AT Settler Colonialism K - Michigan 7 2023 STARTER

AFF
Nuke 1st
Also see AT: KATO
Consequences of nuclear warfare outweigh.
Nicole Akoukou Thompson 18. Thompson. Chicago-based creative writer. "Why I will not allow the fear of a nuclear attack to be white-washed." RaceBaitR. 4-6-2018. http://racebaitr.com/2018/04/06/2087/#
I couldn’t spare empathy for a white woman whose biggest fear was something that hadn’t happened yet and might not. Meanwhile, my most significant fears were in motion: women and men dying in cells after being wrongly imprisoned, choked out for peddling cigarettes, or shot to death during ‘routine’ traffic stops. I twitch when my partner is late, worried that a cantankerous cop has brutalized or shot him because he wouldn’t prostrate himself. As a woman of color, I am aware of the multiple types of violence that threaten me currently—not theoretically. Street harassment, excessively affecting me as a Black woman, has blindsided me since I was eleven. A premature body meant being catcalled before I’d discussed the birds and the bees. It meant being followed, whistled at, or groped. As an adult, while navigating through neighborhoods with extinguished street lights, I noticed the correlation between women’s safety and street lighting—as well as the fact that Black and brown neighborhoods were never as brightly lit as those with a more significant white population. I move quickly through those unlit spaces, never comforted by the inevitable whirl of red and blue sirens. In fact, it’s always been the contrary. Ever so often, cops approach me in their vehicle’s encouraging me to “Hurry along,” “Stay on the sidewalk,” or “Have a good night.” My spine stiffening, I never believed they endorsed my safety. Instead, I worried that I’d be accused of an unnamed accusation, corned by a cop who preys on Black women, or worse. A majority of my 50-minute bus ride from the southside of Chicago to the north to join these women for the birthday celebration was spent reading articles about citywide shootings. I began with a Chicago Tribute piece titled “33 people shot, seven fatally, in 13 hours,” then toppled into a barrage of RIP posts on Facebook and ended with angry posts about police brutality on Tumblr. You might guess, by the time I arrived to dinner I wasn’t in the mood for the “I can’t believe we’re all going to die because Trump is an idiot” shit. I shook my head, willing the meal to be over, and was grateful when the check arrived just as someone was asking me about my hair. My thinking wasn’t all too different from Michael Harriot’s ‘Why Black America Isn’t Worried About the Upcoming Nuclear Holocaust.” While the meal was partly pleasant, I departed thinking, “fear of nuclear demolition is just some white shit.” Sadly, that thought would not last long. I still vibe with Harriot’s statement, “Black people have lived under the specter of having our existence erased on a white man’s whim since we stepped onto the shore at Jamestown Landing.” However, a friend—a Black friend—ignited my nuclear paranoia by sharing theories about when it might happen and who faced the greatest threat. In an attempt to ease my friend’s fear, I leaned in to listen but accidentally toppled down the rabbit hole too. I forked through curated news feeds. I sifted through “fake news,” “actual news,” and foreign news sources. Suddenly, an idea took root: nuclear strike would disproportionately impact Black people, brown people, and low-income individuals. North Korea won’t target the plain sight racists of Portland, Oregon, the violently microaggressive liberals of the rural Northwest, or the white-hooded klansmen of Diamondhead, Mississippi. No, under the instruction of the supreme leader Kim Jong-un, North Korea will likely strike densely populated urban areas, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York City. These locations stand-out as [are] targets for a nuclear strike because they are densely populated U.S. population centers. Attacking the heart of the nation or populous cities would translate to more casualties. With that in mind, it’s not lost on me that the most populous cities in the United States boast sizeable diverse populations, or more plainly put: Black populations. This shit stresses me out! There’s a creeping chill that follows me, a silent alarm that rings each time my Google alert chimes letting me know that Donald Trump has yet again provoked Kim Jong-Un, a man who allegedly killed his very own uncle. I’ve grown so pressed by the idea of nuclear strike holocaust that my partner and I started gathering non-perishables, candlesticks, a hand-crank radio, and other must-buy items that can be banked in a shopping cart. The practice of preparing for a nuclear holocaust strike sometimes feels comical, particularly when acknowledging that there has long been a war on Black people in this country. Blackness is bittersweet in flavor. We are blessed with the melanized skin, the MacGyver-like inventiveness of our foremothers, and our blinding brightness—but the anti-blackness that we experience is also blinding as well as stifling. We are stuck by rigged systems, punished with the prison industrial complex, housing discrimination, pay discrimination, and worse. We get side-eyes from strangers when we’re “loitering,” and the police will pull us over for driving “too fast” in a residential neighborhood. We get murdered for holding cell phones while standing in our grandmother’s backyard. The racism that strung up our ancestors, kept them sequestered to the back of the bus and kept them in separate and unequal schools still lives. It lives, and it’s more palpable than dormant. To me, this means one thing: Trump’s America isn’t an unfortunate circumstance, it’s a homecoming event that’s hundreds of years in the making, no matter how many times my white friends’ say, “He’s not my president.” In light of this homecoming, we now flirt with a new, larger fear of a Black genocide. America has always worked towards Black eradication through a steady stream of life-threatening inequality, but nuclear war on American soil would be swift. And for this reason I’ve grown tired of whiteness being at the center of the nuclear conversation. The race-neutral approach to the dialogue, and a tendency to continue to promote the idea that missiles will land in suburban and rural backyards, instead of inner-city playgrounds, is false. “The Day After,” the iconic, highest-rated television film in history, aired November 20, 1983. More than 100 million people tuned in to watch a film postulating a war between the Soviet Union and the United States. The film, which would go on to affect President Ronald Reagan and policymakers’ nuclear intentions, shows the “true effects of nuclear war on average American citizens.” The Soviet-targeted areas featured in the film include Higginsville, Kansas City, Sedalia, Missouri, as well as El Dorado Springs, Missouri. They depict the destruction of the central United States, and viewers watch as full-scale nuclear war transforms middle America into a burned wasteland. Yet unsurprisingly, the devastation from the attack is completely white-washed, leaving out the more likely victims which are the more densely populated (Black) areas. Death tolls would be high for white populations, yes, but large-scale losses of Black and brown folks would outpace that number, due to placement and poverty. That number would be pushed higher by limited access to premium health care, wealth, and resources. The effects of radiation sickness, burns, compounded injuries, and malnutrition would throttle Black and brown communities and would mark us for generations. It’s for that reason that we have to do more to foster disaster preparedness among Black people where we can. Black people deserve the space to explore nuclear unease, even if we have competing threats, anxieties, and worries. Jacqui Patterson, Director of the Environmental and Climate Justice Initiative, once stated: African American communities are disproportionately vulnerable to and impacted by natural (and unnatural) catastrophes. Our socio-economic vulnerability is based on multiple factors including our lack of wealth to cushion us, our disproportionate representation in lower quality housing stock, and our relative lack of mobility, etc.
Basic Income - Perm
Doing the aff and the alternative leads to a redistributive UBI that helps unsettle settler colonialism.
Klein, and Fouksman, 2021 (Elise, Senior lecturer @Australian National University, Elizaveta, Lecturer at King’s College London, Reparations as a Rightful Share: From Universalism to Redress in Distributive Justice, Development and Change, Volume 53(1): 31-57)
Any granting of compensation in Australia is often framed by the state and judiciary as an exceptional event and not linked to redressing the settler colonial process that underpins the compensation award. This is at odds with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ calls for reparations as a means through which the process of settler colonialism can be recognized, unsettled and destabilized (Newfong, 1972/2014). Equally, as demonstrated by the case of the East Kimberley, Aboriginal sovereignty is constantly in danger of being undermined by the settler state, often through punitive, workfarist social security policies. This danger can be partially avoided with more unconditional redistribution and welfare, but can only be fully eschewed via a recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty along with the dismantling of settler colonial structures such as the contemporary social security system. This means that a more just distribution and access to a rightful share of national wealth (for instance, via a UBI for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples) would need to be one part of a broader reparations framework that also includes land rights, treaties, self-determination and the truth-telling of past and ongoing contemporary violence. Grants for collective community-led projects are also a way to make up for lost assets and associated inequality (Altman and Klein, 2017). These aspects together could begin to destabilize the structures of settler colonialism while honouring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty. A UBI, perhaps in the form of something similar to the U+BI proposed by the Movement for Black Lives, could be a mechanism for just distribution as long as it also provides scope for recognition and the unravelling of ongoing settler colonial structures of repression and dispossession. It would be a way to replace punitive conditionalities on payments such as those attached to the Cashless Debit Card and CDP. But payments to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples need also to be controlled by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples themselves. In paying for the plus in the U+BI formulation, the Australian state would also need to acknowledge not just the past but also the contemporary violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, such as what has been done in the name of ‘welfare’.
Fanon Wrong
Revolutionary actions renders colonized populations the oppressor and equates any negotiation with anti-revolutionary dooming revolutions to kill the very colonized populations they claim to protect.
Kebede, 2001 (Messay, Professor of Philosophy at Dayton, “The Rehabilitation of Violence and the Violence of Rehabilitation: Fanon and Colonialism” Journal of Black Studies 31 (5) p. 555-560.)
But recall that Fanon does not raise the issue of violence only as a means of expelling the rule of an outsider. He attributes to violence a therapeutic and creative value: It liberates the colonized from inferiority complex and turns them into active makers of his- tory. My purpose is to question the alleged therapeutic and creative value of violence. Let me begin by saying that Fanon's rejection of the rehabilitation of the past sounds excessive. His position would have been correct if, instead of characterizing the rehabilitation of the past as a useless and detrimental attempt, he had implied that it was not enough to obtain liberation. What makes his argument against the rehabilitation of the past even less receivable is that more than any- body else, Fanon has studied the profound and devastating effects of inferiority complex on the colonized peoples. His study suggests that this sense of inferiority has been inculcated by a deliberately disparaging discourse on the history of these peoples. If so, it is not clear why the attempt to refute the colonial discourse would be without effect. The discredit of the legacy of the colonized peoples having induced the inferiority complex, its rehabilitation should act as an antidote. This is to say that Fanon's resolution to convince the colonized that they have no other option than recourse to violence is at best exaggerated and highly restrictive. True, the method of ethnophilosophy, notably the claim to Otherness and the subsequent endorsement of the notion of race, can be debilitating. Still, other ways than racial classification exist to defend pluralism. Such is the case, for instance, of cultural pluralism, which draws diversity from cultural rather than biological inheritances. This position is all the more consistent the more identities are ascribed to inventions, a case in point being Fanon himself. To say that the nigger does not exist any more than the White man is to hold that what distinguishes people is less their biological determinants than the way they choose to define themselves. This fact of identities being constructs allows the cultural approach to pluralism. Sure enough, human beings can define themselves in a beneficial or detrimental way. Fanon was quite within his rights when he maintained that rehabilitation cannot come from songs and poems or when he charged racial classification with detrimental outcomes. But it is one thing to say that cultural rehabilitation is not enough or misguided and quite another to suggest that the refutation of the colonial discourse is useless. At any rate, Fanon's opposition to cultural rehabilitation does not yet indicate why violence should take the lead. His argument that the rehabilitation drawn from the past is an illusory wealth that distracts the colonized from fully identifying with their wretchedness and hence from growing into a real revolutionary force can be seriously contested. More yet, the question of whether violence is an efficient and relevant response to the challenge posed by Western hegemony must be posed against the back- ground of economic power being the major driving force of the modern world. No response is really defiant of the West if it does not pave the way to economic power. This issue of economic power is how Hegel took his revenge on Fanon. Does it not point out that the mastery of nature is the only dialectical, progressive way to liberation? Unlike the dialectics of Hegel in which the slave submits and turns his attention to work, Fanon wanted the colonized to rebel. Without the episode of violent confrontation, Fanon maintained, the colonized will never gain freedom and self-respect. Freedom remains a mere grant of the col- onizers so long as it is not wrenched from them. Galvanizing and fulfilling however the snatching of freedom may appear to be, in the context of colonial and neocolonial domination, it overlooks one important aspect of the question: The colonized are yet to understand the real reason for their subordination. They will understand the real reason if they ascribe their inferiority to their inability to dominate nature. But then, the issue is not so much the violent expulsion of the colonizer as the resolution to rise to the economic challenge. So long as the economic handicap persists, independence remains illusory. Fanon was right when he stated that independence is not enough but wrong when he stipulated that regeneration cannot occur without the moment of violent confrontation If anything, the idealization of rebellious attitude has led a generation of Third World scholars and leaders to assert their freedom through the rejection of Western values. This defiant attitude refuses the patience of learning; it identifies it with submission. It goes without saying that the depiction of the problems of the Third World in terms of bravado has been detrimental to its real interest. It has caused the devalorization of bourgeois virtues as well as impatience with expectations. Most of all, it has served as a justification for those numerous regimes that presented dictatorship as the only appropriate defense against imperialism. Antagonism toward imperialism became a much-praised virtue, the mark of a progressive regime, even though the defiance was empty talk. We hear an echo of this orientation coming from Fanon (1982) himself when, speaking of African bourgeoisie, he stated, "The combined effort of the masses led by a party and of intellectuals who are highly con- scious and armed with revolutionary principles ought to bar the way to this useless and harmful middle class" (p. 175). Yet, without economic power, the violence that the colonized brandish against the West is anything but frightening. It remains the violence of arrows and spears against missiles and jet fighters. So long as violence is not backed by science and technology, the whole idea of considering the Third World as a rising revolutionary force intent on toppling the developed world is nothing but laughable. Insofar as the poor world is granted with a power of violence that it does not yet possess, Fanon can be justifiably accused of putting the cart before the horse. In being technologically insignificant, the violence of the Third World will be countered by real violence, to paraphrase Fanon. If violence thus resolves nothing because it cannot even be real violence without the power of technology, the narrowing of the technological gap emerges as the only remedy for Western hegemony and, hence, the only dissolvent of the inferiority complex. Let alone curing the disease, the prescription of bravado retards the administration of the real remedy. But there is more to the matter than this. Fanon denounced Negritude and ethnophilosophy as an internalization of the colonial world. The whole question is to know whether the valorization of violence and the vision of human relationships in terms of violent confrontations are not themselves a projection of the violent colonial world.The question makes sense in view of the fact that Fanon endowed violence with a curative mission. If violence is an outcome of colonial rule, it is not clear how it can possess curative virtues. The attempt to decontaminate one's soul from such a perversion would be the right attitude. The point, one may object, is that the decontamination requires the phase of violent response, there being no doubt that for Fanon, the colonial neurosis will not dissipate unless the accumulated frustration is provided with an outlet. But then, this therapy of violence needs to explain how capitulation to an impulse amounts to a victory over that impulse. All ethical thinking teaches that resistance to impulses is the manner the will and the good triumph. Even those theories that resent resistance admit that the best way to deal with uncontrolled impulses is to sublimate them, that is, to channel them into superior and creative works. Fanon rightly took note of the accumulated anger of the colonized people but never shows how this immense anger could be transformed into a creative work. His proposal was not to sublimate anger; it was rather to let it explode. But is capitulation to anger likely to have a positive outcome when it is but providing an outlet to destructive impulses? What the Third World needs is to give in to its anger less and to channel it into con- structive works. The sublimation of violence, and that alone, would be the right therapy. Alluding to 

Preview shortened. Download the file for the full document.