Perm do both---the law can be utilized for abolition of anti-blackness---the alt’s

rejection of law shuts down the most realistic possibilities for ending the world
Amna Akbar 18, Assistant Professor, Moritz College of Law, 7/25/18, “Toward a Radical
Imagination of Law,” Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series No. 426
Around the same time, I had begun teaching a law and social movements seminar. We studied the Black Panthers and Young Lords,
Len Holt, Assata Shakur, and Ella Baker. I worried my students found the questions faced by these movements to be abstract and
faraway. I wanted them to understand that contemporary movements struggled with questions similar to those in the texts we
labored over. That’s how an organizer found himself surrounded by future lawyers. Hayes, along with his comrades in the
contemporary Black
liberation and immigrant justice movements, confronted many of the same strategic
and tactical choices every day. As I had hoped, his presence transformed our conversation.
Our intellectual distance from the texts vanished, and our lively conversation ended with a question: What is the proper role of
lawyers within the movement? After a short pause, Hayes praised the technical chops and procedural expertise lawyers bring to the
table. But that is not enough, he said. “Most
lawyers see a problem and think, ‘How can I fix this law?’”
This view is too narrow: it obscures the stakes and concedes to status quo arrangements. “The
role of the law is to protect the state,” Hayes reasoned. “ Lawyers must work with movements
to imagine with us the kind of state we want to live in. Only from there can we work together
to think about the laws we need.”2

In conversations with intellectuals and organizers around the country, I realized the Movement for Black Lives ( M4BL or
Movement)3—the larger movement configuration in which the chapter based Black Lives Matter network functions— was
having a far richer and more imaginative conversation about law reform than lawyers and law
faculty. The Movement for Black Lives was situating their critique in Black history and
intellectual traditions, and their imagination of alternate futures in Black freedom movements.
Their critique was more expansive at the same time as it was more grounded, and their
imagination more radical.4

Legal scholars often assume the movement’s fight is over policing: indictments for police killings ,
independent prosecutors to investigate police shootings, better training and supervision for police, more diverse police forces, and
so on.5 But, as Hayes suggested, the
most imaginative voices within contemporary racial justice
movements are fighting for much more than body cameras and police convictions.6

The movement is focused on shifting power into Black and other marginalized communities;7
shrinking the space of governance now reserved for policing, surveillance, and mass
incarceration; and fundamentally transforming the relationship among state, market, and
society.8 Movement actors have made policy proposals and engaged in law reform campaigns
at the same time they have prominently contested law and politics as usual.9 In the few years after
Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown, there were shutdowns of bridges and highways; die-ins at
courthouses and statehouses; occupations of police stations, police unions, and universities; arrests and curfews; tear gas and riot
gear.10 But the movement’s highprofile campaigns have not been waged by lawyers or via litigation.11

Indeed, the movement has largely refrained from fighting to strengthen preexisting rights or
demanding legal recognition of new ones.12 The focus is not on investing even-handedness to
law or the police, not on restoring criminal justice to some imaginary constitutional or pre-raced
status quo, and not on increasing resources for community policing.13 But it would be wrong to think the
movement has given up on law. The movement is not attempting to operate outside of law, but
rather to reimagine its possibilities within a broader attempt to reimagine the state. Law is
fundamental to what movement actors are fighting against and for.14
To illustrate how the movement approach reorients traditional criminal law reform conversations, I examine the 2016 policy
platform of the Movement for Black Lives, “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice” (the
Vision).15 I put the Vision in conversation with the Ferguson and Baltimore reports by the Department of Justice16—which
represent more traditional liberal approaches to criminal law reform. The Vision and the DOJ reports offer some of the most
damning critiques of policing in recent memory, but differ fundamentally in their analysis and conclusions. The contrast reflects the
limitations of liberal law reform at the same time that it
opens up a more imaginative set of possibilities about
reorganizing the very structure of our society. By studying the convergences and divergences between these texts,
this Article highlights how radical social movements reimagine the very same social problems with which significant bodies of legal
scholarship engage.

The Vision and DOJ reports offer alternate conceptualizations of the problem of policing and the appropriate approach to law
reform. Reflective of liberal law reform projects on police, the DOJ reports identify policing as a fundamental
tool of law and order that serves the collective interests of society, and locate the problems of
police in a failure to adhere to constitutional law. As a corrective, the DOJ reports advocate for investing more
resources in police: more trainings, better supervision, community policing. In contrast, the Vision identifies policing as a
historical and violent force in Black communities , underpinning a system of racial capitalism
and limiting the possibilities of Black life. As such, policing as we now know it cannot be fixed.
Thus, the Vision’s reimagination of policing—rooted in Black history and Black intellectual traditions—transforms mainstream
approaches to reform. In
forwarding a decarceral agenda rooted in an abolitionist imagination, the
Vision demands shrinking the large footprint of policing, surveillance, and incarceration, and shifting
resources into social programs in Black communities : housing, health care, jobs, and schools.
The Vision focuses on building power in Black communities, and fundamentally transforming the
relationships among state, market, and society. In so doing, the movement offers transformative,
affirmative visions for change designed to address the structures of inequality —something legal
scholarship has lacked for far too long.

The DOJ reports document the problems endemic to policing. While presenting a critical view of Ferguson’s and Baltimore’s police
departments, the reports are committed to the legal status quo, to a mode of governance that relies on criminal law enforcement to
deal with a broad set of deep-seated social problems, and to rules and authorities that are historically and functionally oppressive.
As a result, the reports double down on traditional
reforms that reinvest in law and police.17 This approach
cedes more legitimacy—not to mention more resources—to the police and the legal frameworks in which
they operate without a meaningful consideration of alternatives. Of course, the reports emerge from a
particular time and social location: a prosecutorial agency, the Civil Rights Division, embedded within the executive branch during
the Obama administration.18 As with any social location, there are possibilities, pressures, and constraints on what the DOJ may say
or do as a law enforcement agency under a particular administration. But framed in a different understanding, accountable to
different constituencies, the
DOJ could have taken an approach to reform more aligned with the Vision,
suggesting a realignment of resources from policing to the underlying social problems stemming
from structural inequality in Ferguson and Baltimore.
The additional importance of the DOJ reports lies in how they reflect how legal institutions—and, in turn, law scholarship—
approach long-standing structural problems while firmly committed to the status quo and restoring legitimacy thereto. In this way,
the DOJ reports expose a central dilemma of liberal
law reform projects, caught between a commitment to
the rule of law and status quo arrangements on the one hand, and the desire for substantive
justice and social, economic, and political transformation on the other.19

But our political moment is defined by crisis and polarization , with insurgencies on the left and
right calling for reform, transformation, and even revolution. 20 Amid the electoral triumph of
Trump, protest and people-of-color-led anti-capitalist movements have surged in activity.21
These radical movements mark the revival of anti-capitalist racial justice politics in the United
States in a way that we have not seen since the civil rights, Black power, and Chicano
movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Contemporary racial justice movements are not simply
arguing the state has created a fundamentally unequal criminal legal system. They are
identifying policing, jail, and prison as the primary mode of governing Black, poor, and other
communities of color in the United States, and pointing to law as the scaffolding. They are working to build
another state—another world even—organized differently than the one we have inherited.
They are aiming to use the law as a tool to build that alternative future. We can ignore their
deep critiques and visionary alternatives, or we can embrace the possibilities of a more
searching inquiry. This is a moment calling for a radical imagination, where the scale of deep
critique is matched with a scale of grand vision.22
While many progressive and left legal scholars reach for meaningful change, most of us lack alternative frameworks.23 Like the DOJ
reports, even when the scale of our critique is large, our visions for change are often too small. We have focused on a narrow picture
of law and law reform while sidestepping questions about the structure of the society, the state, and the market. These movements
make these questions central to their work.24 They do not have it all worked out. But they are making powerful sketches of much-
needed alternative frameworks.

Imagining with social movements seeking to transform the state would invest law scholarship
in a project of reconstruction and transformation.25 For radical racial justice movements, the primary
commitment is not to law, its legitimacy, rationality, or stability: It is to people.26 The motivations are to protest an
enduring set of social structures rooted in European and settler colonialism and the Atlantic
slave trade; to fight for transformative change, justice, and liberation; and to invest in a
redistributive and transformative project, one demanding a more equal distribution of
resources and life chances,27 with a focus on the most intersectionally marginalized people.28

Don’t give up on the state. Anything except reclaiming sovereignty devolves

into individual resistance, whitewashing the structure of class through and
reifying “progressive neoliberalism” wherein the illusion of freedom unwittingly
provides charisma for an oppressive system. Only an active reclamation of
sovereignty and national government can avert enormous human costs by
ensuring basic social services.
--Turns case – the attempt to totally purge the state results in the purity politics purges of 1930s
radical politics

---a2 Agamben/sovereignty/law bad – also useful v. Foucaultien centralized power

bad/biopolitics arguments

---only our theory of economics can explain and effectively respond to ongoing radical right wing
victories

---cites Streek

Mitchell and Fazi 17. William Mitchell, chair in economics at the University of Newcastle
(Australia) and visiting professor at Maastricht University (Netherlands) and Thomas Fazi,
activist, film-maker, and journalist, “Make the Left Great Again,” American Affairs Volume I,
Number 3 (Fall 2017): 75–91, online at https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/08/make-left-
great/
This has gone hand in hand with another, equally tragic, development. Following its historical defeat, the Left’s
traditional anticapitalist focus on class slowly gave way to a liberal-individualist understanding
of emancipation. Waylaid by postmodernist and poststructuralist theories, Left intellectuals
slowly abandoned Marxian class categories to focus instead on elements of political power and
the use of language and narratives as a way of establishing meaning. This shift also defined new arenas of
political struggle that were diametrically opposed to those defined by Marx. Over the past three decades, the Left’s focus on
“capitalism” has given way to a focus on issues such as racism, gender, homophobia,
multiculturalism, etc. Marginality is no longer described in terms of class but rather in terms of
identity. The struggle against the illegitimate hegemony of the capitalist class has given way to
the struggles of a variety of (more or less) oppressed and marginalized groups and minorities:
women, blacks, LGBTQs, etc. As a result, class struggle has ceased to be seen as the path to
liberation. In this new postmodernist world, only categories that transcend class boundaries
are considered meaningful. Moreover, the institutions that evolved to defend workers against
capital—such as trade unions and social democratic political parties—have become subjugated
to these non–class struggle foci. What has emerged in practically all Western countries as a
result, as Nancy Fraser notes, is a perverse political alignment between “mainstream currents
of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights ), on the
one side, and high-end ‘symbolic’ and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon
Valley, and Hollywood), on the other.”12 The result is a progressive neoliberalism
“that mixe[s] together truncated ideals of emancipation and lethal forms
of financialization,” with the former unwittingly lending their charisma to
the latter. As societies have become increasingly divided between well-educated, highly mobile, highly skilled, socially
progressive cosmopolitan urbanites, and lower skilled and less educated peripherals who rarely work abroad and face competition
from immigrants, the mainstream Left has tended to consistently side with the former. Indeed,the split between the
working classes and the intellectual-cultural Left can be considered one of the main reasons
behind the right-wing revolt currently engulfing the West. As Jonathan Haidt has argued, the
way the globalist urban elites talk and act unwittingly activates authoritarian tendencies in a
subset of nationalists.13 In a vicious feedback loop, however, the more the working classes
turn to right-wing populism and nationalism, the more the intellectual-cultural Left doubles
down on its liberal-cosmopolitan fantasies, further radicalizing the ethnonationalism of the
proletariat. This is particularly evident in the European debate, where, despite the disastrous effects of the EU and monetary
union, the mainstream Left—often appealing to exactly the same arguments used by Callaghan and Mitterrand more than a
generation ago—continues to cling to these institutions. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the mainstream
Left asserts that these institutions can be reformed in a progressive direction, and dismisses any
talk of restoring a progressive agenda on the foundation of retrieved national sovereignty as a
“retreat into nationalist positions,” inevitably bound to plunge the continent into 1930s-style
fascism.14 This position, as irrational as it may be, is not surprising, considering that the European Monetary Union is, after all, a
brainchild of the European Left. However, such a position presents numerous problems, which are ultimately rooted in a failure to
understand the true nature of the EU and monetary union. First of all, it ignores that the EU’s economic and political constitution is
structured to produce the results that we are seeing: the erosion of popular sovereignty, the massive transfer of wealth from the
middle and lower classes to the upper classes, the weakening of labor and more generally the rollback of the democratic and
socioeconomic gains that had previously been achieved by subordinate classes. The EU is designed precisely to impede the kind of
this position
radical reforms to which progressive integrationists or federalists aspire. More importantly, however,
effectively reduces the Left to the role of defender of the status quo, thus allowing the political
Right to monopolize citizens’ legitimate anti-systemic and specifically anti-EU grievances. This
approach is tantamount to relinquishing the discursive and political battleground for a post-
neoliberal hegemony—which is inextricably linked to the question of national sovereignty—to
the Right and extreme Right. It is not hard to see that if progressive change can only be
implemented at the global or European level—in other words, if the alternative to the status
quo offered to electorates is one between reactionary nationalism and progressive globalism—
then the Left has already lost the battle. Reclaiming the State It need not be this way, however.
As we argue in Reclaiming the State, a progressive, emancipatory vision of national sovereignty
radically alternative to that of both the Right and the neoliberals—one based on popular
sovereignty, democratic control over the economy, full employment, social justice,
redistribution from the rich to the poor, inclusivity, and more generally the socioecological
transformation of production and society—is possible. Indeed, it is necessary. As J. W. Mason writes:
Whatever [supranational] arrangements we can imagine in principle, the systems of social security, labor
regulation, environmental protection, and redistribution of income and wealth that in fact exist
are national in scope and are operated by national governments. By definition, any struggle to
preserve social democracy as it exists today is a struggle to defend national institutions.15 By
the same token, the struggle to defend the democratic sovereign from the
onslaught of neoliberal globalization is the only basis on which the Left can
be refounded, the nationalist Right challenged, and the rift between the
Left and its “natural” social base—the dispossessed—mended. To this end, the
Left also needs to abandon its obsession with identity politics and retrieve the “more
expansive, anti-hierarchical, egalitarian, class-sensitive, anti-capitalist understandings of
emancipation” that used to be its trademark. These emphases are, of course, not in
contradiction with the struggle against racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, and other forms of
oppression and discrimination.16 Fully embracing a progressive vision of sovereignty also means abandoning the many
false macroeconomic myths that plague left-wing and progressive thinkers. As we have mentioned, one of the most pervasive and
persistent myths is the assumption that governments are revenue-constrained. By buying into these myths, the Left has become
unable to articulate radical alternatives. However, radical alternatives are exactly what we need. As Perry Anderson recently noted:
“For anti-systemic movements of the Left in Europe”—though the same applies elsewhere as well—“the lesson of recent years is
If they are not to go on being outpaced by movements of the Right, they cannot afford to
clear.
be less radical in attacking the system, and must be more coherent in their opposition to it.”17 In
other words, the Left needs to get radical again. In Reclaiming the State, we provide what we consider to be the necessary
requirements—in theoretical, political, and institutional terms—for conceiving a political-institutional framework within which the
achievement of a socially and economically progressive agenda is technically possible. The following is required: (1) A correct
understanding of the capacities of monetarily sovereign (or currency-issuing) governments, and more specifically an understanding
that such governments are never revenue- or solvency-constrained, because they issue their own currency by legislative fiat and
therefore can never “run out of money” or become insolvent. These governments always have an unlimited capacity to spend in
their own currencies: that is, they can purchase whatever they like, as long as there are goods and services for sale in the currency
they issue, and can use their money-creating powers to underwrite massive investment in physical and social infrastructure. At the
very least, they can purchase all idle labor and put it back to productive use (for example, through a job guarantee). This, of course,
does not apply to countries that are part of the European Monetary Union. Understanding the operational reality of modern fiat
economies is therefore a conditio sine qua non for envisioning a progressive, emancipatory vision of national sovereignty. (2)
A
drastic expansion of the state’s role—and an equally drastic downsizing of the private sector’s
role—in the investment, production, and distribution system. A progressive agenda for the
twenty-first century must thus necessarily include a broad renationalization of key sectors of
the economy—including, and most importantly, the financial sector—and a new and updated
notion of planning, aimed at placing the commanding heights of economic policy under
democratic control. We consider this to be an equally necessary condition for the pursuit of a
progressive agenda and in particular for the socioecological transformation of production and
society that is desperately needed to deal with the ongoing and worsening environmental
crisis. These two elements, in our opinion, provide the foundations on which to build a radical and progressive alternative to
neoliberalism, the specific details of which should be the outcome of a broad debate among progressive thinkers, social movements,
it is clear that having a compelling
and political parties in each country and at the international level. Finally,
socioeconomic program is not enough to win over the hearts and minds of the people. Beyond
the centrality of the state from a political-economic point of view, the Left has to come to terms
with the fact that for the vast majority of people that do not belong—and never will belong—to
the globe-trotting international elite, their sense of citizenship, collective identity, and common
good is intrinsically and intimately tied to nationhood. Ultimately, being a citizen means to
deliberate with other citizens in a shared political community and hold decision-makers
accountable. The Right today is winning also because it is capable of weaving
powerful narratives of collective identity in which national sovereignty is
defined in nativist or even racist terms. Progressives must thus be able to provide
equally powerful narratives and myths, which recognize the human need for belonging and
connectedness. In this sense, a progressive vision of national sovereignty should aim to
reconstruct and redefine the national state as a place where citizens can seek refuge “in
democratic protection, popular rule, local autonomy, collective goods, and egalitarian
traditions” rather than in a culturally and ethnically homogenized society , as Wolfgang Streeck
argues.18 This is also the necessary prerequisite for the construction of a new international
order, based on interdependent but independent sovereign states.

Their theory can’t explain other racialized forms of violence that

emanate from the political culture of weapons– [tactics of mass death of
civilian populations in Iraq, North Korea, Vietnam, Latin America all
reflect unique ways that nuclear weapons are leveraged to enact racial
violence that the alt doesn’t explain] ~~

Their thesis is wrong – anti-black racism is a contingent function of

institutionalized social power, which can be dismantled through the
transformation of these institutions
Gordon ‘17 (Lewis, professor of philosophy with affiliations in Judaic studies, Caribbean
and Latina/o studies, and Asian and Asian American studies at UCONN-Storrs, The Oxford
Handbook of Philosophy and Race, pp. 296-298)
Should the analysis remain at white and black, the world would appear more closed than
it in fact is. For one, simply being born black would bar the possibility of any legitimate
appearance. This is a position that has been taken by a growing group of theorists known as
“Afro-pessimists” (Wilderson 2010; Sexton 2011). Black for them is absolute “social death:’
it is outside of relations. Missing from this view is; however, is at least what I argued in Bad
Faith and Antiblack Racism, which is that no human being is “really” any of these things;
the claim itself is a manifestation of mauvaise foi. The project of making people into such
is one thing. People actually becoming such is another. This is an observation Fanon also
makes in his formulation of the tone of nonbeing and his critique of Self—Other discourses
in Peau noir, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). Fanon distinguishes between the
zone of nonbeing (nonappearance as human beings) and those of being. ‘The latter
presumes a self-justified reality, which means it does not call itself into question. The
former faces the problem of illegitimate appearance (Fanon 1952, chapters; Gordon 1999;
AIcoir 2006; Yancy 2008). Thus, even the effort “to be” is in conflict as the system in
question presumes legitimate absence of certain groups. Yet, paradoxically, the human
being comes to the fore through emerging from being in the first place. Thus, the assertion
of being is also an effort to push the human being out of existence, so to speak. The racial
conflict is thus changed to an existential one in which an existential ontology is posed
against an ontology of being. Existential ontology pertains to human being, whereas
ontological being pertains to gods. This is why Fanon concludes that racism is also an attack
against human being, as it creates a world in which one set stands above others as gods and
the rest as below human. Where, in this formulation, stand human beings? The argument
itself gains some clarity with the etymology of “existence” which is from the Latin
expression exsístere (to stand out, to emerge -that is, to appear). Blacks thus face the
paradox of existing (standing out) as nonexistence (not standing out). The system of racism
renders black appearance illicit. This conundrum of racialized existence affects ethics and
morals. Ethical relations are premised on selves relating to another or others. The others
must, however, appear as such, and they too, manifest themselves as selves. Implicit in such
others as other selves is the formalization of ethical relations as equal. as found in the
thought of Immanuel Kant and shifted in deference to the other in that of Emmanuel
Levinas, Racism, however, excludes certain groups from being others and selves (if
interpreted as being of a kind similar to the presumed legitimate selves). Thus, the schema
of racism is one in which the hegemonic group relates to its members as selves and others,
whereas the nonhegemonic groups are neither selves nor others. They, in effect, could only
be such in relation to each other. It is, in other words, a form of ontological segregation as a
condition of ethics and morals. The fight against racism, then, does not work as a fight
against being others or The Other. It is a fight against being nonothers. Fanon’s insight
demands an additional clarification. Racists should be distinguished from racism. Racists
are people who hold beliefs about the superiority and inferiority of certain groups of
racially designated people. Racism is the system of institutions and social norms that
empower individuals with such beliefs. Without that system, a racist would simply be an
obnoxious, whether overtly deprecating or patronizing, individual. With that system, racist
points of view affect the social world as reality. Without that system, racists ultimately
become inconsequential and, in a word, irrelevant beyond personal concerns of saving
their souls from unethical and immoral beliefs and choices. Fanon was concerned with
racists in his capacity as a psychiatrist (therapy, if necessary). but he was also concerned
with racism as a philosopher, social thinker, and revolutionary (Fanon 1959/1975). The
latter, in other words, is a system, from an antiracism perspective, in need of eradication. An
objection to the Afro-pessimistic assertion of blackness as social death could thus be raised
from a Fanonian phenomenological perspective: Why must the social world be premised
on the attitudes and perspectives of antiblack racists? Why don’t blacks among each other
and other communities of color count as a social perspective? And if the question of racism
is a function of power, why not offer a study of power, how it is gained and lost, instead of
an assertion of its manifestations as ontological? An additional problem with the Afro-
pessimistic model is that its proponents treat “blackness” as though it could exist
independent of other categories. A quick examination of double consciousness (Du Bois
1903)—a phenomenological concept if there ever were one by virtue of the focus on forms
of consciousness and, better, that of which one is conscious, that is, intentionality would
reveal why this would not work. Double conscious ness involves seeing oneself from the
perspective of another that deems one as negative (for example, the Afro-pessimistic
conception of blackness). That there is already another perspective makes the subject who
lives through double consciousness relational. Added is what Paget Henry (2005) calls
polemic, ted double consciousness and Nahum Chandler (2014, 6o—6i) calls the redoubled
gesture, which is the realization that the condemnation of negative meaning means that one
must not do what the Afro pessimist does. Seeing that that position is false moves one
dialectically forward into asking about the system that attempts to force one into such an
identity: This relational matter requires looking beyond blackness ironically in order to
understand blackness. This means moving from the conception of meaning as singular,
substance-based, fixed, and semantical into the grammar of how meaning is produced. Such
grammars, such as that of gender, emerge in interesting ways (Gordon 1999, 124—129;
1997,73—74). However, as all human beings are manifestations of different dimensions of
meaning, the question of identity requires more than an intersecting model; otherwise
there will simply be one (a priori) normative outcome in every moment of inquiry:
whoever manifests the maximum manifestation of predetermined negative
intersecting terms. That would in effect be an essence before an existence indeed, before
an actual event of harm. This observation emerges as well with the Afro-pessimist model
when one thinks of pessimism as the guiding attitude. The existential
phenomenological critique would be that optimism and pessimism are symptomatic of
the same attitude: a priori assertions on reality. Human existence is contingent but not
accidental, which means that the social world at hand is a manifestation of choices and
relationships in other words, human actions. Because human beings can only build the
future instead of it determining us, the task at hand, as phenomenology-oriented
existentialists from Beauvoir and Sartre to Fanon, William R. Jones, and this author have
argued, depends on commitment. This concern also pertains to the initial concerns about
authenticity discourses with which I began. One could only be pessimistic about an
outcome, an activity. It is an act of forecasting what could only be meaningful once actually
performed. Similarly, one could only be optimistic about the same. What however, if there
were no way to know either? Here we come to the foi element in mauvaise foi. Some
actions are deontological, and if not that, they are at least reflections of our commitments,
our projects. Thus, the point of some actions is not about their success or failure but
whether we deem them worth doing. Taking responsibility for such actions—bringing
value to them— is opposed to another manifestation of mauvaise foi: the spirit of
seriousness.
Framing issue – if anti-blackness is axiomatic and fixed, the alternative
doesn’t reverse that, and if anti-blackness is malleable, voting neg only
cements anti-blackness and entrenches racism.

Universal liberal principles shape the best ethical and practical

platform for emancipatory change, and racial oppression is a product of
contingent inequalities in distribution of power rather than an
inevitable consequence of enlightenment thought. They abandon
essential normative and conceptual resources for creating an
egalitarian future.
Mills 17 (Charles, a Caribbean philosopher from Jamaica. He is known for his work in social and political philosophy, particularly in
oppositional political theory as centred on class, gender, and race. “Occupy Liberalism!”, Black Rights/White Wrongs, Kindle)

The “Occupy!” movement, which has made headlines around the country, has raised the hopes of young American radicals new to political
engagement and revived the hopes of an older generation of radicals still clinging to nostalgic dreams of the glorious ’603. If the original and still
most salient target was Wall Street, a long list of other candidates for “occupation” has since been put forward. In this essay, I
want to
propose as a target for radical occupation the somewhat unusual candidate of liberalism
itself. But contrary to the conventional wisdom prevailing within radical circles, I am going to
argue for the heretical thesis that liberalism should not be contemptuously rejected
by radicals but retrieved for a radical agenda. Summarized in bullet-point form, my argument is as follows: 0 The
“Occupy Wall Street" movement provides an opportunity unprecedented in decades to build a broad
democratic movement to challenge plutocracy, patriarchy, and white supremacy in the
United States. 0 Such a movement is more likely to be successful if it appeals to principles
and values most Americans already endorse. o Liberalism has always been the dominant ideology in the United States.
- Liberalism in the United States has historically been complicit with plutocracy, patriarchy,
and white supremacy, but this complicity is a contingent function of dominant group
interests rather than the result of an immanent conceptual logic . Therefore
progressives in philosophy [and elsewhere) should try to retrieve liberalism for a radical
democratic agenda rather than rejecting it, thereby positioning themselves in the ideological mainstream of the
country and seeking its transformation. Let me now try to make this argument plausible for an
audience likely to be aprioristically convinced of its obvious unsoundness. Preliminary
Clarification of Terms First we need to clarify the key terms of “radicalism” and “liberalism.” While of course a radicalism of the right exists, I
mean to refer here to radicals who are progressives. But “progressive” cannot just denote the left of the political spectrum, since the whole point
of the “new social movements” of the 19 605 onwards was that the traditional left-right political spectrum, predicated on varying positions on
the question of public vs. private ownership, did not ex- haust the topography of the political. Issues of gender and racial domination were to a
significant extent “orthogonal” to this one-dimensional trope. So I will use “radicalism” broadly, though still in the zone of progressive politics, to
refer generally to ideas/ concepts / principles/values endorsing pro-egalitari- an structural change to reduce or eliminate unjust hierarchies of
domination. “Liberalism” may denote both a political philosophy and the institutions and practices characteristically tied to that political
philosophy. My focus will be on the former. The issue of how bureaucratic logics may prove refractory to reformist agendas is undeniably an
important one, but it does not really fall into the purview of philosophy proper. My aim is to challenge the radical Shibboleth that radical ideas /
concepts/ principles/values are incompatible with liberalism. Given the deep entrenchment of this assumption in the worldview of most
radicals, refuting it would still be an accomplishment, even if working out practical details of operationalization are delegated to other hands. In
the United States, of course, “liberalism” in public parlance and everyday political discourse is used in such a way that it really denotes left-
liberalism specifically (“left” by the standards of a country whose center of gravity has shifted right in recent decades]. In this vocabulary, right-
liberals are then categorized as “conservatives”—in the market sense, as against the Burkean sense. On the other hand, some on the right would
insist that only they, the heirs to the classic liberalism of John Locke and Adam Smith, are re- ally entitled to the “liberal” designation. Later
welfarist theorists are fraudu- lent pretenders to be exposed as socialist intruders unworthy of the title. Re- jecting both of these usages, I will be
employing “liberalism” in the expanded sense typical of political philosophy, which links both ends of this spectrum. “Liberalism” then refers
broadly to the anti-feudal ideology of individual- ism, equal rights, and moral egalitarianism that arises in Western Europe in the seventeenth to
eighteenth centuries to challenge the ideas and values inherited from the old medieval order, and which is subsequently taken up and develped
by others elsewhere, including many who would have been explicitly excluded by the original conception of the ideology. Left-wing so- cial
democrats and right—wing market conservatives, fans of John Rawls on the one hand and Robert Nozick on the other, are thus both liberals.1
From this perspective, it will be appreciated that liberalism is not a monolith but an umbrella term for a variety of positions. Here are some ex-
amples—some familiar, some perhaps less so: Varieties of Liberalism Left-wing [social democratic) vs. Right-wing
(market conservative) Kantian vs. Lockean Contractarian vs. Utilitarian Corporate vs. Democratic Social vs. Individualist Comprehensive vs.
Political Ideal-theory vs. Non-ideal-theory Patriarchal vs. Feminist Imperial
vs. Anti-imperial Racial vs. Anti-racial
Color-blind vs. Color-conscious Etc. It is not the case, of course, that these different species of liberalism have been equally
represented in the ideational sphere, or equally implemented in the institutional sphere. On the contrary, some have been dominant while others
have been subordinate, and some have never, at least in the full sense, been implemented at all. But nonetheless, I suggest they
all count
as liberalisms and as such they are all supposed to have certain elements in common, even
those characterized by gender and racial exclusions . (My motivation for making these last varieties of liberalism
rather than deviations from liberalism is precisely to challenge liberalism’s self- congratulatory history, which holds an idealized Platonized
liberalism aloft, untainted by its actual record of complicity with oppressive social systems.) So the
initial question we
should always ask people making generalizations about “liberalism” is: What
particular variety of liberalism do you mean? And are your generalizations really true
about all the possible kinds of liberalism, or only a subset? Here is a characterization of
liberalism from a very respectable source, the British political theorist, John Gray: Common
to all variants of the liberal tradition is a definite conception, distinctively modern in character, of man
and society. . . . It is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the
claims of any social collectivity; egalitarian, inasmuch as it confers on all men the same moral
status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among
human beings; universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and
according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms; and
meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social
institutions and political arrangements . It is this conception of man and society which gives liberalism a definite
identity which transcends its vast internal variety and complexity.2 What generate the different varieties of liberalism are different concepts of
individualism, different claims about how egalitarianism should be con- strued or realized, more or less inclusionary readings of universalism
[Gray’s characterization sanitizes liberalism’s actual sexist and racist history), dif- ferent views of what count as desirable improvements,
conflicting normative balancings of liberal values (freedom, equality) and competing theoretical prognoses about how best they can be realized
in the light of (contested) soda-historical facts. The huge potential for disagreement about all of these explains how a common liberal core can
produce such a wide range of vari- ants. Moreover, we
need to take into account not merely the spectrum of
actual liberalisms but also hypothetical liberalisms that could be generated through novel
framings of some or all of the above. So one would need to differentiate dominant versions of liberalism from Oppositional
versions, and actual from possible variants. Once the breadth of the range of liberalisms is appreciated—dominant and subordinate, actual and
potential—the obvious question then raised is: Even if actual dominant liberalisms have been conservative in
various ways (corporate, patriarchal, racist) why does this rule out the development of
emancipatory, radical liberalisms? One kind of answer is the following [call this the internalist
answer): Because there is an immanent conceptual/ normative logic to liberalism as a political
ideology that precludes any emancipatory development of it. Another kind of answer is the
following [call this the externalist an- swer): It doesn't. The historic domination of conservative
exclusionary lib- eralisms is the result of group interests, group power, and successful
group political projects. Apparent internal conceptual /normative barriers to an
emancipatory liberalism can be successfully negotiated by drawing on the
conceptual/normative resources of liberalism itself , in conjunction with a revisionist socio-historical picture
of modernity. Most self-described radicals would endorse —indeed, reflexively, as an obvious truth-the first
answer. But as indicated from the beginning, I think the second answer is actually the correct one. The
obstacles to developing a “radical liberalism” are, in my opinion, primarily externalist in
nature: material group interests, and the way they have shaped hegemonic varieties of
liberalism. So I think we need to try to justify a radical agenda with the normative
resources of liberalism rather than writing off liberalism . Since liberalism has always been the dominant
ideology in the United States, and is now globally hegemonic, such a project would have the great ideological
advantage of appealing to values and principles that most people already endorse. All
projects of egalitarian social transformation are going to face a combination of material,
political, and ideological obstacles, but this strategy would at least reduce somewhat the
dimensions of the last. One would be trying to win mass support for policies that—and the challenge will, of course, be to
demonstrate this—are justifiable by majoritarian norms, once reconceived and put in conjunction with facts not always familiar to the majority.
Material barriers [vested group interests) and political barriers [organizational difficulties)
will of course remain. But they will constitute a general obstacle for all egalitarian political
programs, and as such cannot be claimed to be peculiar problems for an emancipatory
liberalism. But the contention will be that such a liberalism cannot be developed . Why? Here are ten
familiar objections, variants of internalism, and my re- plies to them. Ten Reasons Why Liberalism Cannot Be
Radicalized (And My Replies) 1. Liberalism Has an Asocial, Atomic Individualist Ontology This is one of the oldest radical
critiques of liberalism; it can be found in Marx’s derisive comments, for example in the Grundrisse, about the “Robin- sonades” of the social
contract theory whose “golden age” [1650—1800) had long passed by the time he began his intellectual and political career: The individual and
isolated hunter or fisher who forms the starting-point with Smith and Ricardo belongs to the insipid illusions of the eighteenth century. They are
Robinson Crusoe stories . . . . no more based on such a naturalism than is Rousseau’s contrat social which makes naturally inde— pendent
individuals come in contact and have mutual intercourse by con- tract... . . Man is in the most literal sense of the word a zoon politikon, not only a
social animal, but an animal which can develop into an individual only in society. Production by individuals outside society . . . is as great an
absurdity as the idea of the development of language without individuals living together and talking to one another.3 But several replies can be
made to this indictment. To begin with, even if the accusation is true of contractarian liberalism, not all liberalisms are contractarian. Utilitarian
liberalism rests on different theoretical founda- tions, as does the late nineteenth—century British liberalism of T. H. Green and his colleagues: a
l-legelian, social liberalism.4 Closer to home, of course, we have [ohn Dewey’s brand of liberalism. MoreOver, even within the so- cial contract
tradition, resources exist for contesting the assumptions of the Hobbesian/Lockean version of the contract. Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins
of Inequality [1755) (nowhere given proper credit by Marxs) re- thinks the “contract” to make it a contract entered into after the formation of
society, and thus the creation of socialized human beings. So the ontology presupposed is explicitly a social one. In any case, the contemporary
revival of contractarianism initiated by John Rawls's 1971 A Theory of ] ustice makes the contract a thought experiment, a “device of
representation," rather than a literal or even metaphorical anthropological account. The communitar- ian/contractarian debates of the 19805
onwards recapitulated much of the “asocial” critique of contractarian liberalism (though usually without a radi- cal edge). But as Rawls pointed
out against Michael Sandel, for example, one needs to distinguish the figures in the thought experiment from real hu- man beings.6 And radicals
should be wary about accepting a communitarian ontology and claims about the general good that deny or marginalize the dynamics of group
domination in actual societies represented as “communi- ties.” The great virtue of contractarian liberal individualism is the conceptu- al room it
provides for hegemonic norms to be critically evaluatedthrough the epistemic and moral distancing from Sittiichkeit that the contract, as an
intellectual device, provides. 2. Liberalism Cannot Recognize Groups and Group Oppression in Its
Ontology—I (Macro) The second point needs to be logically distinguished from the first, since a theory could acknowledge the social
shaping of individuals while denying that group oppression is central to that shaping. [So #1 is necessary, but not sufficient, for #2.) The
Marxist critique, of course, was supposed to encapsulate both points: people were shaped by society and
society (post- “primitive communism") was class-dominated. The ontology was social and it was an
ontology of class. Today radicals would demand a richer ontology that can accommodate the
realities of gender and racial oppression also. But whatever candidates are put forward, the ‘key claim is that a
liberal frame- work cannot accommodate an ontology of groups in relations of
domination and subordination. To the extent that liberalism recognizes social groups, these are basically conceived of as
voluntary associations that one chooses to join or not join, which is obviously very different from, say, class, race, and gender memberships. But
this evasive ontology, which obfuscates the most central and obvious fact about all societies since humanity exited the hunting-and-
gathering stage—viz, that they are characterized by oppressions of one kind or another— is not a definitional constituent of
liberalism. Liberalism has certainly recognized some kinds of oppression : the absolutism it opposed in
the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the Nazism and Stalinism it opposed in the twentieth century. Liberalism’s failure to
systematically address structural oppression in supposedly liberal-democratic societies is a
contingent artifact of the group perspectives and group interests privileged by those
structures, not an intrinsic feature of liberalism’s conceptual apparatus .

Faith in ending white supremacy is necessary – we can be hopeful without

being certain. They invert American exceptionalism and lock in white
supremecy.
Rogers 11/1 [Melvin Rogers, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University.
He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy,
Keeping the Faith, November 1, 2017, Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/race/melvin-
rogers-keeping-faith]
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, is his clearest expression yet of political fatalism—his “deeply held
belief that white supremacy was so foundational to this country that it would not be defeated in my lifetime, my child's lifetime, or perhaps ever.” As in
Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), we
again encounter white supremacy not as a political ideology, but
as the defining feature of the U.S. polity—its essential nature .

The book comprises previously published essays—one for each of the eight years Barack Obama
held the presidency—prefaced by moving biographical and personal meditations that give each
chapter philosophical weight. Taken together, it is about Obama and the United States—and it is
about Coates.

It charts the course of Coates’s career from a time when he could not make ends meet to his
recent position of speaking for and to Americans about Black America. Obama’s presidency
made this possible; it opened the door for a “crop of black writers and journalists who achieved
prominence during his two terms.” This is also a book about shattering a great illusion—the idea
that Obama’s presidency represented black power. “Obama, his family, and his administration
were a walking advertisement for the ease with which black people could be fully integrated
into the unthreatening mainstream of American culture, politics, and myth. And that was always
the problem.”

For Coates, Obama represented a possibility that had always been denied, the idea that a black
American could one day inhabit the highest office of the land. And if a black American could be
president, couldn’t the United States be more than the explicit racism of its past and the
institutional racism of its present? Coates himself was taken by this seductive idea, something
he laments throughout the book. As he explains:

It is not so much that I logically reasoned out that Obama’s election would author a post-racist
age. But it now seemed possible that white supremacy, the scourge of American history might
well be banished in my lifetime. In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be
isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and
essential to that body.

Herein lies the explanation for why a man who curries favor with white supremacists assumed
the presidency after Obama. Donald Trump’s ascendancy was a virulent reaction not only to
Obama, but to the idea that his presidency signaled the country’s embrace of a multiracial
polity.

The running theme in Coates’s book is that white supremacy is native and essential. It is the
source of his motivation. Coates’s goal is to distance both black Americans and himself from
thinking of white supremacy as a focus of transformative politics. And his theme should guard
against the familiar tendency to deny the national past by invoking its ever-present commitment
to redemption. Sometimes denial comes in the form of efforts to sanitize history, Coates tells us,
as was the case with Americans seeking to reconcile themselves to a civil war that was about
rights, or railroads, or tariffs—anything but race. But denial also comes in the form of believing
in “an arc of cosmic justice,” the sense “that good acts were rewarded and bad deeds punished .
. . ” Coates argues instead that U.S. history is merely the record of its fundamental nature.
Transcendent stories cannot relieve us of this burden.

For Coates, the desire to transform the U nited States reflects a naïve religious longing. When Coates tells us
that “cosmic justice, collective hope, and national redemption” are meaningless to him, he is asking black Americans to resist the temptation to allow
those things (which all seem to be interchangeable throughout the book) to have meaning for them. This is his “black atheism.” It removes the desire to
appeal to white Americans because it removes the belief that white Americans are “interested listeners” (even if they are regular readers). In doing so,
black Americans arm themselves against disappointment because they drop their “expectations of white people . . . ”

Challenging Coates is difficult, not because of the assuredness of his analysis, but because of his reputation as “America’s best writer on race.” Coates
bristles at this reputation, but he has also embraced his status. He has mastered the balance between speaking to black pain and suffering
(acknowledgement, after all, is so central to one's ethical and political standing in a community otherwise defined by disregarding black life) and
lacerating a class of white Americans, many of whom perversely see such attacks as moments of cathartic release.

This is as Coates intends. Similar to his affection for hip-hop music—the way in which he was captured and captivated by the lyricism of its artists—he
seeks to deploy his writings as a talisman. “Out here,” he tells us, “in the concrete and real, sentences should be supernatural, words strung together
until they compelled any listener to repeat them at odd hours . . . ” Coates understands the power of music, and from his love for it, he crafted his
“earliest sense of what writing should mean.” His audience is captured precisely because his words are incantations that leave them spellbound.

But when the United States selects its eloquent spokesperson on the “race issue”—as it always does—all other voices become mere noise, and the
complexity of our political traditions and our lived experiences are flattened out. In Coates’s view, for instance, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, and
Martin Luther King Jr. were all failures. They performed the same script, they failed to move their audience to action, and they never reshaped U.S. life
and culture. “All of these heroes,” Coates insists, “had failed to cajole and coerce the masters of America.” In Coates’s telling, fine historical distinctions
disappear, time stands still, and the past and future collapse into the political horrors of the present.

This is what happens when we listen only to a single voice; no conversation is possible. We are disabled from speaking thoughtfully and accurately
about political and cultural transformation on racial matters.

But there is a sleight of hand in Coates’s “black atheism”; it conflates hope with certainty, and hope
becomes our fatal flaw. Yet we don’t need to believe that progress is inevitable to think that ,
through our efforts, we may be able to move toward a more just society. We can, however, be
sure that no good will come of the refusal to engage in this work .

Coates describes the pain visited on black bodies and engenders

There is much in this that should concern us.

white guilt. He erodes the idea that who we are need not determine who we may become. He obstructs rather than opens
any attempt to reckon with our racial past and present in the service of an inclusive future. And
he participates in a politics where words and actions can never aspire to change the political
community in which we live, and for that reason they only fortify our indignation and deepen
our suspicion—namely, that as black Americans, we are as alien to this polity as it is alien to us .
The aspiration to defend a more exalted vision of this country’s ethical and political life is
taken as the hallmark of being asleep, dreaming in religious illusions. To be alive to an unvarnished reality,
to be woke, is to recognize that no such country is possible .

This runs roughshod over that thread in the grand tradition of U.S. struggles for justice—a
tradition in which hope and faith are forged through political darkness . Hope involves
attachment and commitment to the possibility of realizing the goods we seek .

Faith is of a broader significance, providing hope with content. Faith, the black scholar Anna Julia
Cooper suggested in 1892, is grounded in a vision of political and ethical life that is at odds
with the community one inhabits. It is a vision that one believes ought to command allegiance, for which one is willing to fight, and
in which one believes others can find a home. Faith looks on the present from the perspective of a future vision of

society, and uses the vision as a resource to remake the present . And so faith, the philosopher and psychologist William
James explained in 1897, is “the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.” In other words, faith has
never been exhausted by the political reality one happens to be living in.
Political faith has always rested on the idea that we are not finished , a thought that Coates rejects out of hand. In
the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson called this capacity for human renewal “ascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms.” In

our political life this means, as James Baldwin well knew, that both our liberal democratic
institutions and its culture “depends on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever,
every day.”

Faith has always been a loving but difficult commitment precisely because it makes politics
about maybes rather than certainties . One of the greatest dangers of U.S. exceptionalism , for
instance, is that it has habituated us to think about the structure of political life as necessarily

progressing. Writing in the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott —a successful nonviolent campaign against racial
segregation—King sought to chasten the obvious excitement: “Human progress is neither automatic

nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.”

Yet Coates appears simply to invert U.S. exceptionalism, replacing it with the equally fatalistic
idea that the United States is fundamentally broken. In a world where the good or bad is fated to happen, faith and hope have
no foothold. This ultimately weakens our resolve and undermines our ability to take seriously the

idea of an “American experiment.”

Black activists have not forged their faith with the stone of U.S. exceptionalism . Rather, they
have used their darkest hours to “make a way out of no way ”—to address the triple crises of
exclusion, domination, and violence. Abolitionists such as David Walker faced it in the form of the
enslavement of black folks. Frederick Douglass encountered it with the rise and crash of
reconstruction. Wells faced it as she confronted the horror of lynchi ng and the disposability of black life. And
in our own time, Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists are reminded of a similar disposability of black life
that goes unpunished.

And yet, they are keepers of the faith, recognizing that its vitality is not exhausted by the
reality they struggle against. In her recent New York Times article, “Black Lives Matter Is Democracy in Action,” Barbara Ransby
narrates a powerful account of BLM activists creating contexts for collective leadership and using those opportunities to transform the power of voice
into actions that meet the needs of ordinary people. This effort would be impossible for people who accept Coates’s perspective. Their efforts may not
win the day, but they certainly won’t win the day without the faith that winning is a possibility.

Faith does not deny the present, but refuses to be defined by it and sink into it . We now face a
president who seeks to colonize every waking moment of our lives with feelings of dread, thus arresting our ability to
imagine a reality beyond television, social media feeds, and newspapers . The illusion of our present moment is not

expressed in political faith, but in the belief that we can respond constructively without such
faith. Political faith is fully realistic about the present disasters and rejects illusions about
assured future progress, while also insisting that we are not certain to fail. It is hopeful
without being optimistic.

We may falter, and the material, psychological, and political goods of white supremacy may
deplete our desire to transform. We know the history—from the 1880s to the 1960s—of white backlash in response to a more
expansive racial justice. In fact, we are living through one such backlash given the ascendancy of Trump. But our political community is

what it is because we have made it this way. It is not fated to be. Believing otherwise makes
white supremacy something more than a collection of choices, habits, and practices —it makes it
part of human nature itself. Coates wants us to face the facts and embrace black atheism. But throughout the book he often slides from
working in the historical register to speaking in the idiom of philosophical metaphysics—at one moment he stands in time and at another he stands
outside of it, confidently telling us how history will end. For this reason, Coates doesn't dismantle white supremacy; he ironically provides it with
support.
Please understand my concern. Coates
is right: he doesn’t have a “responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic
or make anyone feel better about the world. ” We must, as he has often done, speak the truth. But we must not
claim to know what we cannot possibly know. Humility creates space for hope .

This is why James Baldwin remains so helpful and why his work is ubiquitous these days. The United States, he insisted, is a
collection of choices. And precisely for this reason, we must learn how to let go of former identities as we quest after better ones. He was
not a political strategist, but a keen observer and analyst of U.S. political and ethical culture and in this regard, his writings are directed to cultivating a
new orientation. Baldwin’s insight for us was that we find it challenging to live together precisely because we have not always understood what it
means to allow features of ourselves to perish. In depicting our many selves, Baldwin reduces the burden of letting go. If there is only one self at stake,
as Coates believes, if white supremacy is the country’s only identity, then letting go is entering an abyss.