Depictions of the Middle East as being in need of democracy assistance or lacking civil society epistemologically function to historicize the region as primitive while also building the West as “normal” within the dual function of Orientalism.
Yegenoglu 1998 (Meyda “Colonial Fantasies: Towards a feminist reading of Orientalism” page 6.)
For instance, from the point of view of feminist discourse, modern humanism appears to be a mode of patriarchal discourse ...The subject is thus produced by a linguistic/discursive strategy in which the denial of dependence on the other guarantees an illusion of autonomy and freedom.
The view of the Arab world as “backwards” and in need of Western style democracy that the resolution perpetuates through their rhetoric, the literature base they subscribe to, and their plan of action, is orientalist – and, it’s part of a narrative in our culture that is used to mask the true intent of policymakers in Washington – to further perpetuate imperialism.
Said 3 [Edward, University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University]. “Preface.” Orientalism. <http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/650/op11.htm>//Alex
Orientalism is very much a book tied to the tumultuous dynamics of contemporary history. Its first page opens with a 1975 description of the Lebanese Civil War that ended in 1990, but the violence and the ugly shedding of human blood continues up to this minute...innumerable tabloids and even middle-brow journals, all of them re-cycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalisations so as to stir up "America" against the foreign devil.
And this method of Orientalizing the Arab states in the topic is the methodology of Whiteness to reaffirm itself in the age of Empire.
Sharma and Sharma 2003 (Sanjay and Ashwani “White Paranoia in the age of Empire” in Fashion Theory)
The “crisis of modernity” has been most acutely expressed in the invariable exigency of a Manichean division between an emergent Europe and its abject Other...Following and Deleuze and Guattari, they contend that cultural racism needs to be conceived as a “strategy of differential inclusion,” as opposed to the absolute exclusion of the Other…Subordination is enacted in regimes of everyday practices that are more mobile and flexible but that create racial hierarchies that are nonetheless stable and brutal (Hardt and Negri 2000: 194)
This means that we allow the Orientalized other into the ranks of white, Western democracies only if they prove themselves to be an idealized, desirable other through which whiteness is able to safely reify itself. Now go be a good Arab state and learn how to be like us!
Sharma and Sharma 2003 (Sanjay and Ashwani “White Paranoia in the age of Empire” in Fashion Theory)
To elaborate, this paranoid authority inscribed in contemporary Orientalism – where the ethical drive of global postmodern capitalism is to work through cultural deterritorialization, difference, and the regulation of ethnicity – has required the obsessive mediation of otherness in the form of multicultural commodification... The emergent global commodity culture, with its fetishization of difference and ethnicity, “screens-out” these abject figures, to produce a conflict-free, “post-ideological” aestheticized world of desirable otherness.
And this function of fixing the distance to the Orientalized other is both repugnant and essential to the continuation of white hegemony. This is the structural pathology of whiteness which allows the presence of the other as a source of anti-identification.
Sharma and Sharma 2003 (Sanjay and Ashwani “White Paranoia in the age of Empire” in Fashion Theory)
This presence of “Islamic terrorists” or the defiling images against the West are not something we wish to offer as a legitimate form of political critique or mode of action against Empire...While the false universality of Eurocentric Whiteness is being made more visible (inaugurated by former anticolonial struggles), the challenge to contemporary Orientalism will succeed neither by simply exposing how it continues to objectify the Other, nor by a cultural politics that demands more truthful representations and knowledge of different cultures. Let us not forget that Said’s central provocation was that the Orient does not exist.
And Orientalism is the root cause of war, genocide, and slavery.
Smith 2006 (Andrea “Color of Violence: INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence” pg. 66-73)
A third pillar of white supremacy is the logic of Orientalism. Orientalism was defined by Edward as the process of the West defining itself as a superior civilization by constructing itself in opposition to an “Exotic” but inferior “Orient.”...Their privilege is not a signal that they will be assimilated, but that they will be marked as perpetual foreign threats to the US world order.
The framework for this round is which team best epistemologically resists whiteness. Vote affirmative as an opportunity to rupture epistemological complicity with Whiteness by refusing to engage in the Orientalist depictions of the resolution.
Owen 2007 (David S. “Towards a Critical Theory of Whiteness” accessed via Sage Journals http://psc.sagepub.com/content/33/2/203)
To begin with, given the systematicity of the functioning of whiteness, disrupting its operations will require a pluralistic strategy...Instead, the critical theory of whiteness implies that the structures of whiteness that generate racial oppression need to be exposed, challenged and re-formed.
And Orientalism is inherent to the Empire of pathological whiteness. By resisting orientalism we are able to strike against whiteness.
Sharma and Sharma 2003 (Sanjay and Ashwani “White Paranoia in the age of Empire” in Fashion Theory)
It is through the strategy of unraveling Whiteness that we may begin disrupting Orientalism’s command...Contemporary Orientalism treacherously pervades and sustains an Empire of pathological Whiteness.
The subjectivity of the Western radical intellectual can best be characterized as parasubjective: the sovereignty of the European Subject is smuggled through the supposed transparency of representation inaugurated by the conflation of signification and action.
Spivak 1988 [Gaytari, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, pp. 271-316]
When Foucault considers the pervasive heterogeneity of power, he does not ignore the immense institutional heterogeneity that Althusser here attempts to schematize....The banality of leftist intellectuals' lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent.
