Multivalent Oppression K - NDI 2015

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1NC ShellAff focus on Blackness as explanatory of overarching oppression renders it impossible to challenge multivalent forms of racism & discrimination, increasing sufferingAlcoff 6 (Linda Alcoff a philosopher at the City University of New York who specializes in epistemology, feminism, race theory and existentialism. “Visible identities Race Gender And the Self” 2006 Oxford Press)

Native peoples were represented∂ as vanquished, disappearing, and thus of no account.∂ Thus, the paradigm of an antiblack racism intertwined with slavery does not help to illuminate specific forms and experiences of oppression, where ideologies often relied on charges of innate evil, religious backwardness, horde mentalities, the inevitability of extinction, and other projections not used in regard to African Americans. I will argue that the hegemony of the black/white paradigm has stymied the development of an adequate account of the diverse racial realities in the United States and weakened the general accounts of racism that attempt to be truly inclusive. This has had a negative effect on our ability to develop effective solutions to the various forms that racism can take, to make common cause against ethnic- and race-based forms of oppression and to create lasting coalitions, and has recently played a significant role in the demise of affirmative action. I will support

these claims further in what follows. Criticisms Critics of the black/white paradigm have argued that, although all communities of color have shared the experience of political and economic disenfranchisement in the United States, there are significant differences between the causes and the forms of this disenfranchisement. Bong Hwan Kim, a Korean American community leader who has worked both as the director of the Korean Community Center of∂ East Bay in Oakland and as director of the Korean Youth and Community Center in∂ Los Angeles, blames the black/white binary for disabling relationships among∂ people of color and even for creating the conditions leading to the Los Angeles civil∂ disaster of April 1992, in which 2300 small Korean-owned businesses were destroyed∂ by mostly Latino and African American looters. Kim cites the xenophobia marshaled∂ by African American leader Danny Bakewell before the looting occurred,∂ and argues that the Korean American community had been and continues to be∂ systematically rendered incapable of responding to such rhetoric because they are∂ not recognized in the media as a player in racial politics.2 Elaine Kim explains:∂ It is difficult to describe how disempowered and frustrated many Korean Americans∂ felt during and after the sa-i-ku p’ok-dong (the April 29 ‘‘riots’’). Korean∂ Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary 253∂ Americans across the country shared the anguish and despair of the Los Angeles∂ tongp’o (community), which everyone seemed to have abandoned—the police∂ and fire departments, black and white political leaders, the Asian and Pacific∂ American advocates who tried to dissociate themselves from us because our∂ tragedy disputed their narrow and risk-free focus on white violence against∂ Asians. ... [T]he Korean Americans at the center of the storm were mostly∂ voiceless and all but invisible (except when stereotyped as

hysterically inarticulate,∂ and mostly female, ruined shopkeepers.) (Kim 1994, 71–72)∂ Similar to the Mexican Americans in Texas, the Korean Americans have been denied the legal or socially recognized category of being a politicized group at the same time that they are made subject to group-based scapegoating. Moreover, as this event demonstrates, the black/white paradigm of race is incapable of theoretically or politically addressing racism among communities of color, or addressing∂ racism, in other words, that is not all about white people. A response to this line of reasoning might be that it is white supremacy which is at the root of the conflictual relations among communities of color and responsible for their acceptance of stereotypes manufactured by a white dominant power structure. Thus, on this reading, what occurred in Los Angeles can be reductively∂ explained as the result of white supremacy. Although I often find explanatory∂ arguments that focus on political economy compelling, it is

simplistic to∂ imagine cultural conflicts as the mere epiphenomena of economic forces with no∂ life or grounding of their own. To blame only white supremacy for what occurred in Los Angeles would deny power and agency to any groups but the dominant, which is increasingly untrue. However, one could hold a monocausal account of the genealogy of racism and still acknowledge that racism has multiple targets and a variety of forms. Supporting the arguments of both Elaine Kim and Bong Hwan Kim, Juan∂ Perea argues that because of the wide

acceptance of the black/white paradigm, ‘‘other racialized groups like Latinos/as, Asian Americans, and Native Americans are often marginalized or ignored altogether ’’ (1998, 361). He points out that the concerns of Asian Americans and Latinos cannot be addressed through immigration∂ legislation because not all are immigrants. This is one reason to reject the∂ claim of some ethnic theorists that these groups will follow the path of European∂ immigrants in gradual assimilation and economic success (the other reason to∂ reject this claim is their racialization or status as nonwhites).3∂ Roberto Suro argues that the black/white binary forces Latinos and other∂ people of color who are not African Americans to adopt the strategies of civil rights∂ litigation even though these are ‘‘not particularly well-suited to Latinos’’ because∂ Latinos are a much more diverse group (1999, 87). For example, any meaningful∂ redress of economic discrimination affecting Latinos and Asian Americans will∂ need to disaggregate these groups, as some ‘‘target of opportunity’’ programs today∂ in fact do, since the gap between median incomes in Filipino and Japanese∂ households, or between Puerto Rican and Cuban households,

makes averaging∂ these incomes useless as an indicator of economic success. Richard Delgado argues that ‘‘if one’s paradigm identifies only one group as deserving of protection, everyone else is likely to suffer’’ (Delgado 1998, 370). Current civil rights legislation,∂ 254 Latino/a Particularity∂ in Delgado’s view, has provided legal advantages for African Americans, unwittingly∂ perhaps, over other people of color. I don’t take Delgado to be implying that∂ the legislation has necessarily been very effective in benefiting the African American∂ population, but that the language of the law, however much it has yet to be∂ applied, is based on the experience of only one group.

Vote negative to endorse a politics of multivalent recognition, it is the only access to truly transformative politicsSnyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

Others might be concerned that widening the meaning of a collective identity—its terms of

membership—dilutes the solidarity group members feel with one another and thereby undermines a group’s ability to respond effectively to injustice. Tommie Shelby (2005) has convincingly argued, however, that the solidarity that animates a collective politics can be fostered through a common (though multifaceted) experience of oppression

just as through a strong collective identity. Indeed, this is the way that Alexander envisions the “ties that bind” black people and allow her to say “my people”—she suggests that “stories of violence and subsequent responsive group knowledge and strategy compel us even as we hold onto the understanding of profound differences between African Americans”

(2004, 176–77). Challenging the assertion that people categorized as black are identical does not prevent such people from sharing a common identification (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Of course, serious

political work must be done to convince heterogeneous group members that they share a similar plight (Cohen 1999). Then again, serious political work must also be done to convince heterogeneous group members that they share a substantive collective identity. Those engaged in a politics of multivalent recognition are more aware of and willing to acknowledge the insight of intersectionality scholars—that “the organized identity groups in which we find ourselves are in fact coalitions, or at least potential coalitions

waiting to be formed” (Crenshaw 1991, 1299)—than are those engaged in a politics of monovalent recognition.8 Critics of identity politics warn that the politics of difference undermines cross-identity coalitions by emphasizing difference (Brown

1995; Gitlin 1996; Wolin 1993). Yet a politics of multivalent recognition is actually poised to “unburden groups of excessive ascribed or constructed distinctiveness” (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 47) like the universalist politics of recognition from which I distinguished it earlier. Highlighting the diversity within identities brings points of similarity across identities to light. Put otherwise, as the symbolic boundaries of identities are widened—as more and different

people are accepted as “really black”—identities once seen as distinct from one another are now seen as overlapping. While a multivalent politics of recognition centers on a single collective identity, it necessarily has implications across identities. When black feminist men demand recognition, for instance, this demand has implications for the categories of black, male and female. Moreover, inasmuch as identity categories are interrelated—think, for example, of the dependence of whiteness on blackness—a multivalent politics of recognition

as engaged in by one identity group will affect another. Participation by one identity group in the politics of recognition may be catalyzed by the participation of another identity group: witness the men’s

movement springing from the successes of feminism. But cooperation between identity groups in a politics of multivalent recognition can be secured by agreement that more capacious notions of identity can benefit members of all identity groups—including the privileged within identity groups and members of privileged identity groups. Coalition work is the only hope for radical transformation in an identity field inasmuch as “resistance on one front in isolation rarely represents a significant departure from or challenge to the dominant modes of being or production” (Iton 2008, 103). By drawing attention to similarities across identities, intersectionality, the interrelatedness of

group identities, and the benefits that redound from more capacious notions of identities, a politics of multivalent recognition can foster the kind of cross-identity coalitions that are necessary to incite radical changes within an identity field.9 Moreover, actors engaged in a politics of multivalent recognition are predisposed to coalition work by the understanding that any form of politics—be it intra-identity or cross-identity—requires working across difference. By complicating identities in a way that encourages cross-identity coalitions, an affirmative politics of recognition can have transformative effects (Fraser and Honneth 2003).

Links

Link - Blackness as Monovalent IdentityTheir discussion of blackness is monovalent- monolithic interpretation of black identitySnyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

Despite contentious differences in their vision and projection of black identity,3 there was one striking similarity in the way Panther leaders and Karenga along with BAM artists presented black people: black people were presented as fundamentally alike. “In the [initial] fight for representation and recognition,” says Cornel West, “images ‘re-presented’ monolithic and homogeneous Black communities … These Black responses…assumed that all Black people were really alike” (1993, 16–17). Demands for recognition by the Panthers and by the US Organization and those they influenced encouraged the perception that black identity is more “fixed”—more homogenous, more static—than it can possibly be (Markell 2003; Phillips 2007). The privileging of a particular monolithic interpretation of black identity had problematic effects in terms of both intra and intergroup relations. Black people that did not accept US’s philosophy were rejected as “Negroes”: “the only thing Negroes produce,” Karenga proclaimed derisively, “are problems and babies” (Ogbar 2005, 94). While progressive in relation to white racism, the Black Panther Party’s focus on the redemption of black manhood had repressive effects on black women and gay men (White 1990). The broader extragroup effects of the recognition politics of the US Organization and the Panthers were ambivalent at best and counterproductive at worst. Drawing from a vision of Africa that was significantly shaped by (racist) Western readings of Africa (Brown 2003; White 1990), Karenga reinscribed the “romanticist mythology created by European ideologies” that associated civilization/reason with whiteness and nature/emotion with blackness—thereby “giving credence to the oldest of racist stereotypes” (Mercer 1994, 113). In their vehement rejection of black identities represented by Moynihan, McCone, the southern civil rights protest model, the Nation of Islam and US, the Panthers encouraged “myopic and simplistic notions of ghetto authenticity” (Ogbar 2005, 122), promoted the pervasive equation of “black” with “urban poor” (Ongiri 2009, 19) and opened the door for the association of black men with hypermasculine aggression (Morgan 2006). Both groups sought to reverse stereotypes in the dominant discourse used to oppress blacks. But as Stuart Hall has admonished, “to reverse the stereotype is not necessarily to overturn or subvert it” (1997, 272). Since the symbolic system remains intact—white is to civilization as black is to nature; white is to reason as black is to emotion—meaning continued to be framed by it (2009, 274). By emphasizing differences between groups and homogeneity within them, a politics of recognition “tends to call up its own stereotypes” (Phillips 2007, 31). Given the monolithic nature of the identity being projected by these groups—black identity as homogenous, static, and wholly different from white identity—I categorize the kind of politics of recognition engaged in by the Panthers, Karenga and figures associated with BAM as a politics of monovalent recognition. While US had some success in revaluing essential blackness and the Panthers had some success in revaluing authentic blackness, both reinforced problematic stereotypes and a hierarchically organized symbolic system. Looking to other cultural political realities and possibilities

overlooked by political theorists, however, we find demands for recognition animated by a different goal than public affirmation of a homogenous, static, and utterly differentiated conception of a collective identity.

Link – Authentic Blackness Blackness ideals are monovalent-enables identity as mutually exclusiveSnyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

Thanks to the politics of monovalent recognition, positive representations of black identity are much more common today than they were prior to the Black Power movement. Yet as Elizabeth Alexander laments, visions of blackness are calcified: “embraceable” black people tend to be athletes, comedians, musicians and mystics or gurus (Guerrero 1995; Hughey 2009; Page 1997) while the gangster, the pimp, the hustler, and the welfare queen still dominate the cultural imaginary (Entman and Rojecki 2001; Tucker 2007). Indeed, in a 2009 review of the state of race relations, Lawrence Bobo and Camille Charles report that “between half and three-quarters of whites in the United States still express some degree of negative stereotyping of blacks” (2009, 246). This regime of representation has been produced and reproduced by both racist ideology and the monovalent recognition movements that sought to challenge this ideology. The 2008 Presidential election provides a compelling example of the way in which “calcified” visions of group identity are implicated in both the reproduction of the marginalization of black Americans and repressive intragroup dynamics. Consider the questions that dogged Barack Obama during his primary—is he “black enough/too black?” One prominent commentator opined that these questions, asked by both blacks and whites, were borne of the “belief that 50 Cent, not Barack Obama, represents the real black America” (Coates 2007). Indeed, the notion that “real blackness” resides “exclusively in the ghetto among the poorest and most disenfranchised of the African American population”—the notion endorsed by the Black Panthers—“continues to be pervasive in post-Black Power…culture” (Ongiri 2009, 19). This association undermines the ability/willingness of both black and white people to see those who identify as black but do not fit these cultural constructions (i.e., Obama) as “really black.” Moreover, these questions suggest that “blackness” is incompatible with traits exemplified by Obama—including, as comments by Joe Biden in January 2007 implied, his articulateness and intelligence (Coates 2007). Presenting a collective identity like “black” as homogenous, static, and bounded as monovalent recognition movements do enables that identity to be understood as one part of a symbolic system in which identities are mutually exclusive. And in such a system, as Jacques Derrida, Stuart Hall, and others have forcefully argued, the traits associated with one group will always be privileged. Highlighting the multiplicity of black identity and unmooring blackness from a specific and limited set of characteristics challenges white dominance without promoting intragroup repression or exclusion. —that all black people are the same. Moving beyond the symbolic confines set by the hegemonic group or “negating the negation” involves highlighting the difference that exists within identity categories through demands for recognition.

Link - SlaveryTheir monolithic depiction of Blackness ignores material evidence of multivalent responses to the condition of slaveryMatthew 11 (Christopher N. Matthews, Hofstra University , African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter, 3-1-2011, “The Archaeology of Race and African American”, http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2009&context=adan)

The chapter reproduced here is my favorite since it exemplifies how I worked to weave together cultural, historical, and political economic factors to produce an archaeological interpretation that highlights both agency and critique. My argument is that capitalism is based on a particular worldview that supports the agency of actors engaged in society as individuals; thus individual agency is a key to participation and to the reproduction of the capitalist system. However, individual agency comes at a price. While many pay this price in labor, debt, and sacrifice, others, usually those most marginal to the mainstream and thus least able to afford the costs of participation, developed alternatives that I consider as critiques. These critiques pointed out the shortcomings and flaws of the system capitalism created, but as 1 show in the book, most of these critiques failed to generaa te substantial change as they were adopted by people too heavily invested in that system to see beyond it. My chapter on African Diaspora communities tells a different story by showing how the material culture of African Americans exhibits astute and critical readings of racism and the foundations of capitalism that helped to dehumanize them as slaves and, thus, commodities. Being so marginalized, in other words, African Americans felt and saw what capitalism most expects from its participants and thus were in a unique position to develop a critical standpoint against it. I also emphasize the importance of considering multivalency in the interpretation of African Diaspora materials. The fact that objects can produce and sustain multiple meanings allowed African Americans to develop autonomous though partly hidden cultural systems informed but not controlled by the white capitalists who surrounded them. Similarly, I highlight the value of considering assemblages so that we are able to consider how artifacts were ordered and related in particular ways that allow us to see the African American cultural critique of capitalism. Finally, I emphasize the social value of religious expression. As religion is based in a community of believers I describe how the material expressions of ritual action and religious belief, from marking colonoware bowls to experiencing conversion in African American Christianity, informs us about how communities critical of racism and capitalism were reproduced through time. Ultimately, I argue that an archaeology of capitalism provides vital insights into the origins and meanings of African American culture from which America as a whole still has so much to learn.

Link - Black/White BinaryThe aff only describes one facet of race but claims that it is a universal approach – this renders anyone outside of Black/White invisiblePerea 97 [Professor of Law, University of Florida College of Law, Juan, RACE, ETHNICITY & NATIONHOOD: ARTICLE: The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The "Normal Science" of American Racial Thought, California Law Review, October, 1997, 85 Calif. L. Rev. 1213, p. 1254]

My objection to the state of most current scholarship on race is simply that most of this scholarship claims universality of treatment while actually describing only part of its subject , the relationship between Blacks and Whites. Race in the United States means more than just Black and White.

It also refers to Latino/a, Asian, Native American, and other racialized groups. Accordingly, books titled "Race in America" or "White Racism" that only discuss Blackness and Whiteness claim a universality of scope that they do not deliver. These books offer a paradigmatic rendering of their subject that excludes important portions of civil rights history. Authors of such books need to be aware that they promulgate a binary paradigm of race that operates to silence and render invisible Latinos/as, Asian Americans and Native Americans. Accordingly, they reproduce a serious harm.

Link White/NonWhiteCollapsing of multiple identities into “non white” erases differenceBowman 1 (Kristi, prof of law @MSU, JD from Duke, Duke Law Journal “The New Face of School Desegregation,” http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?50+Duke+L.+J.+1751)

White privilege is reinforced when racial and ethnic groups are conceptualized not as White, African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American, etc., but instead as White or Non-White. Acknowledgement of differences among groups disappears in a White-Non-White paradigm, because instead of allowing racial or ethnic groups to identify themselves by what they are,238 all Non- [*pg 1787] White groups are explicitly identified by what they are not, and only by reference to whiteness. Although aspects of a specific Non-White group might be easier to identify than "White

culture," this occurs because White culture is mainstream culture. The culture of a specific Non-White group appears distinctive because it deviates from the norm. Professor Martha Mahoney notes that a term such as "racially identifiable" in the context of housing and urban development generally refers "to locations that are racially identifiably

black."239 The same is true in the context of education: racially identifiable means racially identifiably Non-White. The White-Non-White paradigm reinforces the power dynamic of the acted and the acted upon, of presence and absence,

of the defining and the defined. The power that Whites receive from their unearned privilege in the White-Non-White duality "is, in fact, permission to escape [the debate of race] or to dominate."240

When federal courts reinforce this dynamic in the name of school desegregation, they perpetuate the normalized, mainstream practices and institutions that reinforce racial inequality. It is often these practices and institutions that are most damaging in terms of perpetuating oppression because they are not usually questioned. They are

conceptualized as just normal.241 In contemporary school desegregation jurisprudence, Whites are normalized, and all Non-Whites are collapsed into the category of "other." Like African Americans, Latinos have been the victims of state-sanctioned educational segregation;242 but if courts gave attention to the present differences between African Americans and Latinos, courts' remedial orders would likely be structured differently. As will be discussed below, the recognition of Latinos and African Americans as distinct groups that continue to suffer different harms is easily within reach.

Link – Rejection of StateRejection of sovereignty is another link – there are groups that strive for inclusion within the state. Their criticism of the state erases their identity. Perea 10 (Juan, Cone, Wagner, Nugent, Johnson, Hazouri & Roth Professor of Law, University of Florida Levin College of Law, An Essay On The Iconic Status Of The Civil Rights Movement And Its Unintended Consequences, Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, Vol. 18:1, Fall, p. 57, http://scs.student.virginia.edu/vjspl/18.2/Perea.pdf]

There are important reasons to recognize the Chicano, American-Indian, and Native Hawaiian struggles for civil rights. With respect to the Chicano and American-Indian struggles, it is important to counter the belief, demonstrably untrue, that groups other than African Americans are latecomers to civil rights struggle. To the extent that the legitimacy of civil rights claims rests on a history of struggle—and the African-American Civil Rights Movement suggests that this is

true to a large extent—then the legitimacy of Latino and American-Indian claims for civil rights depends on acknowledgement and recognition of their histories of struggle.54 It is also important to

recognize that the substantive content of civil rights for groups other than African Americans may be different than the civil rights demanded by African Americans. To illustrate, the African-American struggle has focused on equality and full inclusion in American society. Equality and inclusion are remedies for centuries of

servitude and forced exclusion. American-Indian and Native Hawaiian struggles for civil rights, on the other hand, focus on the attainment and enhancement of sovereignty. Greater sovereignty for

American Indians and Native Hawaiians is the remedy for the denial of sovereign status historically characteristic of relations between the federal and state governments and Indian nations. Civil rights in the form of enhanced sovereignty for indigenous peoples, although different than the civil rights sought by African Americans, remain civil rights. Civil rights are, in

important part, remedies for particular forms of oppression experienced by some peoples. As advocates for civil and human rights generally, we do not want to fail to recognize a struggle for civil rights merely because it differs from the African-American struggle.

Link White supremacyObsession with White Supremacy is bad – white racists have mastered that game. The result of their project is to reinscribe whites as the principal point of reference. West 93 (Cornell, Race Matters, p. 98-99]

The project of black separatism -- to which Malcolm X was beholden for most of his life after his first psychic conversion to the Nation of Islam -- suffered from deep intellectual and organizational problems. Unlike Malcolm X's notion of psychic conversion, Elijah Muhammad's idea of religious conversion was predicated on an obsession with white supremacy. The basic aim of black Muslim theology -- with its distinct black supremacist account

of the origins of white people -- was to counter white supremacy. Yet this preoccupation with white supremacy still allowed white people to serve as the principal point of reference . That which fundamentally motivates one still dictates the terms of what one thinks and does -- so the motivation of a black supremacist doctrine reveals how obsessed one is with white supremacy. This is understandable in a white racist society -- but it is crippling for a despised people struggling for freedom, in

that one's eyes should be on the prize, not on the perpetuator of one's oppression . In short, Elijah Muhammad's project remained captive to the supremacy game -- a game mastered by the white racists he opposed and imitated with his black supremacy doctrine.

Link – Opacity/FugitivityFugitivity is a monovalent recognition- Snyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

Like Patricia Williams, I want to maintain that there is a distinction between “good visibility” and “bad visibility.” Bad visibility, as Williams argues, involves hypervisibility, objectification, making a spectacle, stereotyping. Good visibility, on the other hand, involves “a recognition of individuality that includes blacks as a social presence” (Williams 1991, 121). While a politics of monovalent recognition encourages visibility, the kind of visibility it encourages often ends up falling on the negative side of Williams’ spectrum. On the other hand, I believe that a politics of multivalent recognition can make black Americans visible in ways that better their lives.

Alternative

Alt = Endorse Multivalent BlacknessOur alternative should be to endorse multivalent blackness- more nuanced visions of black identity Snyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

Poet and cultural critic Elizabeth Alexander champions an alternative in her 2004 book of essays entitled The Black Interior.4 Alexander is explicit about the importance of presence—of recognition—to African American life and politics (2004, 8). Yet her critique of “narrow descriptors of blackness” and her concern with “the straightjacketed constraints of racial ideologies imposed from the mythic within” (Alexander 2004, 204) communicates a wariness of the politics of monovalent recognition. Writing to black cultural producers, Alexander seeks to reorient black cultural politics. Alexander opens with the following concern: Visions of black identity—both self-representations and representations of black identity in the mainstream—have become “calcified” (2004, ix). Drawing the connections between calcification, oppression of the group and repression of the individual, Alexander argues that cultivating and accessing that metaphysical space—“the black interior”—from which complex and nuanced visions of black identity spring is of the utmost importance. While the black interior harbors racialized visions of identity—the interior of which Alexander speaks is specifically black—she Alexander insists that a social identity like black “need not be seen as a constraint” (2004, 5). In the black interior, black artists have found black “selves that go far, far beyond the limited expectations and definitions of what black is, isn’t or should be” (5). Only such black selves can combat not just devaluation, but calcification. Integral to achieving a more capacious notion of black identity is the proliferation of different identities signified as black. Monolithic versions of blackness frequently contradict one another (Alexander 2004, 6); this was certainly true of blackness as represented by the Panthers and US. These groups did not allow the different visions to peacefully coexist, but Alexander advocates for a world in which different conceptions of blackness are enabled to coexist side-by-side in contradiction. In this world, people insist on the importance of “black” as a social identity while embracing the multiplicity of blackness. As the visions of black identity enabled to sit side-by-side proliferate, Alexander envisions “being black” going so far as “to be emptied of meaning and reclaimed as possibility” (2004, 8). An abundance of contradicting meanings renders blackness more malleable. In the absence of a determinate definition of real blackness, black people are freed of expectations about what black is, isn’t, and should be, and empowered to realize selves that go “beyond stereotype and romance” (203).

Impacts

No Solvency for racismaff can never solve white racismPerea 10 [Cone, Wagner, Nugent, Johnson, Hazouri & Roth Professor of Law, University of Florida Levin College of Law, Juan, AN ESSAY ON THE ICONIC STATUS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND ITS UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES, Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, Vol. 18:1, Fall, p. 57-58, http://scs.student.virginia.edu/vjspl/18.2/Perea.pdf]

Lastly, recognizing a fuller scope of civil rights struggles is important in helping us understand the full measure of unremedied past injustice. If we take no account of denials of civil rights to Mexican Americans, American Indians, and Native Hawaiians, among other groups, then we underestimate dramatically the scope of white racism . Every struggle against racism and oppression deserves recognition. The iconic status of the African-American Civil Rights Movement is a testament to the power of righteous struggle. While it certainly deserves its hallowed place in our history and our hearts, we should be careful that its

long shadow not obscure the importance of other righteous struggles. If we care about justice, we should always be attuned to struggles for greater justice, whether or not they resemble the African-American struggle for civil

rights. As inspiring as the African-American struggle has been, we may find additional inspiration, and more possibilities for justice, if we cast our gaze beyond the African-American Civil Rights Movement, gazing further back, further forward, and to the side.

They calcify negative racial classificationsLeong 10 (Nancy, Assistant Professor, William and Mary School of Law, JUDICIAL ERASURE OF MIXED-RACE DISCRIMINATION, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW, Vol. 59, 59 Am. U. L. Rev. 469, p. 551]

Multiracial individuals have long vexed courts and commentators because they challenge and confound existing racial categories. Despite the recognition that multiracial individuals have received in some

contexts, the reliance of antidiscrimination jurisprudence on categories has generally excluded plaintiffs identified as multiracial. This absence obscures animus directed at multiracial individuals.

Moreover, the dominance of racial categories calcifies existing racial classifications and the stereotypes associated with them, preventing society from moving beyond these arbitrary categories.

Focus on the black-white binary excludes analysis of racism that affects other oppressed populations. Perea 97 (juan, Professor of Law at the University of Florida, "The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The "Normal Science" of American Racial Thought," Oct. 5, JSTOR]

Paradigms of race shape our understanding of race and our definition of racial problems. The most pervasive and powerful paradigm of race in the United States is the Black/White binary paradigm. I define this paradigm as the conception that race in America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two

constituent racial groups, the Black and the White. Many scholars of race reproduce this paradigm when they write and act as though only the Black and the White races matter for purposes of discussing race and social

policy with regard to race. The mere recognition that "other people of color" exist, without care- ful attention to their voices, their histories, and their real presence, is merely a reassertion of the Black/White paradigm. If one conceives of race and racism as primarily of concern only to Blacks

and Whites, and understands "other people of color" only through some unclear anal- ogy to the "real" races, this just restates the binary paradigm with a slight concession to demographics. My assertion is

that our shared understanding of race and racism is essentially limited to this Black/White binary paradigm.27 This

paradigm defines, but also limits, the set of problems that may be recognized in racial discourse . Kuhn's notion of "normal science," which further articulates the paradigm and seeks to solve the problems perceivable because of the paradigm, also applies to "normal research" on race. Given the Black/White paradigm, we would expect to find that much research on race is concerned with understanding the dynamics of the Black and White races and attempting to solve the problems

between Blacks and Whites. Within the paradigm, the relevant material facts are facts about Blacks and Whites. In addition, the paradigm dictates that all other racial identities and groups in the United States are best understood through the Black/White binary paradigm. Only a few writers even recognize that they use a

Black/White paradigm as the frame of reference through which to understand racial relations.28 Most writers simply assume the importance and correctness of the paradigm, and leave the reader grasping for whatever significance descriptions of the Black/White relationship have for other people of color. As I shall discuss, because the Black/White binary paradigm is so widely accepted, other racialized groups like Latinos/as, Asian Americans, and Native Americans are often marginal- ized or ignored altogether. As Kuhn writes, "those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all."29

Alcoff 6’

Linda Alcoff a philosopher at the City University of New York who specializes in epistemology, feminism, race theory and existentialism. “Visible identities Race Gender And the Self” 2006 Oxford Press

What I would argue here is that the black/white binary is operating in this case∂ to obscure the real problems. Conservatives argued that Asian Americans are nonwhite∂ so that their case can be used to dismantle affirmative action for all: if they can∂ get in, we all

can get in. But this would follow only if the category ‘‘nonwhite’’ is∂ undifferentiated in terms of how racism operates. Others wanted to argue that Asian∂ Americans are being treated here as white, and thus have no interest in an antiracist∂ coalition.∂ It is certainly true that it is a white power structure that privileges such things∂ as test scores. But Asian Americans were still not actually being treated as whites.∂ Takagi points out that the claims of overrepresentation conveniently ignored the∂ large disparity between Asian American admission rates and white admission rates∂ (the percentage of admissions in relation to the pool of applicants), a disparity that∂ cannot be accounted for by SAT scores or grades. That is, holding scores and∂ grades constant, white individuals were more likely to be admitted than Asian∂ Americans, even if in real numbers on some campuses Asian American acceptances∂ outnumbered whites. (To give one example of this, the Asian American∂ Student Association at Brown University discovered that between 1979 and 1987∂ there was a 750 percent increase in Asian applications, even while there was a∂ steadily declining admission rate—from 44 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 1987)∂ (1992, 28). So there has been a covert quota system operating against Asian∂ American applicants in many university systems, which is covered over by their∂ high numbers of admission and is no doubt motivated by the same fears of ‘‘yellow∂ 262 Latino/a Particularity∂ peril’’ that were used to justify discrimination in the 1800s. Asian Americans are not∂ seen as white despite the fact that they have so-called ‘‘white’’ attributes because they∂ are seen as unassimilable; they are suspected of retaining loyalty

to Asian countries∂ and thus of being a threat to ‘‘the nation.’’ The concern about overrepresentation∂ targeted Asian Americans exclusively; the only people similarly targeted in the past∂ were Jews, and these cases are clearly attributable to anti-Semitism. This concern∂ certainly has not been raised in regard to the poor, who are underrepresented, or to∂ the children of alumni or to athletes, both of whom are overrepresented.∂ Takagi traces the empirical studies, public discourse, and policy changes∂ prompted by this concern over overrepresentation to the argument that

affirmative∂ action should ignore race and address only class, even though the claim that racism∂ can be addressed in this way can be easily empirically disproved given the disparity∂ of SAT scores within classes across racial difference.6∂ What this case demonstrates is not that all nonwhites should be grouped∂ together in all cases of attempts to redress social inequities, but precisely the∂ opposite: they should not be lumped together. The problems of discrimination that∂ Asian Americans face in higher education in the United States have had to do with∂ overt policies that apply quotas based on specific forms of racism directed against∂ them.

The problem of discrimination that African Americans and Latinos have∂ faced in higher education has to do with the use of SAT scores and the quality of∂ their public education, which is vastly unequal to that received by whites. Racism∂ is the culprit in each case, but the means and ideology vary, and thus the effective∂ redress will have to vary.∂ Takagi recounts that some Asian American activists who wanted to end the∂ unfair quotas on their admission rates called for a meritocracy of admissions based∂ on SAT scores and grades. But this would block only one form of racism, leaving∂ others

not only intact but ideologically reenforced. Meritocracy is still an illusion∂ highly disadvantageous to African Americans and Latinos. Thus, strategies that∂ seek to eliminate discrimination, including argumentative strategies used to defend∂ affirmative action, must either be made specific to certain historically disadvantaged∂

groups or, if they are general, must consider their possible effects on other∂ groups. Only a rich knowledge of the specific and variable forms of racism in the∂ United States will make such considerations possible.

Erases Arab AmericansBlack/White conceptions erase Arab AmericansChen, et al., Department of Educational Psychology, University of Texas, 2006

[Grace, Exploring Asian American Racial Identity, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 3, p. 461]

The history of race relations in the U.S. reveals that racial minorities have been subjected to widespread oppression based on the color of their skin (Omi & Winant, 1994; Takaki, 1993). Unfortunately, a by-product of the Black/White binary model of race relations is that non-Black racialized groups (e.g., Latinas/os, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans) have been largely understudied in psychological research on race and racial identity. A starting point of our study is that for Asian Americans, in particular, a clear distinction must be made between the constructs of racial identity and ethnic/cultural identity, even as we recognize the overlap and interplay between the two (Helms & Richardson, 1997).

Makes it impossible to challenge Muslim Terrorist representationsGotanda 11 [professor of law at Western State University College of Law. Coeditor of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, he has written on racial theory, constitutional colorblindness, and Asian American jurisprudence, 2011 [Neil, The Racialization of Islam in American Law, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 637, September, p. 184]

After 9/11, the “Muslim terrorist” trope altered the American understanding of Islam. This article argues that the Muslim terrorist in our popular culture should not be seen as new but within an established tradition of racializing Asian Americans. The article employs three dimensions of racialization: raced body, racial category, and ascribed subordination. The raced body is the “brown” body of immigrants and descendants of immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East, and Central and Southern Asia. “Muslim” as a racial category has acquired meaning beyond religion and now also describes a racial category: those whose ancestry traces to countries where Islam is significant. Linked to that category are the stereotypes of “terrorist,” “spy,” or “saboteur”—understandings within the tradition of characterizing Asian Americans as permanent, unassimilable foreigners. Inscribing the linked racial category and ascribed subordination of permanent foreignness upon the “brown” raced body is the racialization of Muslims into Muslim terrorists.

Erases Latinos/asTheir characterizations of race that categorize everything as part of a Black/White paradigm – this excludes Latinas from analysis, which reproduces racismPerea 97 [Professor of Law, University of Florida College of Law, Juan, RACE, ETHNICITY & NATIONHOOD: ARTICLE: The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The "Normal Science" of American Racial Thought, California Law Review, October, 1997, 85 Calif. L. Rev. 1213, p. 1214-1216]

[*1214] This Article is about how we are taught to think about race. In particular, I intend to analyze the role of books and texts on race in structuring our racial discourse. I believe that much writing on racism is structured by a paradigm that is widely held but rarely recognized for what it is and what it does. This paradigm shapes our understanding of what race and racism mean and the

nature of our discussions about race. It is crucial, therefore, to identify and describe this paradigm and to demonstrate how it binds and organizes racial discourse, limiting both the scope and the range of legitimate viewpoints in that discourse. In this Article, I identify and criticize one of the most salient features of past and current discourse about race in the

United States, the Black/White binary paradigm of race. A small but growing number of writers have recognized the paradigm and its limiting effect on racial discourse. n2 I believe that its dominant and pervasive character has not been well established nor discussed in legal literature. I intend to demonstrate the existence of a Black/White paradigm and to show its

breadth and seemingly pervasive ordering of racial [*1215] discourse and legitimacy. Further, I intend to show how the Black/White binary paradigm operates to exclude Latinos/as n3 from full membership and participation in racial discourse, and how that exclusion serves to perpetuate not only the paradigm itself but also negative stereotypes of Latinos/as. Full membership in society for Latinos/as will require a paradigm shift away from the binary paradigm and towards a new and evolving understanding of race and race relations. This Article illustrates the kind of contribution to critical

theory that the emergent Latino Critical Race Studies (LatCrit) movement may make. This movement is a continuing scholarly effort, undertaken by Latino/a scholars and other sympathetic scholars, to examine critically existing structures of racial thought and to identify how these structures perpetuate the subordinated position of Latinos/as in particular. LatCrit studies are, then, an extension and development of critical race theory (and critical theory generally) that focus on the previously neglected areas of Latino/a identity and history and the role of racism as it affects Latinos/as. I identify strongly, and self-consciously, as a Latino writer and thinker. It is precisely my position as a Latino

outsider, neither Black nor White, that makes possible the observation and critique presented in this Article. My critique of the Black/White binary paradigm of race shows this commonly held binary understanding of race to be one of the major impediments to learning about and understanding Latinos/as and their history. As I shall show, the paradigm also creates significant distortions in the way people learn to view Latinos/as. I begin with a review of the principal scientific theory that describes the nature of paradigms and the power they exert over the formation of knowledge. I then analyze important, nationally recognized books on race to reveal the binary paradigm of race and the way it structures race thinking. After reviewing these popular and scholarly books on race, I analyze a leading casebook on constitutional law. Like other books, textbooks on constitutional law are shaped by the paradigm and

reproduce it. Then, by describing some of the legal struggles Latinos/as have waged, I will demonstrate that paradigmatic presentations of race and struggles for equality have caused significant omissions with undesirable repercussions. Thus, I demonstrate the important role that legal history [*1216] can play in both correcting and amplifying the Black/White binary paradigm of race.

Answers To

AT: PermStarting points matter – all of our link evidence prove they foreclose multivalent analysis of oppressions, means the perm cant solve

Perm is severance - Their 1ac made exclusive/prioritizing claims about Blackness like (examples) _______________________________________

The method of the aff doesn’t take into account for violence between communities - marginalization and disavowal of agency are DAs to the permAlcoff 2 Linda Martín, , Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, “Latino/as, Asian-Americans and the Black-White Binary,” http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25115747?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102494840991

Critics of the black/white paradigm have argued that, although all communities of color have shared the experience

of political and economic disenfranchisement in the U.S., there are significant differences between the causes and the forms of this disenfranchisement. Bong Hwan Kim, a Korean American

community leader who has worked both as the Director of the Korean Community Center of East Bay in Oakland, CA, and as Director of the Korean Youth and Community Center in Los Angeles, blames the black/white binary for disabling relationships among people of color and even for creating the conditions leading to the Los Angeles civil disaster of April 1992, in which 2,300 small Korean owned busi nesses were destroyed by mostly Latino/a and African American looters. Kim cites the xenophobia marshaled by African American leader Danny Bakewell before the looting occurred, and argues that the Korean American community had been and continues to be systematically rendered incapable of responding to such rhetoric because they are not recognized in the media as a player in racial politics.20 Elaine Kim explains: It is difficult to describe how disempowered and frustrated many Korean Americans felt during

and after the sa-i-ku p'ok-dong (the April 29 "riots"). Korean Americans across the country shared the anguish and despair of the Los Angeles tongp'o (community), which everyone seemed to have abandoned - the police and fire departments, black and white political leaders , the Asian and Pacific American advocates who tried to dissociate themselves from us because our tragedy disputed their narrow and risk-free focus on white violence against Asians ... the Korean Americans at the center of the storm were mostly voiceless and all but invisible (except when stereotyped as hysterically inarticulate, and mostly female, ruined

shopkeepers .. .).21 Similar to the Mexicans in Texas, the Koreans have been denied the legal or socially recognized category of being a politicized group at the same time that they are made subject to group based scapegoating. Moreover, as this event demonstrates, the black/white paradigm of race is incapable of theoretically or politically addressing racism among communities of color , or racism,

in other words, which is not all about white people. A response to this line of reasoning might be that it is white supremacy which is at the root of the conflictual relations among communities of color, and responsible for their acceptance of stereotypes manufactured by a white dominant power structure. Thus, on this reading, what occurred in Los Angeles can be reductively analyzed as caused by white supremacy. Although I do find explanatory arguments that focus on political economy often

compelling, it is far too simplistic, as I think Karl Marx himself knew, to imagine cultural conflict as the mere epiphenomenon of economic forces with no life or grounding of their own. To blame only white supremacy for what occurred in Los Angeles would also deny power and agency to any groups but the

dominant, which is increasingly untrue. We must all accept our rightful share of the blame, whatever that turns out to be in particular instances, and resist explanations that would a priori reduce that blame to zero for communities of color.

Supporting the arguments of both Elaine Kim and Bong Hwan Kim, Juan Perea argues that because of the wide acceptance of the black/white paradigm, "other racialized groups like Latino/as, Asian Americans, and Native Americans are often marginalized or ignored altogether ." 22 He points out that

the concerns of Asian Americans and Latino/as cannot be addressed through immigration legislation because all are not immigrants, which is one of the reasons to reject the claim of some ethnic theorists that these groups will follow the path of European immigrants in gradual assimilation and economic success (the other reason to reject this claim is their racialization).23

Turn – Permutation footnotes other oppressions, repeats inclusions/exclusionsPerea 97 (Juan , Professor of Law, University of Florida College of Law, Race, Ethnicity & Nationhood: Article: The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The "Normal Science" of American Racial Thought, California Law Review, October, 1997, 85 Calif. L. Rev. 1213, p. 1257-1258]

Paradigmatic descriptions and study of White racism against Blacks, with only cursory mention of "other people of color," marginalizes all people of color by grouping them, without particularity , as somehow analogous to Blacks . "Other people of color" are deemed to exist only as unexplained

analogies to Blacks. Thus, scholars encourage uncritical readers to continue to assume the paradigmatic importance of the Black/White relationship and to ignore the experiences of other Americans who also are subject to racism in profound ways. Critical readers are left with many important questions: Beyond the most superficial understanding of aversion to non-White skin color, in what ways is White racism against Blacks explanatory of or analogous to White racism against Latinos/as, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and others? Given the unique historical legacy of slavery, what does a deep understanding of White-Black racism contribute to understanding rac-isms against

other "Others?" Why are "other people of color" consistently relegated to parenthetical status and near-nonexistence in treatises purporting to cover their fields comprehensively? It is time to ask

hard questions of our leading writers on race. It is also time to demand better answers to these questions about inclusion, exclusion, and racial presence, than perfunctory references to "other people of color." In the midst of profound demographic changes, it is time to question whether the Black/White binary paradigm of race fits our highly variegated current and future population. Our "normal science" of writing on race, at odds with both history and demographic reality, needs reworking.

AT: “No Link – we’re not politics of recognition”Aff is form of politics of recognition- demanding recognition of white or the stateSnyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

I will end by highlighting some additional contributions this article makes to the political theoretical literature on recognition. Too often, the encounter between dominant and marginalized groups has been rendered in overly simplistic ways: marginalized groups

demand recognition from privileged groups; marginalized groups demand recognition from the state. In this article, I offer a broader conception of where and how the politics of recognition occurs. We are right to be skeptical of the argument that the Black Panthers were really demanding recognition of whites or of the state: the Panthers were primarily directing their message to black people and young, urban black men in particular. Yet the Panthers did seek to change the white authority structure and the (intentional) publicization of the Panthers’ symbolic mediations of black identity (Ongiri 2009) made it a force in the struggle over what blackness meant to the American public. Instead of a unidirectional struggle for

recognition, this examination of cultural politics shows that demands for recognition are part of a multidirectional struggle for influence over the dominant cultural order, a struggle that occurs in multiple mediums and multiple sites, at multiple levels and between multiple parties . While the cultural studies literature enhances political theory by encouraging political theorists to widen their vision of the politics of recognition thereby altering calculations about the possibilities and pitfalls of this politics, I also believe that greater interaction between the two disciplines can benefit cultural studies. Integrating the insights of cultural studies into the political theoretical framework of recognition enables us to specify the links between representation and power/resistance in a way that those engaged

in the discipline of cultural studies often fail to do (see Alvarez et al. 1997, 6). In this article, I have developed and offered a normative argument for a standard of political cultural production—multivalent recognition—that is more nuanced than “positive imagery” (Alexander 2004) and less problematic than “representational

correctness” (Shiappa 2008). Despite the United States’ commitment to formal equality, racial identity continues to matter. Being identified as black means one is significantly more likely to face demeaning and constraining stereotypes, suspicion, distrust, poverty, illness, discrimination, and violence. The hegemony of colorblindness has effectively reconstituted white power by undercutting political claims made by marginalized groups even as the cultural representations that underwrite racial inequality continue to circulate (Bonilla-Silva 2009; Snyder 2011). In this context, a politics of multivalent recognition has an important role to play: challenging white dominance without incurring the significant costs of internal repression and exclusion.

AT: Coalitions Bad, Erase BlacknessTheir ev on coalitions doesn’t account for multivalent analysis that functions not to erase or subsume difference, but to highlight diversity within identities while maintaining ability to foreground BlacknessSnyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

Critics of identity politics warn that the politics of difference undermines cross-identity coalitions by emphasizing difference (Brown 1995; Gitlin 1996; Wolin 1993). Yet a politics of multivalent recognition is actually poised to “unburden groups of excessive ascribed or constructed distinctiveness” (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 47) like the universalist politics of recognition from which I distinguished it earlier. Highlighting the diversity within identities brings points of similarity across identities to light. Put otherwise, as the symbolic boundaries of identities are widened—as more and different people are accepted as “really black”—identities once seen as distinct from one another are now seen as overlapping. While a multivalent politics of recognition centers on a single collective identity, it necessarily has implications across identities. When black feminist men demand recognition, for instance, this demand has implications for the categories of black, male and female. Moreover, inasmuch as identity categories are interrelated—think, for example, of the dependence of whiteness on blackness—a multivalent politics of recognition as engaged in by one identity group will affect another. Participation by one identity group in the politics of recognition may be catalyzed by the participation of another identity group: witness the men’s movement springing from the successes of feminism. But cooperation between identity groups in a politics of multivalent recognition can be secured by agreement that more capacious notions of identity can benefit members of all identity groups—including the privileged within identity groups and members of privileged identity groups.

AT: Alt Denies BlacknessOur alt is not some vague universalization or emptying of identity, but rather opens spaces for particular differences within and among BlacknessSnyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

Identity claims are integral to this negation of the negation. Yet these demands are neither for recognition of a universal identity (i.e., human, citizen) nor for recognition of a political identity that cuts across identity groups (i.e., “the left”). Unlike these forms of recognition politics—wherein actors deemphasize the identity that marks them as particular—those who seek multivalent recognition explicitly identify themselves as particular (i.e., as “black”). In other words, for those engaged in multivalent recognition, “it is not the existence of [identity] categories that is the problem, but rather the meaning and particular values attached to them” (Crenshaw 1991, 1297; also see Hancock 2007). Contesting the meaning and values attached to an identity category requires working with, within, and through a particular identity: it requires offering “racialized but not delimited” visions of identity.5 While black people engaged in a politics of multivalent recognition demand recognition as black, they demand recognition as not only black. They simultaneously demand recognition for other salient aspects of their identity—demanding recognition as black and…. This “and” can draw attention to the membership of black individuals other categorical identity groups (black and woman, black and gay, black and poor, etc.)6 But it also strategically links blackness with traits, values, abilities, talents, and predilections with which the collective identity has not previously been predominantly associated. In a politics of multivalent recognition, black feminist lower-class men, black gay Jews, and rural black working-class single mothers demand recognition of their embodiments of and claim to blackness, and in turn strategically de-essentialize blackness. They demand to be recognized as “black” despite the fact that they contradict stereotypes of/about blackness. If a politics of monovalent recognition aims for fixity and thus transparency (Markell 2003) in identity, then a politics of multivalent recognition is about unfixing an identity.7

Real visions of blackness come from multivalent views- not only demanding one category but define themselvesSnyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

Some might say that such a politics “dilutes” black identity. But those who would do well to remember that although strong visions of “real blackness” do have significant effects, they do not have an anchor in a metaphysical reality. The politics of recognition cannot achieve a “mimetic correspondence with the ‘real’” in either its monovalent or in its multivalent incarnations, for, as Cornel West notes, no one has “unmediated access to the ‘real Black community’” (1993, 18). Seeking to broaden public perception of an identity is not to betray it, but to recognize the diversity that was always already inherent in it. Alexander has pointed to the diversity that bubbles under the surface of anthologies that aim to present the black arts

and politics of a time as unified. And as Madhavi Sunder (2001) argues, this diversity is increasingly breaking the surface: individuals engaged in “cultural dissent” are demanding not only membership within a particular category, but the right to define it on their own terms.

AT: Alt = Vacating IdentityAlt is not deconstruction of identitySnyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

The unfixing that a politics of multivalent recognition aims to accomplish, however, should be distinguished from the deconstruction that some anti-identity theorists hope to achieve. Unlike an anti-identity politics such as that recommended by Monique Wittig (1985), the ultimate purpose of a politics of multivalent recognition is not to do away with those collective identities that have been subject to oppression. Whereas Wittig envisions a world without identity (more specifically, gender) distinctions, those who engage in a politics of multivalent recognition aim for a world in which identity categories are more capacious. Highlighting the “multivalence” of the identity category—its multiple meanings, the diversity within—stretches its symbolic boundaries. Disparate individuals’ demands for recognition of their claim to blackness prompt group members and members of other identity groups to broaden their understanding of black identity. In doing so, they complicate the distinctions drawn between black and white, distinctions that help reproduce inequality. A politics of multivalent recognition operates on the assumption that we need not do away with identity categories to break down hierarchical symbolic distinctions and transform identity relations. Unfixing is distinct from deconstruction that goes “all the way down.” In fact, there are good reasons for sustaining particular identities as actors engaged in a politics of multivalent recognition seek to do. Certainly, the concept of race and racial identity has justified the unjust treatment of black Americans. Yet while implicated in oppression, categorical distinctions like “black” and “white” have a critical role to play in addressing oppression, enabling individuals to talk about racial injustice and to develop a sense of “we” (Crenshaw 1991, 1297). Second, even those who do not understand racial distinctions as natural may view them as inextricable (Young 1990). A politics of multivalent recognition is premised on the assumption that identities are resignifiable, but not infinitely reconstructable. Finally and perhaps most importantly, these identities are not simply sites of oppression but sources of pride and meaning (Bickford 1997; Kompridis 2007, 286). Monovalent movements insist that black Americans are talented cultural creators; multivalent movements reinforce this point, while suggesting that multiple and disparate black identities spring from the cultures created by black Americans. In light of the inherent and strategic importance of black identity, not to mention its indelibility, those engaged in a politics of multivalent recognition are not only concerned with demonstrating the contingency of identity as are those engaged in a strategy like parodic subversion (Butler 1999). A politics of multivalent recognition is equally concerned with the revaluation of an identity category as a whole. Elizabeth Alexander, for example, refrains from presenting certain poems in certain spaces due to her sense that the poems would reinforce problematic stereotypes. Those engaged in a politics of multivalent recognition seek to change blackness’ valence by changing its connotative field of reference. To delegitimize a symbolic system that marginalizes black people, they must bring greater visibility to specific ways of realizing black identity.

The idea of multivalent thinking forces us to challenge assumptions of identitySnyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

As I hope this argument demonstrates, even those actors who agree that demands for recognition are simply a means to the end of equality can deploy these demands in different ways, with different effects: even if essentialism is deployed strategically, it invites a monovalent reading of identity and the problems associated with it. The distinction between multivalent and monovalent recognition offers a more nuanced picture of what Iris Young calls the “politics of positional difference” (2007), thereby enabling political theorists and actors to specify and attend to the range of problems facing those who engage in the politics of recognition. Additionally, the idea of a politics of multivalent recognition forces us to rethink our assumptions about recognition politics and identity politics. While presenting the politics of recognition as a kind of identity politics, I have resisted Nancy Fraser’s conclusion that identity politics reifies identities. The concept of multivalent recognition not only distinguishes the politics of recognition from the politics of authenticity and the politics of essentialism, it presents recognition as a means to address their problematic consequences. On the other hand, I present multivalent recognition as distinct from deconstructive anti-identity approaches. In its multivalent form, the politics of recognition has the potential to transform identity relations while maintaining identities.

AT Black white Binary Good/NecessaryBinary structure is wrong – Look through a lens of multivalent oppressionWestmoreland 13’Peter Westmoreland Doctrine Race political and social professor at the university of Miami Area of specialization in Continental Early Modern Rousseau “Racism in a Black White Binary: On the Reaction to Trayvon Martin’s Death”

Can this outcome be right? Does racism require a binary structure? Let us consider three proposals. First, we may make choices to reject the binary (as Perea and Alcoff do). We can attack it in at least two ways philosophically. First, we can recognize that Foucault’s argument is subject to rebuttal. One approach would question whether the texts he examines are representative of the dominant race paradigm of the time. In the philosophical discourse on the formation of the race concept, for example, we have influential thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, and de Gobineau who reject binary thinking. Rousseau, on whom Foucault relies, models the people as sovereign-subjects in an explicit attempt to subvert binaries in the state’s structure. We could perhaps write a counter-history of the relationship between race and the state that eschews the binary; possibly it shows up but does not have the influence Foucault suggests. Another version of the first proposal would emphasize the black-white binary’s arbitrariness and contingency. Once we diagnose the paradigm, distinguishing races outside its terms according to their own voices and concerns can mitigate the binary’s force. Similarly, I would note that the binary structure is a contingent feature of our race discourse’s history, even on Foucault’s scheme, and we can move against binary race thinking through practical advancement of the concerns of races outside the terms of the binary. This response assumes that the binary, while powerful, is not incontrovertible and can be separated from the “us versus them” war structure. Let us now pursue a second proposal: we accept the binary structure of racism. We have seen there are positions, evidence, and arguments indicating that race discourse has a binary paradigm and that this has been the case since the origins of modern racism. If race discourse is binary and we act to destroy the binary, then, we may not be opening the door to identifying new forms of racism. Instead, we destroy the historical meaning of race altogether with the result that all oppression is detached from racialization (for better or worse). Conversely, we may rigidly circumscribe the boundaries of racism to one binary structure or another, which allows us to think some oppression outside of racialization. Either way, we may then move beyond thinking oppression predominately in racial terms. We may ask whether some forms of oppression, although taken as forms of racism, may be better addressed through nonracial discourses. (I have already indicated that nativism may not fit the concepts of racial oppression.)19 Now, though, we may uncover a new conceptual tension. The first proposal lets race remain a hegemonic concern (as it is for Perea and Alcoff), which means that forms of oppression that do not suit the race model of discourse may be covered over. The second proposal protects nonracial oppressions from racialization, but it deemphasizes race discourse and the binary so that actually racist oppression may be overlooked. I do not believe there is a resolution to this tension. However, I also do not believe that we need one. Thus, a third proposal: What we need to do is recognize that there is a tension. Rather than empowering the reduction of forms of oppression to racisms or rejecting the binary or tightly limiting its scope, we realize that there are many forms of oppression. Some will suit racial analyses completely or partly; others will not. We must actively reflect on sites and instances of

oppression to determine which modes of oppression are in operation and provide the best resources we can manage. We have many possible modes of analysis for the Trayvon Martin case: anti-black racism, racism between minorities, cultural insensitivity, Stand Your Ground laws, the culture of fear, the culture of policing, the voicelessness of children, and so on. All of these topics and others deserve our consideration if we are truly to generate justice for Trayvon Martin and other victims. Some concerns may merit racialization and others may not. Reflection on such diverse concerns is not easy or failsafe, but at the least it means that we may take advantage of all available resources to identify effectively victims, modes of oppression, and options for relief. The third proposal is a significant advance beyond previous positions. If pursued rigorously it has the potential to delimit what counts as racial and nonracial oppression so that we may recognize and pursue proper responses. The racism pluralist’s move to expand the concept of racism does not give nonracial oppressions focused consideration, which leaves open the problem of giving race hegemonic status; that is, pluralist analyses raise the fear that all forms of oppression may be coded as racial. At least, the third proposal requires us to consider strategically where race begins and ends so that we do not overlook or crush into the discourse of race nonracial oppression. What proposal three does, in effect, is open the air for the voices of victims to speak and be heard with more clarity, which I believe is the intent of racism pluralists. What proposal three does not do is concretely demarcate racial and nonracial forms of oppression, which is both a strength and a weakness. Salient details will vary case to case. Firm determinations may not be possible in many cases, but recognizing that difficulty is itself something that the third proposal helps to enable by calling our attention to the multivalent nature of oppression. As thinkers have recognized that race discourse in the United States is pluralistic, the black-white binary paradigm has become both untenable and common. By taking the binary seriously, the structure of race and racism will fundamentally change. What comes is uncertain, and may not be for the better, but if we are sensitive to both racial and nonracial considerations we have a chance to attend to once hidden modes of victimization. We owe this to all victims, including Trayvon Martin.20

Black/white binary fails- 4 reasonsNakagawa 13’

Scot nakagawa, 9-4-2013,Nakagawa is a Lifelong political activist, community organizer, organization builder."Race Beyond Black and White: Four Reasons to Move Beyond the Racial Binary,"

With that in mind, here are four reasons to move beyond the black-white racial binary: 1. Ignorance of our multi-racial history is the enemy of civil rights. Here’s an example. In the 1990s, the evangelical right rose to power in part through exploiting widespread homophobia. But, while they appeared to be narrowly targeting LGBT people, they were using those attacks on LGBT rights to simultaneously talk about civil rights more generally. They did so by contrasting LGBT people with blacks who they said have a “legitimate” claim to civil rights because, they argued, blacks were able to pass a litmus test of suffering and morality without which civil rights cannot be conferred. Therefore, civil rights are special rights. The success of that argument relied upon the widespread belief among what we nowadays refer to as “low-information voters,” that civil rights are black rights, not American rights that have historically been withheld

from black people. Right wingers exploited this confusion and doubled down on it, inciting anti-black racism by claiming these (black) rights were being taken too far by a civil rights lobby LGBT people wanted a piece of because it had captured control of Congress. 2. We are all profiled differently by race, but all of the different ways in which we are profiled serve the same racial hierarchy. For instance, in the 1960s, just as the civil rights movement was cresting and black urban uprisings were dominating the news cycle, news stories appeared profiling Asian Americans as a model minority. That profile, which privileged Asians as a super-minority that was “out-whiting the whites,” claimed that Asians in the U.S. had managed to climb to success not through protest nor by way of “riots,” but through hard work and quiet cooperation with the powers that be. This story of Asian success begged the question, if Asian Americans can do it, why can’t black people? The media provided the answer: blacks aren’t succeeding because they’re a “problem minority.” Ever since, the model minority myth has been used as a lever of racial injustice on the fulcrum of anti-black racism. 3. Race is central to the struggle over citizenship in America. The contest over voting rights, for instance, is a fight about citizenship rights, who has them, and who gets to decide in the matter just as much as is the question of the right to citizenship of new immigrants, including those without documents. At the center of these fights is a struggle over nationality, power, and control that revolves around race. We will never resolve these questions until we are able to grapple broadly with the issue of race and citizenship as regards all people of color. Until then, we are all just fighting different battles in the same war, but without the common cause necessary to build a winning coalition. 4. In order to achieve racial equity, we need to complicate our understanding of race. The black-white racial binary is as much a part of the fiction of race in America as dubious science about brain size and intelligence. The truth may not, by itself, set us free, but it might at least get us headed in that direction. As we head toward a “majority-minority” future, we’d do well to acknowledge the complexity of the story of race in America. Just ignoring it might be good for ratings, but it won’t make it go away.

AT: Binary is Correct7 reasons wrong with the white/black binaryAlcoff 6’

Linda Alcoff a philosopher at the City University of New York who specializes in epistemology, feminism, race theory and existentialism. “Visible identities Race Gender And the Self” 2006 Oxford Press

Just as the protection of the∂ right of property advantages the propertied, and the protection of free speech∂ ‘‘increases the influence of those who are articulate and can afford microphones,∂ TV air time, and so on ... the Equal Protection Clause produces a social good,∂ namely equality, for those falling under its coverage—blacks and whites. These it∂ genuinely helps—at least on occasion. But it leaves everyone else unprotected∂ (1998, 370–71).∂ Put in more general terms, these arguments can be summarized

as follows:∂ 1) The black/white paradigm has disempowered various racial and ethnic∂ groups from being able to define their own identity, to mark their difference and∂ specificity beyond what could be captured on this limited map. Instead of naming∂ and describing our own identity and social circumstance,

we have had descriptions∂ foisted on us from outside.∂ 2) Asian Americans and Latinos (among others) have historically been ignored∂ or marginalized in the public discourse in the United States on race and racism.∂ This is a problem for two reasons, first, because it is simply unfair to be excluded∂ from what concerns one, and

second, because it has considerably weakened the∂ analysis of race and racism in the mainstream discussions. To explain the social∂ situation of Asian Americans or Latinos simply in terms of their de jure and de∂ facto treatment as nonwhites is to describe our condition only on the most shallow∂ terms. We must be included in the discussions so that a more adequate account∂ can be developed.∂ 3) By eliminating specificities within the large ‘‘black’’ or nonwhite group, the∂ black/white binary has undercut the possibility of developing appropriate and effective∂ legal and political solutions for the variable forms that racial oppression can∂ take. A broad united movement for civil rights does not require that we ignore the∂ specific circumstances of different racial or ethnic identities, nor does it mandate∂ that only the similarities can figure into the formulation of protective legislation. I∂ will discuss an example of this problem, one that concerns the application of∂ affirmative action in higher education, at the end of this chapter.∂ 4) Eliminating specificities within the large ‘‘black’’ or nonwhite group also∂ makes it difficult to understand or address the real conflicts and differences within∂ this amalgam of peoples. The black/white paradigm proposes to understand all∂ conflicts between communities of color through antiblack racism and white supremacy,∂ when the reality is more complex.∂ 5) For all these reasons, the black/white paradigm seriously undermines the∂ possibility of achieving coalitions. It is obvious that keeping us in conflict with each∂ other and not in coalition is in the interests of the current power structure.∂ I would add to these arguments the following two.∂ 6) The black/white binary and the constant invocation of all race discourses∂ and conflicts as between blacks and whites has produced an imaginary of race in∂ this country in which a very large white majority confronts a relatively small black∂ Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary 255∂ minority. This imagery has the effect of reenforcing the sense of inevitability to∂ white domination.∂ This is not the reality of racial percentages in almost any major urban center∂ in the country today. Nonwhites outnumber whites in New York, Miami, Chicago,∂ Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and come very close in San Francisco, Dallas, and∂ Washington, D.C. There is thus a real potential for a major shift in political power,∂ but there are two main challenges before this shift can take place. The first is the∂ ability of nonwhites to unite and to also make common cause with progressive antiracist∂ whites. The second is the Electoral College. The original intent of the∂ Electoral College was to protect small states and also to create a buffer between∂ the hoi polloi and the government, but the current effect of the Electoral College,∂ given these changed demographics, has the added ‘‘advantage’’ of disenfranchising∂ the occupants of cities generally and people of color specifically

from influencing∂ national electoral outcomes. The fact is that if the popular vote determined∂ elections, the cities would have the determining numbers of votes, since this is∂ where the majority of U.S. citizens now live and where the trend of movement is∂ toward. The numbers and concentrations of people of color in the United States∂ means that we are quickly moving past the politics of recognition, in which people of∂ color must clamor for recognition from the all-powerful majority, and reaching the∂ politics of

power negotiation, in which we can negotiate from a position of power∂ rather than having to rely exclusively on moral appeals. The white majority will not∂ maintain its near hegemonic political control as new configurations of alliances∂ develop.4 Moreover, the white majority is far from monolithic, splintering most∂ notably along gender and class lines: the gender gap has widened in electoral∂ politics along with the gap between union and nonunion households, with droves∂ of white women and white union members voting the same as the majority of∂ people of color.∂ Thus, thinking of race only in terms of black and white produces a sense of∂ inevitability to white domination and thus a sense of fatalism, even though the facts∂ call for the opposite. I believe this issue of imagery is very significant: it affects∂ people’s choices, voting (or nonvoting) practices, and the level of energy they are∂ willing to devote to political activism. By opening up the binary imagery to rainbow∂ images and the like, as Jesse Jackson did with great effect in his presidential∂ campaign, we can more accurately and thus helpfully present the growing and∂ future conditions within which political

action and contestations will occur. This∂ is in everyone’s interests (or at least, the majority’s).∂ 7) The next argument that I would make in regard to the black/white binary is∂ that it mistakenly configures race imagistically as exclusively having to do with∂ color, as if color alone determines racial identity and is the sole object of racism.∂ Equating race with color makes it seem as if all the races other than black and∂ white must be lined up between them since they clearly represent the polar extremes.∂ There is certainly a racist continuum of color operating in this and in∂ many countries, but my point is that this continuum is not the only axis by which∂ racism operates.∂ Some have taken the horrific hierarchy of adoption preferences in the United∂ States, that runs basically from white to Asian to Latino to black, as representative∂ 256 Latino/a Particularity∂ of a continuum of color. Related to this idea is the claim that Asian Americans and∂ Latinos are closer to white and will eventually ‘‘become’’ white. Let me address this∂ latter idea first. The claim that Asian Americans and Latinos will become white is∂ first of all premised on the assumption that we have two choices of racialized∂ identities: white and black. The assumption presupposed is then that if a group is not∂ economically and politically located at or near the bottom of the society, which the∂ black/white paradigm associates exclusively with ‘‘blackness,’’ then such a group is∂ assumed to have achieved ‘‘whiteness.’’ But class does not perfectly map onto race:∂ the poor come in all colors. Moreover, there is significant racial and class variety∂ within each of these large amalgamated groups with highly variant median incomes.∂

Binary is wrong-doesn’t account for any other races other than black and whiteAlcoff 6’

Linda Alcoff a philosopher at the City University of New York who specializes in epistemology, feminism, race theory and existentialism. “Visible identities Race Gender And the Self” 2006 Oxford Press

Wanting to avoid this outcome, however unlikely it∂ Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary 249∂ might be, the court decided to embellish on the arguments made in appeal. Justice∂ Charles J. Murray interpreted legal precedent to argue that the terms ‘‘black’’ and∂ ‘‘white’’ are oppositional terms, from which he concluded that black must mean∂ nonwhite and white must exclude all people of color. Thus, by the law of binary∂ logic, Chinese Americans, after having become Native American, then also became∂ black.∂ Of the many questions that one might like to go back and pose to Charles∂ Murray, perhaps the most obvious is the following: if black and white are oppositional∂ terms, then, instead of black meaning nonwhite,

doesn’t it just as logically∂ follow that white could mean nonblack, in which case all people of color except∂ African Americans would be white? This conclusion is no more or less fallacious or∂ absurd than Murray’s conclusion that black means nonwhite. That such an idea∂ was, apparently, beyond the imagination of the court at that time begins to reveal∂ the strategy at work here. Defining whites as only those without one drop of ‘‘other’’∂ blood has been a tool to maintain a clear and distinct border around white identity.∂ On the other hand, the borders of other identities—their distinctiveness from each∂ other—are not important for the law to define and maintain. The controlling term∂ here is not race but whiteness. To be black is to be nonwhite, but this equation is∂ not reversible if one is using the usual meaning of ‘‘black’’ today, since for Murray∂ ‘‘black’’ includes virtually every Asian American, Latino, Native American, and∂ mixed race person as well as all those of African origin. Although this case began∂ with a strategy to link the Chinese to American Indians, it ends in a ruling that∂ prescribes a black/white binary. The ruling essentially allowed the state to make∂ one all-purpose argument against the civil and political rights of nonwhites, thus∂ increasing the efficiency with which it could maintain discrimination.∂ Asian Americans and Latinos have been tossed back and forth across this∂ black/white binary for 150 years (see Haney Lo´pez 1996; Lee 1993; G. Martinez∂ 1998; Okihiro 1994; Omi and Winant 1986; C. Rodrı´guez, 2000). To continue with∂ the example of Chinese Americans, in 1860 Chinese Americans were classified as∂ white in Louisiana. By 1870 they were classified as Chinese. But in 1900, the∂ children of Chinese and non-Chinese parents were reclassified as either white or∂ black. Other states had similarly convoluted histories of classification. In 1927 the∂ U.S. Supreme Court ended this confusion and defined the Chinese as nonwhite,∂ thus more firmly subjecting them to all the segregationist and Jim Crow legislation∂ then in effect. Similar stories of variable racial classification can be told about∂ Mexicans in Texas and in New Mexico, Japanese in California, and other groups.∂ Needless to say, the variable classifications tell a story of strategic reasoning in∂ which arguments for legal discriminations are deployed against people of color by∂ whatever opportune classification presents itself in the context.∂ Contrary to what one might imagine, it has not always or even generally been∂ to the advantage of Asian Americans and Latinos to be legally classified as white.∂ An illustration of this is found in another important legal case decided by the U.S.∂ Supreme Court in 1954, just two weeks before they issued the decision in Brown vs.∂ Board of Education. The case of Hernandez v. Texas involved a Mexican American∂ man convicted of murder by an all-white jury and sentenced to life imprisonment∂ (G. Martinez 1998; Suro 1999). His lawyer appealed the conviction by arguing that∂ 250 Latino/a Particularity∂ the absence of Mexican Americans on the jury was discriminatory, making reference∂ to the famous Scottsboro case in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned∂ (after many years) the conviction of nine African American men on the grounds of∂ an absence of African Americans from the jury. But in the Hernandez case, the∂ Texas Supreme Court ruled that Mexicans were white people of Spanish descent,∂ and therefore that there was no discrimination in the all-white makeup of the jury.∂ Forty years later, Hernandez’s lawyer, James DeAnda, recounted how he made his∂ argument appealing this ruling:∂ Right there in the Jackson County Courthouse, where no Hispanic had served on∂ any kind of a jury in living memory because Mexicans were white and so it was∂ okay to bring them before all-white juries, they had two men’s rooms. One had a∂ nice sign that just said MEN on it. The other had a sign on it that said COLORED∂ MEN and below that was a hand-scrawled sign that said HOMBRES∂ AQUI [men here]. In that jury pool,

Mexicans may have been white, but when it∂ came to nature’s functions, they were not. (Suro 1999, 85)∂ In fact, in Texas not only were Mexicans subject to Jim Crow in public facilities∂ from restaurants to bathrooms, they were also excluded from business and community∂ groups, and children of Mexican descent were required to attend a segregated∂ school for the first four grades, whether they spoke fluent English or not.∂ Thus, when they were classified as nonwhite, Latinos were overtly denied certain∂ civil rights; when they were classified as white, the de facto denial of their civil rights∂ could not be appealed.∂ Although the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Texas court’s decision in∂ the Hernandez case, its final decision indicated a perplexity regarding Mexican∂ American identity. The court did not want to classify Mexicans as black, and it∂ didn’t want to alter the legal classification of Mexicans as white; since these were∂ the only racial terms the justices thought were available, they ended up explaining∂ the discrimination Mexicans faced as based on ‘‘other differences,’’ left undefined.∂ Thus, oddly, the court upheld that there was racial discrimination against Mexicans,∂ but it denied that Mexicans constituted a race (Haney Lo´pez 1998, 182–83).∂ One clear lesson to be learned from this legal history is that race is a construction∂ that is variable enough to be stretched opportunistically as the need arises∂ in order to maintain and expand discrimination. Racism, in other words, molds∂ racial categories to fit its design. And the legal history also shows that white supremacy∂ has moved Latinos and Asian Americans around the classification schema∂ for its own benefit. Nonetheless, one might take these legal cases to indicate that∂ discrimination against African Americans was the paradigm case that U.S. courts∂ stretched when they could to justify discrimination against other nonwhites, and∂ thus to provide support for the black/white paradigm of race.∂ Modeling Arguments∂ The distinguished historian John Hope Franklin made such an argument at the first∂ official meeting of the Race Relations Commission, which was convened by former∂ U.S. President Bill Clinton to advance his initiative for a national dialogue on race.∂ Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary 251∂ Franklin maintained that ‘‘racism in the black/white sphere’’ developed first in∂ North America when slavery was introduced in the Jamestown colony in 1619 and∂ has served as a model for the treatment of race in the United States. Attorney Angela∂ Oh, also serving on the commission, argued against Franklin on this point, using∂ the example of the uprising of April 29, 1992, in Los Angeles to show that the specific∂ history and racist treatment of Asian Americans needs to be accounted for in order∂ to understand the complex varieties of racism that sparked that event. ‘‘I just want to∂ make sure we go beyond the black-white paradigm ... because the world is about∂ much more than that,’’ she said (see Wu 2002, 32–35). Frank Wu, commenting on∂ this exchange, tries diplomatically to unite both Oh and Franklin’s points. He∂ affirms that ‘‘African Americans bear the greatest burden of racial discrimination’’∂ but adds that the Los Angeles uprising needs to be understood in relation both to∂ African American history as well as Korean American history (and, I would add,∂ Latino history, since Latinos were the largest number of persons arrested). Wu∂ advocates the following commonsense approach:∂ Whatever any of us concludes about race relations, we should start by including all∂ of us. ... Our leaders should speak to all individuals, about every group, and for∂ the country as a whole. A unified theory of race, race relations, and racial tensions∂ must have whites, African Americans, and all the rest, and even within groups∂ must include Arab Americans, Jewish Americans, white ethnicities, and so forth.∂ Our theory is an inadequate account otherwise. (Wu 2002, 36)∂ The question Wu does not address directly is whether the continued acceptance of∂ the black/white paradigm,

what Oh is contesting and Franklin is defending, will∂ allow such a comprehensive account.∂ To say that racism has been modeled on slavery might or might not entail a black/∂ white binary, depending on how much is presumed in the concept of ‘‘modeling.’’ But∂ the reality of race and racism in the North American continent has been more∂ complicated than black/white since the initial conquest of native peoples by European∂ Americans. Slavery was itself an idea put forward by Columbus when he suggested∂ that the indigenous population could be enslaved in order to bring profits to the∂ Spanish crown because the amount of gold and silver here was initially found wanting.∂ The concept of race itself was inspired in large measure without a doubt by the∂ ‘‘discovery’’ of native peoples and the subsequent debates among learned Europeans∂ about their nature, their humanity, and their rights. Later on, emerging legal practice∂ developed typologies of rights based on typologies of peoples, such as the exclusionary∂ laws concerning testimony in court, as mentioned earlier, which grouped ‘‘blacks,∂ mulattoes, and Native Americans.’’ The Chinese laborers brought to the West in the∂ 1800s were subjected to very specific rulings restricting their rights not only to vote or∂ own property but even to marry other Chinese. This latter ruling outlasted slavery and∂ was justified by invoking images of Asian overpopulation, another quite specific racist∂ ideology. To control their reproduction, Chinese women were allowed to come as∂ prostitutes but not as wives, a restriction no other group faced.∂ The Mexicans defeated in the Mexican-American War were portrayed as cruel∂ and cowardly barbarians, and although the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ratified∂ in 1848 guaranteed for the Mexicans who stayed in the United States full rights of∂ 252 Latino/a Particularity∂ citizenship, like the treaties with Native Americans neither local governments nor∂ the federal courts upheld the Mexicans’ right to vote or respected the land deeds∂ they held before the treaty (see Acun˜ a 1988; Shorris 1992). By the time of the∂ Spanish-American War of 1898 the image of barbarism used against Mexicans was∂ consistently attributed to a Latin Catholic heritage and expanded for use∂ throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, thus subsequently affecting the∂ immigrant populations coming from these areas as well as justifying U.S. claims of∂ hegemony in the region (Mignolo 2000). The so-called Zoot Suit riots in Los∂ Angeles in 1943 targeted Mexican Americans and their ethnically specific style of∂ dress. The attempts made to geographically sequester and also to forcibly assimilate∂ Native American groups were not experienced by any other group, and had their∂ own ideological justifications that combined contradictory images of the Great∂ Chain of Being with the romanticized Noble Savage.

AT: Black/White IS OriginEven if their history lesson is correct, white supremacy is not a zero sum game, their focus makes tackling other aspects of racism impossiblePerea 97 (Juan, Professor of Law, University of Florida College of Law, RACE, ETHNICITY & NATIONHOOD: ARTICLE: The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The "Normal Science" of American Racial Thought, California Law Review, October, 1997, 85 Calif. L. Rev. 1213, p. 1254-1255]

One could object to my conclusions on the grounds that White racism against Blacks has operated for a much longer time than racism against Latinos/as or Asians, and therefore the former problem needs to be studied and remedied first. English enslavement of Blacks can be traced to the early 1600s, well before the nationhood of the United States. n207 Encounters between Anglo and Mexican people did not begin on a large scale until the 1830s, as Whites moved west into Texas and other parts of the Southwest that, at the time, were parts of Mexico. n208 To a large extent, the Black/White binary paradigm of race has developed precisely because of the historical priority in time of White

racism against Blacks and because of the nature of the exploitation that slavery caused. The question is whether the earlier deployment of White racism against Blacks in the United States justifies the binary approach in race scholarship and thinking today. I cannot see scholarly efforts to understand and remedy White racism in all its forms as a "zero-sum game," in which efforts to understand other forms of White racism somehow take away from efforts to understand and remedy White racism against Blacks. My goal is not to take away anything from the study of White racism against Blacks.

Rather, it is to identify some limitations of this study and to add to these studies the study of White racism against

other racialized American groups. Stated simply, we must study and understand White racism in all its forms. Indeed, here lie some of the possibilities for coalition and for solving some of the problems that resist solution under our current scholarship. n209

AT: Panthers not MonovalentPanthers are monovalent-Panthers reduced to a single dominant essenceSnyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

Critics may say that the vision of the Panthers, US, and BAM I offered above is reductive. In response, I want to revisit the Panthers. While Panther leaders are in part responsible for promulgating the monovalent identity widely associated with them, I agree that this characterization does not do justice to a dynamic organization. The popularity of this characterization points to structural obstacles to the politics of multivalent recognition. In contrast to the group’s image as hypersexualized, hypermasculine aggressive revolutionaries, women constituted a significant portion of the Panthers’ membership. Sacrifices by women like Ericka Huggins and Angela Davis prompted a transformation in the gender politics of the Panthers (Matthews 1998, 282); a woman—Elaine Brown—ultimately headed the Panthers. The sexual politics of the Panthers also evolved over time. In August 1970, Huey P. Newton preached solidarity with the Gay Liberation Movement, saying “the term ‘faggot’…should be deleted from our vocabulary, and especially we should not attach names normally designed for homosexuals to men who are enemies of the people.” (Newton 1970). Nor was the agenda of the Party static. Although originally styled as a paramilitary organization—the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense—over time the group became increasingly concentrated on its “survival programs.” Survival programs included free breakfast for children, free health clinics, transport to visit relatives in prison, political education programs, and more. Unlike paramilitary operations, the types of activities involved in the survival programs have traditionally been coded as feminine. Few if any would agree that the Black Panther Party achieved a feminist or queer ideal. Even when the official rhetoric of the party cut across the image of black identity initially projected by leaders, the diversity within black identity continued to be glossed over—in his 1970 speech concerning the women and gay liberation movements, for instance, Newton presented woman, gay and black as separate rather than overlapping identities. Yet at the same time, the Party was certainly more complicated—and presented a more complicated image of black identity—than was widely projected. In a content analysis of 163 articles about the Panthers found in major national magazines and newspapers over an 11- year time span, Edward Morgan found that the “the Panthers are reduced to a single, dominant essence” (2006, 331). The mainstream media—including some 300 journalist cooperating with COINTELPRO efforts (Morgan 2006, 329–30)—broadcast images of “brash, gun-toting, profanity-spewing blacks” (Ogbar 2004, 67). By freezing the Black Panthers at their origin, the mainstream media were deeply complicit in promoting the monovalent conception of identity initially projected by the Panthers. The media itself is not monolithic and certainly alternative stories about the Panthers were told through outlets like The Black Panther (the Party’s community news service). Despite this, it remains the case that those engaged in the politics of multivalent recognition are likely to face significant challenges not only in establishing support for and in strategizing how to promote a multivalent view of identity, but also in the dissemination process. That the mainstream media would present a predominantly monovalent view of black identity rather than a multivalent one should not be surprising. Many media formats privilege the simple and the sensational over the complex and

challenging. Moreover, gatekeepers and decision makers in the culture industry are often members of the hegemonic racial (gender, sexual) identity group with vested interests in maintaining their power. The example of the Black Panthers is a potent reminder that the success of a politics of multivalent recognition depends not only on political actors’ intentions, but also on media outlets. In other words, while cultural, this politics is not without its structural prerequisites.

AT: Snyder Only about Race Snyder talks about recognition and feminist recognition not only about raceSnyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

To conclude, I want to clarify several aspects of my argument and offer some final thoughts about how it contributes to the literature on recognition and identity politics. First, though I have focused on one identity group in elaborating the distinction between monovalent and multivalent recognition politics, I believe it to be useful in the interpretation and assessment of the cultural identity politics of other groups. Shane Phelan (1989), for instance, offers a detailed description and trenchant critique of a monovalent lesbian feminist recognition politics, for instance. On the other hand, the early gay pride movement exemplifies the politics of multivalent recognition in its commitment to “unity through diversity” (Armstrong 2002, 26).

AFF Answers

PermDo Both: mono- and multi- valent shift over timeSnyder 12 (Greta Fowler, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics, University of Virginia, ”Multivalent Recognition: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Identity Politics”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 74, No. 1, January, jstor)

Though the gay pride movement was committed to “unity through diversity” in theory, however, it was homogenous (overwhelmingly white, male, middle-class, etc.) in practice (Armstrong 2002, 136). While the Black Panthers initially projected a monovalent view of black identity, both the theory and the practice of the organization transformed over time -- yet these changes were not reflected in predominant representations of the Panthers. These points highlight the following considerations in the categorization and assessment of recognition politics. First, both political ideology and political practice are important in determining whether an example of recognition politics is monovalent or multivalent; both should be considered. Second, attention should be paid both to the nature of the demands for recognition as well as the way in which these demands are interpolated by the culture industry. Finally, recognition movements are not static: the nature of demands for recognition made by a group may change over time, moving nearer to or farther from the multivalent or monovalent pole.

Alt failsAlternative fails 2 reasons- civil rights and inside outsider binaryBrooks and Widner 12’Roy L. Brooks and Kirsten Widner,Brooks is a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal, clerked for the Honorable Clifford Scott Green of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, and practiced corporate law with Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City. He joined the USD School of Law faculty in 1979. Widner is a Post fellow in law worked as a director of policy and advocacy at Emory law and got a degree in law form University of San Diego∂ In Defense of the Black/White Binary: Reclaiming a Tradition of Civil Rights Scholarship, 12 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 107 (2010). ∂ Available at: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/bjalp/vol12/iss1

Furthermore, by arguing that black scholars should abandon the black/white binary (i.e., not focus on white-on-black racial problems), critical theorists, most of whom are non-black, 3 are unintentionally disrespecting a venerable tradition of black scholarship.14 African American scholars as diverse as (at times) Derrick Bell, the "father" of Critical Race Theory,' 5 Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West, civil rights liberals,' 6 Glenn Loury, a civil rights moderate-conservative, 17 and John Hope Franklin, perhaps the greatest African American scholar of the last half of the twentieth century18 (whose public disagreement with an Asian scholar over the black/white paradigm was highly publicized), 19 not only write within this tradition but also have helped to shape it. Equally essential to this scholarly tradition are the enduring works of the late Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, the nation's first scholarly African American judge and the seminal writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, the nation's first (and still greatest) civil rights scholar. 2 ' This tradition of African American scholarship laid the foundation for the NAACP's successful litigation strategy against school segregation. 22 In addition to civil rights scholarship, criticism of the black/white binary extends to civil rights law. Delgado and Stefancic explore the following scenario: Imagine, for example, that Juan Dominguez, a Puerto Rican worker, is told by his boss, 'You're a lazy Puerto Rican just like the rest. You'll never get ahead as long as I'm supervisor.' Juan sues for discrimination under a civil rights-era statute designed with blacks in mind. He wins because he can show that an African American worker, treated in a similar fashion, would be entitled to redress. But suppose that Juan's coworkers and supervisor make fun of him because of his accent, religion, or place of birth. An African American subjected to these forms of discrimination would not be able to recover, and so Juan would go without recourse.23 Thus, the critique of the black/white binary proceeds on two levels-civil rights scholarship and civil rights law. This article considers both critiques. We consider the critique based on civil rights law in Part II. There, we contend that the critics of the binary have misread the extant law. As one of the authors has noted in a previous work, "Courts generally recognize that discrimination on the basis of a foreign trait, such as accent, is actionable under Title VII as discrimination on the basis of national origin.' 24 The point is, our most important civil rights laws apply to all racial groups, including whites, without any precondition that non-black racial groups analogize their situation to that of blacks. The Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution-the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments 25-which provide the foundation for modem civil rights law,26 the 1964 Civil Rights Act,27 and modem-day case law 28 all reach far beyond the black/white binary. To the extent that asymmetrical civil rights statutes have been enacted in the decades after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, these laws have been responsive to non-blacks,

including the disabled,29 women,30 and older workers. 3' Civil rights law recognizes multiple binaries rather than a single binary. We turn in Part III to the theoretical arguments regarding the black/white binary. Here, we argue that African-American scholars have not suggested that non-black racial groups should be accorded second-class civil rights status. Rather, African-American scholars of any stature embrace the multiple-binary approach reflected in civil rights law. The fact that black scholars focus on white-on-black racial problems in their scholarship is natural given their experiences as black Americans and the tradition of black scholarship. Yet, critical theorists have attacked this tradition of black scholarship on anti-binary grounds. We address the three most compelling anti-binary criticisms offered by critical theorists: (1) the binary ignores the histories of other racial groups, thereby distorting our understanding of civil rights history; 32 (2) it ignores interest convergence and thus threatens natural alliances among outsiders, especially people of color; 33 and, related to the latter criticism, (3) it is predicated upon a false notion of "black uniqueness."3 4 In considering each of these criticisms, we argue that the black/white binary-which, again, is most properly understood to mean the focus on white-on-black racial problems makes very good sense to African Americans based on their racial reality. Those who would reject the binary, and would have black scholars do likewise; have simply ignored this fact of life. Why can 't binaries co-exist in civil rights scholarship as they do in civil rights law? We conclude with two arguments in Part IV. First, contrary to what they claim, critics of the black/white binary are, in reality, not arguing for the dissolution of all binaries, but, instead, are arguing for a particular binary. They seek to replace the black/white binary in civil rights scholarship with an insider/outsider binary. The latter not only reflects a monolithic view of racial identity, 5 it also subordinates African Americans by trivializing the black ethos and presuming to tell African-American scholars what to write about. Second, criticism of the black/white binary is, at bottom, a claim regarding racial priority. While some critics of the black/white binary may have hoped that the priority issue could be avoided by simply moving beyond the black/white binary, 36 that simply has not been the case. Among outsider groups, competing claims and conflicts have not and will not disappear. 37 Hence, the questions become: Does it make moral, historical, political, or sociological sense to give priority to African Americans in the realm of civil rights when their interests clash with the interests of other civil rights groups? Have the descendants of slaves earned the right to claim priority because they have suffered the longest and still remain at "the very bottom of the well," to borrow a metaphor from critical theory? Former President Bill Clinton, a liberal, and James Q. Wilson, a conservative scholar, answer these questions in the affirmative. Clinton states, "If we can address the problems between black and white Americans, then we will be better equipped to deal with discrimination in other areas." 38 Similarly, Wilson writes in the aftermath of Katrina that: "The main domestic concern of policy-engaged intellectuals, liberal and conservative, ought to be to think hard about how to change these social weaknesses. Lower-class blacks are numerous and fill our prisons, and among all blacks the level of financial assets is lower than it is for whites. any blacks have made rapid progress, but we are not certain how." 39 While saving until another day the construction of a formula that might facilitate the ranking of civil rights claims in particular situations, we do argue here that any such formula should not necessarily favor African Americans because of the simple fact that they are not at the very bottom of the well across the board. However, such a formula should take into account the

relative severity and duration of each group's deprivation of rights or equality in various situations.

Brooks and Widner 12’Roy L. Brooks and Kirsten Widner,Brooks is a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal, clerked for the Honorable Clifford Scott Green of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, and practiced corporate law with Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City. He joined the USD School of Law faculty in 1979. Widner is a Post fellow in law worked as a director of policy and advocacy at Emory law and got a degree in law form University of San Diego∂ In Defense of the Black/White Binary: Reclaiming a Tradition of Civil Rights Scholarship, 12 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 107 (2010). ∂ Available at: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/bjalp/vol12/iss1

The idea that African Americans should incorporate other racial histories in their scholarship so as not to ignore those histories is thinly supported. Asian and Latino/a scholars, for example, do not need African-American scholars to validate their work, which is exceptionally good. °2 Similarly, although incorporating other racial histories into African-American scholarship may enrich one's perspective on racism, this exercise is typically not a prerequisite for understanding civil rights or the black ethos-nor is it necessary for addressing black issues. To illustrate the point, we refer to Mendez v. Westminister School District of Orange County.10 3 This case is often cited by LatCrits to illustrate the indispensability of Latino/a history in understanding the history of school desegregation that culminated in Brown .104 In Mendez, the court overturned a school segregation statute applicable to Mexican-American students, a decision that predated Brown I by a few years. While interesting, the case is neither necessary nor sufficient in explaining Brown I or in understanding the NAACP's legal strategy. Mendez was a Ninth Circuit opinion, so its precedential value is low compared to that of the Supreme Court cases traditionally regarded as the predecessors of Brown 1.105 Nor was Mendez as significant as the scholarship that informed the NAACP briefs. 0 6 Furthermore, even these Supreme Court cases and scholarly works have little probative valu in explaining why the Court decided Brown I the way it did.'0 7 Indeed, contemporary scholarship on Brown I that omits the geopolitical and other extra-legal factors that underpin the opinion is insufficiently theorized. 08 Authors who write about their own racial experiences are not necessarily signaling ignorance about other racial experiences. These writers are merely taking advantage of their unique position to get the story out more accurately and with greater insight. In fact, Professor Delgado himself rather enthusiastically embraced this position in his influential article, "The Imperial Scholar:" [I]t is possible to compile an a priori list of reasons why we might look with concern on a situation in which the scholarship about group A [outsiders] is written by members of group B [insiders]. First, members of group B may be ineffective advocates of the rights and interests of persons in group A. They may lack information; more important, perhaps, they may lack passion, or that passion may be misdirected. B's scholarship may tend to be sentimental, diffusing passion in useless directions, or wasting time on unproductive breast-beating. Second, while the B's might advocate effectively, they might advocate the wrong things. Their agenda may differ from that of the A's, they may pull their punches with respect to remedies, especially where remedying A's situation entails uncomfortable consequences for B. Despite the best of intentions, B's may have

stereotypes embedded deep in their psyches that distort their thinking, causing them to balance interests in ways inimical to A's. Finally, domination by members of group B may paralyze members of group A, causing the A's to forget how to flex their legal muscles for themselves.'

AT other race oppressionsPrefer white black binary biggest problem and has happened for the longestBrooks and Widner 12’Roy L. Brooks and Kirsten Widner,Brooks is a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal, clerked for the Honorable Clifford Scott Green of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, and practiced corporate law with Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City. He joined the USD School of Law faculty in 1979. Widner is a Post fellow in law worked as a director of policy and advocacy at Emory law and got a degree in law form University of San Diego∂ In Defense of the Black/White Binary: Reclaiming a Tradition of Civil Rights Scholarship, 12 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 107 (2010). ∂ Available at: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/bjalp/vol12/iss1

Critical theorists reject the black/white binary in large part because they reject the notion that African Americans have always been and continue to be the most racially subordinated group in America. 144 Professor Delgado, for example, argues that all racial minorities must avoid "the [s]iren [slong of [u]niqueness. ' According to Delgado, the seductive idea of uniqueness can "predispose a minority group to believe that it is uniquely victimized and entitled to special consideration from iniquitous whites.' 46 However, this argument runs contrary to history, as documented by a large body of research. Although rarely stated in public, 4 7 there is substantial empirical evidence strongly suggesting that African Americans are unique and, hence, warrant separate (but not necessarily dominant) attention. 148 We shall focus on a few pieces of this evidence: slavery and Jim Crow; the subordination of African Americans versus Native Americans; lynching; and what can be termed, "the lost American dream." To begin with, African Americans are the only group to arrive in this country not on, but under Plymouth Rock. African Americans have encountered and continue to encounter unique disadvantages that stem from the very way they were brought into American society. 1 49 Unlike most immigrants who came to the United States voluntarily, blacks were imported in huge numbers as slaves. Although slavery had existed for thousands of years, the Atlantic slave trade was not slavery as usual: Slavery in the Americas introduced the troubling element of race into the master/slave relationship. For the first time in history, dark skin became the social marker of chattel slavery. And, as a means of justifying this new face-a black face-given to an ancient practice, the slavers and their supporters created a race-specific ideology of condemnation.150 This new form of slavery was so much a part of colonial America that the founders addressed it in multiple provisions of the U.S. Constitution.' 5 1 Thus, the subjugation of African Americans was written into the fabric of our nation from the very beginning-a situation that no other group has faced. Although slavery officially ended with the Civil War and the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, the systematic economic exploitation of African Americans continued well into the twentieth century. As Douglas Blackmon chronicles in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Slavery by Another Name," southern states used an elaborate system of laws "specifically enacted to intimidate blacks." They also used a variety of other slave-like practices such as opportunistic arrests, sham trials, convict leasing, and coercive "contracts" to continue supplying white farms and industry with the cheap black labor on which they relied. 152 In spite of this, critical theorists often dismiss African American uniqueness by noting that other racial minorities have experienced many of the injustices blacks have faced. For example, Professor Perea asserts: Mexican Americans were also segregated in separate but unequal schools, were kept out of public parks by law, were refused service in restaurants, were prohibited from attending 'White' churches on Sundays, and were denied burial in 'White'

cemeteries, among all of the other horrors of the separate but equal scheme.153 While it is true that all racial minorities, particularly Latinos/as, have been victims of white oppression, these racialized experiences are nonetheless quite different from what African Americans have experienced. 54 In our view, the differences between African Americans and other racial minorities are so great as to outweigh the similarities. As one of the authors said on a previous occasion: [Bilacks were the main target of slavery and Jim Crow. No other American group inhabited the peculiar institution. No other American group sustained more casualties or lengthier suffering from slavery and Jim Crow... [T]his gives blacks a connection to slavery and Jim Crowboth familial and psychological-that no other racial minority has. There is a collective memory here that only blacks have.... [U]nlike Asians and Latinos, blacks did not volunteer for this tour of duty. Blacks were kidnapped from their homeland and brought to this country by brutal force, the likes of which we have not seen before or since in American history. In short, although blacks, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, Indians, and other people of color are victims of what Joe Feagin calls 'systemic racism' (or the "white-created" paradigm of racial subordination), they do not experience and hence do not react to racial subordination in exactly the same way.... White-on-black oppression is just different from other white-oppression syndromes, whether racial or gender. Patricia Rodriguez has observed, 'White means mostly privilege and black means overcoming obstacles, a history of civil rights. As a Latina, I can't try to claim one of these.'" 55 Black Americans carry the weight of the atrocities-slavery and Jim Crow.... 1 56

A2: DelgadoFocus on blackness the problem is growing and decreasing for other races- other races have seen increases in education and successBrooks and Widner 12’Roy L. Brooks and Kirsten Widner, Brooks is a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal, clerked for the Honorable Clifford Scott Green of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, and practiced corporate law with Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City. He joined the USD School of Law faculty in 1979. Widner is a Post fellow in law worked as a director of policy and advocacy at Emory law and got a degree in law form University of San Diego∂ In Defense of the Black/White Binary: Reclaiming a Tradition of Civil Rights Scholarship, 12 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 107 (2010). ∂ Available at: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/bjalp/vol12/iss1

Professor Richard Delgado argues that binary thinking can harm the group whose interest it places at the center. It can, for example, pit one disadvantaged group against another to the detriment of both. This opposition can impair a group's ability to forge useful coalitions and to leam from other groups' successes and failures.,I I What minority groups should do instead, Delgado argues, is set up a secondary market in which they negotiate selectively with each other. This market would take the form of exchanging support for issues important to various groups, creating win-win solutions whenever possible. Thus, a non-binary framework allows for racial minorities to approach whites in full force."12 Although Professor Delgado's arguments are not without merit, they are based on an unproven assumption that identities among racial minorities are sufficiently monolithic so as to make interracial alliances natural. "The idea would be," Professor Delgado asserts, "for minority groups to assess their own preferences and make tradeoffs that will, optimistically, bring gains for all concerned."' 1 3 However, as Professor Carbado points out, "Non-Black people of color have not always been interested in identifying themselves with the Black or marginalized side of the Black/White paradigm. In fact, there are moments in American history when certain Asian Americans and Latinas/os have attempted to achieve equality by asserting that they are not Black or like Blacks, and/or that they are White." 14 There are costs as well as advantages associated with occupying both ends of the polarity-the black (or subordinated) end as well as the white (or privileged) end-and non-black racial groups have often been able to avoid the costs and exploit the advantages.' 15 Self-interest is a powerful motivating force. Thus, it may be, as Professor Delgado maintains, that all binaries, including the black/white binary, are narrow nationalisms calculated to cutting the most favorable possible deal with whites'6-a possibility that African Americans can ill-afford to ignore. Therefore it is important to explore this possibility more closely to get a sense of how risky it would be for African Americans to abandon the black/white binary-which spawned the scholarly tradition and political strategy that together have been responsible for destroying Jim Crow and forging a racial consciousness from which all racial groups have benefitted." 7 When one looks closely at the natural-alliance theory-more accurately, the presumed-alliance theory-one comes to the unhappy conclusion that the theory founders on the shoals of racial reality. In a world of limited resources, achieving progress on one group's agenda can come at the expense of another group's agenda. 1 1 8 The game is, indeed, often zero-sum. The racial dynamic between blacks and Latinos/as, the latter of whom have been the most persistent critics of the black/white binary,' 19 well illustrates this point. Let us begin with education. Blacks and

Latinos/as both hope to see dramatic improvements in the quality of schools their children attend. For blacks, this means increasing educational funds to their schools and providing curricular services that address issues of racial pride, self-esteem, and the other unique needs of African-American students, especially those of young black males. 20 Likewise, for Latinos/as, improving the quality of education for their children means focusing on the special needs of Latino/as children, including bilingual education and expanded coverage of Latin-American history, which is often tied to immigration concerns.' 21 With the nationwide crisis in public school funding, the pool of state and federal funds as well as other resources available to meet these goals is extremely limited. Consequently, funds possibility more closely to get a sense of how risky it would be for African Americans to abandon the black/white binary-which spawned the scholarly tradition and political strategy that together have been responsible for destroying Jim Crow and forging a racial consciousness from which all racial groups have benefitted." 7 When one looks closely at the natural-alliance theory-more accurately, the presumed-alliance theory-one comes to the unhappy conclusion that the theory founders on the shoals of racial reality. In a world of limited resources, achieving progress on one group's agenda can come at the expense of another group's agenda. 1 1 8 The game is, indeed, often zero-sum. The racial dynamic between blacks and Latinos/as, the latter of whom have been the most persistent critics of the black/white binary,' 19 well illustrates this point. Let us begin with education. Blacks and Latinos/as both hope to see dramatic improvements in the quality of schools their children attend. For blacks, this means increasing educational funds to their schools and providing curricular services that address issues of racial pride, self-esteem, and the other unique needs of African-American students, especially those of young black males. 20 Likewise, for Latinos/as, improving the quality of education for their children means focusing on the special needs of Latino/as children, including bilingual education and expanded coverage of Latin-American history, which is often tied to immigration concerns.' 21 With the nationwide crisis in public school funding, the pool of state and federal funds as well as other resources available to meet these goals is extremely limited. Consequently, funds Angeles have almost entirely replaced the unionized African-American∂ workforce with a non-unionized immigrant workforce.' 6 Even when∂ unionization is not an issue, the results are the same. As Jack Miles observes:∂ If the Latinos were not around to be [gardeners, busboys, chambermaids,∂ nannies, janitors, construction workers], nonblack employers would be∂ forced to hire blacks-but they'd rather not. They trust Latinos. They∂ fear or disdain blacks. The result is unofficial but widespread preferential∂ hiring of Latinos-the largest affirmative action program in the nation,∂ and one paid for, in effect, by blacks. 127∂ Because of the employment implications of undocumented immigration,∂ the NAACP, as well as the AFL-CIO, supported the employer sanctions∂ provision under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. As one∂ NAACP official said, the sanctions were a way "to keep undocumented aliens∂ from taking the food from black children."1' 28 African Americans "were∂ competing more directly with Latinos than with any other ethnic group."' 2 9∂ In addition there have been various political struggles between African∂ Americans and Latinos/as in Los Angeles. A case in point is the 2001 mayoral∂ race in which blacks voted for a white candidate instead of the Latino candidate∂ whom they believed to be more interested in strengthening Latino/a political∂ and economic power than in improving the plight of blacks. For similar∂ reasons, the NAACP objected to the inclusion of Latinos/as in the 1975 Voting∂ Rights Extension.' 30 A black columnist positioned the matter in a

broader∂ context: "Though we pride ourselves on our leadership role in civil rights,∂ paradoxically, we guard the success jealously. 'We're the ones who marched∂ in the streets and got our heads busted. Where were they? But now they want∂ to get in on the benefits."" 13∂ '∂ Similar differences exist between African Americans and other racial∂ minorities. For example, some Asians have sought to exploit the privilege pole∂ of the black/white binary at the expense of African Americans. As Professor∂ Frank Wu observes, "Racial groups are conceived of as white, black, honorary∂ whites, or constructive blacks."' 32 He also reminds us that some Asians have∂ benefited from their "honorary whiteness" and, in so doing, may have∂ "perpetuat[ed] the problem of race."' Professor Wu's use of the terms "honorary whiteness" and "constructive blacks" underscores both the constructedness of race and the poles of privilege and subordination in the black/white binary within which Asians have operated. The latter racial dynamic forms the basis for the uneasy relationship that has developed between the African-American and the Asian-American civil rights agendas since the end of the 1960s. Janine Young Kim aptly describes this situation: Asian Americans have stood on unstable ground between 'black' and 'white,' falling under the honorary white category in anti-affirmative action arguments, but considered constructive blacks for the purposes of school segregation or antimiscegenation laws. To say that Asian Americans have been perceived as honorary whites or constructive blacks is, however, slightly misleading in that it tends to convey a notion of race specificity. It is important to keep in mind that although the status of honorary white does affect identity, recognition, and appellation, its more insidious function is cooptation. For example, within the economy of affirmative action policy, 'whiteness' encompasses victimization through 'reverse racism' and race-based disadvantage in certain educational or occupational opportunities. Insofar as a conservative like Newt Gingrich treats Asian Americans as honorary whites, he refers to common experience under affirmative action, not racial similarity. 34 African Americans do not have this kind of racial flexibility. Phenotype and experience prevent African Americans from benefitting as much as other racial minorities from the pole of privilege. African Americans constitute the social marker for disadvantage, stuck at the pole of subordination. Indeed, African Americans have watched as other racial and ethnic groups with whom they have aligned in the past 135 have leapfrogged past them in resources and power, often distancing themselves from African Americans (what Professor Carbado calls "interracial distancing"' 36) once they obtained a certain level of success. There is palpable concern among African Americans that Latinos/as, with their increasing numbers and desire for acceptance, are poised to repeat this process. Like Asians in the context of affirmative action,' 37 Latinos/as might find interracial distancing to be within their self-interest. To ask African Americans to put aside this racial history and risk being a stepping-stone for yet another racial group's advancement may be overly optimistic. This is not to say that African Americans and other racial groups have never successfully collaborated or can never form mutually beneficial coalitions. As Professor Perea correctly points out, Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado, 38 a school desegregation case, provides an example of interest convergence. 39 Likewise, Mendez v. Westminister School District of Orange County,140 a Mexican-American school desegregation discussed earlier,' 4 ' shows that African Americans can support Latino/a interests when those interests converge with African-American interests. 142 But the crucial question is what happens when the interests clash rather converge? As Latinos/as continue to gain political strength and as both Latinos/as and Asians continue to become more integrated into the

mainstream culture (becoming more "white" 43), will they find it more advantageous to forge coalitions with whites, whose experiences and interests they now share, than with African Americans, whose experiences and interests have become contraposed?

OffenseCalls to “move beyond” black/white binary replicate anti-BlacknessDeilovsky and Kitossa 13 (Katerina Deliovsky, Department of Sociology. Brock University, Ontario and Tamari, “Beyond Black and White: When Going Beyond May Take Us Out of Bounds”, Journal of Black Studies 44; 158, http://jbs.sagepub.eom/content/44/2/158)

At first impression, critiques of the so-called Black/White binary paradigm appear persuasive—but only if one accepts a priori that race scholarship is dominated by this paradigm and that it functions to restrict how race is understood, theorized, and addressed. What is more, many claimants of this position contend that African and European American scholars who

employ the so-called Black/White binary paradigm obscure the histories and claims making of Asian, Native, and Latina/o Americans. There are problems, however, with proposing a multiracial coalition based on a critique of the so-called

Black/White binary paradigm. One such problem is identified by Jared Sexton (2010), who argues that this call is premised on the belief "of an 'endemic* black-white model of racial thought" (p. 90). For Sexton, this notion is "something of a social fiction—one might say a misreading—that depends upon a reduction of the sophistication of the paradigm in question" (Sexton, 2010, p. 90). If Sexton is correct, and we believe he is, then the call to move beyond is fundamentally flawed because it is built on an inadequate understanding of power relations that structure what is, in fact, a black/white Manicheanism. A Manicheanism is a moral and symbolic framework that constructs the world as polarized by forces of good and evil, represented in the oppositions between lightness and darkness and between black and white (see Bastide, 1967; Fanon, 1967; Hoch, 1979; Stone, 1981). Contrary to moving beyond advocates' claim of a Black/White binary paradigm, the black/white

Manicheanism is an incorporative racial matrix in the psychosocial world of European culture that gives meaning to a broad range of identities. Furthermore, this misreading and reduction rests on the presupposition that this call is warranted and that one can move beyond what is posited as a simple binary. This assumption and call to action needs to be interrogated and deconstructed not only because the former is erroneous but also because the latter implicitly reproduces anti-blackness as a presupposition for multiracial coalition building. We argue in this essay that a deconstruction of the move beyond discourse reveals that knowledge about racism, but more specifically, anti-black racism, is not substantively advanced and, in fact, creates

two distinct problems. First, by misreading and misnaming a real historical and contemporary experience as a paradigm, the discourse creates the false dilemma of needing to move beyond . Second, the discourse sets up blackness (interestingly enough, not whiteness), and by extension, those people socially defined as "black," as an impediment to the laudable goals of a multiracial coalition and

complex understanding of race relations in North America. In this way, moving beyond, in terms of praxis (action, epistemology, and

politics), is a discourse based on "bad faith" (Gordon, 1994) toward African-descended peoples. As noted by

Gordon (1994), bad faith is denial of the humanity of the black body and the consistent imputation of a negative value to it as a means of defining the (non-black) self.

Turn – Excludes Black from the coalition of the altDeilovsky and Kitossa 13 (Katerina Deliovsky, Department of Sociology. Brock University, Ontario and Tamari, “Beyond Black and White: When Going Beyond May Take Us Out of Bounds”, Journal of Black Studies 44; 158, http://jbs.sagepub.eom/content/44/2/158)

In closing, moving beyond advocates argue that alternatives to the Black/ White binary paradigm are needed to account for changing experiences of race and racism (Martinez, 1993; Omi & Winant, 1994). Uncritical acceptance of the Black/White binary paradigm situates the call to move beyond as questionable and problematic and all the more

urgently in need of challenge. Perhaps, in the laudable quest for multiracial alliances, the call to move beyond has been uncritically accepted as a necessary tactic in the antiracist struggle . Sexton (2008) warns

against the "unexamined desire for new analyses and the often anxious drive for political alliance" (p. 252). Moreover, he calls into "question the motive force of a nominally critical intervention on the 'black-white paradigm'" (Sexton, 2008, p. 252). If an integral part of this move beyond postulates that blackness is an epistemic obstacle to effective antiracism politics, does this not imply that multiracial alliances are "a social formation for which the exclusion of the category of racial blackness is a sine qua non" (Sexton, 2010, p. 89)? And to exclude racial blackness means, ultimately, to excise those defined as black from this coalition. In other words, the black body may be counted for more than three fifths of a person for the antiracist cause, but African people's history and narratives must be checked at the door. Not only does this (implied) excision do a gross disservice to those victimized by

this Manicheanism; it erases their history and obscures how other non-African people of color are affected by it as well as contribute to it. This situates moving beyond as a faulty and politically harmful episte-mological framework for African-descended people, and what is more, it is an act of bad faith.1 Without question, there is a need for a complex reading and analysis of racial oppression; however, the refusal to grant primacy to this "visible epis-temology of black skin" suggests there is more to this call than an academic pursuit. Put another way, it is one thing to argue that we need a complex understanding of the multiracial makeup of North America; it is quite another to frame the black/white Manicheanism as the reason for this lack of scholarly work. To reiterate, pointing the finger at the black/white Manicheanism creates, in general, two fundamental errors. One, it creates a false problem by confusing and misnaming a real historical and contemporary experience and, as such, grossly simplifies its complexity. Michael Steinberg (2001) argues. Putting the wrong name on a problem is worse than having no name at all. In the latter instance, one is at least open to filling the conceptual void. In the first instance, however, words lead us down a blind alley. They divert us from the facets of the problem that should command our attention and . . . lead

to remedies that are ineffectual or worse, (p. 2) As we see it, in our case, the "worse" leads us to the second fundamental problem: It sets up blackness (interestingly enough, not whiteness), and by extension those people socially defined as black, as an impediment to the laudable goals of a multiracial coalition and complex understanding of race relations in the United States. It is disconcerting how the articulation of moving beyond implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) situates blackness as an obstacle or, as Sexton (2008) argues, "[standing] in the way of future progress, silencing the expression of much needed voices on the political and intellectual scene" (p. 252). It appears that

"the force of anti-blackness consistently troubles the myriad efforts at mediation and amelioration among the nonwhite" (Sexton, 2008, p. 253). It goes without saying the challenge is not to move beyond but to theorize the black/white Manicheanism through a critical inquiry that captures its complexity. This complexity must bear in mind how thoroughly saturated is the sociosymbolic structure of racial difference with the determinants of the black/white Manicheanism.9 The black/white Manicheanism "has and continues to situate every subject in U.S. culture within the panoptic vision of racial meanings" (Weigman, 1995, p. 40). These racial meanings were and are often configured in relation to and against black (and white) racial designations. Thus, rather than calling to move beyond, it would be more conceptually creative and politically advantageous to work toward analyzing the black/white Manicheanism in a way

that makes clear the relationship between this Manicheanism and other racially marginalized groups. Thus, to develop an epistemologically deep understanding of race, racialization, and racism in the North America, the significance of anti-blackness must be apprehended, not as a superior form of oppression but as a form that gives shape and context to the oppression of other racially marginalized groups , while creating a qualitatively distinct oppression for African-descended peoples. As Jared Sexton (2008) cogently argues, anti-blackness is longstanding and ongoing but also . . . unlike other forms of racial oppression in qualitative ways—differences of kind, rather than degree, a structural singularity rather than an empirical anomaly. But all of this is not...to participate in the ranked determination of suffering. It is, instead, to properly locate the political dynamics and to outline the ethical stakes at hand. (p. 245)