Libidinal DA v 1.1

AT: No UniquenessBitch, it’s a linear disad.

AT: All Racism AdvantageFungibility DA – Their instrumental use of black and bodies of color in order to advance a ballot for an instrumental plan text, is a strategy of anti-blackness that seeks to make those bodies fungible and accumulated for ballots. This is an act of commodification that exposes their technologies of whiteness and the ability to surveil and eat the other.

Medical Shell

C-XIs it necessary to have some type of empathy for patients in the Trust advantage to build trust with?

What are the mechanisms for you to do this empathy?

How do doctors create empathy for the black body?

ShellMasking DA - They cannot change the historical nature of anti-blackness in the medical industry.

Their affirmative serves as a mask to the latent, immoral, anti-black, ableist and discriminatory features of the medical industry by giving it the happy face of amending HIPPA

By masking the bad intentions of the medical industry, it allows them to justify other bad acts in other parts of the medical industry, by trying to apply this piecemeal fix.There are systemic disbeliefs that black people have when it comes to the med industry, whether you try to create a piecemeal policy that protects privacy, there is still doc-pat relationship and the idea of treating the body and not looking at the empathetic connection with the patients. They look at patients as bodies to be cured or fixed.Doctors will never be able to extend empathy for the black body because it will only be seen as a tool to be used for research or commodification.The medical industrial complex will never be able to fix trust with black people because it is a manifestation of anti-blackness because of these reasons:Tuskegee experiment – What happens is that hospitals tested the prolonged effects of syphilis on black men and gave them medicine saying it was to cure the symptoms, but it was really a placebo. One of the initial things that created distrust with the medical field and black people.Henrietta Lacks – In 1951 Henrietta Lacks was admitted to the colored only gynecological unit of Johns Hopkins where, unknowingly, two cervical tissue samples were taken. Eight months later she died of cervical cancer. In the intermediating period Lacks reported continuous pain and bleeding, but her medical records indicated that she was feeling ’fine’ at those visits. In the lab her cells were the first documented immortal cells, a necessary quality for long term clinical research and patenting. It was over two decades before these immortal HeLa cells were traced back to the Lacks family who were unaware of the billions made from the patenting and sales of Henrietta Lacks’ genetic material.

Henrietta Lacks is certainly not the first person to have tissues unknowingly or forcibly taken, but her interaction with Johns Hopkins and their use of her genetic material after her death is evidence of a historic transition from the captivity of slavery to the captivity of contractual freedom as a means of extracting the lived labor of people of color.

Planned Parenthood – in the past, Planned Parenthood has racist connotations to it, cause if black women or Latino women went to Planned Parenthood for resources or for an abortion, they would un-knowingly be sterilized.Prisons – Similar to Planned Parenthood, prisons are also known to sterilize black bodies.corporations and research institutions to increase not only tissue harvesting and tissue which not only drastically increased the number of vulnerable populations

Nearly forty years later experimentation on prisoners became the backbone of lucrative biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. In prisons Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia inmates were imbricated in the extraction of their biological material after tests and exposure to sexually transmitted infections to chemical warfare.

Even if they get a portion of solvency, there is a huge DA to the communities they are unable to address.Their focus on individual instances trades off with the structure of anti-blackness and how we theorize of how it produces material violence. As opposed to looking at the structure of how racism materializes. Their advantage is only the contingent form of racism that changes nothing.Their advantage assumes that those victims of the supposed racism they speak about have access to full humanity, but overlooks the ontological positionalities that mark certain bodies as disposable and fungible. Because they don’t position the black body at the center of their analysis, their racism claims will only be shallowly addressed with piecemeal solutions.Their managerial approach does not address the libidinal drive to destroy black and other bodies of color, which means their piecemeal strategy will only expand anti-blackness in more insidious ways.The FDA permitted increased human experimentation for all phases of clinical trials incentivizing large pharmaceutical

Their attempt to solve the Contingent violence against black bodies glosses over and trades off with the focus on the Gratuitous violence against black bodies. The Affirmative doesn’t center their analysis on the black body, which means their racism claims will only be shallowly addressed with piecemeal solutions. This Anti-Blackness is the Controlling Impact for how we should interpret all forms of violenceCrockett 14 ( J’Nasah , writer, performer, and cultural worker who focuses on Black cultural production and Black radical traditions.  “Raving Amazons”: Anti-blackness and Misogynoir in Social Media June 30,2014https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/raving-amazons-antiblackness-and-misogynoir-in-social-media.

Anti-blackness, in a rough-hewn nutshell, is the structuring logic of the modernity and the foundation of the contemporary world we live in. It is the glue and the string running through our conceptions of what it means to be free, what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be a legitimate and productive member of society, what it means to be Human, and what it means to be the anti-Human. Anti-blackness is the structural positioning of the Black (“the

Black” here being a marker for a certain type of subjectivity comparable to Marx’s “the worker” – shoutout Frank Wilderson) as an object that is fungible and

able to be accumulated like any other wicket churned out by the process of capitalism; it is the fact of Black folks being open to perpetual and gratuitous violence that needs no definitive prior provocation or “reason;” the “reason” is the fact of Blackness (see:getting shot for walking home with some Skittles, getting shot while being handcuffed in the backseat of a

car, getting shot for calling 911, being beaten for staring at someone in a “dehumanizing” way, and on and on).It is, to echo Hartman, the afterlife of slavery: a logic that collapses the past and the present and places violence

towards the Black within a range of acceptable daily practices. Certainly anti-blackness is attitudinal – see the libidinal economy, i.e. the systems of desire and instincts and

fantasies and repulsion around skin tone, hair types, bodies that makes itself apparent in Eurocentric beauty standards or the fact that lighter-skinned African American women receive shorter prison sentences than their darker-

skinned counterparts. But that’s how logic and structures operate, they imbue everything that springs forth from them. Our lives and societies (because when we speak of the afterlife of race-based chattel

slavery, Arab and trans-Atlantic, we are speaking of the entire world) are fundamentally shaped by it, not only institutionally, but also at the level of the everyday,   including crossing the street. So of course it makes itself

apparent in the supposedly brave new world (so different from any world that came before!) of social media.I myself joined both Twitter and Tumblr back in 2009, after experiences stretching back to high school with BlackPlanet.com, Myspace, Livejournal, and of course Facebook. With Twitter and Tumblr, however, I joined after spending a year or two lurking on the edges of a particular group of (mostly) women of color, and moving onto social media around the same time they did allowed me to connect with them in ways I wasn’t able to when the main platform was, say, WordPress. For us, and for the many Black women I have since connected and built with since 2009, social media offers us yet another way to build our “beloved communities,” to extend the networks of love, camaraderie, and joyous support that have long existed in our meatspace communities – hair salons, churches, Black student unions, kitchen tables, etc. Social media also becomes a central site for much of our activism, from the multinational #BringBackOurGirls hashtag to holding media outlets accountable for publishing blatant racism. We are also theory houses, circulating and challenging discourses and practices that negatively impact our lives as Black women, and making critical connections that are often missing from the media that surrounds us. I can’t help but see historical parallels to, say, early 20th century Pullman Porters secretly distributing copies of The Chicago Defender to the Black folks they came across. What we’re doing is nothing new, but being on social media means that this

networking is happening in the public eye. I also can’t help but see historical parallels in the multiple forms of anti-black backlash Black women have received on social media over the past few years. The topic of surveillance in social media has been a hot one lately, but many discussions on it stop and end at the Edward Snowden/NSA type revelations over post-9/11, post-War on Terror invasions of privacy at the hands of an overzealous government. However, if we were to extend the idea of policing and surveillance further back in time, and expand it beyond the trope of it being primarily carried out by government employees, it becomes apparent that surveillance has already been a central part of the experience of Black women on Twitter. Recall that in the U.S., the police have their roots in slave patrols; policing and management of the potentially unruly Black bodies underlies the call for law and order and the constituent need for police. To quote Wilderson again, in society there is a “fundamental anxiety over  where is the Black and what is he or she doing ,”  and in an anti-black world, every non-Black is deputized to patrol and manage the Blacks.

This violence is gratuitous violence; unwarranted, created through ontological destruction. There is a qualitative ontological distinction between their CONTINGENT violence and GRATUITIOUS violence. We are controlling the uniqueness of their impacts and control the FRAMING of all other impactsJared Sexton 2010 (“‘The Curtain of the Sky’: An Introduction” in Critical Sociology 36; 11. Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African-American studied and Critical Theory at the UC-Irvine)

To suffer the loss of political sovereignty, the exploitation of labor, the dispossession of land and resources is deplorable; yet, we might say in this light that to suffer colonization is unenviable unless one is enslaved. One may not be free, but one is at least not enslaved . More simply, we might say of the colonized: you may lose your motherland, but you will not ‘lose

your mother’ (Hartman 2007). The latter condition, the ‘social death’ under which kinship is denied entirely by the force of law, is reserved for the ‘natal alienation’ and ‘genealogical isolation’ characterizing slavery . Here is Orlando Patterson, from his encyclopedic 1982 Slavery and Social

Death:nI prefer the term ‘natal alienation’ because it goes directly to the heart of what is critical in the slave’s forced

alienation, the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations. It also has the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It was this alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him [sic] by the master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master wished. And

this was true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated. (Patterson 1982: 7–8) True even if elevated by the income and formal education of the mythic American middle class, the celebrity of a Hollywood

icon, or the political position of the so-called Leader of the Free World . 4 The alienation and isolation of the slave is not only vertical, canceling ties to past and future generations and rendering thereby the

notion of ‘descendants of slaves’ as a strict oxymoron . It is also a horizontal prohibition, canceling ties to the slave’s

contemporaries as well. Reduced to a tool, the deracination of the slave , as Mannoni and Fanon each

note in their turn, is total, more fundamental even than the displacement of the colonized, whose status obtains in a network of persecuted human relations rather than in a collection or dispersal of a class of things . Crucially, this total deracination is strictly correlative to the ‘absolute submission mandated by [slave] law’ discussed rigorously in Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 Scenes of Subjection: the slave estate is the most perfect example of the space of purely formal obedience defining the jurisdictional field of sovereignty (Agamben 2000). Because the forced submission of the slave is absolute, any signs whatsoever of ‘reasoning … intent and rationality’ are [i s] recognized‘solely in the context of criminal liability’. That is, ‘the slave’s will [is] acknowledged only as it [is] prohibited or punished’ (Hartman 1997: 82, emphasis added). A criminal will, a criminal reasoning, a criminal intent, a criminal rationality: with these erstwhile human capacities construed as indices of culpability before the law, even the potentiality of slave resistance is rendered illegitimate and illegible a priori. The disqualification of black resistance by the logic of racial slavery is not unrelated to the longstanding cross-racial phenomenon in which the white bourgeois and proletarian revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic can allegorize themselves as revolts against slavery, while the hemispheric black struggle against actually existing slavery cannot authorize itself literally in those same terms. The latter must code itself as the apotheosis of the French and American revolutions (with their themes of Judeo-Christian deliverance) or, later, the Russian and Chinese revolutions (with their themes of secular messianic transformation)or, later still, the broad anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America of the mid-20th century (with their themes of indigenous reclamation and renaissance).5 One of the defining features of contemporary political and intellectual culture remains this metaphoric transfer that appropriates black suffering as the template for non-black grievances, while it misrecognizes the singularity of black struggles against racial slavery and what Loïc Wacquant calls its ‘functional

surrogates’ or what Hartman terms its ‘afterlife’. Put differently, ‘ the occult presence of racial slavery’ continues to haunt our political imagination: ‘nowhere, but nevertheless everywhere, a dead time which never arrives and does not stop arriving’ (Marriott 2007: xxi). Hartman’s notion of slavery’s afterlife and Wacquant’s theorization of slavery’s functional surrogates are two productive recent attempts to name the

interminable terror of slavery, but we are still very much within the crisis of language – of thinking and feeling, seeing and hearing – that slavery provokes. Both scholars challenge the optimistic idea of a residual ‘legacy’ of slavery, precisely because it requires the untenable demarcation of an historic end in

Emancipation. The relations of slavery live on, Hartman might say, after the death knell of formal abolition, mutating into ‘the burdened individuality of freedom’. The functions of the chattel system are largely maintained, Wacquant might say, despite the efforts of Reconstruction, preserved in surrogate institutional form under Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison. Slavery lives on , it survives, despite the grand attempts on its institutional life forged by the international movements

against slavery, segregation and mass imprisonment (Davis 2003).But what if slavery does not die, as it were,

because it is immortal, but rather because it is non-mortal, because it has never lived, at least not in the

psychic life of power? What if the source of slavery’s longevity is not its resilience in the face of opposition, but

the obscurity of its existence? Not the accumulation of its political capital, but the illegibility of its grammar? On this account, for those that bear the mark of slavery – the trace of blackness – to speak is to sound off without foundation, to appear as a ghost on the threshold of the visible world, a spook retaining (only) the negative capacity to absent thepresence, or negate the will to presence, of every claimto human being, even perhaps the fugitive movement of stolen life explored masterfully by Fred Moten (2008). We might rethink as well the very fruitful notion of ‘fugitive justice’ that shapes the prize-winning 2005 special issue of Representations on ‘Redress’. Co-editors Saidiya Hartman and Stephen Best are posing the right question: ‘How does one compensate for centuries of violence that have as their consequence the impossibility of restoring a prior existence, of giving back what was taken, of repairing what was broken?’ (Hartman and Best 2005: 2)That is to say, they are thinking about ‘the question of slavery in terms of the incomplete nature of abolition’, ‘the contemporary predicament of freedom’ (2005: 5, emphasis added). Yet, the notion subsequently developed of a fugitive life ‘lived in loss’ – spanning the split difference between grievance and grief, remedy and redress, law and justice, hope and resignation – relies nonetheless on an outside, however improbable or impossible, as the space of possibility, of movement, of life. Returning to our schematization of Fanon, we can say that the outside is a concept embedded in the problématique of colonization and its imaginary topography, indeed, the fact that it can imagine topographically at

all.But, even if the freedom dreams of the black radical imagination do conjure images of place (and to do here does not imply that one can in either sense of the latter word: able or permitted); what both the fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black name for us, in their discrepant registers, is an anti-black world for which there is no outside. ‘The language of race developed in the modern period and in the context of the slave trade’ (Hartman 2007: 5). And if that context is our context and that context is the world, then this is the principal insight revealed by the contemporary predicament of freedom: there is no such thing as a fugitive

slave.To be sure, Humans do not live under conditions of equality in the modern world. In fact, modernity is, to a large degree, marked by societies structured in dominance: [hetero]patriarchy and white supremacy, settler colonialism and extra-territorial conquest, imperialist warfare and genocide, class struggle and the international division of labor. Yet, for Wilderson, there is a qualitative difference, an ontological one, between the inferiorization or dehumanization of the masses of people ‘in Asia…in America and the islands of the sea’, including the colonization of their land and resources, the exploitation of their labor and even their extermination in whole or in part, and the singular commodification of human being pursued under racial slavery, that structure of gratuitous violence in which bodies are rendered as flesh to be accumulated and exchanged.

The so called “Reforms” of the affirmative don’t solve – they simply try and solve the contingent violence through policy changes. This will always fail, as their racism advantage assumes that the victims of the supposed racism already has access to full humanity; it overlooks the ontological positionalities that mark certain bodies as disposable and fungible. Their managerial approach to racism does not address the libidinal drive to destroy black and other bodies of color, which means their piecemeal strategy of eliminating racism will only expand anti-blackness in more insidious ways. Only through a rejection of the affirmative’s attempt to fix racism can we truly focus on removing the libidinal drive and gratuitous violence.SEAN ILLING teaches political theory at Louisiana State University JUN 22, 2015 Rich people are the f**king worst: The 1 percent’s vile new war on us all http://www.salon.com/2015/06/22/rich_people_are_the_fking_worst_the_1_percents_vile_new_war_on_us_all/

Rich people rarely tell you how they really feel about poor people . Occasionally, though, you get a glimpse. Earlier this week, the Washington Post published a story about Rancho Santa Fe, a small but extremely wealthy enclave in Southern California. Like the rest of California, the people of Rancho Santa Fe are dealing with a drought. As you might imagine, that means water is scarce and conservation is critical. For the denizens of Rancho Santa Fe, however, conservation is someone else’s problem, namely poor people.¶ According to Steve Yuhas, who lives in the area and hosts a conservative talk-radio show, privileged people “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful.” Oh, the humanity! In case it wasn’t clear, Yuhas added that the right to water ought to scale with income: “No, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”¶ And Yuhas isn’t alone. Gay Butler, an avid equestrian and fellow resident of Rancho Santa Fe, fumed for similar reasons. “It angers me because people aren’t looking at the overall picture,” she said. “What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?” Perhaps Butler has a point. It’s one thing to demand sacrifice in extraordinary circumstances, but we’ve got to draw the line somewhere, right? If a woman wants to ride her finely manicured horse on a dirt-free prairie in the middle of the desert, what matters a little drought?¶ Brett Barbre, a fellow Orange Country aristocrat, also appears to get it. “I call it the war on suburbia,” he remarked. “California used to be the land of opportunity and freedom. It’s slowly becoming the land of one group telling everyone else how they think everybody should live their lives.” Barbre continued: “They’ll have to pry it [his water hose] from my cold, dead hands.”¶ You may be asking yourself: Do restrictions on water consumption during a historic drought really constitute an all-out assault on human freedom? Fair question. Most of us fail to see this issue in such grand terms. Maybe we’re missing something. Mr. Barbre is either a bold lover of liberty or a detached plutocrat with a penchant for hyperbole. You be the judge.¶ In any case, I see the decadence of the people in Rancho Santa Fe as a microcosm of America today, particularly corporate America. What these people exhibit, apart from their smugness, is a complete absence of any sense of collective responsibility. They can’t see and aren’t interested in the consequences of their actions. And they can’t muster a modicum of moderation in the face of enormous scarcity. Every resource, every privilege, is theirs to pilfer with impunity. These

people are prepared to endanger an entire ecosystem simply to avoid the indignity of brown golf courses; this is what true entitlement looks like.¶ The wealthiest Americans – and their apostles in government – tell us that it’s the poor people who are entitled, who take and exploit and keep more than they deserve. But that’s a half-truth, and a

dangerous one at that. Entitlement has many faces, the most destructive of which is on display in Rancho Santa Fe. These adolescent upper-crusters are entitled because they believe they have a right to everything they can get hold of – regardless of the costs. They believe living with others carries no obligations. Anyone who places their right to pristine golf courses above their responsibility to respect communal resources is a social toxin, a privileged parasite eating away at the foundations of society. It’s important that their actions be seen in this context.¶ There’s a lesson in Rancho Santa Fe and in California more generally. What’s happening there foreshadows our future . We’re

confronted with crises on a number of fronts. From climate change to economic inequality, our institutions – and the people controlling them – are failing us . Changes are necessary, but a segment of society (the 1 percent, we’ll call them) is unwilling to sacrifice; they’re too invested in power, in comfort. Whether it’s oil profiteers distorting climate science or Wall Street banks undermining efforts to regulate the

financial industry, entrenched interests are doing everything possible to preserve the status quo, even when so doing threatens to upend the whole system – just like the people of Rancho Santa

Fe.¶ The corrosive elitism in Rancho Santa Fe is the stuff popular revolts are based on. These Dickensian vultures want to hoard until nothing remains; they’re blind to those beyond their gated communities. Disconnectedness is a close cousin of privilege, so it’s not surprising that they live in a bubble. But their persecution mania, their belief in their privileged status, is insufferable – and a public hazard. They can’t imagine what it’s like to live without, so they’ll risk anything to ensure that they don’t. California may survive the selfish stupidity of a few citizens in Rancho Santa Fe, but it’s not clear how long the country can survive the excesses and

greed of Wall Street and Big Business.¶ Wealth, it’s worth noting, isn’t the enemy. The problem is the attitude of the wealthy, the contempt, the indifference, and the lack of anything resembling civic virtue. To be rich is no crime. To abuse privilege, to profit at the expense of others, is quite another thing – and it’s all too common these days.

Generic ShellTheir instance of isolating NSA/Drones/Facial Recognition Technology as an instance of racism is only dealing with the managerial effects of racism, not an overall disavow of the structure of anti-blackness.Their focus on individual instances trades off with the structure of anti-blackness and how we theorize of how it produces material violence. As opposed to looking at the structure of how racism materializes. Their advantage is only the contingent form of racism that changes nothing.Their racism adv assumes that those victims of the supposed racism they speak about have access to full humanity, but overlooks the ontological positionalities that mark certain bodies as disposable and fungible. Because they don’t position the black body at the center of their analysis, their racism claims will only be shallowly addressed with piecemeal solutions.Their managerial approach to racism does not address the libidinal drive to destroy black and other bodies of color, which means their piecemeal strategy of eliminating racism will only expand anti-blackness in more insidious ways.They are making black and other bodies fungible by using them in order to win a ballot

Their attempt to solve the Contingent violence against black bodies glosses over and trades off with the focus on the Gratuitous violence against black bodies. The Affirmative doesn’t center their analysis on the black body, which means their racism claims will only be shallowly addressed with piecemeal solutions. This Anti-Blackness is the Controlling Impact for how we should interpret all forms of violenceCrockett 14 ( J’Nasah , writer, performer, and cultural worker who focuses on Black cultural production and Black radical traditions.  “Raving Amazons”: Anti-blackness and Misogynoir in Social Media June 30,2014https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/raving-amazons-antiblackness-and-misogynoir-in-social-media.

Anti-blackness, in a rough-hewn nutshell, is the structuring logic of the modernity and the foundation of the contemporary world we live in. It is the glue and the

string running through our conceptions of what it means to be free, what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be a legitimate and productive member of society, what it means to be Human, and what it means to be the anti-Human. Anti-blackness is the structural positioning of the Black (“the

Black” here being a marker for a certain type of subjectivity comparable to Marx’s “the worker” – shoutout Frank Wilderson) as an object that is fungible and able to be accumulated like any other wicket churned out by the process of capitalism; it is the fact of Black folks being open to perpetual and gratuitous violence that needs no definitive prior provocation or “reason;” the “reason” is the fact of Blackness (see:getting shot for walking home with some Skittles, getting shot while being handcuffed in the backseat of a

car, getting shot for calling 911, being beaten for staring at someone in a “dehumanizing” way, and on and on).It is, to echo Hartman, the afterlife of slavery: a logic that collapses the past and the present and places violence

towards the Black within a range of acceptable daily practices. Certainly anti-blackness is attitudinal – see the libidinal economy, i.e. the systems of desire and instincts and

fantasies and repulsion around skin tone, hair types, bodies that makes itself apparent in Eurocentric beauty standards or the fact that lighter-skinned African American women receive shorter prison sentences than their darker-

skinned counterparts. But that’s how logic and structures operate, they imbue everything that springs forth from them. Our lives and societies (because when we speak of the afterlife of race-based chattel

slavery, Arab and trans-Atlantic, we are speaking of the entire world) are fundamentally shaped by it, not only institutionally, but also at the level of the everyday,   including crossing the street. So of course it makes itself

apparent in the supposedly brave new world (so different from any world that came before!) of social media.I myself joined both Twitter and Tumblr back in 2009, after experiences stretching back to high school with BlackPlanet.com, Myspace, Livejournal, and of course Facebook. With Twitter and Tumblr, however, I joined after spending a year or two lurking on the edges of a particular group of (mostly) women of color, and moving onto social media around the same time they did allowed me to connect with them in ways I wasn’t able to when the main platform was, say, WordPress. For us, and for the many Black women I have since connected and built with since 2009, social media offers us yet another way to build our “beloved communities,” to extend the networks of love, camaraderie, and joyous support that have long existed in our meatspace communities – hair salons, churches, Black student unions, kitchen tables, etc. Social media also becomes a central site for much of our activism, from the multinational #BringBackOurGirls hashtag to holding media outlets accountable for publishing blatant racism. We are also theory houses, circulating and challenging discourses and practices that negatively impact our lives as Black women, and making critical connections that are often missing from the media that surrounds us. I can’t help but see historical parallels to, say, early 20th century Pullman Porters secretly distributing copies of The Chicago Defender to the Black folks they came across. What we’re doing is nothing new, but being on social media means that this

networking is happening in the public eye. I also can’t help but see historical parallels in the multiple forms of anti-black backlash Black women have received on social media over the past few years. The topic of surveillance in social media has been a hot one lately, but many discussions on it stop and end at the Edward Snowden/NSA type revelations over post-9/11, post-War on Terror invasions of privacy at the hands of an overzealous government. However, if we were to extend the idea of policing and surveillance further back in time, and expand it beyond the trope of it being primarily carried out by government employees, it becomes apparent that surveillance has already been a central part of the experience of Black women on Twitter. Recall that in the U.S., the police have their roots in slave patrols; policing and management of the potentially unruly Black bodies underlies the call for law and order and the constituent need for police. To quote Wilderson again, in society there is a “fundamental anxiety over  where is the Black and what is he or she doing ,”  and in an anti-black world, every non-Black is deputized to patrol and manage the Blacks.

This violence is gratuitous violence; unwarranted, created through ontological destruction. There is a qualitative ontological distinction between their CONTINGENT violence and GRATUITIOUS violence. We are controlling the uniqueness of their impacts and control the FRAMING of all other impactsJared Sexton 2010 (“‘The Curtain of the Sky’: An Introduction” in Critical Sociology 36; 11. Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African-American studied and Critical Theory at the UC-Irvine)

To suffer the loss of political sovereignty, the exploitation of labor, the dispossession of land and resources is deplorable; yet, we might say in this light that to suffer colonization is unenviable unless one is enslaved. One may not be free, but one is

at least not enslaved . More simply, we might say of the colonized: you may lose your motherland, but you will not ‘lose

your mother’ (Hartman 2007). The latter condition, the ‘social death’ under which kinship is denied entirely by the force of law, is reserved for the ‘natal alienation’ and ‘genealogical isolation’ characterizing slavery . Here is Orlando Patterson, from his encyclopedic 1982 Slavery and Social

Death:nI prefer the term ‘natal alienation’ because it goes directly to the heart of what is critical in the slave’s forced

alienation, the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations. It also has the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It was this alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him [sic] by the master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master wished. And

this was true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated. (Patterson 1982: 7–8) True even if elevated by the income and formal education of the mythic American middle class, the celebrity of a Hollywood

icon, or the political position of the so-called Leader of the Free World . 4 The alienation and isolation of the slave is not only vertical, canceling ties to past and future generations and rendering thereby the

notion of ‘descendants of slaves’ as a strict oxymoron . It is also a horizontal prohibition, canceling ties to the slave’s

contemporaries as well. Reduced to a tool, the deracination of the slave , as Mannoni and Fanon each

note in their turn, is total, more fundamental even than the displacement of the colonized, whose status obtains in a network of persecuted human relations rather than in a collection or dispersal of a class of things . Crucially, this total deracination is strictly correlative to the ‘absolute submission mandated by [slave] law’ discussed rigorously in Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 Scenes of Subjection: the slave estate is the most perfect example of the space of purely formal obedience defining the jurisdictional field of sovereignty (Agamben 2000). Because the forced submission of the slave is absolute, any signs whatsoever of ‘reasoning … intent and rationality’ are [i s] recognized‘solely in the context of criminal liability’. That is, ‘the slave’s will [is] acknowledged only as it [is] prohibited or punished’ (Hartman 1997: 82, emphasis added). A criminal will, a criminal reasoning, a criminal intent, a criminal rationality: with these erstwhile human capacities construed as indices of culpability before the law, even the potentiality of slave resistance is rendered illegitimate and illegible a priori. The disqualification of black resistance by the logic of racial slavery is not unrelated to the longstanding cross-racial phenomenon in which the white bourgeois and proletarian revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic can allegorize themselves as revolts against slavery, while the hemispheric black struggle against actually existing slavery cannot authorize itself literally in those same terms. The latter must code itself as the apotheosis of the French and American revolutions (with their themes of Judeo-Christian deliverance) or, later, the Russian and Chinese revolutions (with their themes of secular messianic transformation)or, later still, the broad anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America of the mid-20th century (with their themes of indigenous reclamation and renaissance).5 One of the defining features of contemporary political and intellectual culture remains this metaphoric transfer that appropriates black suffering as the template for non-black grievances, while it misrecognizes the singularity of black struggles against racial slavery and what Loïc Wacquant calls its ‘functional

surrogates’ or what Hartman terms its ‘afterlife’. Put differently, ‘ the occult presence of racial slavery’ continues to haunt our political imagination: ‘nowhere, but nevertheless everywhere, a dead time which never arrives and does not stop arriving’ (Marriott 2007: xxi). Hartman’s notion of slavery’s afterlife and Wacquant’s theorization of slavery’s functional surrogates are two productive recent attempts to name the

interminable terror of slavery, but we are still very much within the crisis of language – of thinking and feeling, seeing and hearing – that slavery provokes. Both scholars challenge the optimistic idea of a residual ‘legacy’ of slavery, precisely because it requires the untenable demarcation of an historic end in

Emancipation. The relations of slavery live on, Hartman might say, after the death knell of formal abolition, mutating into ‘the burdened individuality of freedom’. The functions of the chattel system are largely maintained, Wacquant might say, despite the efforts of Reconstruction, preserved in surrogate institutional form under Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison. Slavery lives on , it survives, despite the grand attempts on its institutional life forged by the international movements

against slavery, segregation and mass imprisonment (Davis 2003).But what if slavery does not die, as it were,

because it is immortal, but rather because it is non-mortal, because it has never lived, at least not in the

psychic life of power? What if the source of slavery’s longevity is not its resilience in the face of opposition, but

the obscurity of its existence? Not the accumulation of its political capital, but the illegibility of its grammar? On this account, for those that bear the mark of slavery – the trace of blackness – to speak is to sound off without foundation, to appear as a ghost on the threshold of the visible world, a spook retaining (only) the negative capacity to absent thepresence, or negate the will to presence, of every claimto human being, even perhaps the fugitive movement of stolen life explored masterfully by Fred Moten (2008). We might rethink as well the very fruitful notion of ‘fugitive justice’ that shapes the prize-winning 2005 special issue

of Representations on ‘Redress’. Co-editors Saidiya Hartman and Stephen Best are posing the right question: ‘How does one compensate for centuries of violence that have as their consequence the impossibility of restoring a prior existence, of giving back what was taken, of repairing what was broken?’ (Hartman and Best 2005: 2)That is to say, they are thinking about ‘the question of slavery in terms of the incomplete nature of abolition’, ‘the contemporary predicament of freedom’ (2005: 5, emphasis added). Yet, the notion subsequently developed of a fugitive life ‘lived in loss’ – spanning the split difference between grievance and grief, remedy and redress, law and justice, hope and resignation – relies nonetheless on an outside, however improbable or impossible, as the space of possibility, of movement, of life. Returning to our schematization of Fanon, we can say that the outside is a concept embedded in the problématique of colonization and its imaginary topography, indeed, the fact that it can imagine topographically at all.But, even if the freedom dreams of the black radical imagination do conjure images of place (and to do here does not imply that one can in either sense of the latter word: able or permitted); what both the fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black name for us, in their discrepant registers, is an anti-black world for which there is no outside. ‘The language of race developed in the modern period and in the context of the slave trade’ (Hartman 2007: 5). And if that context is our context and that context is the world, then this is the principal insight revealed by the contemporary predicament of freedom: there is no such thing as a fugitive

slave.To be sure, Humans do not live under conditions of equality in the modern world. In fact, modernity is, to a large degree, marked by societies structured in dominance: [hetero]patriarchy and white supremacy, settler colonialism and extra-territorial conquest, imperialist warfare and genocide, class struggle and the international division of labor. Yet, for Wilderson, there is a qualitative difference, an ontological one, between the inferiorization or dehumanization of the masses of people ‘in Asia…in America and the islands of the sea’, including the colonization of their land and resources, the exploitation of their labor and even their extermination in whole or in part, and the singular commodification of human being pursued under racial slavery, that structure of gratuitous violence in which bodies are rendered as flesh to be accumulated and exchanged.

The so called “Reforms” of the affirmative don’t solve – they simply try and solve the contingent violence through policy changes. This will always fail, as their racism advantage assumes that the victims of the supposed racism already has access to full humanity; it overlooks the ontological positionalities that mark certain bodies as disposable and fungible. Their managerial approach to racism does not address the libidinal drive to destroy black and other bodies of color, which means their piecemeal strategy of eliminating racism will only expand anti-blackness in more insidious ways. Only through a rejection of the affirmative’s attempt to fix racism can we truly focus on removing the libidinal drive and gratuitous violence.SEAN ILLING teaches political theory at Louisiana State University JUN 22, 2015 Rich people are the f**king worst: The 1 percent’s vile new war on us all http://www.salon.com/2015/06/22/rich_people_are_the_fking_worst_the_1_percents_vile_new_war_on_us_all/

Rich people rarely tell you how they really feel about poor people . Occasionally, though, you get a glimpse. Earlier this week, the Washington Post published a story about Rancho Santa Fe, a small but extremely wealthy enclave in Southern California. Like the rest of California, the people of Rancho Santa Fe are dealing with a drought. As you might imagine, that means water is scarce and conservation is critical. For the denizens of Rancho Santa Fe, however, conservation is someone else’s problem, namely poor people.¶ According to Steve Yuhas, who lives in the area and hosts a conservative talk-radio show, privileged people “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful.” Oh, the humanity! In case it wasn’t clear, Yuhas added that the right to water ought to scale with income: “No, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”¶ And Yuhas isn’t alone. Gay Butler, an avid equestrian and fellow resident of Rancho Santa Fe, fumed for similar reasons. “It angers me because people aren’t looking at the overall picture,” she said. “What are we supposed to do, just have

dirt around our house on four acres?” Perhaps Butler has a point. It’s one thing to demand sacrifice in extraordinary circumstances, but we’ve got to draw the line somewhere, right? If a woman wants to ride her finely manicured horse on a dirt-free prairie in the middle of the desert, what matters a little drought?¶ Brett Barbre, a fellow Orange Country aristocrat, also appears to get it. “I call it the war on suburbia,” he remarked. “California used to be the land of opportunity and freedom. It’s slowly becoming the land of one group telling everyone else how they think everybody should live their lives.” Barbre continued: “They’ll have to pry it [his water hose] from my cold, dead hands.”¶ You may be asking yourself: Do restrictions on water consumption during a historic drought really constitute an all-out assault on human freedom? Fair question. Most of us fail to see this issue in such grand terms. Maybe we’re missing something. Mr. Barbre is either a bold lover of liberty or a detached plutocrat with a penchant for hyperbole. You be the judge.¶ In any case, I see the decadence of the people in Rancho Santa Fe as a microcosm of America today, particularly corporate America. What these people exhibit, apart from their smugness, is a complete absence of any sense of collective responsibility. They can’t see and aren’t interested in the consequences of their actions. And they can’t muster a modicum of moderation in the face of enormous scarcity. Every resource, every privilege, is theirs to pilfer with impunity. These

people are prepared to endanger an entire ecosystem simply to avoid the indignity of brown golf courses; this is what true entitlement looks like.¶ The wealthiest Americans – and their apostles in government – tell us that it’s the poor people who are entitled, who take and exploit and keep more than they deserve. But that’s a half-truth, and a

dangerous one at that. Entitlement has many faces, the most destructive of which is on display in Rancho Santa Fe. These adolescent upper-crusters are entitled because they believe they have a right to everything they can get hold of – regardless of the costs. They believe living with others carries no obligations. Anyone who places their right to pristine golf courses above their responsibility to respect communal resources is a social toxin, a privileged parasite eating away at the foundations of society. It’s important that their actions be seen in this context.¶ There’s a lesson in Rancho Santa Fe and in California more generally. What’s happening there foreshadows our future . We’re

confronted with crises on a number of fronts. From climate change to economic inequality, our institutions – and the people controlling them – are failing us . Changes are necessary, but a segment of society (the 1 percent, we’ll call them) is unwilling to sacrifice; they’re too invested in power, in comfort. Whether it’s oil profiteers distorting climate science or Wall Street banks undermining efforts to regulate the

financial industry, entrenched interests are doing everything possible to preserve the status quo, even when so doing threatens to upend the whole system – just like the people of Rancho Santa

Fe.¶ The corrosive elitism in Rancho Santa Fe is the stuff popular revolts are based on. These Dickensian vultures want to hoard until nothing remains; they’re blind to those beyond their gated communities. Disconnectedness is a close cousin of privilege, so it’s not surprising that they live in a bubble. But their persecution mania, their belief in their privileged status, is insufferable – and a public hazard. They can’t imagine what it’s like to live without, so they’ll risk anything to ensure that they don’t. California may survive the selfish stupidity of a few citizens in Rancho Santa Fe, but it’s not clear how long the country can survive the excesses and

greed of Wall Street and Big Business.¶ Wealth, it’s worth noting, isn’t the enemy. The problem is the attitude of the wealthy, the contempt, the indifference, and the lack of anything resembling civic virtue. To be rich is no crime. To abuse privilege, to profit at the expense of others, is quite another thing – and it’s all too common these days.

2 NRRegardless of the policy that you make, you cannot destroy the libidinal drive to destroy certain bodies of color.

They are not able to get rid of the affect of connections about how certain bodies are devalued, seen as less than normalized bodies. Cause of that, their policy will have error and fail because they will not change the attitude people have towards certain bodies, which still make them killable to the overarching society.