Revolutionary politics within a black/white binary ensures that Latino/as remain invisible within their oppression—this renders them as spectators in the struggle for their own liberation that will always failPerea 1997 (Juan, Professor of Law, University of Florida College of Law, “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The Normal Science of American Racial Thought,” California Law Review, October, p.1250-1252)I n the context of constitutional law, the paradigmatic presentation of the evolution of equality jurisprudence virtually guarantee s that students will learn nothing about the history of racism and "separate but equal" segregation against Mexican Americans nor about the federal cases in which the courts found such segregation unconstitutional. How many of my present readers are aware that Mexican Americans, like Blacks, were lynched frequently? 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. The paradigmatic, truncated presentation of racial and legal history that results from the Black/White binary paradigm ensures that most readers will never learn anything about Mexican American struggles for equality . A presentation of this omitted history, on the other hand, would present law students with a more complex and accurate sense of the scope of racism and the multiple struggles mounted against it. Cases such as Lopez, Mendez and Hernandez should be included in every book that discusses racism and segregation, especially books on constitutional law. Omit these cases, omit this history, and the vast majority of law students (and many law teachers) will have no clue that the Mexican-American struggle against segregation has been long and hard-fought in the courts. Omit these cases and most law students will have no clue that the Mexican American struggle against segregation has a place in our constitutional history. Omit these cases and we get the story of the struggle for equality told only in Black and White. We get only the paradigm, not the picture. I have shown that the tendency to present a linear story of the development of equality doctrines corresponding to the Black/White paradigm leads to the omission of Mexican-American history. Robert Blauner describes more generally the omission of Chicano history by White scholars, which leads directly to reproduction of the Black/White paradigm and public ignorance about Latinos/as: Even informed Anglos [and Blacks] know almost nothing about La Raza, its historical experience, its present situation, its collective moods. And the average citizen doesn't have the foggiest notion that Chicanos have been lynched in the Southwest and continue to be abused by the police, that an entire population has been exploited economically, dominated politically, and raped culturally. In spite of the racism that attempts to wipe out or, failing that, distort and trivialize the history and culture of the colonized, both expert and man in the street are far more aware of the past and present oppression suffered by blacks. Blauner refers to this continuing omission as " academic colonialism" by White scholars who persist in ignoring the history and problems encountered by Mexican Americans. Similar "academic colonialism" exists among constitutional law casebook authors who persist in omitting significant developments in constitutional law and history affecting Latinos/as, for the sake of a linear story within the Black/White binary paradigm . I want to know how casebook authors of constitutional law can justify leaving out the legal history I have described above. Do they deem it unimportant? If the reason for omitting Mexican-American legal history is a judgment that it is unimportant, how was that conclusion reached? Adding this history presents a radically different picture of Latinos/as and Blacks struggling for equality and desegregation, and demonstrates some coalition between Latinos/as and Blacks in the struggle. Omitting this history offers us only a paradigmatic and distorted history in Black and White. The burden should be on constitutional law casebook authors to justify their decisions to omit this material, because its omission leads directly to a distorted picture of

Latinos/as as non-participants and "spectators" in the struggle for civil rights.

Legalization of marijuana is a useful starting point to end the drug war---technical debates allow radical transformation that benefits minorities more than the privilegedNeill Franklin 14, Executive Director of Law, Enforcement Against Prohibition, "3 Reasons Marijuana Legalization in Colorado Is Good for People for Color", 1/23, www.huffingtonpost.com/neill-franklin/marijuana-legalization-race-racism-minorities_b_4651456.htmlFor the first time, President Obama acknowledged this week that the prohibition of marijuana is unfairly enforced against African-Americans and Latinos, and for that reason, he says, legalization in Colorado and Washington should go forward. Without explicitly endorsing the laws, he told the New Yorker, "it's important for [them] to go forward because it's important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time

or another broken the law and only a select few get punished."¶ ¶ As the president acknowledged, marijuana prohibition targets black and brown people (even

though marijuana users are equally or more likely to be white). Ending prohibition through passing legalization laws , as Colorado and Washington have, will

reduce this racial disparity .¶ The war on drugs, as we all know, has led to mass criminalization and incarceration

for people of color. The legalization of marijuana , which took effect for the first time in the country in Colorado on January 1, is one step

toward ending that war. While the new law won't eradicate systemic racism in our criminal justice

system completely, it is one of the most effective thing s we can do to address it . Here are three concrete ways that

Colorado's law is good for people of color.¶ 1. The new law means there will be no more arrests for marijuana possession in Colorado.¶ Under Colorado's new law, residents 21 or older can produce, possess, use and sell up to an ounce of marijuana at a time. This change will have a real and measurable impact on people of color in Colorado, where the racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests have been reprehensible. In the last ten years, Colorado police arrested blacks for marijuana possession at more than three times the rate they arrested whites, even though whites used marijuana at higher rates. As noted by the NAACP in its endorsement of the legalization law, it's particularly bad in Denver, where almost one-third of the people arrested for

private adult possession marijuana are black, though they make up only 11% of the population.¶ These arrests can have devastating and long-lasting consequences. An arrest record can affect the ability to get a job, housing, student loans and public benefits. As law professor Michelle Alexander describes, people (largely black and brown) who acquire a criminal record simply for being caught with marijuana are relegated to a permanent second-class status. When we make marijuana legal, we stop those arrests from happening.¶ 2. Unlike under decriminalization , the new law means there will be no more arrests for mere marijuana possession in Colorado, period.¶ In the Jan. 6 article "#Breaking Black: Why Colorado's weed laws may backfire for black Americans," Goldie Taylor mistakenly suggests that Colorado's new legalization law may "further tip the scales in favor of a privileged class already largely safe from criminalization." Much of the stubborn "this-changes-nothing" belief

about the new law stems from confusion between decriminalization and legalization . There is a profound difference between the hodgepodge of laws known collectively as "decriminalization" passed in

several states over the past 30 years, and Colorado's unprecedented legalization law. Decriminalization usually refers to a change in the law which removes criminal but not civil penalties for marijuana possession, allowing police to issue civil fines (similar

to speeding tickets), or require drug education or expensive treatment programs in lieu of being arrested.¶ Because of the ambiguity in some states with decriminalization, cops still arrest users with small amounts of marijuana due to technicalitie s , such

as having illegal paraphernalia, or for having marijuana in "public view" after asking them to empty their pockets. One only need look as far as the infamous stop-and-frisk law in New York, where marijuana is decriminalized, to see how these ambiguities might be abused to the detriment of people of color.¶ In Colorado, however, the marijuana industry is now legal and above-ground. People therefore have a right to possess and use marijuana products , although as with alcohol,

there are restrictions relating to things like age, driving, and public use. Police won't be able to racially profile by claiming they smelled

marijuana or saw it in plain view.¶ 3. We will reduce real problems associated with the illicit market .¶ As marijuana users shift to

making purchases at regulated stores, we'll start to see improvement in problems that were blamed on marijuana but are in fact consequences of its prohibition. The violence related to the street-corner drug trade will begin

to fall as the illicit market is slowly replaced by well-guarded stores with cameras and security systems. And consumers will now know what they're getting; instead of buying whatever's in a baggie, they have the benefit of

choosing from a wide variety of marijuana products at the price level and potency they desire.¶ Goldie Taylor made the dubious claim that since marijuana prices were initially high in Colorado's new stores, the creation of a legal market won't affect the existing illicit market. But despite sensational headlines, prices for marijuana are just like anything else. They respond to levels of supply and demand. In the first couple weeks, prices were high because only a small fraction of marijuana businesses in Colorado opened, and what looked like every user in the state was in line to make a purchase on the day the historic law took effect. As the novelty-fueled demand levels off and the rest of the stores across the state begin to open, increasing supply, prices will drop. For their money, purchasers can conveniently buy a product they know is tested and unadulterated. And for those who don't want to buy at a store, Colorado residents over 21 are permitted to grow up to six marijuana plants at home.

Connecting our critiques to an advocacy of the legalization of marijuana uniquely provides a training ground for broader reform---legalization is vital and allows effective coalition-buildingKatherine Tate 14, Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine, Something's in the Air: Race, Crime, and the Legalization of Marijuana, pg. 9For increasing numbers of Americans, l egalization of personal- use marijuana is the only alternative to draconian laws drawn up in the "war on drugs" regime of the past three decade s . It is well established that concern and paranoia over petty "crack" cocaine arrests for sales, possession, and use drove the mass warehousing of California's prisons and jail populations to become the largest in the United States (Lusane 1991: Provine 2007:

Reinerman and Levine 1997: Weatherspoon 1998: Weaver 2007). Miller (2008) contends that the U.S. federal system of crime control has left minority citizens less able to challenge unfair sentencing laws. Noting that marijuana possession constituted nearly 8 of 10 drug- related arrests in the 1990s. Michelle Alexander (2010) insists that this period of "unprecedented punitiveness" resulted "in prison sentences (rather than dismissal, community service, or probation)" to the degree that "in two short decades, between 1980 and 2000 the number of people incarcerated in our nation's prisons and jails soared from roughly 300.000 to more than 2 million. By the end of 2007, more than 7 million Americans—or one in every 31 adults— were behind bars, on probation, or parole" (Alexander 2010. 59). Pushed by drug prosecutions, the rising rate of incarceration reached unprecedented levels in the 1990s . Today's movement toward more prisons, mandatory minimums and reinstatement of the death penalty logically followed the racially exploitative "law and order" campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s (Murakawa 2008). Conservative American politicians use the mythical Black or Hispanic male drug dealer, like the Black female welfare queen, to drum up votes. A widespread consensus in

reported government statistics, advocacy studies, and policy think tanks suggests that African Americans bear the brunt of law-and-order management of U.S. marijuana laws because of how marijuana use is racialized . Political scientist Doris Provine contends

that the U.S. government increased its punitive response toward drug use as a response to racial fears and stereotypes. She writes: "[d]rugs remain, symbolically, a menace to white, middle-class values" (2007. 89). Both

politicians and media have used this issue to construct a crisis and sustain punitive state drug laws. The war on drugs, she concludes, has greatly harmed minority citizens through their imprisonment, contributing to deep inequalities in education, housing, health care, and equal opportunities to advance economically. The facts of use. sales, and possession, confirmed by academic and critical legal studies literature, are strikingly different from how the national and local media choose to present them. One study focusing on marijuana initiate found "among Blacks, the annual incidence rate (per 1.000 potential new users) increased from 8.0 in 1966 to 16.7 in 1968. reached a peak at about the same time as "Whites" (19.4 in 1976). then remained high throughout the late 1970s. Following the low rates in the 1980s, rates among Blacks rose again in the early 1990s, reached a peak in 1997 and 1998 (19.2 and 19.1. respectively), then dropped to 14.0 in 1999. Similar to the general pattern for Whites and Blacks. Hispanics' annual incidence rate rose during late 1970s and 1990s, with a peak in 1998 (17.8)" (National Survey on Drug Use 1999).

Individuals and groups in civil society, advocacy communities, and state legislatures must put forth a serious struggle among activists and potential coalition partners who can understand the need for reform as a

matter of civil rights and justice, and not the morality of marijuana consumption. Supporting decriminalization potentially can be the training ground for a

new generation of leadership in addressing the larger problem of mass incarceration and social and political isolation associated with it. For Black people and their allies who long for the days— against all odds—of political education, voter mobilization, legal reform , group solidarity, challenge to the

political parties, and political empowerment, expressed in the modern civil rights movement, the

matter of decriminalization is ripe for galvanizing a collaboration at the grassroots . Too many Blacks

have assumed that the "War on Drugs" ended with the dissipation of the "crack" emergency, when, in sum, marijuana's criminalization—rather than incarceration—of Black people has been more perennial. If Michelle Alexander (2010) is correct in arguing that mass incarceration has effectively reasserted Jim Crow second-class citizenship (or no citizenship) rights on African American people, then they must get off the sidelines of the legalization of cannabis or decriminalization struggle and stop allowing others to fight what is essentially their battle. This has long been the case in the challenge to the crushing "prison industrial complex." Whites and others, for the most part, have been the leaders in reform efforts concerning such things as mandatory minimums, the old 100:1 gram of cocaine-to-crack formula, and health care for geriatric

or HIV AIDS patients in prisons, while we have seen Calvin "Snoop- Dogg"' Broadus become more influential than the congressional Black Caucus to our young. When ordinary people change their thinking and consciousness and begin to demystify small, personal- use marijuana, then the

leaders will eventually come around without reticence or fear. The marijuana debate needs to be

reframed to remove all penalties against its use (Scherlen 2012). This is our exit strategy: decriminalization

reform is the only path to reversing the dismal trends minorities face in America.

We should engage in these debates regarding institutional reforms within the system rather than radical alternativesJ. Harvie Wilkinson 14, judge serving on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, former Associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, formerly had a position in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, June, “In Defense of American, Criminal Justice”, Vanderbilt Law Review, http://www.vanderbiltlawreview.org/content/articles/2014/06/In-Defense-of-American-Criminal-Justice.pdfOne final count in the indictment remains. Can we truly call a system democratic when a very large section of the citizenry—African-Americans—feel oppressed by or excluded from it? Is this a reason to discredit American criminal justice? The reaction to the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial in July 2013—in parts angry, reflective, and resigned—reminded us that many African-Americans feel as though the criminal justice system does not work for them. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson argued, "Our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable, guilty until proven innocent.” 362 Manhattan Institute scholar and New Republic contributor John McWhorter argued that, for African-Americans, “the poisonous relationship between young black men and law enforcement is the prime manifestation of racism in modern America.” 363 And President Obama noted that “the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and history that

doesn’t go away,” one wrapped up in “a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal law.” 364¶ There is something to these criticisms. Americans have tried to address them over the years by requiring objective, race-neutral justifications for government actions within the criminal

justice system. We have, for example, required that the jury venire be composed of a fair cross-section of the community , and in Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court outlawed the use of peremptory challenges of jurors based upon their race. We can insist that objective criteria support stop and frisks. And we can focus on racial discrepancies in criminal-law enforcement—which may lead, for example, to four times as many marijuana arrests for black Americans as white Americans, despite similar rates of use.367¶ But efforts such as these won’t solve our problems altogether. This is because the story is more complicated than simply a criminal justice system that has failed to win the

trust and confidence of many in the African-American community. The problem of racial equality and criminal justice is one of “painful complexity.” 368 We can acknowledge that we have not yet reached our goal of race neutrality in the dispensation of justice while acknowledging also that this alone does not account for the racial makeup of our prisons and halfway houses. Then–New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated, “Ninety percent of all people killed in our city—and 90 percent of all those who commit the murders and other violent crimes—are black and Hispanic.” 369 That is the great double-edged sword. It understandably leads to more stops and more arrests in high-crime areas. It understandably leads to more convictions of those of whatever race who commit the crimes. But it also leads to understandable anger and resentment on the part of disadvantaged young black males who want to make a decent go of

American life, only to find themselves the object of recurrent false suspicion and repeated frisks.¶ The solution to the problem of race and criminal justice is not a total overhaul of the system . That just renders the criminal justice system the scapegoat for a much larger set of social problems. The criminal justice system feels the effects of those problems; it does not cause them. Drug and gun crimes are not any less a blight upon society because of the racial makeup of the offenders; indeed, as Robinson noted, “[N]owhere will you find citizens more supportive of tough law-and-order policies than in poor, high-crime neighborhoods.” 370 Our criminal justice system rightly aims to reduce dangerous behavior, and the beneficiaries of success in that endeavor may be those less advantaged citizens for whom basic safety will make for greater opportunity, not to mention better prospects for a brighter life. ¶ To cast ceaseless blame on America’s criminal justice system is to

ignore the enormity of the problems it has been asked to solve . It only diverts attention from the larger ways in which America has failed its underclass. As Michael Gerson recently noted, “The problem of African American boys and young men is a complex mix of lingering racial prejudice, urban economic dislocation, collapsing family structure, failing schools and sick, atomized communities.” 371 To chastise criminal justice when many levers of upward mobility are so compromised is an inversion of priorities. A complete “fix” of what the critics allege ails criminal justice will do nothing to restore shattered family structures, improve failing schools, impart necessary job skills, restore religious and community support groups, or provide meaningful alternatives in deprived neighborhoods to the gangs and drug rings that steer young people toward lifelong addictions and lives of crime. Society doesn’t create opportunity by sacrificing the basic social need for order. To the contrary,

improvements in communities and institutions will only take root in the kind of safe environment that, at its best, a strong criminal justice system can provide. And when we provide opportunity, we in

turn reduce the pressure on the criminal justice system and lessen the monumental task that lack of opportunity for the poorest Americans has left it to perform.¶ How a society chooses to balance justice and safety with rights and liberties will invariably be the subject of vigorous debate. Our criminal justice system is no exception. Many good and intelligent people will disagree passionately about the contours of our criminal

law. That is all to the good. We should not grow complacent in the face of particular problems, both for the sake of individual defendants and for the rule of law itself. ¶ But instead of engaging in a constructive debate

about the American approach to criminal justice , legal elites largely have condemned the entire enterprise. The system, we are told, is broken, and only sweeping reforms imposed from on high can save it. But the rhetoric that fuels the wholesale assault upon the system not only will fail to achieve any meaningful change , it obscures the many strengths of our institutio n s. By focusing so much on what is wrong, we inevitably forget what is right.¶ The terms of engagement

must change. My call is not for scholars to whitewash our system’s failings but to realize the picture is far more nuanced and complex than they have presented it. Given the volume of matters it is asked to address and immensity of the task it is asked to perform, our criminal justice system functions rather well. It is both unrealistic and uncharitable to portray the system as an engine of oppression and injustice. Ironically, many of the features that critics claim operate one-sidedly against defendants often work to their benefit. The American criminal justice system strikes a valuable front-end note. It strikes difficult balances between protecting the innocent and convicting the guilty, between procedural protections and administrative realities. It rightly allows these contestable choices to be made democratically, but only to a point. Such qualities are hardly the

hallmarks of a failed system .¶ Indeed, those who have been among the most persistent critics of the criminal justice system were among the first to call for its utilization in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks.372 And since that time, the refrain has often been that acts of terrorism are crimes that should be dealt with in the customary way through enforcement of federal criminal law.373

I recognize that this plea for criminal trials does not constitute an acknowledgment of the system’s perfection, but it does indicate that the system imparts a legitimacy for the deprivation of liberty that other routes of trying suspected terrorists may lack. This is no place to explore the complicated question of whether alleged terrorism is more aptly regarded as a criminal offense or as an act of war. Separation of powers concerns and the need for action to prevent mass casualties make the question an exceptionally

complicated one. I note only the irony that many who reject the considerable virtues of the American criminal justice system are at least prepared to look upon it as a preferred solution when the values of liberty and security are in epochal tension.¶ To be sure, there is plenty of room for reform , and all parts of the legal profession should head for the front lines. But let us not forget our system’s virtues as we seek to correct its vices. Otherwise, any legitimate concerns will be lost in the din of diatribe. We have gone too long

without a degree of balance or moderation in our assessment of the American criminal justice system. It is time we gave our institutions a fair trial.

Efforts toward reform can’t be understood outside of their ultimate goals---building bridges on the legalization of marijuana itself challenges the logic of incarceration---institutional engagement is necessary to actualize the ideals of revolution while avoiding the failures of typical reformJulia Sudbury 8, Metz Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is a leading activist scholar in the prison abolitionist movement. She was a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national abolitionist organization. “Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the Transnational Prison-Industrial Complex”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 10, Issue 4Chronic overcrowding has led to worsening conditions for prisoners. As a result of the unprecedented growth in sentenced populations, prison authorities have packed three or four prisoners into cells designed for two, and have taken over recreation rooms, gyms, and rooms designed for programming and turned them into cells, housing prisoners on bunk beds or on the floor. These new conditions have created challenges for activists, who have found themselves expending time and resources in pressuring prison authorities to provide every prisoner a bed, or to provide access to basic education programs. As prison populations continue to

swell, anti-prison activists are faced with the limitations of reformist strategies. Gains temporarily won are swiftly undermined, new “women-centered” prison regimes are replaced with a focus on cost-efficiency and minimal programming and even

changes enforced by legal cases like Shumate vs. Wilson are subject to backlash and resistance. 19 Of even greater concern is the well-documented tendency of prison regimes to co-opt reforms and respond to demands for changes in conditions by further expanding prison budgets. The vulnerability of prison reform efforts to cooption

has led Angela Y. Davis to call for “non-reformist reforms,” reforms that do not lead to bigger and

“better” prisons. 20 Despite the limited long-term impact of human rights advocacy and reforms,

building bridges between prisoners, activists, and family members is an important step toward

challenging the racialized dehumanization that undergirds the logic of incarceration . In this way, human

rights advocacy carried out in solidarity with prisoner activists is an important component of a radical

anti-prison agenda . Ultimately, however, anti-prison activists aim not to create more humane, culturally sensitive, women-centered

prisons, but to dismantle prisons and enable formerly criminalized people to access services and resources outside the penal system. After three decades of prison expansion, more and more people are living with criminal convictions and histories of incarceration. In the U.S., nearly 650,000 people are released from state and federal prisons to the community each year. 21 Organizations of formerly incarcerated people focus on creating opportunities for former prisoners to survive after release, and on eliminating barriers to reentry, including extensive discrimination against former felons. The wide array of “post-incarceration sentences” that felons are subjected to has led activists to declare a “new civil rights movement.” 22 As a class, former prisoners can legally be disenfranchised and denied rights available to other citizens. While reentry has garnered official attention, with President Bush proposing a $300 million reentry initiative in his 2004 State of the Union address, anti-prison activists have critiqued this initiative for focusing on faith-based mentoring, job training, and housing without addressing the endemic discrimination against former prisoners or addressing the conditions in the communities which receive former prisoners, including racism, poverty, and gender violence. Organizations of ex-prisoners working to oppose discrimination against former prisoners and felons include All of Us Or None, the Nu Policy Leadership Group, Sister Outsider and the National Network for Women Prisoners in the U.S., and Justice 4 Women in Canada. All of Us Or None is described by members as “a national organizing initiative of prisoners, former prisoners and felons, to combat the many forms of discrimination that we face as the result of felony convictions.” 23 Founded by anti-imperialist and former political prisoner Linda Evans, and former prisoner and anti-prison activist Dorsey Nunn, and sponsored by the Northern California–based Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, All of Us Or None works to mobilize former prisoners nationwide and in Toronto, Canada. The organization's name, from a poem by Marxist playwright Bertold Brecht, invokes the need for solidarity across racial, class, and gender lines in creating a unified movement of former prisoners. Black women play a leading role in the organization, alongside other people of color. All of Us Or None focuses its lobbying and campaign work at city, county, and state levels, calling on local authorities to end discrimination based on felony convictions in public housing, benefits, and employment, to opt out of lifetime welfare and food stamp bans for felons, and to “ban the box” requiring disclosure of past convictions on applications for public employment. In addition, the organization calls for guaranteed housing, job training, drug and alcohol treatment, and public assistance for all newly released prisoners. 24 In the context of the war on drugs, many people with felony convictions also struggle with addictions. The recovery movement, which is made up of 12-step programs, treatment programs, community recovery centers, and indigenous healing programs run by and for people in recovery from addiction, offers an alternative response to problem drug use through programs focusing on spirituality, healing, and fellowship. However, the recovery movement's focus on individual transformation and accountability for past acts diverges from many anti-prison activists' focus on the harms done to criminalized communities by interlocking systems of dominance. As a result, anti-prison spaces seldom engage with the recovery movement, or tap the radical potential of its membership. Breaking with this trend, All of Us Or None has initiated a grassroots organizing effort to reach out to people in 12-step programs with felony convictions. This work is part of their wider organizing efforts that aim to mobilize former prisoners as agents of social change. Building on the strengths of identity politics, these organizations suggest that those who have experienced the prison-industrial complex first-hand may be best placed to provide leadership in dismantling it. As former prisoners have taken on a wide range of leadership positions across the movement, there has been a shift away from leadership by white middle-class progressives, and a move to promote the voices of those directly affected by the prison-industrial complex. Politicians who promote punitive “tough-on-crime” policies rely on racialized controlling images of “the criminal” to inspire fear and induce compliance among voters. Once dehumanized and depicted as dangerous and beyond rehabilitation, removing people from communities appears the only logical means of creating

safety. Activists who pursue decarceration challenge stereotypical images of the “criminal” by making visible the human stories of prisoners, with the goal of demonstrating the inadequacy of

incarceration as a response to the complex interaction of factors that produce harmful acts .

Decarceration usually involves targeting a specific prison population that the public sees as low-risk and arguing for an end to the use of imprisonment for this population. Decarcerative strategies often involve the promotion of alternatives to incarceration that are less expensive and more effective than prison and jail. For example, Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, which passed in California in 2000 and allowed first- and second-time non-violent drug offenders charged with possession to receive substance abuse treatment instead of prison, channels approximately 35,000 people

into treatment annually. 25 Drug law reform is a key area of decarcerative work . Organizations and campaigns that promote drug law reform include Drop the Rock, a coalition of youth, former prisoners, criminal justice reformers, artists, civil and labor

leaders working to repeal New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws. The campaign combines racial justice, economic, and public safety

arguments by demonstrating that the laws have created a pipeline of prisoners of color from New York City to

newly built prisons in rural, mainly white areas represented Republican senators, resulting in a transfer of funding and electoral influence from communities of color to upstate rural communities. 26 Ultimately, the campaign calls for an end to mandatory minimum sentencing and the reinstatement of judges' sentencing discretion, a reduction in sentence lengths for drug-related offenses and the expansion of alternatives, including drug treatment, job training, and education. Former drug war prisoners play a leadership role in decarcerative efforts in the field of drug policy reform. Kemba Smith, an African–American woman who was sentenced to serve 24.5 years as a result of her relationship with an abusive partner who was involved in the drug industry, is one potent voice in opposition to the war on drugs. While she was incarcerated, Smith became an active advocate for herself and other victims of the war on drugs, securing interviews and feature articles in national media. Ultimately, Smith's case came to represent the failure of mandatory minimums, and in 2000, following a nation-wide campaign, she and fellow drug war prisoner Dorothy Gaines were granted clemency by outgoing President Clinton. After her release, Smith founded the Justice for People of Color Project (JPCP), which aims to empower young people of color to participate in drug policy reform and to promote a reallocation of public expenditures from incarceration to education. While women like Kemba Smith and Dorothy Gaines have become the human face of the drug war, prison invisibilizes and renders

anonymous hundreds of thousands of drug war prisoners. The organization Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) challenges this process of erasure and dehumanization through its “Faces of FAMM” project. The project invites people in federal and state prisons serving mandatory minimum sentences to submit their

cases to a database and provides online access to their stories and photographs. 27 The “Faces of FAMM” project highlights cases where sentencing injustices

are particularly visible in order to galvanize public support for sentencing reform. At the same time, it dismantles popular representations of the war on drugs as a necessary protection against dangerous drug dealers and traffickers, demonstrating that most drug war prisoners are serving long sentences for low-level, non-violent drug-related activities or for being intimately connected to someone involved in these activities. Decarcerative work is not limited to drug law reform. Free Battered Women's (FBW) campaign for the release of incarcerated survivors is another example of decarcerative work. The organization supports women and transgender prisoners incarcerated for killing or assaulting an abuser in challenging their convictions by demonstrating that they acted in self-defense. Most recently, FBW secured the release of Flozelle Woodmore, an African–American woman serving a life sentence at CCWF for shooting her violent partner as an 18 year old. Released in August 2007, after five parole board recommendations for her release were rejected by Governors Davis and then Schwarzenegger, Woodmore's determined pursuit of justice made visible and ultimately challenged the racialized politics of gubernatorial parole releases. 28 While the number of women imprisoned for killing or assaulting an abuser is small—FBW submitted 34 petitions for clemency at its inception in 1991, and continues to fight 23 cases—FBW's campaign for the release of all incarcerated survivors challenges the mass incarceration of gender-oppressed prisoners on a far larger scale. FBW argues that experiences of intimate partner violence and abuse contribute to the criminalized activities that lead many women and transgender people into conflict with the law, including those imprisoned on drug or property charges, and calls for the release of all incarcerated survivors. Starting with a population generally viewed with sympathy—survivors of intimate partner violence—FBW generates a radical critique of both state and interpersonal violence, arguing that “the violence and control used by the state against people in prison mirrors the dynamics of battering that many incarcerated survivors have experienced in their intimate relationships

and/or as children.” 29 In theorizing the intersections of racialized state violence and gendered interpersonal violence, FBW lays the groundwork for a broader abolitionist agenda that refutes the legitimacy of

incarceration as a response to deep-rooted social inequalities based on interlocking systems of

oppression . By gradually shrinking the prison system, Black women activists involved in decarcerative

work hope to erode the public's reliance on the idea of imprisonment as a commonsense response to

a wide range of social ills. At the other end of anti-expansionist work are activists who take a more confrontational approach. By starving

correctional budgets of funds to continue building more prisons and jails, they hope to force politicians to embrace less expensive and more effective alternatives to incarceration. Prison moratorium organizing aims to stop construction of new prisons and jails. Unlike campaigns against prison privatization, which oppose prison-profiteering by private corporations, and seek to return imprisonment to the public sector, prison moratorium work opposes all new prison construction, public or private. In New York, the Brooklyn-based Prison Moratorium Project (PMP), co-founded by former prisoner Eddie Ellis and led by young women and gender non-conforming people of color, does this work through popular education and mass campaigns against prison expansion. Focusing on youth as a force for social change, New York's PMP uses compilations of progressive hip hop and rap artists to spread a critical analysis of the prison-industrial complex and its impact on people of color. PMP's strategies have been effective; for example, in 2002 the organization, as part of the Justice 4 Youth Coalition, succeeded in lobbying the New York Department of Juvenile Justice to redirect $53 million designated for expansion in Brooklyn and the Bronx. 30 PMP has also worked to make visible the connections between underfunding, policing of schools, and youth incarceration through their campaign “Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” By demonstrating how zero tolerance policies and increased policing and use of surveillance technology in schools, combined with underfunded classrooms and overstretched teachers, has led to the criminalization of young people of color and the production of adult prisoners, PMP argues for a reprioritization of public spending from the criminal justice system to schools and alternatives to incarceration. 31 Moratorium work often involves campaigns to prevent the construction of a specific prison or jail. In Toronto,

for example, the Prisoner Justice Action Committee formed the “81 Reasons” campaign, a multiracial collaboration of experienced anti-prison activists, youth and student organizers , in response to proposals to build a youth “superjail” in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto. 32 The campaign combined popular education on injustices in the juvenile system, including the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Aboriginal youth, with an exercise in popular democracy that invited young people to decide themselves how they would spend the $81 million slated for the jail. Campaigners mobilized public concerns about spending cuts in other areas, including health care and education, to create pressure on the provincial government to look into less expensive and less punitive alternatives to incarceration for youth. While this campaign did not ultimately prevent the

construction of the youth jail, the size of the proposed facility was reduced. More importantly, the campaign built a grassroots

multiracial antiprison youth movement and raised public awareness of the social and economic costs of incarceration. Moratorium campaigns face tough opposition from advocates who believe that building prisons stimulates economic development for struggling rural towns. Prisons are “sold” to rural towns that have suffered economic decline in the face of global competition, closures of local factories, and decline of small farms. In the context of economic stagnation, prisons are touted as providing stable, well-paying, unionized jobs, providing property and sales taxes and boosting real estate markets. The California Prison Moratorium Project has worked to challenge these assertions by documenting the actual economic, environmental, and social impact of prison construction in California's Central Valley prison towns. According to California PMP: We consider prisons to be a form of environmental injustice. They are normally built in economically depressed communities that eagerly anticipate economic prosperity. Like any toxic industry, prisons affect the quality of local schools, roads, water, air, land, and natural habitats. 33 California PMP opposes prison construction at a local level by building multiracial coalitions of local residents, farm workers, labor organizers, anti-prison activists, and former prisoners and their families to reject the visions of prison as a panacea for economic decline. 34 In the Californian context, where most new prisons are built in predominantly Latino/a communities and absorb land and water previously used for agriculture, PMP facilitates communication and solidarity between Latino/a farm worker communities, and urban Black and Latino/a prisoners in promoting alternative forms of economic development that do not rely on mass incarceration. Scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore's research on the political economy of prisons in California has been critical in providing evidence of the detrimental impact of prisons on local residents and the environment. 35 As an active member of

CPMP, Gilmore's work is deeply rooted in anti-prison activism and in turn informs the work of other activists, demonstrating the important relationship between

Black women's activist scholarship and the anti-prison movement. 36 Many anti-prison activists view campaigns for

decarceration or moratorium as building blocks toward the ultimate goal of abolition. These practical

actions promise short and medium-term successes that are essential markers on the road to long-

term transformation. However, abolitionists believe that like slavery, the prison-industrial complex is a system of racialized state violence that cannot

be “fixed.” The contemporary prison abolitionist movement in the U.S. and Canada dates to the 1970s, when political prisoners like Angela Y. Davis and Assata Shakur, in conjunction with other radical activists and scholars in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, began to call for the dismantling of prisons. 38 The explosion in political prisoners, fuelled by the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and targeting of Black liberation, American Indian and Puerto Rican independence movements in the U.S. and First Nations resistance in Canada as “threats” to national security, fed into an understanding of the role of the prison in perpetuating state repression against insurgent communities. 39 The new anti-prison politics were also shaped by a decade of prisoner litigation and radical prison

uprisings, including the brutally crushed Attica Rebellion. These “common” prisoners, predominantly working-class people of color imprisoned for

everyday acts of survival, challenged the state's legitimacy by declaring imprisonment a form of cruel and unusual punishment and confronting the brute force of state power. 40 By adopting the term “abolition” activists drew deliberate links between the dismantling of prisons and the abolition of slavery. Through historical excavations, the “new abolitionists” identified the abolition of prisons as the logical completion of the unfinished liberation marked by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which regulated, rather than ended, slavery. 41 Organizations that actively promote dialogue about what abolition means and how it can translate into concrete action include Critical Resistance (CR), New York's Prison Moratorium Project, Justice Now, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Free Battered Women, and the Prison Activist Resource Center in the U.S. and the Prisoner Justice Action Committee (Toronto), the Prisoners' Justice Day Committee (Vancouver) and Joint Action in Canada. CR was founded in 1998 by a group of Bay Area activists including former political prisoner and scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis. Initially, CR focused on popular education and movement building, coordinating large conferences where diverse organizations could generate collective alternatives to the prison-industrial complex. Later work has included campaigns against prison construction in California's Central Valley and solidarity work with imprisoned Katrina survivors. CR describes abolition as: [A] political vision that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons, policing, and surveillance by creating

sustainable alternatives to punishment and imprisonment … . An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today

that can represent how we want to live in the future . It means developing practical strategies for

taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead the average person to

believe that things really could be different . It means living this vision in our daily lives . 42 In this sense,

prison abolitionists are tasked with a dual burden: first, transforming people's consciousness so that they can believe that a world without prisons is possible, and second, taking practical steps to

oppose the prison-industrial complex. Making abolition more than a utopian vision requires

practical steps toward this long-term goal . CR describes four steps that activists can get involved in:

shrinking the system, creating alternatives, shifting public opinion and public policy , and building leadership

among those directly impacted by the prison-industrial complex. 43 Since its inception in the San Francisco Bay Area, Critical Resistance has become a national organization with chapters in Baltimore, Chicago, Gainesville, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Tampa/St. Petersburg, and Washington, D.C. As such, CR has played a critical role in re-invigorating abolitionist politics in the U.S. This work is rooted in the radical praxis of Black women and transgender activists.

Reformism is effective and brings revolutionary change closer rather than pushing it awayRichard Delgado 9, self-appointed Minority scholar, Chair of Law at the University of Alabama Law School, J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, his books have won eight national book prizes, including six Gustavus Myers awards for outstanding book on human rights in North America, the American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Professor Delgado’s teaching and writing focus on race, the legal profession, and social change, 2009, “Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want, Arguing about Law”, p. 588-590 2. The CLS critique of piecemeal reform¶ Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform. Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society. Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize oppression. Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and¶ just. In fact, Crits believe that

teaching the¶ common law or using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure.“ To avoid this, CLS

scholars¶ urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to find rationality and order¶ in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion.¶ The CLS

critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong . Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court

victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand. The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events affecting them. A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not . In the meantime, the order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat now,¶ unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer , not push them further away. Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a tenants‘ union meeting in their heated living room . CLS

scholars‘ critique of piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes, will be what we want.

Racial progress has occurred though legal change and more in the area of drug laws is still possible---reject pessimism because it ignores specific reforms that achieved lasting reductions in racial inequalityMichael Omi 13, and Howard Winant, Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias, Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-973, 2013 Special Issue: Symposium - Rethinking Racial Formation TheoryIn Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent. There is little sense that the

‘white racial frame’ evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time. They dismiss important

rearrangements and reforms as merely ‘a distraction from more ingrained structural oppressions and

deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call ‘surface flexibility’ to

argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase ‘racial democracy’ is an oxymoron – a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to race and racism issues, we agree. If they mean that people of colour have no democratic

rights or political power in the USA, we disagree . The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in our view it is also in many

respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or less inclusive and redistributive

economic policies , social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the

present) with respect to race and racism? ¶ Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in different institutional sites – employment, health, education – persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as a result; race-based wealth

disparities widened tremendously. It would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has

been continuous and unchanging throughout US history . But such a perspective misses the

dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era.¶ Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and that we ‘overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not . In Racial Formation we wrote about ‘racial reaction’ in a

chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial

agreement with us. While we argue that the right wing was able to ‘rearticulate’ race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil rights movement, we also believe that there are limits to what the right could

achieve in the post-civil rights political landscape.¶ So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice

are demoralizing at best. But we do not think that is the whole story. US racial conditions have changed

over the post-Second World War period, in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have proved irreversible ; they have set powerful democratic forces in motion . These racial (trans)formations were

the results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led by the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as well as key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like Loving v. Virginia that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. While we have the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his ‘interest convergence hypothesis’ effectively explains all these developments. How does Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil

Rights Act on 2 July 1964 – ‘We have lost the South for a generation’ – count as ‘convergence’?¶ The US racial regime has been

transformed in significant ways . As Antonio Gramsci argues, hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p.

182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this process; here the US racial regime – under movement pressure – was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms – which he calls ‘passive revolutions’ – cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains in

the process. Once again, we are in the realm of politics, not absolute rule.¶ So yes, we think there were important if partial victories that

shifted the racial state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think that

further victories can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of social

interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society . Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social. In the USA and indeed

around the globe, race-based movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially defined ‘others’ and the democratization of structurally racist societies, but also the recognition and validation by both

the state and civil society of racially-defined experience and identity. These demands broadened

and deepened democracy itself. They facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion accomplished by other ‘new social movements’:

second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the environmentalist and anti-war movements among others.¶ By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge was an unmitigated success. Far from it: all the new social movements were subject to the same ‘rearticulation’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. xii) that produced the racial ideology of ‘colourblindness’ and its variants; indeed all these movements confronted their mirror images in the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. Yet even their incorporation and containment, even their confrontations with

the various ‘backlash’ phenomena of the past few decades, even the need to develop the highly contradictory ideology of ‘colourblindness’, reveal the transformative character of the ‘politicization of the social’. While it is not possible here to explore so

extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the long-delayed eruption of racial subjectivity and self-awareness into the mainstream political arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the democratic and anti-democratic social movements that are evident in US politics today.¶ What are the political implications of

contemporary racial trends?¶ Feagin and Elias's use of racial categories can be imprecise. This is not their problem alone; anyone writing about race and racism needs to frame terms with care and precision, and we undoubtedly get fuzzy too from time to time. The absence of a careful approach leads to ‘ racial

lumping’ and essentialisms of various kinds. This imprecision is heightened in polemic . In the Feagin and Elias

essay the term ‘whites’ at times refers to all whites, white elites, ‘dominant white actors’ and very exceptionally, anti-racist whites, a category in which we presume they would place themselves. Although the terms ‘black’, ‘African American’

and ‘Latino’ appear, the term ‘people of colour’ is emphasized, often in direct substitution for black reference points.¶ In the USA today it is important

not to frame race in a bipolar manner . The black/white paradigm made more sense in the past than it does in the twenty-first century. The racial make-up of the nation has now changed dramatically. Since the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the USA has become more ‘coloured’. A ‘majority–minority’ national demographic shift is well underway. Predicted to arrive by the mid-twenty-first century, the numerical eclipse of the white population is already in evidence locally and regionally. In California, for example, non-Hispanic whites constitute only 39.7 per cent of the state's population. While the decline in the white population cannot be correlated with any decline of white racial dominance, the dawning and deepening of racial multipolarity calls into question a sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit black/white racial framework that is evident in Feagin and Elias's essay. Shifting racial demographics and identities also raise general questions of race and racism in new ways that the ‘systemic racism’ approach is not prepared to explain.3¶ Class questions and issues of panethnicizing trends, for example, call into question what we mean by race, racial identity and race consciousness. No racially defined group is even remotely uniform; groups that we so glibly refer to as Asian American or Latino are particularly heterogeneous. Some have achieved or exceeded socio-economic parity with whites, while others are subject to what we might call ‘engineered poverty’ in sweatshops, dirty and dangerous labour settings, or prisons. Tensions within panethnicized racial groups are notably present, and conflicts between racially defined groups (‘black/brown’ conflict, for example) are evident in both urban and rural settings. A substantial current of social scientific analysis now argues

that Asians and Latinos are the ‘new white ethnics’, able to ‘work toward whiteness’4 at least in part, and that the black/white bipolarity retains its distinct and foundational qualities as the mainstay of US racism (Alba and Nee 2005; Perlmann 2005; Portes and Rumbaut 2006; Waters, Ueda and Marrow 2007).¶ We question that argument in light of the massive demographic shifts taking place in the USA. Globalization, climate change and above all neoliberalism on a global scale, all drive migration. The country's economic capacity to absorb enormous numbers of immigrants, low-wage workers and their families (including a new, globally based and very female, servant class) without generating the sort of established subaltern groups we associate with the terms race and racism, may be more limited than it was when the ‘whitening’ of Europeans took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other words this argument's key precedent, the absorption of white immigrants ‘of a different color’ (Jacobson 1998), may no longer apply. Indeed, we might think of the assimilationist model itself as a general theory of immigrant incorporation that was based on a historically specific case study – one that might not hold for, or be replicated by, subsequent big waves of immigration. Feagin and Elias's systemic racism model, while offering numerous important insights, does not inform concrete analysis of these issues.¶ It is important going forward to understand how groups are differentially racialized and relatively positioned in the US racial hierarchy: once again racism must be seen as a shifting racial project. This has important consequences, not only with respect to emerging patterns of inequality, but also in regard to the degree of power available to different racial actors to define, shape or contest the existing racial landscape. Attention to such matters is largely absent in Feagin and Elias's account. In their view racially identified groups are located in strict reference to the dominant ‘white racial frame’, hammered into place, so to speak. As a consequence, they fail to examine how racially subordinate groups interact and influence each others’ boundaries, conditions and practices. Because they offer so little specific analysis of Asian American, Latino or Native American racial issues, the reader finds her/himself once again in the land (real or imaginary, depending on your racial politics) of bipolar US racial dynamics, in which whites and blacks play the leading roles, and other racially identified groups – as well as those ambiguously identified, such as Middle Eastern

and South Asian Americans (MEASA) – play at best supporting roles, and are sometimes cast as extras or left out of the picture entirely.¶ We still want to

acknowledge that blacks have been catching hell and have borne the brunt of the racist reaction of

the past several decades. For example, we agree with Feagin and Elias's critique of the reactionary politics of incarceration in the USA. The ‘new Jim Crow’ (Alexander 2012) or even the ‘new slavery’ that the present system practises is something that was just in

its beginning stages when we were writing Racial Formation. It is now recognized as a national and indeed global scandal. How is it to be

understood? Of course there are substantial debates on this topic, notably about the nature of the ‘prison-industrial complex’ (Davis 2003, p. 3) and the

social and cultural effects of mass incarceration along racial lines. But beyond Feagin and Elias's denunciation of the ferocious white racism that is operating here, deeper political implications are worth considering . As Alexander (2012), Mauer

(2006), Manza and Uggen (2008) and movement groups like Critical Resistance and the Ella Baker Center argue, the upsurge over recent decades in incarceration rates for black (and brown) men expresses the fear-based, law-and-order appeals that have shaped US racial politics since the rise of

Nixonland (Perlstein 2008) and the ‘Southern strategy’. Perhaps even more central, racial repression aims at restricting the increasing

impact of voters of colour in a demographically shifting electorate .¶ There is a lot more to say about this, but for the

present two key points stand out: first, it is not an area where Feagin and Elias and we have any sharp disagreement, and second, for all the horrors and injustices that the ‘new Jim Crow’ represents, incarceration, profiling and similar practices remain political issues . These practices and policies are not ineluctable and unalterable

dimensions of the US racial regime . There have been previous waves of reform in these areas. They

can be transformed again by mass mobilization, electoral shifts and so on. In other words, resistance

is not futile . ¶ Speaking of electoral shifts and the formal political arena, how should President Barack Obama be politically situated in this discussion? How

do Feagin and Elias explain Obama? Quite amazingly, his name does not appear in their essay. Is he a mere token, an ‘oreo’, a shill for Wall Street? Or does Obama represent a new development in US politics, a black leader of a mass, multiracial party that for sheer demographic reasons alone might eventually triumph over the white people's party, the Republicans? If the President is neither the white man's token nor Neo, the One,5 then once again we are in the world of politics: neither the near-total white despotism depicted by Feagin and Elias, nor a racially inclusive democracy.¶ President Obama continues to enjoy widespread black support, although it is clear that he has not protected blacks against their greatest cumulative loss of wealth in history. He has not explicitly criticized the glaring racial bias in the US carceral system. He has not intervened in conflicts over workers’ rights – particularly in the public sector where many blacks and other people of colour are concentrated. He has not intervened to halt or slow foreclosures, except in ways that were largely symbolic. Workers and lower-middle-class people were the hardest hit by the great recession and the subprime home mortgage crisis, with black families faring worst, and Latinos close behind (Rugh and Massey 2010); Obama has not defended them. Many writers have explained Obama's centrism and unwillingness to raise the issue of race as functions of white racism (Sugrue 2010).¶ The black community – and other communities of colour as well – remains politically divided. While black folk have taken the hardest blows from the reactionary and racist regime that has mostly dominated US politics since Reagan (if not since Nixon), no united black movement has succeeded the deaths of Malcolm and Martin. Although there is always important political activity underway, a relatively large and fairly conservative black middle class, a ‘black bourgeoisie’ in Frazier's (1957) terms, has generally maintained its position since the end of the civil rights era. Largely based in the public sector, and including a generally centrist business class as well, this stratum has continued to play the role that Frazier – and before him, Charles S. Johnson. William Lloyd Warner, Alison Davis and other scholars – identified: vacillation between the white elite and the black masses. Roughly similar patterns operate in Latino communities as well, where the ‘working towards whiteness’ framework coexists with a substantial amount of exclusion and super-exploitation.¶ Alongside class issues in communities of colour, there are significant gender issues. The disappearance of blue-collar work, combined with the assault by the criminal justice system – chiefly profiling by the police (‘stop and frisk’) and imprisonment, have both unduly targeted and victimized black and brown men, especially youth. Women of colour are also targeted, especially by violence, discrimination and assaults on their reproductive rights (Harris-Perry 2011); profiling is everywhere (Glover 2009).¶ Here again we are in the realm of racial politics. Debate proceeds in the black community on Obama's credibilty, with Cornel West and Tavis Smiley leading the critics. But it seems safe to say that in North Philly, Inglewood or Atlanta's Lakewood section, the president remains highly popular. Latino support for Obama remains high as well. Feagin and Elias need to clarify their views on black and brown political judgement. Is it attuned to political realities or has it been captured by the white racial frame? Is Obama's election of no importance?¶ ***¶ In conclusion, do Feagin and Elias really believe that white power is so complete, so extensive, so ‘sutured’ (as Laclau and Mouffe might say) as they suggest here? Do they mean to suggest, in Borg-fashion, that ‘resistance is futile?’ This seems to be the underlying political logic of the ‘systemic racism’ approach, perhaps unintentionally so. Is white racism so ubiquitous that no meaningful political challenge can be mounted against it? Are black and brown folk

(yellow and red people, and also others unclassifiable under the always- absurd colour categories) utterly supine, duped, abject, unable to exert any political pressure? Is such a view of race and racism even recognizable in the USA of 2012? And is that a responsible political position to be advocating? Is this what we want to teach our students of colour? Or our white students for that matter?¶ We suspect that if pressed, Feagin and Elias would concur with our judgement that

racial conflict, both within (and against) the state and in everyday life, is a fundamentally political process .

We think that they would also accept our claim that the ongoing political realities of race provide extensive evidence

that people of colour in the USA are not so powerless , and that whites are not so omnipotent , as Feagin

and Elias's analysis suggests them to be.¶ Racial formation theory allows us to see that there are contradictions in racial oppression. The racial formation approach reveals that white racism is unstable and constantly challenged, from the national and indeed global level down to the personal and intra-psychic conflicts that we

all experience, no matter what our racial identity might be. While racism – largely white – continues to flourish, it is not monolithic. Yes, there have been enormous increases in racial inequality in recent years. But movement-based anti-racist opposition continues, and sometimes scores victories. Challenges to white racism continue both within the state

and in civil society . Although largely and properly led by people of colour, anti-racist movements also incorporate whites such as Feagin and Elias

themselves. Movements may experience setbacks, the reforms for which they fought may be revealed as inadequate, and indeed their leaders may be co-opted or even eliminated, but racial subjectivity and self-awareness, unresolved and

conflictual both within the individual psyche and the body politic, abides . Resistance is not futile.

Legal change has resulted in racial advancement and more is still possible---reject pessimism because it results in subversive alternativesRandall Kennedy 12, Harvard Law Professor, Race, Crime, and the Law, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, pp. 388-389True, it is sometimes genuinely difficult to determine an appropriate remedial response. The proper way to address that difficulty, however, is to acknowledge and grapple with it, not bury it beneath unbelievable

assertions that, in fact, no real problem exists. Whitewashing racial wrongs (especially while simultaneously proclaiming that

courts are doing everything reasonably possible to combat racially invidious government action) corrupts officials and jades onlookers, nourishing

simplistic, despairing, and defeatist critiques of the law that are profoundly destructive .¶ The second impression

that I want to leave with readers should serve as an antidote to these overwrought, defeatist critiques by acknowledging that the administration of criminal law has changed substantially for the better over the past half century and that there is

reason to believe that, properly guided, it can be improved even more . Today there are more formal

and informal protections against racial bias than ever before , both in terms of the protections accorded to blacks against criminality and the treatment accorded to black suspects, defendants, and convicts.

That deficiencies, large deficiencies, remain is clear. But comparing racial policies today to those that

prevailed in 1940 or 1960 or even 1980 should expose the fallacy of asserting that nothing substantial

has been changed for the better .¶ This point is worth stressing because of the prevalence and prominence of pessimistic thinking about the race question in American life. Some commentators maintain, in all seriousness,

that there has been no significant improvement in the overall fortunes of black Americans during the past half

century, that advances that appear to have been made are merely cosmetic, and that the United States is doomed to remain a pigmentocracy. This pessimistic strain often turns paranoid and apocalyptic in commentary about the administration of criminal law.¶ It is profoundly misleading , however, to focus

exclusively on the ugliest aspects of the American legal order . Doing so conceals real achievements: the Reconstruction Constitutional Amendments, the Reconstruction civil rights laws, Strauder v. Alabama, Dempsey v. Moore, Brown v. Mississippi, Powell v. Alabama, Norris v. Alabama, Batson v. Kentucky, the resuscitation of Reconstruction by the civil rights movement, the changing demographics of the bench, bar,

and police departments—in sum, the stigmatization (albeit incomplete) of invidious racial bias. Neglecting

these achievements robs them of support . Recent sharp attacks upon basic guarantees bequeathed by the New Deal ought to put everyone on notice of the perils of permitting social accomplishments to lose their

rightful stature in the public's estimation. Moreover, one-dimensional condemnations of the racial situation in America renders attractive certain subversive proposals that are, given actual conditions , foolish,

counterproductive , and immoral . I think here in particular of the call for racially selective jury nullification. Such proposals should be openly challenged on the grounds that they fundamentally misperceive the racial realities of American life.

the law is obviously problematic, but that’s a reason we should hold it accountable to live up to its ideals Kimberle Crenshaw 88, Law @ UCLA, “RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW”, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331, lexisQuestioning the Transformative View: Some Doubts About Trashing The Critics' product is of limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The implications for Blacks of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling, even though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating possibilities. Trashing legal ideology

seems to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable and relatively indeterminate. Furthermore, trashing offers no idea of how to avoid the negative consequences of engaging in reformist discourse or how to work around such consequences. Even if we imagine the wrong world when we think in terms of legal discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present world where legal protection has at times been a blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The fundamental problem is that, although Critics criticize law because it functions to legitimate existing institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating function that has made law receptive to certain demands in this area. The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for liberation leads to the conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it reinforces not only the discourse itself but also the society and the world that it embodies. Yet Critics offer little

beyond this observation. Their focus on delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest that, once rights rhetoric has been

discarded, there exists a more productive strategy for change, one which does not reinforce existing patterns of domination. Unfortunately, no such strategy has yet been articulated , and it is difficult to imagine that racial minorities will ever be able to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367]

excellent account of the civil rights movement, popular struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic and a challenge to that logic. 137 People can only demand change in ways that reflect the logic of the

institutions that they are challenging . 138 Demands for change that do not reflect the institutional logic -- that is, demands that do not engage and subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will probably be ineffective . 139 The possibility for ideological change is created through the very process of legitimation, which is triggered by crisis. Powerless people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by challenging an institution internally, that is, by using its own logic against it. 140 Such crisis occurs when powerless people force open and politicize a contradiction between the dominant ideology and their reality. The political consequences [*1368] of maintaining the contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things appear fair. 141 Yet, because the adjustment is triggered by the

political consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary to close the apparent contradiction. This approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to the civil rights movement. Because Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were those that reflected American society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology. Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a series of contradictions -- the most important being the promised

privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial subordination. Rather than using the contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false, civil rights protestors proceeded as if American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the “rights” that citizenship entailed. By seeking to restructure reality to reflect American mythology, Blacks relied upon and ultimately benefited from

politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by granting formal rights. Although it is the need to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wrest concessions from the dominant order, it is the very accomplishment of legitimacy that forecloses greater possibilities. In sum, the potential for change is both created and limited by legitimation.

a dialectical process of revolutionary reforms is necessary---the aff is a concrete expression of a more systemic critique Ben Wray 14, International Socialist Group, The case for revolutionary reforms, http://internationalsocialist.org.uk/index.php/2014/04/the-case-for-revolutionary-reforms/We need revolutionary change. There’s no two ways about it – if the exploitation of labour by capital continues to be the central dynamic driving

economic development, we are headed for human and environmental catastrophe.¶ But as I’ve discussed in the previous five parts of this series, getting from where we are to a revolutionary transformation that overthrows the dominant property relations of the

capitalist economy and replaces them with social relations based on democratic control of the world’s resources is not as simple as

declaring our desire for it to be so. I saw a petition on change.org the other day proposing the overthrow of capitalism. If one million people signed that petition and one million people signed a further petition to introduce full collective bargaining rights for trade-unions in the UK, which one would move us closer to the overthrow of capitalism? I wager the latter. ¶ Whilst having an end goal in sight is important, most people don’t change their thinking about the world based on bold visions of what could be done at some point in

the future: they change their ideas based on evidence from their material lives which points to the inadequacy or irrationality of the status quo. In other words, we need to have ideas that build upon people’s lived experience of capitalism, and since that it is within the framework of a representative democracy

system, we need ideas based around proposals for reforms. At the same time those reforms have to help rather than hinder a move to more revolutionary transformation that challenges the very core of the capitalist system.¶ The dialectic of reform and revolution¶ What we need, therefore, is a strategy of revolutionary reforms. Such a notion would appear as a contradiction in terms to many who identify as reformists or revolutionaries and see the two as dichotomous, but there is no reason why this should be the case. Indeed, history has shown that revolutionary transformations have always happened as a dialectical interaction between rapid, revolutionary movements and more institutional, reform-based challenges . Even the revolutionary part of that dialectic has always been

motivated by the immediate needs of the participants involved – ‘land, bread and peace’ being the first half of the slogan of the Russian Revolution.¶ What does a

strategy of ‘revolutionary reforms’ entail? Ed Rooksby explains that it is a political strategy that builds towards

revolutionary change by using reforms to ‘push up against the limits’ of the ‘logic of capitalism’ in practice:¶ “At first these “feasible objectives” will be limited to reforms within capitalism—or at least to measures which, from the standpoint of a more or less reformist working class consciousness, appear to be legitimate and achievable within the system, but which may actually run counter to the logic of capitalism and start to push up against its limits. As the working class engages in struggle, however, the anti-capitalist implications of its needs and aspirations are gradually revealed. At the same time, through its experience of struggle for reform, the working class learns about its capacity for “self-management, initiative and collective

decision ” and can have a “foretaste of what emancipation means”. In this way struggle for reform helps

prepare the class psychologically, ideologically and materially for revolution .” The late Daniel Bensaid expressed this

argument through the lens of the history of the socialist movement:¶ “In reality all sides in the controversy agree on the fundamental points inspired by The Coming Catastrophe (Lenin’s pamphlet of the summer of 1917) and the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International (inspired by Trotsky in

1937): the need for transitional demands , the politics of alliances (the united front), the logic of hegemony and on the dialectic (not antinomy) between reform and revolution. We are therefore against the idea of separating an (‘anti-neoliberal’) minimum programme and an (anti-capitalist) ‘maximum’ programme. We remain convinced that a consistent anti-neoliberalism leads to anti-capitalism and that

the two are interlinked by the dynamic of struggle.Ӧ So revolutionary reforms means a policy agenda that , as Alberto Toscano has

put it, “at one and the same time make concrete gains within capitalism which permits further movement against capitalism”. The Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci described this approach as a ‘war of positon’.