority.’’ This declaration echoes a central ethic of Black Nationalism: the belief that colonized people of color can find comfort and encouragement in the fact that they outnumber their oppressor (see Campbell, 1971; Fanon, 1963; Hill Collins, 2006). By imagining her- or himself as part of an urban majority, the listening youth can, through Ren, assert, ‘‘Readin’ my rights and shit, it’s all junk.’’ The track, in other words, reveals the potential of parody to articulate a proto-nationalist politics by mocking and, therefore, reversing the discursive power dynamics of Compton. Like Cube, Ren highlights the artificiality of law enforcement authority. Mocking the police, he raps, ‘‘Pullin’ out a silly club, so you stand/With a fake-assed badge and a gun in your hand/ But take off the gun so you can see what’s up/And we’ll go at it punk, and I’m-a-fuck you up!’’ Elaborating upon this theme Eazy-E joins in with a third verse, rapping, ‘‘Without a gun and a badge, what do ya got?/A sucker in a uniform waitin’ to get shot.’’ Eazy insists that the police possess no authentic authority in the ‘hood. Rather, they are invaders rightfully vulnerable to the mockery and weaponry of N.W.A. As I argue below, such a highly publicized parodic reversal of law enforcement’s prerogative of violence constituted an intolerable threat to the state’s institutional authority and cultural hegemony in the war on crime. Instead of attempting to sanitize the public image of the fearsome black male, N.W.A. enacts the mark of criminality as a playful conduit for framing black urban violence as righteous vengeance, replacing the ethical police officer with the savvy, Signifyin(g) gangsta guerrilla. The tracks ‘‘Straight Outta Compton’’ and ‘‘Fuck Tha Police’’ intervened at a political and cultural moment when most Americans had been exposed to a particular narrative of the inner city that was void of irony, one in which law enforcement cleans the streets of drug dealers and violent gangsters. These tracks and much of the rest of the album invert this dynamic not by refuting the criminal deeds that Reagan, Bush, and other cultural figures crafted policy to supposedly combat, but by parodically redeploying the mark of criminality as a resource for heroic, playful masculinity and artistic mastery, while vilifying the colonizer police officer as an unwanted fool in the streets of Compton. Because SOC was a multi-platinum album inaugurating a new phase in music history, it represented a very potent threat to the discourses of criminality on which many had staked their political careers. The fallout following the record’s release revealed precisely how unamusing their challenge would be.

Fugitivity exists in our use of language and it’s constant re-reading and re-use. Freedom isn’t fiat; it is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the location of the body or an abstract vision of social change. Such a “freedom” is utopian and fugitive

Tremblay McGraw 10 – Robin Tremblay-McGraw @University of California, Santa Cruz “Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive Recyclopedia of Harryette Mullen’s Writing” MELUS Volume 35, No.2 Summer 2010. Pp 71-94 (Article) Oxford University Press [E.Smith]

Harryette Mullen has published five books of original poetry—Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002). Additionally, she has published two books which reissue her earlier works: Blues Baby: Early Poems (2002), which reprints Tree Tall Woman and also includes a previously unpublished collection; and Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-consciously inherits and intervenes in what Kathy Lou Schultz calls the “legacy gone missing” of “avant-garde practice by African-American women poets” (n. pag.). Mullen is actively engaged in recovering this legacy through her creative, scholarly, and editorial work.1 Poised in the dialectic of what I call “enclosure” (identity, history, and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and “run” (mobility, flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), Mullen’s work plies the tensions between these disparate but mutually dependent poles. From the negotiation of this tension, Mullen produces a formal strategy predicated on the communal participation of others and distinctive among innovative poets—the recyclopedia. Mullen’s writing creates texts that remain open to ambiguity, difficulty, and difference. Her writing engages in political and social criticism with particular attention to race, gender, and the discourse of the commodity, while it delights in the pleasures of an infinite linguistic jouissance. Many of the critics who have written about Mullen’s work, including Elisabeth A. Frost, Juliana Spahr, Allison Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex “mixtery” of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen’s attention to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen’s work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen’s work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullen’s “subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein’s] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs” (71). Frost demonstrates Mullen’s rare (“among recent avant-garde poets”) revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that Mullen “constructs lyric otherwise—as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice” (466). While Spahr asserts that “what has interested me about Mullen’s work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy- and identity-centered poetry’s concerns with community building and alliance” (115), Cummings points out that “Mullen’s work then has garnered critical adulation not only because it works to synthesize disparate traditions, but because it reflects on that synthesis explicitly” (24). Surveying Mullen’s body of work as a whole and elaborating on Cummings’s assertion that Mullen self-consciously refl ects her work’s synthesis of multiple discourses, I contend in addition that Mullen’s writing is characterized by a productive tension between “enclosure” and “run,” between an archive of cultural, linguistic, and historical references, images, and information and the fugitivity that is both a thematics and a formal strategy. Her archive manifests in the form of the palimpsest, or, to use a fi gure that Mullen herself foregrounds, her archive is a recyclopedia. She takes debased, erased, and forgotten histories and found discourses and runs with and recycles them; she invites the reader to participate in this educative process of conservation and production, enclosure and fugitive run. Her work articulates a need for a more equitable ecology, one of acknowledgment and memory, conservation and reuse; she and we as readers are caught up in her recyclopedia, an ongoing poetics of reuse that benefits from the multiple perspectives of a heterogeneous community. The concept of the fugitive in Mullen’s work is connected equally to the history of the United States, the global slave trade, historical strategies of escape for enslaved blacks, and formal methods for escaping and reinventing genre and poetic method. Furthermore, the fugitive is both critical and generative and intimately linked to Mullen’s concept of the recyclopedia. Mullen’s formal strategies explicitly reference the history of the fugitive slave laws. In an interview with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen delineates the connection of the fugitive to her own work: I wanted the poem to have that quality of quick movement from one thing to another, from one subject or thought to another, from one mood or emotion to another. Partly because I wanted things to be in flux, a state of flux, a state of change. If you stand still too long, they will put chains on you, so you want to keep moving. This is one of the things that is most fascinating to me about the slave narratives I was studying while I was writing my dissertation. The true freedom in the slave narrative is at the point of deciding to escape and the journey north . . . the freedom that people experience is actually when they are on the road, in fl ight. (par. 25)\ Mullen links the structure of her poetry to the fl ight of the fugitive slave and then connects these movements of fugitivity with freedom. Interestingly, Mullen simultaneously problematizes the effi cacy of such movement and the resultant freedom gained when she further locates the moment of “true freedom . . . at the point of [the slave’s] deciding to escape and . . . journey.” This quote suggests that freedom is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive rather than related to the location of the body. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive. The diffi culties of fl ight and the frequency of slaves being returned to owners as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Act made the journey north dangerous, exhausting, and subject to failure. Furthermore, in the literature of passing Mullen surveys in her article “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” which explores how whites repress and suppress miscegenation and argues that the racial category of white is predicated on the black, she notes that in texts such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Death is better than slavery.” This is a “recurring refrain in Jacobs’s and other slave narratives, [that] acquires an ironic signifi cance when Benjamin [Jacobs’s lightskinned uncle] dies as a slave, vanishing into the white race in his third and fi nal escape” (82). For some, freedom means leaving one’s family and community, effectively dying in order to take up a new life as a free person or as a black who passes for white. Historically, flight is a means of escape, but not an unproblematic or uncomplicated means. Flight and travel (voluntary or not) undertaken by slaves, refugees, exiles, or nomads does not always erase histories but rather sometimes produces a palimpsestic and productive layering. In her doctoral dissertation, Mullen writes about Olaudah Equiano, the son of an African king who was taken into slavery and wrote from England in the eighteenth century. Discussing how “captivity disrupts his life, so that this African child fails to be ritually initiated [via scarifi cation] as an adult member of his tribe,” Mullen notes that in Equiano’s own discursive production: the displaced African is no blank page, as his reconstruction of early memories goes to show. He is more like a palimpsest, or like the protean “form of this Narrative.” . . . In the pages of Equiano’s prolifi c narrative, the black body retains its relation to a place of origin, but never acquires a fi xed signifi cation; instead layers of meaning accumulate as the character of the narrator evolves through a series of travels and adventures. (“Gender” 59) According to Mullen, for Equiano “retrospectively this disruption of cultural continuity is figured as a divine providence that intervenes to open up a new identity and destiny—a destiny constructed out of the individual’s unique interaction with chance and continually changing environments— rather than a predetermined fate or fi xed identity” (60). For some individuals fl ight and “cultural disruption” will enable strategic redefi nitions or recycling and make possible an identity open to change and resignifi cation; flight can create a kind of open archive always sedimented and palimpsestic so that past traces are not erased but available and recontextualized, refi gured and thus open to the future. Individuals and texts constructed out of fugitive fl ight from the law or those that travel across multiple cultural communities constitute the “recyclopedias” of disparate experiences, ideologies, and discourses. In the recyclopedia, fugitive fl ight rewrites identity by enabling a return to and reappropriation of the past. The neologism recyclopedia in the title of Mullen’s collection of three of her previous books is a combination of recycle and encyclopedia. Recycle references reuse, suggesting “to use again in the original form,” and the taking of intractable “used” or “waste” material and making it suitable for something new. Pedia recalls encyclopedia and its Greek root, paideia, meaning education. Mullen’s neologism clearly articulates a project that is both process and product. It entails a cyclical reuse of given materials and a process that takes dirty, contaminated, and worthless “waste” materials and turns them into something newly usable. Mullen’s recyclopedia suggests that the continual reuse of materials, even those that construct blacks as dirty, contaminated, and worthless, can serve to identify an original “use” (the racist construction of blacks as waste, for example); her writing enables the critical recycling of problematic materials to produce something new, something with different or oppositional value for writer, reader, history, and the future. Mullen’s recyclopedia constructs fugitive movement as a means of escape from arrest and as a productive process of remembering and rewriting. Mullen includes in her recyclopedia many diverse materials, yet she is particularly attentive to bringing to the surface the unarticulated, marginalized, nearly lost, and invisible as well as the “used” or “waste” material. Mullen’s recyclopedia enables the sort of activity described by David Scott that opens up “vast possibilities not just of memory but of countermemory; the moral idiom and semiotic registers of remembering against the grain of the history of New World black deracination, subjection, and exclusion” (vi). Such a process entails both identifying and preserving histories and experiences elided and prohibited from official discourses and simultaneously exposing such discourses’ bad faith. Rather than placing them under lock and key in order to solidify, arrest, and exclude racist and sexist discourses, Mullen remakes the encyclopedia—the discourse and its attendant pedagogies—through her recycling of its alphabets, grammars, metaphors, and other tropes. In the process, these discursive tigations reveal the often unmarked and unnamed structurings of various internecine ideologies.

Vote aff in favor of embracing radical forms of public pedagogy that are key to teens like us to deconstruct corrupt politics and institutional violence

Giroux 2000 (The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence)

The organization and regulation of culture by large corporations such as Disney profoundly influence children's culture and their everyday lives. The concentration of control over the means of producing, circulating, and exchanging information has been matched by the emergence of new technologies that have transformed culture, especially popular culture, which is the primary way in which youth learn about themselves, their relationship to others, and the larger world. The Hollywood film industry, television, satellite broadcasting technologies, the internet, posters, magazines, billboards, newspapers, videos, and other media forms and technologies has transformed culture into a pivotal force, "shaping human meaning and behav- ior and regulat[ing] our social practices at every turn."' Although the endlessly proliferating media sites seem to promise unlimited access to vast stores of information, such sites are increasingly controlled by a handful of multi- national corporations. Consider the Disney Company's share of the communication industry. Disney's numerous holdings include a controlling interest in twenty television stations that reach 25 percent of U.S. households; owner- ship of over twenty-one radio stations and the largest radio network in the United States, serving 3,400 stations and covering 24 percent of all households in the country; three music studios; the ABC television network; and five motion picture studios. Other holdings include, but are not limited to, television and cable channels, book publishing, sports teams, theme parks, insurance companies, magazines, and multimedia prod~ctions.~ Mass-produced images fill our daily lives and condition our most intimate perceptions and desires. At issue for par- ents, educators, and others is how culture, especially media culture, has become a substantial, if not the primary, edu- cational force in regulating the meanings, values, and tastes that set the norms that offer up and legitimate partic- ular subject positions-what it means to claim an identity as a male, female, white, black, citizen, noncitizen. The media culture defines childhood, the national past, beauty, truth, and social life.~ The impact of new electronic technologies as teaching machines can be seen in some rather astounding statistics. It is estimated that "the aver- age American spends more than four hours a day watching television. Four hours a day, 28 hours a week, 1456 hours a year."4 The American Medical Association reports that the "number of hours spent in front of a television or video screen is the single biggest chunk of time in the waking life of an American ~hild."Such statistics warrant grave concern, given that the ped- agogical messages provided through such programming are shaped largely by a $130-billion-a-year advertising indus- try, which sells not only its products but also values, im- ages, and identities that are largely aimed at teaching young people to be consumers. It would be reductionist not to recognize that there is also some excellent programming that is provided to audiences, but by and large much of what is produced on television and in the big Hollywood studios panders to the lowest common denominator, de- fines freedom as consumer choice, and debases public dis- course by reducing it to ~pectacle.~ Consider the enormous control that a handful of trans- national corporations have over the diverse properties that shape popular and media culture: "51 of the largest 100 economies in the world are corporation^."^ Moreover, the U.S. media is dominated by fewer than ten conglomerates, whose annual sales range from $10 billion to $27 billion. These include major corporations such as Time-Warner, General Electric, Disney, Viacom, TCI, and Westinghouse. Not only are these firms major producers of much of the entertainment and news, culture, and information that permeates our daily lives, they also produce "media soft- ware and have distribution networks like television net- works, cable channels and retail store^."^ Although this book focuses on the role that the Disney corporation in particular plays as an educational force in shaping American popular culture, it also makes clear that the production of meaning, social practices, and de- sires-or what can be called public pedagogy-must be ad- dressed as both an educational issue and a matter of politics and institutional power.

The use of popular culture and rap in educational spaces is key to creating a critical pedagogy

Powell 2015 (The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 60, No. 3, Socialization Forces Affecting the Education of African American Youth in the 1990s (Summer, 1991), pp. 245

Conceptual Framework We initially considered how the two schools used popular culture as critical pedagogy and how our own practices reflected the philosophies of these schools. Critical pedagogy and popular media literature provided a context for our thinking about the schools’ critical engagements. Critical pedagogy provides a way of seeing an unjust social order and revealing how this injustice has caused problems in the lives of young people who live in impoverished conditions. It offers an approach to education, through dialogue and reflection, whereby the effects of power can be interrogated and the needs of students met POPULAR MEDIA, CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, AND INNER CITY Youth247ȱȱȱ (Apple, 1990). Shor (1987) additionally illustrates the need to situate formal learning within students’ cultures. Through the process of “unveiling … reality and thereby coming to know it critically” (Freire, 1996, p. 51) those who have been disenfranchised come to explore their own social and cultural realities, draw their own conclusions, and work toward appropriate responses.ȱȱ Critical pedagogy and cultural studies approaches offer understandings of how young people use popular cultural representations to construct and express the meaningfulness of their lives, identities, and cultures (Giroux, 2001; Hall, 1997). These approaches interrogate mainstream cultural representations and encourage youth to construct their own representations through understandings of their own realities. Willis (1990) referred to the “extraordinary symbolic creativity of the multitude of ways in which young people use, humanise, decorate and invest meanings within their common and immediate life spaces and social practices” (p. 6). Creative engagement with popular culture allows youth “a sense that they are controlling their own representation, that they are in control of their own cultural identity, and are creatively shaping and moulding language, style, and self into something new” (Carlson & Dimitriadis, 2003, p. 21). If schools are to become more relevant spaces for young people, it is useful to listen to the stories youth are telling educators through their use of popular culture. Graveline (1998) has added that “insisting on people representing their own voices, their own stories” as a “central pedagogical tool” is imperative in the classroom (p. 124). Lincoln and Denzin (2003) noted: “We can study experience only through its representations, through the ways in which stories are told” (p. 240). Representation and narrative are useful concepts for developing better understandings of how young people draw from a variety of popular media to continually redefine and reposition themselves within the social contexts of their everyday lives.

1ac—Black Privilege

Black privilege - Crystal Valentine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rYL83kHQ8Y

Black Privilege is the hung elephant swinging in the room

Is the memory of a slave ship, preying for the Alzheimer’s to kick in

Black Privilege is me having already memorized my nephew’s eulogy,

My brother’s eulogy,
My father’s eulogy
My un-conceived child’s eulogy

Black Privilege is me thinking my sister’s name safe from this list

Black Privilege is me pretending to know Travyon Martin on a first name basis
Is me using a dead boy’s name to win a poetry slam
Is me carrying a mouth full of other people’s skeletons to use at my own convenience

Black Privilege is the concrete that holds my breath better than my lungs do

Black Privilege is always having to be the strong one,
Is having a crow bar for a spine,
Is fighting, even when you have no more blood to give
Even when you have lost sight of your bones
Even when your mother prayed for you
Even after they’ve prepared your body for the funeral

Black Privilege is being so unique that not even God will look like you,

Black Privilege is still being the first person in line to meet him

Black Privilege is having the same sense of humor as Jesus
Remember how he smiled on the cross?
The same way Malcolm X laughed at his bullet
And there I go again, asserting my Black Privilege, using a dead man’s name without his permission
I can feel his maggots congregating in my mouth

Black Privilege is a myth,
Is a joke, is a punchline
Is that time a teacher asked a little boy what he wanted to be when he grew up and he said alive
Is the way she laughed and said “there’s no college for that”

Ignorance is the only thing that won’t discrimination against you,

Is the only thing that don’t need a tombstone to learn your name

And it’s tiring, you know, for everything about my skin to be a metaphor

For everything black to be pun intended, to be death intended

Black Privilege is the applause at the end of this poem

Is me giving you a dead boy’s body and you giving me a ten 10
Is me being okay with that

I tired writing a love poem the other day, but my fingers wouldn’t move

My skin started to blister
Like it didn’t trust me any more
Like it thought I’ve forsaken it for something prettier
Something smoother to wrap around my bones
Like I was trading in my noose for a pearl necklace

Some days I’m afraid to look into the mirror

For fear that a bullet George Zimmerman-ed its way into my chest while I was asleep

The breath in my mouth is weapon enough to scare a courtroom
I’ll be lucky if I’m alive to make it to the stand
For some people, their trials live longer than they do
Black Privilege is knowing that if I die,
At least Al Sharpton will show up to my funeral
At least Al sharpen will mason jar my mother’s tears

Remind us that the only thing we are worthy of is our death
We are judged by the number of people it takes to carry our casket

Black Privilege is me think that’s enough
Is me thinking this poem is enough

Black Privilege is this
Is this breath in my lungs right now
Is me
Standing right here
With a crowd full of witnesses
To my heartbeat

Valentine began by defining Black Privilege as “the memory of a slave ship”. Black Privilege begins with the beginning of surveillance: slavery.

American surveillance grew from slavery—the original lists of human cargo, plantation inventories and diaries were used by masters to govern slaves. Disciplinary power operated through the compulsory visibility of targets, and fugitives became targets of additional layers of surveillance like wanted posters and slave patrols that evolved into modern policing and oversight

Browne 2012 – PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone; “Race and Surveillance” “Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies”; Google Book; https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=F8nhCfrUamEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA72&dq=race+and+surveillance+Simone+browne&ots=y_cvDcnYS0&sig=ZmhtR3WJI2mp_clVI6qwScZDZwQ#v=onepage&q=race%20and%20surveillance%20Simone%20browne&f=false; 7/5/15 || NDW)

According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be traced to the "simple accounts" of slave owners. Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves. One example involved the "General Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the Negro that what you say is the result of reflection." The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is "exercised through its invisibility," while imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its targets. Disciplinary power then operated on the enslaved as racialized surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to and that produced them as racial, and therefore enslave able, subjects. Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system, a system that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three "information technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes" when apprehended. This security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (black) illiteracy", a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts, became a part of the aparatus of surveillance, and the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place." For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for "a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: "sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception." Seth's, or Sall's, duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white parent) or a "Quadroon Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official with the first US federal census in 1790. I will retun to the census as a technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that required constant policing and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned "colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open." "Top eye" here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so as not to appear uppity To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken to." This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a "Technology of Whiteness".

Our performance is an act of poetics from a “legacy gone missing,” a strategy that both utilizes enclosure and run, that is here but is not here, that is there but is not there, visible but not visible.

We begin with a radically different interpretation of freedom. Freedom from surveillance isn’t achieved when the NSA dissolves or the PATRIOT Act is reversed, nor is the fugitive simply imagined or demanded as a concept in the 1ac.

Fugitivity and freedom exists in our use of language and it’s constant re-reading and re-use as a way of knowing the world. Freedom isn’t fiat; it is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the location of the body or an abstract vision of social change. Such a “freedom” is utopian and fugitive

Asserting Black Privilege through Fugitivity is the alternative to status quo racism.

When slaves sang songs like “follow the drinking gourd” they were singing the steps and guides for fugitive slaves to navigate the underground railroad and escape the plantation. They could sing these songs publicly because their masters interpreted it as the delightful tone of slaves singing in the fields. It was at once visible but not visible, there but not there.

Similarly, Valentine’s challenge of current racial constructs is a form of fugitivity through poetics. Her contrasting definitions of Black Privilege mirror the contradictory nature of the social role of black bodies and the difficulties of maintaining Black Identity. Additionally, the different interpretations of her poem her radical message to exist under the master’s proverbial nose.

She gives voice to the voiceless in order to instill and embrace change

ARIEL 6/11 (Amani Ariel – writer at Blavity. “This Poet Explains Exactly What Black Privilege Is” – 6/11/15. Blavity – the Voice of Black Millennials. Accessed 7/7/15. http://blavity.com/this-poet-explains-exactly-what-black-privilege-is/) dortiz

Crystal is the current two-time Grand Slam Champion of NYU’s poetry slam team, is the 2015 NYC Youth Poet Laureate, has won first place atCUPSI in both 2013 and 2015, and was a member of the 2014 Urban Word youth slam team. She has been featured on the Melissa Harris-Perry show, as well as theBrian Lehrer Radio talk show, and has performed at venues such as the Lincoln Center and the Apollo Theater. During her time at New York University, when she’s not immersed in work for her creative writing and adolescent mental health studies courses, Valentine continues to use her talents to give voice to the narratives of, and to be an advocate for, Black and brown people whose stories are so often silenced. This summer, with the support of her devoted fans (i.e. YOU!), she hopes to continue pursuing her passion for writing in Paris. While away, Crystal will have the opportunity to immerse herself in the experiences of a different culture while also discovering new literary devices to better articulate the messages, pains, struggles and triumphs of the Black and brown communities for which she advocates. In the words of this dynamic Black female poet, Crystal “believes in poetry’s ability to instill change in those who embrace it”

Vote aff to affirm our use of poetic fugitivity to break down social constructs of race and surveillance.

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