Race Census Aff – mags compiled by Lenny Brahin Jaden Lessnick Jillian Gordners Brian Roche 1AC
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- Specifically, racial categorization on the census is used to maintain a colonial order of racial exclusion
- No moral order is possible while racism is tolerated—ethics are meaningless without a prior rejection of it
- Hence the plan: The United States Federal Government should eliminate racial categorization on the United States Census.
- Identity categories are in constant flux—ontologizing race only reinscribes violence
Race Census Aff – MAGSCompiled by Lenny Brahin Jaden Lessnick Jillian Gordners Brian Roche 1ACThe census has always been a powerful means of state surveillance—from its very inception, census-taking has been a means to maintain a violent social orderMezey, 3 – Professor of Law at Georgetown University (Naomi, “Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination”, 97 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1701-1768 (2003) Northwestern University Law Review, 2003)//jml The Power to Discipline But power, needless to say, is at once affirmative and repressive, and the power of enumeration is no exception. Even to the extent it fulfilled its purpose of documenting American excep- tionalism and fueling the national imagination, the census did so partly by implicit and explicit reference to outsiders and others, by identifying and exercising authority over the more undesirable and unproductive citizens and non-citizens. Official statistics (and most social and economic statistics are official in the sense that they are gathered by the state) are generally compiled by means of a census, and early census-taking began as a method of surveil- lance, conscription, tax assessment, manners control, and exclusion of un- wanted elements.71 The pre-modern census was, as Paul Starr contends, "unambiguously an instrument of state power and social control."72 While Starr maintains that modem censuses have replaced coercion with coopera- tion, I suggest that even in the heady days of nineteenth century America, where statistics and state-building made a giddy pair, there remained an as- pect of social control to the enterprise of numbering the people, and indeed, there remains such an aspect today.73 This was especially evident when it came to naming and numbering by race. How the modern census functions as an exercise of state disciplinary power and social control requires expla- nation. One subtle aspect of social control made possible by statistics was the creation of the idea of "the average person" and its corollary, the deviant. Thus, statistics introduced two mutually dependent and thoroughly modem concepts: the norm and deviance. Ian Hacking, in his remarkable book, The Taming of Chance, argues that statistics gave rise to more than new concepts; they ushered in epistemological change as well.74 Hacking identi- fies what he calls the "avalanche of numbers" at the beginning of the nine- teenth century as the beginning of a profound change in the way Americans and Europeans thought about people, an epistemological shift away from the prevailing belief in determinism and causality to the modem idea of probability and the laws of chance.75 The laws of chance, unlike the preced- ing laws of nature, emerged from the gathering of statistics of large popula- tions. "The imperialism ofprobabilities could occur only as the world itself became numerical."76 But this new kind of information, in addition to pro- viding sound bites for a growing empire, also occasioned a new kind of so- cial control.77 Society became statistical. A new type of law came into being, analogous to the laws of nature, but pertaining to people. These new laws were expressed in terms of probability. They carried with them the connotations of normalcy and of deviations from the norm. The cardinal concept of the psychology of the Enlightenment had been, simply, human nature. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was being replaced by something different: normal people." Specifically, racial categorization on the census is used to maintain a colonial order of racial exclusionKertzer 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 State modernity and the impetus to categorize The significance of official state certification of collective identities through a variety of official registration procedures can be gleaned by contrasting these government efforts with the situation that existed be- fore such bureaucratic categorization began. Collective identities are, of course, far from a recent innovation in human history. However, before the emergence of modern states, such identities had great fluidity and im- plied no necessary exclusivity. The very notion that the cultural identities of populations mattered in public life was utterly alien to the pre-modern state (Gellner 1983). That state periodically required some assessment of its population for purposes of taxation and conscription, yet remained largely indifferent to recording the myriad cultural identities of its sub- jects. As a result, there was little social pressure on people to rank-order their localized and overlapping identities. People often had the sense of simply being “from here.” The development of the modern state, however, increasingly instilled a resolve among its elites to categorize populations, setting boundaries, so to speak, across pre-existing shifting identities. James Scott refers to this process as the “state’s attempt to make a society legible,” which he regards as a “central problem of statecraft.” In order to grasp the complex social reality of the society over which they rule, leaders must devise a means of radically simplifying that reality through what Scott refers to as a “series of typifications.” Once these are made, it is in the interest of state authorities that people be understandable through the categories in which they fall. “The builders of the modern nation-state,” Scott writes, “do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit these techniques of observation” (1998:2–3, 76–77, 81). The emergence of nationalism as a new narrative of political legitimacy required the identification of the sovereign “nation” along either legal or cultural criteria, or a combination of both. The rise of colonialism, based on the denial that the colonized had political rights, required a clear demarcation between the settlers and the indigenes. The “Others” had to be collectively identified. In the United States, the refusal to enfranchise Blacks and native Americans led to the development of racial categories. The categorization of identities became part and parcel of the legitimating narratives of the national, colonial, and “New World” state. States thus became interested in representing their population, at the aggregate level, along identity criteria. The census, in this respect, emerged as the most visible, and arguably the most politically impor- tant, means by which states statistically depict collective identities. It is by no means the sole categorizing tool at the state’s disposal, however. Birth certificates are often used by states to compile statistics on the ba- sis of identity categories. These include ethnic nationality (a widespread practice in Eastern Europe); mother tongue, as in Finland and Quebec (Courbage 1998: 49); and race, in the United States (Snipp 1989: 33). Migration documents have also, in some cases, recorded cultural iden- tities. The Soviet Union, for instance, generated statistics on migra- tion across Soviet republics according to ethnicity. The US Immigration Service, from 1899 to 1920, classified newly arrived immigrants at Ellis Island according to a list of forty-eight “races or peoples,” gener- ally determined by language rather than physical traits (Brown 1996). The categorization of racial identity on the census demands a static recognition based in the politics of state surveillance to crowd out alternative conceptions of cultural identity based in hybridity and mutualityTorres 99 (maría de los Angeles. Maria is the director and professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago, she has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan, “In the land of mirrors: Cuban exile politics in the United States,” University of Michigan Press, 1999. pp. pp. 188-189, LB) Furthermore. although these home countries were not direct colonies of the United States (with While rooted in the experience of slavery, ideas about race have affected conceptions of nationality as well. People of certain nationalities, Latin Americans included, are often not considered white (the exception of Puerto Rico), they do share some of the same dynamics of European countries and their colonies. The United States essentially took over the postcolonial relationship between Europe and its others in the southern part of the Western hemisphere. This economic and political relationship is accompanied by a conceptual framework that sees Latin America and Latin Americans as others. At the turn of the century U.S. views of Latin Americans were blatantly racist. While such images have given way to more sophisticated portrayals of Latin Americans, they are still influenced by these perspectives. Once in the United States, emigres from Latin America live and work in a society that has often excluded people of different cultures from full participation through a process of racialization. Unlike European societies, the United States had legalized slavery, along with which came a racist conception of who was entitled to participate in the public sphere. Racism permeated society.5 . For example, government forms ask applicants whether they are white, black, or Hispanic. "Hispanic"-an ethnic category-is equated conceptually with the racial categories of "white" and "black." While color is a concept that was part of the language of colonization, in the United States, it has unique elements that influence the way that exclusion and, consequently, struggles for inclusion have been waged. 6 Yet, instead of challenging the categories themselves as exclusionary practices, many of the empowerment movements of the 1960s reproduced the same categories, albeit in a positive light. Race, ethnicity, and gender were exalted as essential elements in defining one's identity. For immigrant communities, these movements sought a reconnection to their cultural roots, a notion which suggested a return to a lost territory. In the past ten years rigid categories have given way to more complex understandings of ethnic and cultural identity. Curiously, some of these new ways of looking at identity are not direct responses to exclusionary categories of race and culture but, rather, a response to categories promoted by progressive movements that, in trying to develop a discourse of inclusion, promoted exclusionary categories themselves. As such, the conceptual paradigms were not transformed but applied differently. In the 1990s intellectuals, particularly artists and writers, began proposing more complex ways of understanding multiple identities and multiple points of cultural and political references that inform the postmodern experience and that have been particularly evident in communities made up of large numbers of immigrants. 7 There is a rich intellectual tradition in Latin America that can contribute to these debates. Unlike the British, whose settlement patterns led colonial societies to create rigid categories of insider and outsider (note the "one drop of blood" rule), the Spanish relied on armies to implement colonialism. In addition, the military was accompanied by Catholic missionaries who believed that, if converted, natives could be considered full human beings. As a result, in the Spanish colonies there was more intermingling of different peoples and a more flexible view of blending than in the British colonial tradition. Mestizaje and syncretism have long been accepted as contributing to the formation of Latin American identity. 8 There is an important debate about identity issues taking place in postcolonial Europe that can enrich the American debate. 9 One perspective that can be discerned from both is the need to understand cultures and, consequently, identities both as hybrids and as ongoing processes. In diaspora communities in particular the transculturation, or practice of clearly identifiable multiple cultures previously conceived as homogeneous (home and host cultures), produces new forms of cultural practices that can best be described as hybrid. In contrast to a paradigm that sees these cultures as proof of cultural diversity, Homi Bhabha suggests that they demonstrate the hybridity of cultures themselves. This may open the way "to conceptualizing an international culture based not on exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity" and in politics as a place "not located in any particular geographic space, nor ... tied to a single predetermined political position." This hybridity is polyculturalism, the recognition that racial and cultural categories are not only socially constructed but also historically intertwined such that their state categorization is nothing but an arbitrary imposition of power. A polycultural understanding of race is a necessary check on colonial racismPrashad 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. No moral order is possible while racism is tolerated—ethics are meaningless without a prior rejection of itMemmi 2K (Albert, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism, Translated by Steve Martinot, p. 163-165) The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animosity to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is ‘the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsels respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall.” says the Bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal—indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible. Hence the plan: The United States Federal Government should eliminate racial categorization on the United States Census.Total elimination of racial categories on the census is necessary—reform isn’t enoughCAPLAN 2012 (Arthur Caplan is head of the division of medical ethics at New York University's Langone Medical Center, “Time to drop racial categories in census,” Chicago Tribune, August 16, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-08-16/site/ct-persepc-0816-race-20120816_1_racial-categories-race-and-ethnicity-questions-quadroons) The U.S. Census Bureau announced that it wants to make a number of changes in how it counts membership in a race. The change is based on an experiment the bureau conducted during the last census in which nearly 500,000 households were given forms with the race and ethnicity questions worded differently from the traditional categories. The results showed that many people who filled out the traditional form did not feel they fit within the five government-defined categories of race: white, black, Asian, Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native. If Congress approves, the bureau says it plans to stop using the word "Negro" as part of a question asking if a person was "black, African-American or Negro." There are a number of other changes planned for counting Hispanics and Arab-Americans. These changes may seem like improvements. They are not. The bureau and Congress ought to be considering a more radical overhaul of the census — dropping questions about race entirely. There are a lot of reasons why. First, the concept of "race" makes no biological sense. None. The classifications Americans use to divide people into groups and categories have nothing to do with genetics or biology. The notion that there is a black genome or an Hispanic genome or a Native American genome is ludicrous. There is tremendous variation in the genomes of the most common racial categories used in America. Think about it — what is the biological basis for the Asian category? There is far more in common genetically between the Census Bureau's racial groups than there are differences. If advances in genetics have shown us anything since the mapping of the human genome 15 years ago it is that there is zero overlap between the terms the census is using and biology. Worse, the terms are the product of nothing but racism. The old "one-drop" rule continues to apply in how many people divide whites from blacks — any black ancestry makes you black. Remember the old days of quadroons and mulattos — the racism that inspired these racial categories simply became unacceptable in American society? Nothing changed about biology. Who is a Native American? A person who may be of mixed ancestry who may look anything but stereotypically Native American but who speaks a tribal language and holds a high office in a tribal government? Is there any reason other than racism to lump together Hispanics as a class that captures anything significant except a connection to Spanish and Spanish colonialism? Consider how other parts of the world with very different histories than ours think about racial categories. India has all manner of divisions of its people that would never even occur to an American. When the British controlled India they introduced a whole scheme of "races" based upon the assumption that certain groups were more warlike and combative than others. They divided the entire spectrum of Indian ethnic groups into two categories: a "martial race" and a "nonmartial race." Dogras, Gurkhas, Garhwalis, Devars, Sikhs, Jats and Pashtuns were the martial races — as it turns out they were also the groups who were initially more accepting of British rule. The everyday classification of racial groups in the Balkans, Africa, China, Japan, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa (pre- and post-apartheid) shows that what we think of as natural racial divisions are not seen that way in other countries. By using our race categories decade after decade, the Census Bureau reinforces categories that are nothing more than the results of a racism-tainted tale of who got to America first and who followed — combined with a hefty dollop of 18th-century European colonialist thinking. The attempt to put everyone into a totally fabricated, socially constructed box also means that the growing number of mixed-race Americans have to make a choice or become "other." Even President Barack Obama is described as black when there is no reason he could not be classified as white but for the racist past of the country he was born in. Why force the notion of mixed race on anyone much less let it be an accepted part of government policy? The lobby to keep race as a key driver in the census is powerful. Many see their jobs and futures tied to resources that are allocated by race. Others fear a loss of identity if racial categorizations are allowed to erode. They are wrong. India did away with divisive, historically racist, racial categories in its census in 1951. It is time for Congress to tell the Census Bureau to do the same. There is no alternative to state engagement—we have to engage the policy details of the census to confront racist violenceThompson, 10 – PhD candidate (poli sci) at University of Toronto (Debra Elizabeth, “Seeing Like a Racial State: The Census and the Politics of Race in the United States, Great Britain and Canada” A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science, 2010)//jml A more focused lens is necessary in order to examine how policy-makers propose and evaluate alternatives and come to decisions about the methods that will be employed in the enumeration of the multiracial population. Though the census is a racial project, it is also a policy sphere, inhabited by elites, bureaucrats, “experts,” data users, academics, interest groups, and members of the public. These conceptualizations of the census are not mutually exclusive. As a racial project the census connects meanings of race – meanings which, I have argued, often exist beyond national boundaries – with different means of (racially) organizing societies. I contend that the organization of race occurs through census policy schema in the creation of aggregate or dispersed racial taxonomies, the standardization of racial classifications, the conceptualization of racial categories as discrete or multiple, and the determination of which groups can access government programming. Moreover, who gets a seat at the table within this policy universe, the relative power or influence of its denizens and how they connect ideas about race to their preferred method of organization are at the crux of the production of this racial project. The first section of this chapter establishes a conceptual framework that identifies important characteristics of policy networks and demonstrates their congruency with this dissertation’s overarching exploration of the schematic state. It details Marsh and Smith’s (2000) dialectical approach to policy networks, which will be used in subsequent sections to examine the ways in which: 1) macro-level structures such as ideas and institutions shape the scope and power of policy networks; 2) processes of network policy formation institutionalize path-dependencies and access points for network participants; and 3) network structure dovetails with network interactions – that is, agent skills, bargaining and resources – and leads to the policy outcomes of these cases. Debates about identity, surveillance, and power must start with the census—state classification renders subjects into objects of observation and controlMezey, 3 – Professor of Law at Georgetown University (Naomi, “Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination”, 97 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1701-1768 (2003) Northwestern University Law Review, 2003)//jml In modem America, the census epitomizes the examination as an in- strument of power. In a sense the examination is for Foucault any ritualized form of documenting the individual, and the census is a national rite of mass individual documentation. It is a regularly administered, probing questionnaire, to which the state requires a response, inquiring into myriad details of life which are at once mundane and intimate. 9 The census makes each person seen and known by an invisible bureaucracy; each person be- comes an object of observation, a subject of surveillance.9 3 Where once the documentation of a life was saved for nobles and heroes, in the modem age it has been democratized, and "it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection."94 And yet the census as examination also obscures the in- dividuality of people by incorporating them into a bewildering mass of sta- tistics, into a comparative system of collective facts that sets and adjusts our sense of the normal.95 It takes individuals and turns them into "statistical people." 96 David Theo Goldberg has analyzed the racial categories of the census from a Foucaultian perspective, focusing perceptively on the ways in which the literal bureaucratic forms, used by the Census Bureau and now count- less other agencies and organizations, reflect, reproduce, and distribute ra- cial identity. 97 He locates the bureaucratic form as part and product of the epistemic shift that both Foucault and Hacking detail, noting that statistics and forms emerge around the same time and as part of the same process: forms give structure, order, and logic to data, allowing it to be 'formalized," to be turned into "information."9 The ordering of knowledge in this fashion is intertwined with the creation and regulatory control of identity. "Formal identity is identity conceived, manufactured, and fabricated in and through forms.... The form, and the identity prompted and promoted by the form, is regulatory and regulative. The form furnishes uniformity ... to identity, rendering it accordingly accessible to administration .... The form is the technology of scientific management par excellence."9 9 Thus the census and its attendant standardized forms can be seen as a Foucaultian examination, a primary instrument by which the state exercises disciplinary power on individuals. It is evident in the way it creates, counts, and arranges objects; in its classifying and ordering of living beings; in its plotting of people into tables and forms in order to best observe the most in- timate details of their lives: their living arrangements, the number of televi- sions and toilets in their home, their commute times, their wealth, their skin color. This power to make and arrange objects of inquiry is particularly evident with respect to racial classification because race has been one of the main axes of state disciplinary power in this country. This view of the census, as examination and disciplinary instrument, is not limited to high theorists. In fact, currently this position is most ardently espoused by some conservatives and civil libertarians, who argue that the census should be scaled back to fulfill only the minimum requirement of "actual enumeration" set by the Constitution. In particular, these opponents of the census regard the questions about income, race, and standards and style of living as overly intrusive, an invasion of privacy, and irrelevant to the Constitutional purpose of the census.°° While civil libertarian concerns about the census are aimed primarily at the way the routine business of gov- ernment regulation and redistribution invade citizens' privacy,'' they also fo- cus on the issue of racial documentation and surveillance. To substantiate their fears of government misuse of census data, civil libertarians remind us that the federal government used racial identifiers taken from census data to help round up Japanese Americans for internment in camps during World War II,102 despite a strict policy of confidentiality. 13 Taken to its most ex- treme, the disciplinary power exercised through the census does more than just see us, know us, and tell us what is normal. It makes us who we are and situates us with respect to others. It also makes evident that the power to dis- cipline and the power to recognize are an indivisible power. As Foucault himself acknowledged, the disciplinary power that operates through the documentation of the individual is not just repressive and censoring, it is also, as I have argued above, creative and aspirational. "[I]t produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.""' 4 There’s no benefit to state programs based on race until the categories are deconstructed—welfare programs solidify violent categories and undermine struggles for justice ESPINOZA 1997 (Leslie, Associate Professor of Law, Boston College Law School, California Law Review, October) Race certainly is operational. 80 For each group, race provides benefits and burdens. As a hierarchical system, the benefits and burdens are distributed in a grossly unequal and unjust way. Other systems of oppression, such as misogyny, homophobia and poverty, intersect with racism and synergistically operate to disempower some and empower others. 81 Yet for all the complexity, we recognize race as a correlate, negative and positive, to well-being. At the moment we recognize it, however, we also discount it - it could be capitalism, sexism, colonialism, etc. The complexity of oppression contributes to, and indeed may be at the heart of, our inability to understand race. In the same way that we think we know who is white, who is black, who is brown, and who is [*1611] yellow, we think that we know why she is poor, why she was fired, why she cannot read and why she is in jail. Naming and understanding oppression seems like a catch-22. We use the master's tools to try to dismantle the master's house and think we are making headway, only to discover that the destruction of this house was part of a larger "urban renewal" plan to build a "Master's Fortress." For example, as we break down racial categories, we find that each group has a stake in maintaining their place in the racial order. Undocumented workers break their back in the hot sun, but are grateful for work; women, in dilapidated housing and with no hope for education or child care, raise small children and are thankful for a welfare check; sweatshop slaves work interminable hours for a pittance but are relieved to pay off the cost of their passage to America. And there are those who have moved up a step to own a small house in the barrio or a vegetable cart in the market; or those whose third-cousin's daughter managed to finish technical school and who have hope that one of their children will be in college instead of in a gang. It is the focus on the crumb thrown their way that keeps even the most oppressed from taking action for change. 82 There are many examples of small benefit programs that are premised on definitional categories for racially oppressed groups:bracero work permits, welfare benefits, refugee immigration exceptions, targeted lending grants, minority business set-asides and affirmative action. The benefits are always tenuous because the benefactor can alter the application and understanding of the definitional category. This ambiguity is often used to pit different groups against each other in a scramble for benefits. 83 It is also used to pit persons within categories against each other. 84 [*1612] Tension and conflict within and between oppressed racial groups keep us from forming coalitions. Yet, united action is the only hope for effectively changing the vast disparities in wealth between social strata in this country. Racial outsiders are stuck in the "bottom of the well" 85 if they buy into the myth that equality means individual equality of opportunity. "Opportunity" has competition conceptually built into it. Equality is viewed as the responsibility of the individual to take advantage of opportunity. It is not understood as actual equality of basic material needs and it is not understood as something derived from group action. Race definitions operate to define the "have-nots" and to mask the correlation between race and the "haves." American social discourse attaches negative characteristics by group; for example, he is poor because he is a lazy Spic. We do not attach success by racial group. Success is the reward of individual characteristics, e.g., he is rich because he is smart, he works hard and he is ruthless. We do not acknowledge that, as a statistical reality, he is rich because he is a white male. Race definitions go to the heart of our conception of equality. We learn that being racially identified can hurt us: we are part of a group that is unfairly stereotyped and unfairly treated. Likewise, we are taught that group identity does not lead to material success. We "race" ourselves in a way that leaves us lonely, isolated and mired in poverty. Our strategy is distinct from colorblindness and multiculturalism, both of which have only served to circulate white supremacy—polyculturalism allows us to build on the limited successes scored against white supremacy to constitute more far-reaching resistanceWendland 2003 (joe, peace activist in Michigan and Ohio and teaches in the Ethnic Studies Department at Bowling green State University. Chopping Through the Foundations of Racism With Vijay Prashad, http://www.frictionmagazine.com/imprint/books/kung_fu.asp, LB) Racism, like racialism, is not natural to human social relations. More specifically, Prashad shows with devastating accuracy that, "White supremacy emerged in the throes of capitalism's planetary birth to justify the expropriation of people off their land and the exploitation of people for their labor." Although societies pre-dating capitalism and those outside of Europe did use slave labor and were sometimes xenophobic and ethnocentric, Prashad argues that, "It would be inaccurate to reduce this xenophobia or ethnocentrism to racism." Cultural and national differences developed and recognized before the system of private expropriation of socially produced value was transplanted by European (mostly English, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish) imperialism and were based primarily in language and geography -- not in human bodies. Prashad concretely asserts historical and linguistic evidence that the primacy of color in the Indian caste system emerged with the advent of British conquests. Another important aspect of this work is the discussion of fascism. Prashad notes that, "Fascism or a movement with fascistic tendencies has at its core hierarchy, racism, and militarism." It tends to define the "nation" as "unitary" and tries to exclude or erase difference -- primarily that of ethnicity or race. Such a movement tries every strategy or tactic to set aside the "mess of democracy" and promotes the popularity of racial nationalism. Though readers likely will recognize the US right-wing in this definition, Prashad also argues that elites in colonized (or formerly colonized) countries are not immune to these tendencies. Especially within neocolonial frameworks elites tend to try to emulate the sort of ideological and material practices of repression in order to assert their own power over the colonized working class. The result is highly hierarchical societies in which right-wing ruling cliques rely on imperialism (initially British, now American) to rule their countries. They build their power on the ability to repress dissent and difference within their countries and by orienting the labor and resources of their countries to imperialist interests. But, even within this general picture of domination and fascism, the oppressed have historically fought back and, in so doing, built unique and sometimes forgotten alliances. These alliances, contrary to common misperceptions, have a deep and powerful history among Asians and Africans. Prashad documents ancient links between Africans and Chinese and Asian Indian merchant explorers. He notes Calcutta-born religious activist William Quinn, one of the founders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He linksMarcus Garvey with Ho Chi Minh and Ghandi. Ho visited UNIA offices while traveling in the US; Ghandi, while a leader of the anti-racist movement in South Africa, relied on Garveyite formulations and followers to develop a message for his constituents in the Indian National Congress; and Ghandi influenced and was impressed by the work of the leaders who formed the organizations that would become the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. By the mid-20th century, these tenuous relations had been transformed into full-fledged alliances among Third World peoples. Rastafarianism and its cultural expressions were likely as much the result of the styles and habits of East Indian residents of Caribbean islands as they were of African descended people. Racially oppressed Dalits in India emulated the organization and rhetoric of the Black Panther Party, and representatives of the National Liberation Front (Vietnam) claimed to be "Yellow Panthers." Among Americans, Asian American, Chicano, Black, Puerto Rican, and American Indian radicals borrowed from and left their marks on a broad movement for social revolution. This larger social trend was encapsulated, for Prashad, in the martial arts films of Bruce Lee. This aspect of Prashad's work should open up doors for greater detailed study of these movements. A powerful countervailing force to fascism -- whether from the imperialists or from the compradors (intermediaries) -- in Prashad's view, is an anti-racist and anti-imperialist national liberation movement formulated on shared social position, customs and practices, rather than skin color or desire to maintain class dominance. A true anti-imperialist strategy is a socialist-based movement. Prashad's description and criticism of racism and its various disguises is crucial for contemporary cultural studies students and political activists. He contrasts two forms of racism (white supremacy) -- colorblindness and liberal multiculturalism. One of the successes of the civil rights movement, though it did not end white supremacy, was to reform the terrain on which white supremacists could operate. (Even Trent Lott and Phil Gramm -- one-time members of the White Citizen's Council and KKK, respectively -- had to change the framework, or hide, how they moved within these circles in order to maintain legitimacy.) Crude blatant racist became sophisticated "colorblind" libertarians. They appropriated and re-worded the rhetoric of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and demanded the erasure of race. What they sought in reality was a political stick to use against the mild gains of the civil rights movement -- affirmative action or other protections against discrimination. Colorblindness was a way of normalizing the already normal white that dominates US society. To this Prashad contrasts liberal multiculturalism. This version of white supremacy sets in motion a variety of racialized and essentialized cultural positions, assumed to exist in nature and to occupy the pre-designated skin tone and body shape of people, in order to manage the complexity of a multicultural society. Diversity, rather than colorblindness, is the political tool of social control and maintenance of class relations. When it comes down to it, both of these ideologies translate race into a device for forcing working-class people to compete for vital but scarce resources falling off the tables of capitalists. The latter, however, as Prashad indicates, opens space within which true anti-racist and anti-capitalist alliances can be organized and cultivated. Identity categories are in constant flux—ontologizing race only reinscribes violenceHipwell, 4 - Department of Geography, College of Social Sciences, Kyungpook National University (William T., ‘A Deleuzian critique of resource-use management politics in Industria’ The Canadian Geographer 48, no 3 (2004) 356–377)//jml Identity. When you begin making decisions and cutting it up, rules and names appear. And once rules and names appear, you should know when to stop. (Tao Te Ching, quoted in Scott 1998, 262) The Deleuzian critique most important to this discussion is directed against ontological ‘identity’— which Deleuze argues has underlain western thought since Plato. In simple terms, ontological identity assumes that the ‘total field’ of reality can be reduced to discrete points or ‘identities’ that interact atomistically, much like balls on a billiard table. Deleuze shows that belief in ontological identity is an error, since reality is a continuum (an unbounded ‘whole’), not an aggregation of separate ‘points’. In this discussion, I use the word ‘identitarianism’ to refer to the set of ideas arising from an ontology of identity. Identity is a useful fiction, employed to make intellectual epistemologies of calculation and measurement possible. However, when its fictionality is forgotten, identitarianism quickly contributes to serious social, political and ecological problems. A list of identity categories familiar to readers would include human races, animal species and academic disciplines. Identities are generalisations based upon some agreed-upon norm. Identitarianism masks, misrepresents or excludes transitional or marginal cases that do not fit easily into the identity category under consideration. Deleuze undertakes the most systematic and rigorous critique of identity in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994). His project is to show that the being supposed in an ontology of identity is defined by what it is not; that it relies on a negative, external support (the ‘is/is not’ duality, or Hegel’s thesis/antithesis’) and is thus ‘no being at all’ (Hardt 1993, 114). Ontological identity denies the positive movement of being, or ‘becoming’, and thus creates a static, negative and, ultimately, false picture of the world (Doel 1996, 430). In practice, the most significant feature of identitarianism is the process of ‘striation’: Deleuze and Guattari’s term for the mental or physical imposition of fixed, sedentary boundaries (enclosures) onto hitherto smooth space to create what philosopher Paul Patton (2000, 112) has called a ‘homogeneous space of quantitative multiplicity’. Representational intellect In Deleuze’s view, the myth of identity has had profound epistemological implications. This is so because intellectual epistemologies are necessitated by a belief in ontological identity. That is to say, identitarian thinking holds that the only way of gaining reliable knowledge about the world, and to make accurate predictions, is through conscious, intellect-based approaches, grounded in logic. This, Deleuze suggests, is a mistake. Of course, if reality truly were made up of discrete identities, then measuring them and logically calculating their interactions would surely be the soundest way of gaining access to knowledge about the real world. Deleuze does recognise that logic and reason are very frequently successful strategies; he merely emphasises that they should not be granted exclusive epistemological status. His argument is that reality is not, in fact, fundamentally atomistic and that therefore an identitarian epistemology, how- ever useful, is ultimately inadequate. He shows that representation is the inevitable outcome of the privileging of intellect over intuition. Moreover, he argues that the fluid and mobile nature of reality—which the intellect on its own can never adequately grasp—means that representation is doomed to perpetual error. Arran Garrue (1995, 70) argues that representation results from Platonic thought’s ‘celebration of eternal forms and its denigration of the changing, sensible world’ (on this point see also Deleuze 1994, 59). In Deleuze’s view, the representational intellect cannot truly understand the continuity and flow that characterise the world. Instead, we see the world through our intellect as series of moments, aggregations of units. Representation also leads directly to reductionism, where complex ideas and conditions are simplified to the point of minimising, obscuring and distorting them (Random House Webster 1998, 1618). John Ralston Saul (1993) has called this the ‘dictatorship of reason’. Deleuze would almost certainly have agreed. Difference Chaos is not a stable condition or fixed state. It is a process, it is dynamic. It is more like the changing relationship between things than the things them- selves. (Merry 1995, 11) For Deleuze, static identities are dangerous illusions: the real world is, by contrast, always fluid and mobile; reality is ontologically characterised by ‘difference’. This difference is not, as it might seem, difference between things (an identitarian notion) but rather the idea that reality is a continuum of interplay, interpenetration and interconnectedness and that ‘things’ are merely intensities in this continuum, internally constituted by the interplay of different forces, and themselves interacting and interpenetrating with everything around them. In this sense, allegedly separate entities are mutually constitutive and interdependent, and treating them as entirely separate inevitably does intellectual and physical violence to the world. In an ontology of difference, the world is viewed holistically. Differential being is defined on the basis of what it is rather than what it is not. It is dynamic, not static. As Deleuze (1988, 123) puts it, ‘the important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between different velocities’. While we may, for practical purposes, speak of ‘a tree’, ‘a fish’, ‘the human species’, etc., awareness of ontological difference reminds us that it is a mistake to abstract such things from their dynamic and continuous context. Prior to striation by identitarian forces, the world is made of ‘smooth space’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 474–500), or what Patton (2000, 112) has called ‘the heterogeneous space of qualitative multiplicity’. In smooth space, diverse and unexpected interconnections may appear and reconfigure (‘lines of flight’). Smooth space is continually in flux; it is difficult to know intellectually and (therefore) difficult to control. To know one’s way in the tangle of primeval forest or other ‘wild zones’ (Dalby 2001), one must have good instincts. Words matter—our exposure of racial tradeoffs can help to disrupt white supremacy. The state is important but words on the census are proof that the circulation of categories in language also forms the social world in which we live HARRIS 1994 (Angela, Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, California Law Review, July) Discourse theory relies on a social constructionist understanding of the concepts "language" and "power." 151 The central insight of discourse theory with respect to language is the blurring of the line between the "real" and the "ideal." 152 Discourse theory puts language at the center of human experience by asserting that language not only describes the world, it makes it. 153 We only make sense of experience through the conceptual categories [*773] we use to interpret and classify it. Even sensory perception itself, which we tend to think of as an unmediated encounter with pure "reality," is better described as a process of interpretation in which our brains pick and choose the stimuli to which to pay attention on the basis of preestablished conceptual frameworks. 154 This view of language suggests an important role for "power" in creating and maintaining the world. 155 As theorists have recognized, one of the most potent kinds of power one can have is the power to label experience. 156 The struggle over what to call things, and hence how to understand and ultimately experience them, is a struggle over social power. Just as history is written by the winners, language is shaped by the socially dominant. 157 In post-structuralist theory, however, "power" is not only negative or repressive - an infringement on prior liberty - but also productive and creative. If "power" is understood simply as the human interactions that stabilize social meanings and practices, then the concept includes the power to do something as well as power over someone. 158 In this broad account of "power," there is no individual or social group completely lacking in power. 159 Power circulates, in Foucault's terms, from the bottom up, not [*774] just from the top down; resistance is always possible even when power is at its most repressive. 160 In discourse theory, then, language is implemented through power relations which, in turn, are shaped by social understandings created through language. A "discourse" refers both to a system of concepts - the set of all things we can say about a particular subject - and to the relations of power that maintain that subject's existence. The project of post-structuralist theory is to tell stories about how certain discourses emerge, shift, and submerge again. Under a post-structuralist account, then, "race" is neither a natural fact simply there in "reality," nor a wrong idea, eradicable by an act of will. "Race" is real, and pervasive: our very perceptions of the world, some theorists argue, are filtered through a screen of "race." 161 And because the meaning of "race" is neither unitary nor fixed, while some groups use notions of "race" to further the subordination of people of color, other groups use "race" as a tool of resistance. 162 The task of a discourse theory of race would be to chart this history. In Omi and Winant's phrase, "race" is "an unstable and "decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle": 163 the concept with which, John Calmore says, CRT begins. 164 Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.87 Mb. Share with your friends:
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