Abolition Kritik - Michigan 2024 BFHR

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Framework
AT Limits
Their limits offense props up Black out-of-placeness that relies on unspoken attitudinal practices born of slavery. Acts of transgression in places Black people and their literature should not be is the first step towards abolishing their reliance on slave logics.
Walcott 21(Rinaldo Walcott Is Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies. He holds the Carl V. Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies. He is a writer and critic. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality with interests in nations, nationalisms, multiculturalism, policy and education broadly defined, PhD University of Toronto, Sociology of Education, 1996, MA University of Toronto, Sociology of Education, 1992, BA York University, 1990, On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition, 5/14/21, Biblioasis, pdf pg. 19-20//ATW)
- I think this works against black people reading framework/limits offense like t-tactics too because it talks about how black institutions also use out of placeness
There are histories and stories of places throughout the Americas, even in putatively Black countries, where Black people know not to go, even today. Now that tourism has replaced the plantation as the primary sources of revenue in many of these regions, places frequented by tourists (who are almost always assumed to be white), like certain higher-end bars and restaurants, are often off limits to Black people. These new plantations by the sea, as Derek Walcott, the Caribbean Nobel Prize-winning writer and artist, called them, are shaped by the long history of the older plantation model still.16 In many countries beaches and parks are also off limits, if only informally, as are the neighbourhoods of the small-pocketed descendants of white plantocracy, even after all these years. The gated condominium and time-share communities that have sprung up share similar dynamics. Black people only show up in these places as (service) labour, as police and private police, or, on rare occasions, as exceptionally rich individuals whose wealth buys access normally denied. But by and large Black people retain an outsider status in such spaces.
These are places where the police will question Black people for just being present. These are places where Black out-of-placeness is a signal of the long and enduring history of Black subjection. And in a post-slavery world, these are places where the unspoken attitudinal practices of slavery, fully born from the plantation’s womb, still fashion social relations. Black people know these places and share stories of them among themselves. Black people know the attitudes of these places too. Black people feel, deep in their bones, that these places should not exist. In short, these are places worthy of abolition. The plantation’s afterlife extends to these places, and it also helps to set and manage the social relations that shapes our interactions within them.
To fully comprehend Black people’s desire for abolition as a politics worth fighting for and as a philosophy orienting how we live together in the future, it is important to note all the ways in which the history of Black enslavement in the Americas continues to shape our current existence. The afterlife of slavery is in part a set of social relations between Black and white people in which it is often assumed that Black people should practice some form of subordination. Black people continue to resist forms of ownership, subordination, and possession in both conscious and unconscious ways—by ourselves and others. Black people have had to actively work to refuse and resist being reduced in this way, in order to exist in a world perceived to be made for white fulfilment only.
AT Predictability/Stasis
The aff’s call for debate to be centered around the predictable stasis shows the way property logics of protecting and retaining civility deputize seemingly liberal people through pathological images of blackness
Walcott 21(Rinaldo Walcott Is Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies. He holds the Carl V. Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies. He is a writer and critic. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality with interests in nations, nationalisms, multiculturalism, policy and education broadly defined, PhD University of Toronto, Sociology of Education, 1996, MA University of Toronto, Sociology of Education, 1992, BA York University, 1990, On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition, 5/14/21, Biblioasis, pdf pg. 22-23//ATW)
Black people, once owned as property and now the main (if not the exclusive) target of mass criminalization and incarceration and all the notso-deadly and deadly actions of modern policing and its extensions, understand that property remains a central roadblock in our collective quest to figure out how to both live differently and better together. In the following pages I will not only be suggesting that the abolition of policing and incarceration are necessary for Black people to have their full lives and their full breaths acknowledged, I will be arguing that the abolition of property is also central to this endeavour. It is precisely because of Black peoples’ intimate relationship to property as both an idea and an actual practice as a result of having been property ourselves, that we understand that the entire carceral network and the innumerable problems that afflict it are intimately bound up with modern conceptions of property, because in many ways we are the foundation of the idea itself. I am not making a case for Black people’s exceptional experience as an oppressed group. History, recent and ancient, has already made this exceptionality abundantly clear. I am suggesting that our long history of thingification, and how we have resisted it, stands as a political and intellectual blueprint for how we can transform all of human life. We know that some of the ghastliest experiments in the history of the last five hundred years or more have been enacted on Black people and we further know that to recover from those experiments something more radical than reform is necessary.
One of plantation slavery’s most important and still living legacies is the diffusion of the ideas that came along with it and how these ideas influence policing in both its broadest and most restricted forms. Given that modern policing in the Americas, as we have discussed, was created to police the property that was Black flesh, it should not be surprising that policing continues to remain hostile and brutal to Blacks in the Americas; and, one can confidently say, beyond the Americas too. Policing is central to how Black people experience life even when they are not having encounters with the actual police, because white people remain, as Frank Wilderson III, a co-founder of the Afropessimism school, put it, “deputized” all the time.18 This is just one of the ways that the plantation persists, shaping actions, attitudes, and behaviours. White deputization works to police Black people in all manner of ways, especially in the West—from modes of speech, dress, and attitudes to suspicion, threat and assumed danger. The archetypal figure of the big, threatening Black man is an important element of this dynamic, alongside the belligerent, angry Black woman. Long embedded and cemented stereotypes of Black people are often experienced and understood to be threats to white people and their ideas of what is appropriate and even safe; threats that therefore must be subdued or policed. Of course, this form of banal, everyday policing can and often does result in more official state policing too.
Link
Link—Trademark
Trademark law sustains itself through trading racist images of Black people which dehumanize them, sway elections, and paint them as inherently stupid—refuse the protection of these images
Greene 08 (K.J. Greene, B.A., Highest Departmental Honors, Political Science, State University of New York, 1986 Law School Thesis Paper Morehouse College – Atlanta, GA,J.D., with honors, Yale Law School, Kevin J. Greene joined Southwestern’s faculty in 2020. Professor Greene is a nationally recognized entertainment and intellectual property law scholar and an expert witness consultant for copyright, trademark, publicity rights, and entertainment contract disputes, "Intellectual Property at the Intersection of Race and Gender: Lady Sings the Blues." American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law. 16, no. 3 (2008): 365-385. https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=jgspl)
At first blush, as Alex Johnson, Jr. has remarked, “the law of trademarks would seem to have little to do with issues of race and racial identification.”50 Trademark law provides protection to trademark owners against unauthorized use of their own or a similar mark, when it is likely to lead to consumer confusion.51 On closer examination, however, Johnson demonstrated that “the principles of trademark law provide surprising insight into the formation of dichotomous racial classifications in the United States.”52 Trademark law is inextricably tied to advertising and marketing. As Desiree Kennedy pointed out, advertising “is an important means of public discourse . . . [and] . . . is instrumental in affecting viewers’ perceptions of their world and their interactions with others.”53 Further, Lew Gibbons noted, modern trademarks play a large role in shaping “individual and group social identity.”54 The history of advertising, and the role of trademarks therein, is one rife with stereotypical images.55
Trademarks used in advertising can impact more than just commercial transactions; media images “are frequently the predominant source of information many have about people of color.”56 In the same way that “coon” music in early America reflected derogatory anti-black stereotypes, so did trade symbols used to sell products. Historically, trademarks and symbols almost perfectly replicated cultural stereotypes about black men and women. From Sambo and Ratus, the grinning chef on the box of Cream of Wheat cereal, to Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima, trademark law essentially legalized and promoted the use of stereotypical representations of blacks and other minorities. Additionally, it has been said that “twentieth century white identity was forged in the crucible of Jim Crow iconography, including Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and blackface minstrels.”57 These idyllic southern stereotypes of the smiling, happy black domestic servant could be seen as “myths [that] masked the ugly violence of lynching, disenfranchisement and segregation.”58
In the case of black men, history shows the durability of three stock prototypes: the “Tom” character, the “Coon” character, and the “Buck” character.59 “The Tom caricature portrays Black men as faithful, happy, submissive servants.”60 An example of this in trademark law is Uncle Ben, the elderly black man used to sell rice. He is comforting, non-threatening, de-sexualized, and there to serve whites.
The Coon character, in contrast, is lazy, shiftless, and unintelligent, yet cunning in obtaining vices he enjoys.61 Amos ‘n’ Andy, examples of Coon characters, were characters created for a radio show in 1928 that went on to “become one the country’s most popular radio programs.”62 The characters were black, but initially played by whites—the show’s creators—on the radio, who posed in blackface for publicity photos. When the show went to television in 1951, black actors took over in the lead roles. Amos ‘n’ Andy was protected by both copyright and trademark. In the 1980s trademark litigation ensued over whether CBS, which had discontinued the show in the 1960s after protests by civil rights advocates, abandoned and therefore lost legal rights in the Amos ‘n’ Andy mark.63
Similarly, Sambo’s Restaurants used the symbol of a smiling Coon-type character to sell food products for over sixty years. “Little Black Sambo” was a literary character that “has long been a part of the American culture,” dating back to a 1781 play “where the black male Sambo character, played by a white actor in blackface, ‘danced, sang, spoke nonsense, and acted the buffoon.’”64 After numerous complaints from civil rights activists and lawsuits by municipalities seeking to prevent expansion, Sambo’s Restaurants changed its name to “Sam’s” in 1989.65
The Buck character is a brute, and could represent the worst fears of early white America—that of the hyper-sexual black male intent on getting access to white women’s sexuality.66 The Buck character surfaces in political marketing, a fairly recent incarnation, being the “infamous television spot from the 1988 presidential campaign” of George Bush, Sr., featuring released criminal Willie Horton.67
Stereotypes with roots in trademarks have stigmatized African-American women. It has been noted that “American history is replete with ‘slaverooted’ images of African-American womanhood.”68 Three negative stereotypes exist regarding black women: the “Aunt Jemima” type, a domestic servant; the “Mammy” type, a typically domineering, matriarchal figure; and the “Jezebel” type, a highly amoral, sexualized representation.69
Trademark law derives its authority at the federal level from the Lanham Act of 1946. The Lanham Act prohibits the trademarked use of racially derogatory images, but limits the trademark registration of such images under Section Two, part of which prohibits the registration of a mark that consists of or comprises “scandalous” or “immoral” matter.70 Further, trademark law prohibits the registration of trademarks that may disparage—i.e., bring into contempt or disrepute—living or dead persons, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols.71 In recent years, groups including Native Americans and African-Americans used Section Two of the Lanham Act to cancel the registration of racially offensive trademarks.
Link—Copyright
Copyright law does not foster innovation but instead the imitation of Black art. Foundational Black artists for all genres of American have been degraded and devalued through predatory contracts and even when they’re free that just mean someone white is going to take it and gain the credit.
Greene 08 (K.J. Greene, B.A., Highest Departmental Honors, Political Science, State University of New York, 1986 Law School Thesis Paper Morehouse College – Atlanta, GA,J.D., with honors, Yale Law School, Kevin J. Greene joined Southwestern’s faculty in 2020. Professor Greene is a nationally recognized entertainment and intellectual property law scholar and an expert witness consultant for copyright, trademark, publicity rights, and entertainment contract disputes, "Intellectual Property at the Intersection of Race and Gender: Lady Sings the Blues." American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law. 16, no. 3 (2008): 365-385. https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=jgspl)
At its core, IP in America “is understood almost exclusively as being about incentives.”27 The history of blacks in the arts is one of unparalleled innovation and creativity, especially in the realm of music and dance. There has always been “an overwhelming prevalence of black innovators in jazz,”28 as well as blues, ragtime, rock-and-roll, and today’s hip-hop music. The history of black artists within U.S. IP law, however, has been one of appropriation, degradation, and devaluation beginning with the creation of the nation until the 1950s and ’60s. In the arena of music, there is no need to assume mass appropriation and disparate treatment of black composers and performers. Time after time, foundational artists who developed ragtime, blues, and jazz found their copyrights divested, and through inequitable contracts, their earnings pilfered.29 I argued elsewhere that for a long period of U.S. history, the work of black blues artists was essentially dedicated to the public domain.30 The public domain “can most broadly be defined as ‘material that is unprotected by intellectual property rights, either as a whole or in a particular context, and is thus “free” for all to use.’”31
Similarly, it has been argued that with respect to black artists “copyright law . . . was created without deference to the interests of large segments of society,” including women and minorities.32 Indeed, my previous work demonstrates that five copyright structures disadvantaged black cultural production.
First, the idea/expression dichotomy of copyright law prohibits copyright protection for raw ideas, and protects only expression of ideas. I contend that this standard provided less protection to innovative black composers, whose ground-breaking work was imitated so widely that it became the “idea” and thus impossible to protect.
Second, copyright’s fixation standard provides that copyright protection extends only to a work that is “fixed” in a tangible medium of expression.33 However, a key component of black cultural production is improvisation. As a result, fixation deeply disadvantages African-American modes of cultural production, which are derived from an oral tradition and communal standards.34
Third, copyright law sets forth a minimal standard of originality, which does not protect innovation, and in fact encourages imitation. Fourth, copyright formalities, until 1976, put copyright protection out of reach of the illiterate or semi-literate creators of the blues.35 Finally, there is a general absence of moral rights protection, which protects against harms to authorial dignity. The fact that black artists continued to create and innovate, even in the face of diminished economic incentives, poses a challenge to copyright policy, which dictates that copyright “is fundamentally about providing a balance of incentives for authors.”36 This phenomenon surely gives weight to the notion that economic incentives alone are not the sole motivator of creative output.
Larry Lessig, a leading IP scholar, asserted that the “record industry was born of . . . piracy.”37 Lessig contends that the “law governing recordings gives artists less . . . by giving artists a weaker right than it otherwise gives creative authors.”38 Lessig was referring to the compulsory license provision of the 1909 Copyright Act, which permits anyone to re-record a composition that has been released to the public via sound recording.39
However, beneath Professor Lessig’s analysis lies a much more insidious form of piracy. The early music industry was built on the back of black cultural production from the era of slave songs and spirituals to the period of black-face minstrelsy—America’s most popular and profitable form of entertainment from 1800 to the end of the last century.40 Minstrelsy “was the first truly American contribution to the history of stage entertainment, and it owed its very existence to the Negro [sic].”41 Minstrelsy defamed blacks, and other minorities, in stereotypical and derogatory ways.42
Then came ragtime and blues, which single-handedly carried the recording industry from the 1920s until the Great Depression. Although ragtime music was innovated by black composers such as Scott Joplin, and served as “the most popular ‘pop’ style [for twenty years],” it was white composers such as Irving Berlin who reaped the greatest financial rewards.43 The line between permissible “borrowing” and impermissible appropriation may be dim at times, but there is strong evidence that the works of black artists were plagiarized and appropriated extensively.44 Furthermore, the routine stereotyping that occurred concurrently with copyright appropriation negatively impacted black artists’ personality rights. It has been said that the creative process “implicates the honor, dignity, and artistic spirit of the author in a fundamentally personal way.”45 From this perspective, black artists also were subject to deprivation of the moral rig

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