Format/Explanation
Imagine that the 1AC has read the Slave Narratives case. This activity simulates a
topicality 1NC and 2AC and asks students to prepare a 2NC on topicality. The 1AC,
1NC, and 2AC are included below; relevant threads from the 1AC cross-ex are also
included.
1. All students should review the 1AC, CX notes, 1NC, and 2AC.
2. All students should prepare to cross-examine the 2AC (as if they were the 1N). The
goal is to set up the topicality arguments your team will make in the 2NC.
3. All students should prepare an eight-minute extension of the topicality argument.
4. One (or more than one) student will be chosen to cross-examine the 2AC.
5. One (or more than one) student will be chosen to present a 2NC.
6. The rest of the group will cross-examine the 2NC speech(es).
Previous Speeches
1AC — Slave Narratives/Mourning
We begin with the letter, “Beloved Sister”
Hartman, 2002, (Saidiya, specialist in African American literature and history and a professor at Columbia University,
“In Time of Slavery” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 Project Muse) // dobp
"Beloved Sister" skillfully circumvents and negotiates accusations of love and betrayal. The boys' letters are stock items in the
local circuits of roots tourism. The artisanal mode of production and the stiffly crafted narrative of slavery, separation, and
dislocation recounted in these epistles do not fail in their appeal. Kwesi's
letter begins, Please write me.
We are one Africa which simple [sic] means we are the same people and I know it's
because of the slave trade that's why you left here to U.S.A and I want you to know
that you are my sister and I am your brother according to the history of our
ancestors and Africa is both of us motherland so you are welcome back home
(Akwaaba) please let['s] keep in touch by letters so that we could learn from each
other and know ourselves well as brother and sister. Share my greetings with my
other brothers and sisters in America. Thank you. Peace and love to you senior
sister. Isaac's letter is short. In three lines, he states the basics: his grade in school, need of pencils and paper,
and my status as an orphan. It closes with an admonishment that I learn my history or risk
not knowing who I really am: "Because of the slave trade you lose your mother, if
you know your history, you know where you come from." Francis Mensah writes,
"Don't forget to write me because we are one Africa which simple [sic] means we are the
same people but only because of the slave trade that's why you lose your
motherland to another country and this is time we should learn from each other and
understand ourselves as brothers and sisters and may those who die on the way to
America will come back to the motherland and I always remember all of my Africa
brothers and sisters in my prayers and may God bless you to live in long life and
prosperity [End Page 761] and I hope you will never forget to write Africa brother and
you know is very painful that they trade our ancestors as slaves and I became very
sad whenever I read the history of the slave trade." The rush of declaratives in these galloping
sentences, the lack of pause or caesura, no time even to catch the breath, inadvertently express the enduring presence of
slavery. I lose my mother again and again and again, not in the past, but today. Kwesi, Isaac,
Francis, and I exist in the painful present of the slave trade. These forged and formulaic letters prey on longings that I am loath
to admit. For I would rather not acknowledge that the language of kin still holds some appeal. "Dear Sister" pierces through the
armor of my skepticism, which, like a scab covering a wound, is less the sign of recovery than it is a barrier against the still
pulsating state of injury.
What happened throughout the Middle Passage was not just a singular event, it
created a colonial and anti-black matrix, which was structured off the death of the
black. This structure places the Black Body into structural damnation in a permanent
state of hell, open to rapeability and killability. This is the death ethics of war.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers, ‘8 (Against
War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, p. 217-21)
what happened in the Americas was a transformation
and naturalization of the non-ethics of war—which represented a sort of exception to the ethics that regulate normal conduct in
Christian countries—into a more stable and long-standing reality of damnation, and that
this epistemic and material shift occurred in the colony. Damnation, life in
hell, is colonialism: a reality characterized by the naturalization of war by
means of the naturalization of slavery, now justified in relation to the very constitution of people and no longer solely or principally to their
Dussel, Quijano, and Wynter lead us to the understanding that
faith or belief.
That human beings become slaves when they are vanquished in a war translates in the
Americas into the suspicion that the conq uered people, and then non-European peoples in
general, are constitutively inferior and that therefore they should assume a position of
slavery and serfdom. Later on, this idea would be solidified with respect to the slavery of African peoples, achieving stability up to the present with the tragic
reality of different forms of racism. Through this process, what looked like a "state of exception" in the colonies became the rule in the modern world. However, deviating from Giorgio
the colony--long before the concentration camp and the Nazi
politics of extermination--served as the testing ground for the limits and
possibilities of modernity, thereby revealing its darkest secrets." It is race, the
coloniality of power, and its concomitant Eurocentrism (and not only national socialisms or forms of fascism)
that allow the "state of exception" to continue to define ordinary relations in this, our so-called postmodern world. Race
emerges within a permanent state of exception where forms of behavior that
are legitimate in war become a natural part of the ordinary way of life. In that world, an
otherwise extraordinary affair becomes the norm and living in it requires extraordinary effort." In the racial/ colonial world, the "hell"
of war becomes a condition that defines the reality of racialized selves, which Fanon
referred to as the damnes de la terre (condemned of the earth). The damne (condemned) is a subject who exists
in a permanent "hell," and as such, this figure serves as the main referent or liminal other that guarantees the
continued affirmation of modernity as a paradigm of war. The hell of the
condemned is not defined by the alienation of colonized productive forces, but
rather signals the dispensability of racialized subjects, that is, the idea that the
world would be fundamentally better without them. The racialized subject is ultimately a dispensable source of value,
Agarnben's diagnosis, one must say that
and exploitation is conceived in this context as due torture, and not solely as the extraction of surplus value. Moreover, it is this very same conception that gives rise to the particular erotic
The condemned, in short, inhabit a context in
which the confrontation with death and murder is ordinary. Their "hell" is not
dynamics that characterize the relation between the master and its slaves or racialized workers.
simply "other people," as Sartre would have put it-at least at one point - but rather racist perceptions that
are responsible for the suspension of ethical behavior toward peoples at the
bottom of the color line. Through racial conceptions that became central to the
modern self, modernity and coloniality produced a permanent state of war
that racialized and colonized subjects cannot evade or escape. The modern function of
race and the coloniality of power, I am suggesting here, can be understood as a radicalization and
naturalization of the non-ethics of war in colonialism." This non-ethics included
the practices of eliminating and enslaving certain subjects-for example, indigenous and black-as part of
the enterprise of colonization. From here one could as well refer to them as the death ethics of war. War, however, is
not only about killing or enslaving; it also includes a particular treatment of
sexuality and femininity: rape. Coloniality is an order of things that places
people of color within the murderous and rapist view of a vigilant ego, and the
primary targets of this rape are women. But men of color are also seen through
these lenses and feminized, to become fundamentally penetrable subjects for the ego
conquiro. Racial- ization functions through gender and sex, and the ego conquiro is thereby constitutively a phallic ego as
well." Dussel. who presents this thesis of the phallic character of the ego cogito, also makes links, albeit indirectly, with the reality of war. And thus, in the beginning of modernity, before
Descartes discovered ... a terrifying anthropological dualism in Europe, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in America. The phallic conception of the European-medieval world is now added to
the forms of submission of the vanquished Indians. "Males," Bartolome de las Casas writes, are reduced through "the hardest, most horrible, and harshest serfdom"; but this only occurs with
those who have remained alive, because many of them have died; however, "in war typically they only leave alive young men (mozos) and women.""5 The indigenous people who survive the
massacre or are left alive have to contend with a world that considers them to be dispensable. And since their bodies have been conceived of as inherently inferior or violent, they must be
constantly subdued or civilized, which requires renewed acts of conquest and colonization. The survivors continue to live in a world defined by war, and this situation is peculiar in the case of
women. AsT. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T, White put it in the preface to their anthology Spoils oJ War: Women oJ Color, Cultures, and Revolutions: A sexist and/or racist patriarchal
culture and order posts and attempts to maintain, through violent acts of force if necessary, the subjugation and inferiority of women of color. As Joy James notes, "its explicit, general premise
constructs a conceptual framework of male [and/or white] as normative in order to enforce a politicaljracial, economic, cultural. sexual] and intellectual mandate of male [and/or white] as
superior." The warfront has always been a "feminized" and "colored" space for women of color. Their experiences and perceptions of war, conA ict, resistance, and struggle emerge from their
specific racial-ethnic and gendered locations ... Inter arma silent leges: in time of war the law is silent," Walzer notes. Thus, this volume operates from the premise that war has been and is
The links between war, conquest, and the exploitation of women's
bodies are hardly accidental. In his study of war and gender, Joshua Goldstein argues that conquest usually proceeds through an extension of the rape
presently in our midst.”
and exploitation of women in wartime." He argues that to understand conquest, one needs to examine: I) male sexuality as a cause of aggression; 2) the feminization of enemies as symbolic
these three elements came
together in a powerful way in the idea of race that began to emerge in the
conquest and colonization of the Americas. My second point is that through the
domination; and 3) dependence on the exploitation of women's labor-including reproduction." My argument is, first, that
idea of race, these elements exceed the activity of conquest and come to define
what from that point on passes as the idea of a "normal" world. As a result, the
phenomenology of a racial context resembles, if it is not fundamentally identical
to, the phenomenology of war and conquest. Racism posits its targets as
racialized and sexualized subjects that, once vanquished, are said to be
inherently servile and whose bodies come to form part of an economy of sexual
abuse, exploitation, and control. The coloniality of power cannot be fully
understood without reference to the transformation and naturalization of war
and conquest in modern times. Hellish existence in the colonial world carries
with it both the racial and the gendered aspects of the naturalization of the nonethics of war. "Killability" and "rapeability" are inscribed into the images of
colonial bodies and deeply mark their ordinary existence. Lacking real authority, colonized men are permanently
feminized and simultaneously represent a constant threat for whom any amount of authority, any visible trace of the phallus is multiplied in a symbolic hysteria that knows no lirnits.?" Mythical
depiction of the black man's penis is a case in point: the black man is depicted as an aggressive sexual beast who desires to rape women, particularly white women. The black woman, in turn, is
seen as always already sexually available to the rapist gaze of the white, and as fundamentally promiscuous. In short, the black woman is seen as a highly erotic being whose primary function is
fulfilling sexual desire and reproduction. To be sure, any amount of "penis" in either one represents a threat, but in his most familiar and typical forms the black man represents the act of rape"raping" -while the black woman is seen as the most legitimate victim of rape- "being raped." In an antiblack world black women appear as subjects who deserve to be raped and to suffer the
consequences-in terms of a lack of protection from the legal system, sexual abuse, and lack of financial assistance to sustain themselves and their families-just as black men deserve to be
penalized for raping, even without having committed the act. Both "raping" and "being raped" are attached to blackness as if they form part of the essence of black folk, who are seen as a
Black bodies are seen as excessively violent and erotic, as well as
being the legitimate recipients of excessive violence, erotic and otherwise."
"Killability" and "rapeability" are part of their essence, understood in a phenomenological way. The
"essence" of blackness in a colonial anti-black world is part of a larger context of
meaning in which the death ethics of war gradually becomes a constitutive
part of an allegedly normal world. In its modern racial and colonial connotations and uses, blackness is the invention and the projection of a
dispensable population.
social body oriented by the death ethics of war." This murderous and raping social body projects the features that define it onto sub-Others in order to be able to legitimate the same behavior
The same ideas that inspire perverted acts in war--particularly
slavery, murder, and rape--are legitimized in modernity through the idea of race
and gradually come to be seen as more or less normal thanks to the alleged
obviousness and non-problematic character of black slavery and anti-black
racism. To be sure, those who suffer the consequences of such a system are primarily blacks and indigenous peoples, but it also deeply affects all of
those who appear as colored or close to darkness. In short, this system of symbolic
representations, the material conditions that in part produce and continue to
legitimate it, and the existential dynamics that occur therein (which are also at the same time derivative and
constitutive of such a context) are part of a process that naturalizes the non-ethics or death
ethics of war. Sub-ontological difference is the result of such naturalization and
is legitimized through the idea of race. In such a world, ontology collapses into a
Manicheanism, as Fanon suggested."
that is allegedly descriptive of them.
Remembering the horrors of the transatlantic trade is able to rid of the unfreedom
promised during the Middle Passage by reclaiming kin and community---the act of
grief itself has an immense effect on political imagination and is a pre-requisite to
challenging contemporary challenges regarding racism
Hartman, 2002, (Saidiya, specialist in African American literature and history and a professor at Columbia University,
“In Time of Slavery” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 Project Muse) // dobp
Without this defense, I am exposed and vulnerable, a naive woman on an impossible
mission: the search for dead and forgotten kin. And these pubescent boys trading for
pens and pocket money are the bridge I would travel to my past. In their dire scramble for
small change, I imagine Ethiopia stretching forth her hand. In the clichéd and purloined prose of their
letters, I see my redemption. I wear the title senior sister proudly, despite knowing that terms of endearment
and affiliation are part and parcel of the lingua franca of trade. I war with myself in a battle between desire and discernment.
Slavery denied the captive all claims of kin and community; this loss of natal
affiliation and the enduring pain of ancestors who remain anonymous still haunt the
descendants of the enslaved. "Dear Sister" extends the promise of restored
affiliations, but it is a placebo, a pretend cure for an irreparable injury. In Elmina, sister and brother are a kind of
currency and, as such, these endearments circulate promiscuously. These scruffy adolescents, pockets stuffed with dreams of
return and promises of belonging, play rough-and-tumble with my yearnings; their fleeting and evanescent gifts of sodality cut
me to the quick. Belated encounters.
The journey "home" is always a journey back, that is, back in
time, since the identification with Africa as an originary site occurs by way of the
experience of enslavement. And, above all else, it is a belated return. One has come too late
to recuperate an authentic identity or to establish one's kinship with a place or
people. Ultimately these encounters or journeys occur too late, far too long after the event, to be considered a return. In
short, returning home is not possible. Nor is this an encounter [End Page 762] with Africa in its contemporaneity, the present
is eclipsed by an earlier moment—the event of captivity and the experience of enslavement in the Americas. It is the encounter
of those who have come after "that event"—the Middle Passage and after slavery. More importantly, this belatedness might be
considered an essential feature of the diasporic in that, as James Clifford notes, diasporas usually presuppose "a constitutive
taboo on return," so that the homeland is that which is always already lost. It is this loss that underlines the impossibility of
return and the inevitable belatedness of these encounters. It is interesting to note that the residents of Cape Coast and Elmina
also invoke the notion of belatedness to describe the African-American encounter with Africa. Frequently African Americans
are identified in Fanti as "asika fo amba ntem"—the rich ones who have come too late, if they would have been here earlier, we
don't know what they would have done. 6 Essentially, these
belated encounters illumine the
disparate temporalities of unfreedom. 7 The encounter with the seemingly remote
anteriority of the past—slavery and the transatlantic slave trade—provides a
vehicle for articulating the disfigured promises of the present, that is, equality, freedom from
discrimination, the abolition of the badges of slavery, and so on. In short, what becomes clear is that the past is
neither remote nor distant and that Africa is seen, if at all, through the backward
glance or hindsight. For these reasons, it is crucial to consider the matter of grief as
it bears on the political imagination of the diaspora, the interrogation of U.S.
national identity, and the crafting of historical counternarratives. In other words, to
what end is the ghost of slavery conjured up? What is at stake here is more than exposing the artifice
of historical barricades or the tenuousness of temporal markers like the past and the present. By seizing
hold of the past, one illuminates the broken promises and violated contracts
of the present. The disjuncture between what David Scott has described as "that event" and "this memory," beyond
comprising an essential dimension of belatedness, raises a host of questions about the use and relevance of the past, the
political and ethical valence of collective memory, and the relation between historical responsibility and the contemporary
crisis, whether understood in terms of a masochistic attachment to the past, the intransigence of racism, or the intractable and
enduring legacy of slavery. 8 In other words, Africa
as an atavistic land as well as the character and
consequences of an identification with Africa are mediated by way of [End Page 763] the
experience of enslavement, and perhaps, even more important, by way of a
backward glance at U.S. history as well. That is, the identification with Africa is always already after the
break.
African culture has historically been targeted by civil society in an active effort to
forget the horrors of the slave trade---this cultural erasure is an intentional act of
systematic discrimination that will never cease to exist unless we reclaim the past via
counternarratives
Mayer, 2000, Ruth, “"Africa As an Alien Future": The Middle Passage, Afrofuturism, and Postcolonial Waterworlds,”
Source: Amerikastudien / American Studies, Vol. 45, No. 4, Time and the African-American, pp. 555-566, accessed: 6/29/14 //
dobp
There are no stories of the middle passage. One hundred million people were stolen
and sold from their homes, shipped across the world, and not a single story of that
journey survives."5 The photographer and installation artist Carrie Mae Weems is very well aware of the perils of representing the
"
Middle Passage. To avoid the pitfalls of 'porno-troping'6 and retrospective exculpation, she focuses on the very logic of recollection and
reconstruction in her turn to black history. In an installation concluded in 1995, Untitled (Sea Island Series), Weems approaches the entangled
histories of Africa and America from a markedly contemporary perspective, juxtaposing photographs and folk narratives from the Gullah Islands
off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, to present a picture of the past inflected with the knowledge of the present. The bulk of the series
consists of large-format landscape photographs combined with text panels. But Weems also takes resort to a device familiar from another series,
entitled, tellingly, Commemorating (1992), in which she imprinted cheap ceramic dinner plates with the names of famous Americans. In her Sea
Island series, she uses dinner ware to display general reflections about the project under the joint heading "Went looking for Africa." One such
dinner plate inscription reads: Fig. 1: Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Went looking For Africa) WENT LOOKING FOR AFRICA and found Africa here
in the proverbs of Mclntosh in the voices of Sapeto in the songs of St. Simons Along the highways of Jekyll in the gardens of Johns in the graveyards of Hilton Head. By dint of this approach, Africa and America are no longer conceived of as geographical entities, to be neatly separated, but
as convoluted concepts, flightlines of beliefs, memories, and projections that are far too intersected to be told apart. Africa is en- grained in the
very core of American culture, its language, its folklore, its soil. Characteristically, Weems expresses this insight both verbally and formally, the
dinner ware figuring as an emblem of commemoration, invested with a significance that is visible only at second glance and to the initiate, as
Houston Baker remarked: "The dishes are memory, and they are luxury. They pass through generations as family inheritance. Carrie Mae Weems
reclaims such ceramics for the everyday uses of cultural conversation."7 The Gullah Islands, once the last illegal resort for slavery in the United
the fact that black history is both
there and not there, evident in countless traces, scars, and memories, yet largely
submerged when it comes to written accounts and first-person documentations of
the past from the viewpoint of the victims. To come to pass in its own right, the
African presence in the United States has to be pried away from the mainstream
culture of which it has become an integral part- not by choice, but by necessity, as
Samuel Delany pointed out: . . . until fairly recently, as a people we were systematically
forbidden any images of our past. . . . every effort conceivable was made to
destroy all vestiges of what might endure as African social consciousness.
When, indeed, we say that this country was founded on slavery, we must remember that
we mean, specifically, that it was founded on the systematic, conscientious, and
massive destruction of African cultural remnants. That some musical rhythms endured, that certain
States, epitomize a central predicament of contemporary African-American culture:
religious attitudes and structures seem to have persisted, is quite astonishing, when you study the efforts of the white, slave-importing
machinery to wipe them out.8 Weems's series can be seen as an effort to remobilize these remnants and draw them to our attention,
reassembling traces of the past into new, if only temporary, unities."9 The same idea motivated
in the field of the
visual and narrative arts the project of excavating an African past will invariably
deviate from its anthropological and historiographical premises and venture into
the realm of fantasy and myth to compensate for the lack of concrete and
indubitable material. Time and again in the Sea Islands series, the rhetoric of historical fact is replaced with the vernacular of
"
a later project, in which she documented the traces of New World slavery in West Africa. Both projects evince that
personal fantasies and sense impression.
Africa has come to be a distant and alien concept---reclaiming the ocean as a vital
aspect of history addresses the contemporary themes of dislocation and social contact
by placing it in an ‘oceanic’ context. Fantastic imagination is crucial to this process.
Mayer, 2000, Ruth, “’Africa As an Alien Future’: The Middle Passage, Afrofuturism, and Postcolonial Waterworlds,”
Source: Amerikastudien/American Studies, Vol. 45, No. 4, Time and the African-American, pp. 555-566, accessed: 6/29/14 //
dobp
With this, Amistad manages to downplay precisely the aspects at the heart of the horrors of slavery, the fact that thousands of
people were dragged into a world which could not possibly make sense to them, and from which they could not escape other
than at the risk of self-annihilation. This is what the underwater scene briefly captures early in the film, and it is no accident
that it presents one of the film's most unreal scenes. But then, to
capture events that were never
documented in writing by the ones who experienced them might very well require
another structure than the realist ones of representation. All narratives around the
Middle Passage are invariably and necessarily speculative, and the more so today,
over one hundred years after the fact. And thus fantastic, mythic, or grotesque
narratives seem so much more adequate to tackle the estrangement and angst
erupting in its wake. This is, at any rate, the course a series of recent reenactments of the Middle Passage take,
brought forth by artists working in most diverse fields. All of these revisions, as different as they are, concentrate on the
fantasy spaces in-between and nowhere at all, spaces that present themselves as mixed-up, ambivalent, floating. The most
obvious of these in-between spaces is, of course, the
sea, this paradigmatic space of openness and
indeterminacy which gains so radically contradictory connotations once it becomes
the setting for abduction, violation, enslavement, and revolt. Placed into the context
of the Middle Passage, the ocean becomes the 'oceanic,' as Hortense Spillers argued: ". . .
removed from the indigenous land and culture and not-yet 'American' either, these
captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in
movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all."1 When reenacted
from the perspective of today, the last decades of the twentieth century, the Middle
Passage acquires a whole set of new connotations, the theme of enforced
displacement and violent abduction merging with other, more contemporary,
scenarios of migration, dislocation, and contact. Paul Gilroy's study The Black Atlantic
set out most impressively to trace the imageries of travel in the African diaspora,
imageries which often enough managed to translate the starkly negative into
accounts of liberation and self-fashioning, rewriting the past from the vantage point
of the present It is in the contemporary arts- literature, installation art, pop musicthat such transformations become most obvious, and it is here that the passages
between Africa and the Caribbean are most glaringly reenacted and transformed. In
such reenactments, "the metaphor of travel is emptied of a purely retrospective thrust, in
which the ship is envisioned as the vehicle of an original abduction or of the return
to an original territory. Now the metaphor, especially in contemporary youth
cultures of the African diasporas, is opened up to harbor all kinds of notions of
development, mutation and crossover."3 By consequence, speculations and fantasies arise
which move ceaselessly back and forth through time and space, between cultural
traditions and geographical time zones, and thus "between Africa as a lost continent
in the past and between Africa as an alien future."4
Remembrance is a necessary starting point---mourning as a counternarrative unlocks
the potential for emancipation from the contemporary terrors of racism
Hartman, 2002, (Saidiya, specialist in African American literature and history and a professor at Columbia University,
“In Time of Slavery” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 Project Muse) // dobp
I am not trying to suggest that these weeping women are exemplary models of mourning, especially given the ease with which the group moves
from tears to a smiling portrait in front of the Door of No Return to an afternoon of shopping; in fact, it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to
it is important to
consider the possibility of mourning as a counternarrative to the exclusions of U.S.
national history and a personal seizure and appropriation of the narrative resources
separate the mourning that exceeds tourism from the contained catharsis promoted by it. Nonetheless,
made available by tourism. In short, all I am suggesting is that the tears shed by these women might possibly exceed the closures of tourism, if
grief might be a form of critically engaging the past, or, at least one
that calls emancipation into crisis. As W. E. B. Du Bois noted a century ago, despair was sharpened
rather than attenuated by emancipation. In the face of the freed, not having found
freedom in the promised land, could be seen the "shadow of a deep
disappointment." Tears and disappointment create an opening for counterhistory, a
story written against the narrative of progress. [End Page 769] Tears reveal that the time of
slavery persists in this interminable awaiting—that is, awaiting freedom and
longing for a way of undoing the past. The abrasive and incommensurate
temporalities of the "no longer" and the "not yet" can be glimpsed in these tears.
Mourning makes visible the lost object, variously defined as the homeland,
authentic identity, and/or the possibility of belonging. It also addresses itself to the
only momentarily, and that
dismissal of grief as whining and the repression of slavery from national memory.
Certainly, the use of the word loss strains at the complexity of the event and its aftermath and risks imposing a too-neat narrative of continuity
Yet the work of mourning, if it is not dedicated to establishing
such connections, at the very least, succeeds in making them. At the Door of No Return, the litany of
between that event and this condition.
captives taken to the United States, Haiti, Brazil, Surinam, Jamaica, and so forth, maps the lines of affiliation between various parts of the
the chronicle of
slavery yields to the everyday terror of racism, the civil rights movements,
and praises issue forth to a pantheon of African Americans including W. E. B. Du Bois, the
Americas. In recounting the saga of captivity and enslavement a particular axis of identification emerges—
Nicholas Brothers, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, and Angela Davis.
Vote AFF to mourn the loss endured during the Middle Passage---remembrance is vital
to mend the social disparity of delineation---the introduction of a counternarrative is
necessary to negate the State’s masking of history
Hartman, 2002, (Saidiya, specialist in African American literature and history and a professor at Columbia University,
“In Time of Slavery” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 Project Muse) // dobp
A memorial plaque posted near the entryway of the courtyard of Elmina Castle reads, "In everlasting memory of the anguish of
our ancestors. May those who died rest in peace. May those who return find their roots. May humanity never again perpetrate
such injustice against humanity. We the living vow to uphold this." As the plaque suggests, reckoning
with our
responsibility to the dead necessitates not only our remembrance but also a
promise to forswear the injustice that enabled this crime against humanity to
occur. It would appear that our lives [End Page 757] and even those of the dead depend on such
acts of remembrance. Yet how best to remember the dead and represent the past is an issue fraught with difficulty,
if not outright contention. The difficulty posed by the plaque's injunction to remember is as much the faith it bespeaks in the
redressive capacities of memory, as the confidence it betrays in the founding distinction or break between then and now. For
the distinction between the past and the present founders on the interminable grief engendered by slavery and its aftermath.
How might we understand mourning, when the event has yet to end? When the injuries not only perdure, but are inflicted
anew? Can one mourn what has yet ceased happening? The
point here is not to deny the abolition of
slavery or to assert the identity or continuity of racism over the course of centuries,
but rather to consider the constitutive nature of loss in the making of the African
diaspora and the role of grief in transatlantic identification, especially in light of the plaque's
behest that those returning find their roots, which is second only to the desire that the dead rest in peace. I attempt to grapple
with these questions by examining the role of tourism as a vehicle of memory, specifically tourist performances at Cape Coast
Castle and Elmina Castle in Ghana and at La Maison de Esclaves on Goree Island, Senegal, and the ways in which the
identifications and longings of the tourist, the formulas of roots tourism, and the economic needs of African states shape,
affect, and influence our understanding of slavery and in concert produce a collective memory of the past. 1 As the plaque
intimates, to
remember the dead is to mend ruptured lines of descent and filiation. In this
is entangled with reclaiming the past, propitiating ancestors,
and recovering the origins of the descendants of this dispersal. To remember slavery
is to imagine the past as the "fabric of our own experience" and seizing hold of it as
"the key to our identity." 2 And the belated return of the African-American tourist is fraught with these issues. The
regard, remembrance
fixation on roots reveals the centrality of identity not only to the transactions of tourism, but in staging the encounter with the
past. Identification and bereavement are inextricably linked in this instance; since the roots we are encouraged to recover
presuppose the rupture of the transatlantic slave trade and the natal alienation and kinlessness of enslavement. Put
differently, the
issues of loss and our identification with the dead are central to both the
work of mourning and the political imagination of the African diaspora. 3 And, for this
reason, grief is a central term in the political vocabulary of the diaspora. [End Page 758] By
looking at a range of practices—the bartering of letters of welcome and return, the state's role in the
fabrication of a common memory of slavery, tourist performances and the peregrinations of middleclass African-American tourists—I set out to explore the time of slavery, that is, the relation between the past
and the present, the horizon of loss, the extant legacy of slavery, the antinomies of
redemption (a salvational principle that will help us overcome the injury of slavery and the long history of defeat) and
irreparability. In considering the time of slavery, I intend to trouble the redemptive narratives
crafted by the state in its orchestration of mourning, the promises of filiation proffered by petty
traders, and the fantasies of origin enacted at these slave sites. As well, the "time of slavery" negates the common-sense
intuition of time as continuity or progression, then and now coexist; we are coeval with the dead.
The performance of the 1AC seeks to provide a collective enunciation of the pain of
the captive body. This allows us to lift the mental shackles of slavery.
Hartman 97(Saidiya, specialist in African American literature and history and a professor at Columbia University, Scene
of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America pg. 50-51)
Exploiting the limits of the permissible, creating transient zones of freedom, and
reelaborating innocent amusements were central features of everyday practice.
Practice is, to use Michel de Certeau’s phrase, “a way of operating” defined by “the non-autonomy of
its field of action,” internal manipulations of the established order, and ephemeral
victories. The tactics that compromise the everyday practices of the dominated have neither the means to secure a
territory outside the space of domination nor the power to keep or maintain what is in won in fleeting surreptitious, and
necessarily incomplete victories. The
refashioning of permitted pleasures in the effort to
undermine, transform, and redress the condition of enslavement was consonant
with other forms of everyday practice. These efforts generally focused on the object
status and castigated personhood of the slave, the pained and ravished body,
severed affiliations and natal alienation, and the assertion of denied needs. Practice
is not simply a way of naming these efforts but rather a way of thinking about the
character of resistance, the precariousness of the assaults waged against
domination, the fragmentary character of these efforts and the transient battles
won, and the characteristics of a politics without a proper locus. The everyday practices of the
enslaved encompassed an array of tactics such as work slowdowns, feigned illness, unlicensed travel, the destruction of
property, theft, self-mutilation, dissimulation, physical confrontation with owners and overseers that document the resistance
to slavery. These
small-scale and everyday forms of resistance interrupted,
reelaborated, and defied the constraints of everyday life under slavery and exploited
opening in the system for the use of the enslaved. What unites these varied tactics
is the effort to redress the condition of the enslaved, restore the disrupted
affiliations of the socially dead, challenge the authority and dominion of the
slaveholder, and alleviate the pained state of the captive body. However, these acts
of redress are undertaken with the acknowledgement that conditions will most
likely remain the same. This acknowledgment implies neither resignation nor
fatalism but recognition of the enormity of the breach instituted by slavery and the
magnitude of domination. Redressing the pained body encompasses operating in and against the demand of the
system, negotiating the disciplinary harnessing of the body, and counter investing in the body as a site of possibility. In this
instance,
pain must be recognized in its historicity and as the articulation of a social
condition of brutal constraint, extreme need, and constant violence; in other words,
it is the perpetual condition of ravishment. Pain is a normative condition that encompasses the legal
subjectivity of the enslaved that is constructed along the lines of injury and punishment, the violation and
suffering inextricably enmeshed with the pleasures of minstrelsy and melodrama,
the operation of power on black bodies, and the life of property in which the full
enjoyment of the slave as thing supersedes the admittedly tentative recognition of
slave humanity and permits the intemperate uses of chattel. This pain might best
be describes as the history that hurts-the still-unfolding narrative of captivity,
dispossession, and domination that engenders the black subject in the
Americas. If this pain has been largely unspoken and unrecognized, it is due to the sheer denial of black sentience rather
than inexpressibility of pain. The purported immunity of blacks to pain is absolutely essential
to the spectacle of contended subjection or, at the very least, to discrediting the
claims of pain. The black is both insensate and content, indifferent to pain and
induced to work by threats of corporal punishment. These contradictions are partly explained by the
ambiguous and precarious status often black in the “great chain of being”-in short, by the pathologizing of the
black body-this abhorrence then serves to justify acts of violence that exceed
normative standards of humanely tolerable, though within the limits of the socially
tolerable as concerned the black slave. In this regard, pain is essential to the making
of productive slave laborers. The sheer enormity of this pain overwhelms or
exceeds the limited forms of redress available to the enslaved. Thus the
significance of the performative lies not in the ability to overcome this
condition or provide remedy but in creating a context for the collective
enunciation of this pain, transforming need into politics and cultivating
pleasure as a limited response to need and desperately insufficient form of
redress.
CX of 1AC — Relevant Threads
Q: Should there be a topic?
A: Yes, but the topic shouldn’t require the affirmative to identify with or roleplay as
the USFG.
Q: Why vote aff?
A: To mourn the loss endured during the Middle Passage.
Q: Should the USFG substantially increase its ocean exploration and/or development?
A: We don’t defend the USFG. It is an unethical actor.
Q: How does memorializing the loss endured during the Middle Passage change
material conditions in contemporary American society?
A: First, this doesn’t matter — the process of mourning is valuable in and of itself.
Second, the Middle Passage established a framework that has been used to justify
gratuitous violence against black bodies — that’s Hartman and Maldonado-Torres.
1NC — Topicality (Not Framework)
Our interpretation is that the resolution should define the division of affirmative and
negative ground. It was negotiated and announced in advance, providing both sides
with a reasonable opportunity to prepare to engage one another’s arguments.
This does not require the use of any particular style, type of evidence, or assumption
about the role of the judge — only that the topic should determine the debate’s
subject matter.
The affirmative violates this interpretation because they do not advocate that the
United States federal government substantially increase its ocean exploration and/or
development.
First, “United States federal government” means the three branches of the central
government. The affirmative does not advocate action by the USFG.
OECD 87 — Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Council, 1987 (“United States,” The Control
and Management of Government Expenditure, p. 179)
1. Political
and organisational structure of government
The United States of America is a federal republic consisting of 50 states. States have
their own constitutions and within each State there are at least two additional levels of government, generally designated
as counties and cities, towns or villages. The relationships between different levels of government are complex and varied
(see Section B for more information).
The Federal Government is composed of three branches: the legislative branch,
the executive branch, and the judicial branch. Budgetary decisionmaking is shared primarily by the
legislative and executive branches. The general structure of these two branches relative to budget formulation and
execution is as follows.
Second, “its” implies ownership. Exploration or development of the ocean isn’t topical
unless it is “owned by” the USFG.
Gaertner-Johnston 6 — Lynn Gaertner-Johnston, founder of Syntax Training—a company that provides
business writing training and consulting, holds a Master’s Degree in Communication from the University of Notre Dame,
2006 (“Its? It's? Or Its'?,” Business Writing—a blog, May 30th, Available Online at
http://www.businesswritingblog.com/business_writing/2006/05/its_its_or_its_.html, Accessed 07-04-2014)
A friend of mine asked me to write about how to choose the correct form of its, and I am happy to comply. Those three
little letters cause a lot of confusion, but once you master a couple of basic rules, the choice becomes simple. Here goes:
Its' is never correct. Your grammar and spellchecker should flag it for you. Always change it to one of the forms below.
It's is the contraction (abbreviated form) of "it is" and "it has." It's has no other meanings--only "it is" and "it has."
Its is the form to use in all other instances when you want a form of i-t-s but you are not sure which one. Its
is a
possessive form; that is, it shows ownership the same way Javier's or Santosh's
does.
Example: The radio station has lost its license.
The tricky part of the its question is this: If we write "Javier's license" with an apostrophe, why do we write "its license"
without an apostrophe?
Here is the explanation: Its
is like hers, his, ours, theirs, and yours. These are all
pronouns. Possessive pronouns do not have apostrophes. That is because their spelling already
indicates a possessive. For example, the possessive form of she is hers. The possessive form of we is ours.
Because we change the spelling, there is no need to add an apostrophe to show possession. Its follows that pattern.
Third, this requires that exploration or development be carried out by a federal
agency. Statutory language is clear.
CFR 6 — Code of Federal Regulations, last updated in 2006 (“Coastal Zone Management Act Federal Consistency
Regulations,” Title 15 › Subtitle B › Chapter IX › Subchapter B › Part 930 › Subpart C › Section 930.31, Available Online at
http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/15/930.31, Accessed 07-04-2014)
§ 930.31 Federal agency activity.
(a) The
term “Federal agency activity” means any functions performed by or on
behalf of a Federal agency in the exercise of its statutory responsibilities. The
term “Federal agency activity” includes a range of activities where a Federal
agency makes a proposal for action initiating an activity or series of activities
when coastal effects are reasonably foreseeable, e.g., a Federal agency's proposal to physically alter coastal resources, a
plan that is used to direct future agency actions, a proposed rulemaking that alters uses of the coastal zone. “Federal
agency activity” does not include the issuance of a federal license or permit to an
applicant or person (see subparts D and E of this part) or the granting of federal assistance to an applicant
agency (see subpart F of this part).
(b) The
term federal “development project” means a Federal agency activity
involving the planning, construction, modification, or removal of public works,
facilities, or other structures, and includes the acquisition, use, or disposal of any
coastal use or resource.
(c) The Federal agency activity category is a residual category for federal actions that are not covered under subparts D, E,
or F of this part.
(d) A general permit proposed by a Federal agency is subject to this subpart if the general permit does not involve caseby-case or individual issuance of a license or permit by a Federal agency. When proposing a general permit, a Federal
agency shall provide a consistency determination to the relevant management programs and request that the State
agency(ies) provide the Federal agency with review, and if necessary, conditions, based on specific enforceable policies,
that would permit the State agency to concur with the Federal agency's consistency determination. State agency
concurrence shall remove the need for the State agency to review individual uses of the general permit for consistency
with the enforceable policies of management programs. Federal agencies shall, pursuant to the consistent to the
maximum extent practicable standard in § 930.32, incorporate State conditions into the general permit. If the State
agency's conditions are not incorporated into the general permit or a State agency objects to the general permit, then the
Federal agency shall notify potential users of the general permit that the general permit is not available for use in that
State unless an applicant under subpart D of this part or a person under subpart E of this part, who wants to use the
general permit in that State provides the State agency with a consistency certification under subpart D of this part and the
State agency concurs. When subpart D or E of this part applies, all provisions of the relevant subpart apply.
(e) The
terms “Federal agency activity” and “Federal development project” also
include modifications of any such activity or development project which affect
any coastal use or resource, provided that, in the case of modifications of an activity or development project
which the State agency has previously reviewed, the effect on any coastal use or resource is substantially different than
those previously reviewed by the State agency.
There are several reasons to prefer our interpretation.
First — Deliberation Skills. Topicality facilitates a process of successive debates that
develops important skills and fosters appreciation for multiple perspectives.
Abandoning the topic forecloses the educational and democratic benefits of debate.
Lundberg 10 — Christian O. Lundberg, Associate Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication
Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from Northwestern
University, 2010 (“The Allred Initiative and Debate Across the Curriculum: Reinventing the Tradition of Debate at North
Carolina,” Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century, Edited by Allan D. Louden, Published by the
International Debate Education Association, ISBN 9781617700293, p. 299)
In response to the first critique, which ultimately reduces to the claims that debate overdetermines democratic
deliberation and that it inculcates an unhealthy antagonism, a number of scholars have extended the old maxim that
dissent is critical to democracy in arguing that debate
is a critical tool for civic deliberation
(Brookfield and Preskill 1999; Levinson 2003). Gill Nichols (2000, 132) argues that a
commitment to debate
and dissent as a core component of democracy is especially critical in the face of
the complexity of modern governance, rapid technological change, and an
increasing need to deal with the nexus of science and public policy. The benefits of inclass debate espoused by Stephen Brookfield, Meira Levinson, and Nichols stem from the idea that debate
inculcates skills for creative and open-minded discussion of disputes in the
context of democratic deliberation: on their collective accounting, debate does not close
down discussion by reducing issues to a simple pro/con binary, nor does it
promote antagonism at the expense of cooperative discussion. Rather, properly cultivated,
debate is a tool for managing democratic conflicts that foregrounds significant
points of dispute, and then invites interlocutors to think about them together
creatively in the context of successive strategic iterations, [end page 304] moments of
evaluation, and reiterations of arguments in the context of a structured public
discussion.
Goodwin’s study of in-class debate practice confirms these intuitions. Goodwin’s study revealed that debate produces an
intense personal connection to class materials while simultaneously making students more open to differing viewpoints.
Goodwin’s conclusion is worth quoting at length here:
Traditional teaching techniques like textbooks, lectures, and tests with right answers
insulate students from the open questions and competing answers that so
often drive our own interest in our subjects. Debates do not, and in fact
invite students to consider a range of alternative views on a subject,
encountering the course content broadly, deeply and personally. Students’ comments about the value of
disagreement also offer an interesting perspective on the nature of the thinking skills we want to foster. The
previous research . . . largely focused on the way debate can help students better master the principles of correct
reasoning. Although some students did echo this finding, many more emphasized the importance of debate in
helping them to recognize and deal with a diversity of viewpoints. (Goodwin 2003, 158)
The results of this research create significant questions about the conclusion that debate engenders reductive thinking and
an antagonism that is unhealthy to democracy. In terms of the criticism that debate is reductive, the implication of
Goodwin’s study is that debate
creates a broader appreciation for multiple perspectives
on an issue than the predominant forms of classroom instruction. This
conclusion is especially powerful when one considers debate as more than a discrete
singular performance, but as a whole process of inventing, discussing, employing, and
reformulating arguments in the context of an audience of comparatively
objective evaluators. In the process of researching, strategizing, debating,
reframing stances, and switching sides on a question, students are provided
with both a framework for thinking about a problem and creative solutions to it
from a number of angles. Thus, while from a very narrow perspective one might
claim debate practices reduce all questions to a “pro” and a “con,” the
cumulative effects of the pedagogical process of preparing for, performing, and
evaluating a debate provide the widest possible exposure to the varied
positions that a student might take on an issue. Perhaps more significantly, in-class debate
provides a competitive incentive for finding as many innovative and unique
approaches to a problem as possible, and for translating them into publically
useful positions.
Second — Ocean Literacy. Debates about the assigned topic foster scientific literacy
and citizen engagement. Refusing to participate in debates about ocean policy leaves
us unprepared to confront the daunting challenges facing the global climate and
ecosystems. It is important for ocean policy to be included in the curriculum.
Steffen 10 — Peg Steffen, Education Coordinator in the Communications and Education Division of the National
Ocean Service at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, holds a bachelor’s degree in zoology and a
master’s in curriculum and instruction, 2010 (“Education Around Earth – Ocean Literacy for a Blue Planet,” earthZine—a
publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, March 22nd, Available Online at
http://www.earthzine.org/2010/03/22/education-around-earth-ocean-literacy-for-a-blue-planet/, Accessed 07-02-2014)
“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.” — Arthur C. Clarke
All life is dependent on the ocean. It covers more than 70 percent of the Earth’s
surface, is the source of most life on Earth, regulates our weather and climate,
provides most of our oxygen, and feeds much of the human population. In spite
of its importance, ocean and aquatic sciences remain among the most
underrepresented disciplines in K–12 educational curricula. Rarely taught at any
level, concepts about the ocean, the coasts or the Great Lakes infrequently appear in K–12
curriculum materials, textbooks, assessments or standards. The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is working to help educators bring ocean sciences
into the classroom.
Ocean literacy and science education are important to NOAA not only because the agency
needs experienced and talented scientists to fulfill its mission, but because every individual across the
nation, whether living in a coastal or inland state, affects and is affected by, the oceans and
atmosphere — everyday. NOAA’s mission is to serve the nation’s need for
oceanic and atmospheric information, but doing so also means helping to ensure
that the general public understands how ocean, coastal and climate science
impacts their daily lives and future prosperity.
Society needs citizens who know how to apply science knowledge in their
careers and in their engagement as active members of their communities.
Future changes will bring economic and environmental challenges as well as
opportunities, and citizens who are ocean and climate literate will be better
prepared to respond. To protect fragile ecosystems and to build sustainable
communities that are resilient to climate change—including extreme weather and climate
events—a science literate citizenry is essential.
Children in particular need to be engaged in ocean, coastal and climate science
and NOAA has produced a wide array of resources and programs for students
and professional development training for educators. The online resources and field
experiences described below are just a few of the opportunities offered by NOAA’s education programs.
Third — Constructive Constraints. Absolute affirmative flexibility leaves the negative
without meaningful ground to advance well-developed counter-arguments.
Establishing boundaries is important because they spur imagination and innovation,
improving the quality of debates.
Thomas and Brown 11 — Douglas Thomas, Associate Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication
at the University of Southern California, founding member of the Critical and Cultural Studies division of the National
Communication Association, holds a Ph. D. in Communication from the University of Minnesota, and John Seely Brown,
Visiting Scholar and Adviser to the Provost at the University of Southern California, independent cochairman of the
Deloitte Center for the Edge, former Chief Scientist and Director of the Palo Alto Research Center at Xerox, holds a Ph.D.
in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan, 2011 (“A Tale of Two Cultures,” A New
Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, Published by CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform, ISBN 1456458884, p. 35)
Learning Environments
We believe, however, that learning
should be viewed in terms of an environment—combined
with the rich resources provided by the digital information network—where the context in which
learning happens, the boundaries that define it, and the students, teachers, and
information within it all coexist and shape each other in a mutually reinforcing
way. Here, boundaries serve not only as constraints but also, oftentimes, as catalysts for
innovation. Encountering boundaries spurs the imagination to become more
active in figuring out novel situations within the constraints of the situation or
context.
Environments with well-defined and carefully constructed boundaries are not usually
thought of as standardized, nor are they tested and measured. Rather, they can be described as a set of
pressures that nudge and guide change. They are substrates for evolution, and
they move at varying rates of speed.
Fourth — Policy Engagement. Policy debates over racial issues are productive and
important. Meaningful dialogue about what actions the government should take
overcomes the conversational impasse and paves the way for material change.
Disavowing the policy consequences of one’s ideological positions makes things
worse, not better.
Bracey 6 — Christopher A. Bracey, Associate Professor of Law and Associate Professor of African & African
American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, holds a B.S. from the University of North Carolina and a J.D.
from Harvard Law School, 2006 (“The Cul De Sac of Race Preference Discourse,” Southern California Law Review (79 S. Cal.
L. Rev. 1231), September, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)
IV. A Foundation for Renewed Racial Dialogue
A deepened appreciation and open acknowledgment of this pedigree is crucial to restoring public conversation on race
preferences. Opponents of race preferences must come to understand that this pedigree, if left unaddressed, tends to
overwhelm the underlying merit of arguments against race preferences in the eyes of proponents. At the same time,
proponents should understand that the deployment of these pedigreed rhetorical themes does not necessarily signal
agreement with the nineteenth-century racial norms from which they are sourced. For both proponents and opponents,
the avoidance of a rapid retreat into ideological trench warfare not only
preserves space for reasoned, substantive debate regarding race preferences, but also
allows for the possibility of overcoming our collective fixation on race preferences as the issue in American
race relations and advancing the conversation to reach the larger issue of producing a
more racially inclusive society.
Our failing public conversation on race matters not only presents a particularly
tragic moment in American race relations, but also evinces a greater failure of
democracy. Sustained, meaningful dialogue is a critical, if not indispensable
feature of our liberal democracy. n260 It is through [*1312] meaningful public
conversation about what actions government should take (or refrain from
taking) that public policy determinations ultimately gain legitimacy.
Conversation is particularly important in our democracy, given the profoundly
diverse and often contradictory cultural and political traditions that are the sine
qua non of American life. Under these particular circumstances, "persons ought
to strive to engage in a mutual process of critical interaction, because if they do
not, no uncoerced common understanding can possibly be attained." n261 Sincere
deliberation, in its broadest idealized form, ensures that a broad array of input is heard and considered, legitimizing the
resulting decision. Under this view, "if the preferences that determine the results of democratic procedures are
unreflective or ignorant, then they lose their claim to political authority over us." n262 In the absence of self-conscious,
reflective dialogue, "democracy loses its capacity to generate legitimate political power." n263
In addition to legitimizing the exercise of state authority in a liberal democracy,
dialogue works to promote individual freedom. The power to hash over our
alternatives is an important exercise of human agency. n264 If democracy is taken
to mean rule by the people themselves, then conversation and deliberation are
the principal means through which we declare and assert the power to shape our
own belief systems. The roots of this idea of dialogue as freedom-promoting are traceable to the Kantian view
that individual motivation that is either uncriticized or uncontested can be understood on a deeper level as a mode of
subjugation. As Frank Michelman explains, "in Kantian terms we are free only insofar as we are self-governing, directing
our actions in accordance with law-like reasons [*1313] that we adopt for ourselves, as proper to ourselves, upon
conscious, critical reflection on our identities (or natures) and social situations." n265 Because "self-cognition and ensuing
self-legislation must, to a like extent, be socially situated," Michelman continues, "norms must be formed through public
dialogue and expressed as public law." n266 In this way, dialogue
as democratic modus operandi
can be understood both as a material expression of freedom and as a
mechanism to promote individual freedom.
Robust dialogue on public policy matters also promotes the individual growth
of the dialogue participants. Conversation helps people become more
knowledgeable and hold better developed opinions because "opinions can be
tested and enlarged only where there is a genuine encounter with differing
opinions." n267 Moreover, meaningful conversation serves to broaden people's moral perspectives to include
matters of public good, because appeals to the public good are often the most persuasive arguments available in public
deliberation. n268 Indeed, even if people are thinking self-interested thoughts while making public good arguments,
cognitive dissonance will create an incentive for such individuals to reconcile their self interest with the public good. n269
At the same time, because
political dialogue is a material manifestation of democracy
in action, it promotes a feeling of democratic community and instills in the
people a will for political action to advance reasoned public policy in the spirit
of promoting the public good. n270
For these reasons, the collective aspiration of those interested in pursing serious,
sustained, and policy-legitimating dialogue on race matters must be to cultivate
a reasoned discourse that is relatively free of retrograde ideological baggage that
feeds skepticism, engenders distrust, and effectively forecloses constructive
conversation on the most corrosive and divisive issue in American history and
contemporary life. As the forgoing sections suggest, the continued reliance upon pedigreed rhetorical themes has
and continues to poison racial legal discourse. Given the various normative and ideological commitments that might be
ascribed to [*1314] opponents of race preferences, the question thus becomes, how are we to approach the task of
breaking through the conversational impasse and creating intellectual space for meaningful discourse on this issue?
One can imagine at least three responses to this question. As an initial matter, one might subscribe to the view that
pedigree is not destiny, and thus conclude that the family resemblance tells us little, if anything, definitive about the
normative commitments of today's opponents of race preferences. Consider the argument that the benefits of white
privilege do not extend equally among all whites, and that policies that treat all whites as equally guilty of racial
subordination advance a theory of undesirable rough justice. n271 Although this argument is a staple of modern
opponents of race preferences, it would be a mistake to conclude that it can only be deployed by those persons who
normatively oppose race preferences. Indeed, one might very well support race preferences, but believe quite strongly
that such programs should be particularly sensitive to individual candidate qualifications.
Similarly, although one might believe that diversity does not comport with merit based decisionmaking in education and
employment, it would be incorrect to interpret this belief as necessarily indicative of a greater commitment to preserving
status quo racial inequality. One might reject the diversity rational as insufficient to justify a system of race preferences
that one strongly believes must be justified. In short, one may be inclined to simply engage the argument and ignore the
possibility of retrograde normative underpinnings.
Interestingly, a small cadre of scholars has adopted this approach. Derrick Bok and William Bowen, in The Shape of the
River, investigated whether racial minorities feel stigmatized or otherwise adversely affected as a result of being denoted
beneficiaries of affirmative action policy in college admissions. n272 Thomas Ross has critically examined claims of
collective white innocence. n273 More recently, Goodwin Lui has researched the scope of the burden that affirmative
action in college admissions imposes upon aspiring white students. n274 In each instance, these scholars chose to place to
one side their skepticism about the normative commitments of those advancing the viewpoint, and launch directly into
substantive critiques of that viewpoint.
[*1315] This approach, however, may prove unsatisfactory for those more strongly committed to racial justice - those for
whom it is not enough to simply challenge ideas in the abstract. As the late Robert Cover famously wrote, "legal
interpretation takes place within a field of pain and death." n275 By this, he meant that the stakes of legal discourse are
elevated when bodies are on the line. A vigorous critique of the substantive position alone leaves the normative
underpinnings - the motivational force behind the proposal - dangerously intact. It may stymie the particular vehicle that
attempts to reinforce racial subordination, but it leaves unaddressed the fundamental motive driving policy positions that
seek to undermine racial minorities in the first place.
At the other end of the responsive spectrum is wholesale rejection. One might view the pedigree as providing
good reason to dismiss opponents of race entirely. Proponents of this view may choose to indulge fully this liberal
skepticism and simply reject the message along with the messenger. n276 The tradition of legal discourse on American
race relations [*1316] has been one steeped in racial animus and characterized by circumlocution, evasiveness, reluctance
and denial. When opponents avail themselves of rhetorical strategies used by nineteenth-century legal elites, they
necessarily invoke the specter of this tragic racial past. Moreover, their continued reliance upon pedigreed rhetoric to
justify a system that only modestly responds to persistent racial disparities in the material lives of racial minorities
suggests a deep, unarticulated normative commitment to preserving the racial status quo in which whites remain
comfortably above blacks. The steadfast reliance upon pedigreed rhetoric, coupled with the apparent disconnect between
claims of racial egalitarianism and material conditions of racial subordination as a result of persistent racial disparities,
spoils the credibility of modern opponents of race preferences and creates an incentive for proponents to dismiss them
without serious interrogation, consideration, and weighing of the arguments they advance.
The principal deficit of this approach is that it would
serve only to concretize the existing
conversational impasse and subvert the larger aspiration of seeking constructive
solutions to pressing racial issues. It creates an incentive to view race matters in
purely ideological terms and further subverts the possibility of reasoned policy
debate. Speaking of race matters in purely ideological terms poses a serious
impediment to racial conversation because, in advancing one's position, one essentially argues that a
particular set of circumstances demands a particular outcome. In this [*1317] way, purely ideological race rhetoric
functions much like philosopher Immanuel Kant described in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. n277
According to Kant, a moral imperative is categorical insofar as it is presented as objectively necessary, without reference
to some purpose or outcome. The imperative is the end in and of itself. As Kant explained, the moral imperative "has to
do not with the matter of the action and what is to result from it, but with the form and the principle from which the
action itself follows; and the essentially [sic] good in the action consists in the disposition, let the result be what it may."
n278 Because the moral imperative embodies that which is morally good, it necessarily makes a claim about justice. In
short, an act is deemed morally just to the extent that it retains fidelity to the moral imperative.
By contrast, a policy argument reflects a set of choices or priorities and asserts a
claim about the impact of a particular set of decisions upon the world. n279 A policy
argument does not embody a claim to justice. Indeed, the correctness of a policy choice is often tested against the
backdrop of some agreed upon conception of justice. As the late Jerome Culp, Jr. explained:
Neither side of a moral debate is likely to be persuaded by proof that the policy claims support or discredit
their moral positions. Policy arguments can be disproved by empirical evidence and challenged by showing in
some situations the policy does not work or has contrary results. To refute a moral claim, however, first
requires some agreement on the moral framework. Only then can one discuss whether the moral policy
advocated conforms to the agreed-upon framework. n280
Speaking about race matters in purely ideological or moral terms creates the impression that a particular racial policy is
rooted in some theory of what is morally just. In this way, opposition to race preferences is made to appear "above the
fray" of politics and less susceptible to public choice debate. In addition, it enables opponents to claim that race [*1318]
preferences merely reflect the political whims of its proponents, unanchored by principle or a coherent theory of social
justice.
Second, reducing
conversation on race matters to an ideological contest allows
opponents to elide inquiry into whether the results of a particular preference policy
are desirable. Policy positions masquerading as principled ideological stances
create the impression that a racial policy is not simply a choice among available
alternatives, but the embodiment of some higher moral principle. Thus, the
"principle" becomes an end in itself, without reference to outcomes. Consider the
prevailing view of colorblindness in constitutional discourse. Colorblindness has come to be understood as the
embodiment of what is morally just, independent of its actual effect upon the lives of racial minorities. This explains
Justice Thomas's belief in the "moral and constitutional equivalence" between Jim Crow laws and race preferences, and
his tragic assertion that "Government cannot make us equal [but] can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal
before the law." n281 For Thomas, there is no meaningful difference between laws designed to entrench racial
subordination and those designed to alleviate conditions of oppression. Critics may point out that colorblindness in
practice has the effect of entrenching existing racial disparities in health, wealth, and society. But in
framing the
debate in purely ideological terms, opponents are able to avoid the contentious
issue of outcomes and make viability determinations based exclusively on
whether racially progressive measures exude fidelity to the ideological principle
of colorblindness. Meaningful policy debate is replaced by ideological
exchange, which further exacerbates hostilities and deepens the cycle of
resentment. n282
2AC — Topicality
1. We are in the direction of the topic. The 1AC explores the Atlantic ocean by
mourning the history of the Middle Passage. It’s close enough to facilitate a
productive debate.
2. USFG Role-Playing Bad — it forces students to adopt an imperialist perspective and
promotes spectatorship, not engagement. This turns their “deliberation skills” and
“policy engagement good” impacts.
Reid-Brinkley 8 — Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, Ph.D. Candidate in Communication at the University of Georgia,
holds an M.A. in Communication from the University of Alabama and a B.A. in Political Science and Government from
Emory University, 2008 (“The Harsh Realities of ‘Acting Black’: How African-American Policy Debaters Negotiate
Representation Through Racial Performance and Style,” University of Georgia Ph.D. Dissertation, Available Online at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/93057917/Reid-brinkley-Shanara-r-200805-Phd, Accessed 07-09-2014, p. 117-119)
Genre Violation Four: Policymaker as Impersonal and the Rhetoric of Personal Experience.
Debate is a competitive game. 112 It requires that its participants take on the positions of
state actors (at least when they are affirming the resolution). Debate resolutions
normally call for federal action in some area of domestic or foreign policy. Affirmative teams
must support the resolution, while the negative negates it. The debate then
becomes a “laboratory” within which debaters may test policies. 113 Argumentation
scholar Gordon Mitchell notes that “Although they [end page 117] may research and track public argument as it unfolds
outside the confines of the laboratory for research purposes, in
this approach students witness
argumentation beyond the walls of the academy as spectators, with little or no
apparent recourse to directly participate or alter the course of events.” 114
Although debaters spend a great deal of time discussing and researching
government action and articulating arguments relevant to such action, what
happens in debate rounds has limited or no real impact on contemporary
governmental policy making. And participation does not result in the majority of
the debate community engaging in activism around the issues they research.
Mitchell observes that the stance of the policymaker in debate comes with a “sense of
detachment associated with the spectator posture.”115 In other words, its participants
are able to engage in debates where they are able to distance themselves from
the events that are the subjects of debates. Debaters can throw around terms
like torture, terrorism, genocide and nuclear war without blinking. Debate
simulations can only serve to distance the debaters from real world
participation in the political contexts they debate about. As William Shanahan remarks:
…the topic established a relationship through interpellation that inhered
irrespective of what the particular political affinities of the debaters were.
The relationship was both political and ethical, and needed to be debated as such. When we blithely
call for United States Federal Government policymaking, we are not immune to the
colonialist legacy that establishes our place on this continent. We cannot
wish away the horrific atrocities perpetrated everyday in our name
simply by refusing to acknowledge these implications”(emphasis in original).116
[end page 118]
The “objective” stance of the policymaker is an impersonal or imperialist
persona. The policymaker relies upon “acceptable” forms of evidence, engaging
in logical discussion, producing rational thoughts. As Shanahan, and the Louisville debaters’
note, such a stance is integrally linked to the normative, historical and
contemporary practices of power that produce and maintain varying networks
of oppression. In other words, the discursive practices of policy-oriented debate are
developed within, through and from systems of power and privilege. Thus,
these practices are critically implicated in the maintenance of hegemony. So, rather
than seeing themselves as government or state actors, Jones and Green choose to perform themselves in debate, violating
the more “objective” stance of the “policymaker” and require their opponents to do the same.
3. Counter-interpretation: the topic is the subject of the discussion, but it doesn’t
control the discussion. “Affirmative” means the team that speaks first and last, not the
team that advocates “for the topic.” We are a discussion of the topic even if we don’t
advocate a topical policy.
4. No “procedural fairness” impact. Abstract rules about predictability and limits
reflect power disparities, not objective judgment. Our case critiques this “objective
perspective.”
Delgado 92 — Richard Delgado, Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law at the University of Colorado, holds a
J.D. from the University of California-Berkeley, 1992 (“Shadowboxing: An Essay on Power,” Cornell Law Review (77
Cornell L. Rev. 813), May, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)
II What the Subjective-Objective Debate Shows — and Conceals
Underlying these stylized debates about subjective versus objective standards is a
well-hidden issue of cultural power, one neatly concealed by elaborate
arguments that predictably invoke predictable "principle." n25 These arguments
invite us to take sides for or against abstract values that lie on either side of a
well-worn analytical divide, having remarkably little to do with what is at stake.
The arguments mystify and sidetrack, rendering us helpless in the face of
powerful repeat players like corporations, human experimenters, action-loving surgeons, and sexually aggressive
men. n26
How does this happen? Notice
that in many cases it is the stronger party – the tobacco company,
surgeon, or male date – that wants to apply an objective standard to a key event . n27 The
doctor wants the law to require disclosure only of the risks and benefits the average patient would find material. n28 The
male partygoer wants the law to ignore the woman's subjective thoughts in favor of her outward manifestations. n29 The
tobacco company wants the warning on the package to be a stopper. Generally,
the law complies.
What explains the stronger party's preference for an objective approach, and the
other's demand for a more personalized one? It is not that one approach is more principled, more
just, or even more [*818] likely to produce a certain result than the other. Rather, in
my opinion, the answer lies in issues of power and culture. It is now almost a commonplace that
we construct the social world. n30 We do this through stories, narratives, myths, and
symbols – by using tools that create images, categories, and pictures. n31 Over
time, through repetition, the dominant stories seem to become true and natural,
and are accepted as "the way things are." n32 Recently, outsider jurisprudence n33
has been developing means, principally "counterstorytelling," to displace or overturn these
comfortable majoritarian myths and narratives. n34 A well-told counterstory can
jar or displace the dominant account. n35
The debate on objective and subjective standards touches on these issues of
world-making and the social construction of reality. Powerful actors, such as tobacco
companies and male dates, want objective standards applied to them simply because these
standards always, and already, reflect them and their culture. These actors have
been in power; their subjectivity long ago was deemed "objective" and imposed
on the world. n36 Now their ideas about meaning, action, and fairness are built
into our culture, into our view of malefemale, doctor-patient, and manufacturer-consumer relations. n37
It is no surprise, then, that judgment under an "objective" (or reasonable person) standard
generally will favor the stronger party. This, however, is not always the case: Rules that too
predictably and reliably favored the strong would be declared unprincipled. n38 The stronger actor must be
able to see his favorite principles as fair and [*819] just – ones that a reasonable
society would rely upon in contested situations. n39 He must be able to depict the
current standards as integral to justice, freedom, fairness, and administrability
– to everything short of the American Way itself (and maybe even that, since societies that
regulate these relationships more closely are paternalistic, and verge on (shhh!) socialism). n40
5. Other debates teach policy deliberation skills and ocean literacy. No unique impact
to this strategic iteration.
6. Policy Engagement Bad — participation in policy discussions re-entrenches
structural inequalities by accepting institutional constraints. Withdrawing from policy
in order to critique the deliberative setting from the outside is a better activist
strategy.
Young 1 — Iris Marion Young, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy
from the Pennsylvania State University, 2001 (“Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory, Volume
29, Number 5, October, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via JSTOR, p. 682-685)
V Constrained Alternatives
Let us suppose that by some combination of activist agitation and deliberative persuasion, some
deliberative settings emerge that approximately represent all those affected by the
outcome of certain policy decisions. Given the world of structural inequality as we know it, the activist
believes such a circumstance will be rare at best but is willing to entertain the possibility for the sake of this argument.
The activist remains suspicious of the deliberative democrat's exhortation to engage in reasoned and
critical discussion with people he disagrees with, even on the supposition that the public where he engages in such
discussion really includes the diversity of interests and perspectives potentially affected by policies. That is because
he perceives that existing social and economic structures have set unacceptable
constraints on the terms of deliberation and its agenda.
Problems and disagreements in the real world of democratic politics appear and
are addressed against the background of a given history and sedimentation of
unjust structural inequality, says the activist, which helps set agenda priorities and
constrains the alternatives that political actors may consider in their
deliberations. When this is so, both the deliberative agenda and the institutional
constraints it mirrors should themselves be subject to criticism, protest, and
resistance.7 Going to the table to meet with representatives of those interests
typically served by existing institutional relations, to discuss how to deal most
justly with issues that presuppose those institutional relations, gives both those
institutions and deliberative process too much legitimacy. It co-opts the energy
of citizens committed to justice, leaving little time for mobilizing people to bash
the institutional constraints and decision-making process from the outside.
Thus, the responsible citizen ought to withdraw from implicit acceptance of
structural and institutional constraints by refusing to deliberate about policies
within them. Let me give some examples.
A local anti-poverty advocacy group engaged in many forms of agitation and protest in the years leading up to passage of
the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act by the U.S. Congress in the spring of 1996. This
legislation fundamentally changed the terms of welfare policy in the United States. It abolished entitlements to public
assistance for the first time in sixty years, allowing states to deny benefits when funds have run out. It requires recipients
of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families to work at jobs after a certain period and allows states to vary significantly in
their programs. Since passage of the legislation, the anti-poverty advocacy group has organized recipients and others who
care about welfare justice to protest and lobby the state house to increase welfare funding and to count serving as a
welfare rights advocate in local welfare offices as a "work activity. [end page 682]
In its desire to do its best by welfare clients, the county welfare department proposes to establish an advisory council with
significant influence over the implementation and administration of welfare programs in the county. They have been
persuaded by advocates of deliberative democracy that proceedings of this council should be publicly accountable and
organized so as to facilitate serious discussion and criticism of alternative proposals. They believe that democratic justice
calls for making this council broadly inclusive of county citizens, and they think legitimate deliberations will be served
particularly if they include recipients and their advocates on the council. So they invite the anti-poverty advocacy group
to send representatives to the council and ask them to name recipient representatives from among the welfare rights
organization with which they work.
After deliberating among themselves for some weeks, the welfare activists decline to join the council. The constraints that
federal and state law have put on welfare policy, they assert, make it impossible to administer a humane welfare policy.
Such a council will deliberate about whether it would be more just to place local welfare offices here or there but will have
no power to expand the number of offices. They will decide how best to administer child care assistance, but they will
have no power to decide who is eligible for that assistance or the total funds to support the program. The deliberations of
a county welfare implementation council face numerous other constraints that will make its outcomes inevitably unjust,
according to the activist group. All citizens of the county who agree that the policy framework is unjust have a
responsibility to stay outside such deliberations and instead pressure the state legislature to expand welfare options, by,
for example, staging sit-ins at the state department of social services.
The deliberative democrat finds such refusal and protest action uncooperative and counterproductive. Surely it is better
to work out the most just form of implementation of legislation than to distract lawmakers and obstruct the routines of
overworked case workers. The activist replies that it is wrong to cooperate with policies and processes that presume
unjust institutional constraints. The problem is not that policy makers and citizen deliberations fail to make arguments
but that their starting premises are unacceptable.
It seems to me that advocates of deliberative democracy who believe that deliberative processes are the best way to
conduct policies even under the conditions of structural inequality that characterize democracies today have no
satisfactory response to this criticism. Many advocates of deliberative procedures seem to find no problem with structures
and institutional constraints that limit policy alternatives in actual democracies, advocating reflective political reasoning
within them to counter irrational tendencies to reduce issues to sound bites and decisions to aggregate preferences. In
their detailed [end page 683] discussion of the terms of welfare reform in Democracy and Disagreement, for example,
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson appear to accept as given that policy action to respond to the needs of poor people
must come in the form of poor support rather than changes in tax policy, the relation of private and public investment,
public works employment, and other more structural ways of undermining deprivation and income inequality.8 James
Fishkin's innovative citizens' forum deliberating national issues in connection with the 1996 political campaign, to take
another example, seemed to presume as given all the fiscal, power, and institutional constraints on policy alternatives that
the U.S. Congress and mainstream press assumed. To the extent that such constraints assume existing patterns of class
inequality, residential segregation, and gender division of labor as given, the activist's claim is plausible that there is little
difference among the alternatives debated, and he suggests that the responsible citizen should not consent to these
assumptions but instead agitate for deeper criticism and change.
The ongoing business of legislation and policy implementation will assume
existing institutions and their priorities as given unless massive concerted action
works to shift priorities and goals. Most of the time, then, politics will operate under the constrained
alternatives that are produced by and support structural inequalities. If the deliberative democrat tries
to insert practices of deliberation into existing public policy discussions, she is
forced to accept the range of alternatives that existing structural constraints
allow. While two decades ago in the United States, there were few opportunities for theorists of deliberative
democracy to try to influence the design and process of public discussion, today things have changed. Some public
officials and private foundations have become persuaded that inclusive, reasoned extensive deliberation is good for
democracy and wish to implement these ideals in the policy formation process. To
the extent that such
implementation must presuppose constrained alternatives that cannot question
existing institutional priorities and social structures, deliberation is as likely to
reinforce injustice as to undermine it.
I think that the deliberative democrat has no adequate response to this challenge
other than to accept the activist's suspicion of implementing deliberative
processes within institutions that seriously constrain policy alternatives in ways
that, for example, make it nearly impossible for the structurally disadvantaged to
propose solutions to social problems that might alter the structural positions in
which they stand. Only if the theory and practice of deliberative democracy are
willing to withdraw from the immediacy of the already given policy trajectory
can they respond to this activist challenge. The deliberative democracy should
help create inclusive deliberative settings in which basic social and economic
structures can be examined; such settings [end page 684] for the most part must be
outside of and opposed to ongoing settings of official policy discussion.
7. We are predictable enough. “USFG bad” is a stock issue. If they believe in “switching
sides,” they should be prepared to defend the USFG.
8. Colorblind Debate Bad — topicality and “switch sides” norms are tools of
colorblindness. Traditional models of policy debate exclude alternative perspectives.
Meaningful minority participation requires abandoning topicality in favor of
performative approaches — empirical evidence.
Polson 12 — Dana Roe Polson, Ph.D. Candidate in Language, Literacy and Culture at the University of MarylandBaltimore County, Co-Director and Teacher at a Baltimore City Schools public charter school, 2012 (“’Longing for Theory:’
Performance Debate in Action, University of Maryland-Baltimore County Ph.D. Dissertation, Available Online at
http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/pqdtopen/doc/1027604463.html?FMT=ABS, Accessed 07-09-2014, p. 289-295)
Why We Need Race-Conscious Work
Many people in the debate community question why Black performance debaters won’t just
debate like traditional debaters do. There seems to be the feeling that it is a
stubbornly willful choice; that performance debaters are somehow selfish
because they [end page 289] debate in a stylistically different way from the norm. One
respondent showed this feeling: “What they [performance debaters], what they actually want to do is take this, and say,
we don’t like this, and we’re going to make you do this instead. And that’s kind of disingenuous to the people that wanna
do it this way [traditional debate]” (Scott Smith, interview, p. 23). A similar aggrieved feeling that Black people flout
norms they should instead pay attention to, seems to be held about many Black cultural styles, as is evident from the
mainstream preoccupation with the baggy pants often worn by young men, particularly young Black men, today.
However, there also seems to be a need on the part of some in the debate community to show that Black debaters can
debate like traditional (more often white) debaters do—to show that they can be, or are, just as good. To do so, Black
debaters have to debate in the same style as whites to prove themselves. Duane Hartman specifically talked about the
expectations of (white) UDL founders: “Because for them it’s like, we have a bunch of really successful white debaters, we
want to prove that Black people can do this too. You know, and with that being the goal and the focus that obscures, I
think, the specific needs that you know, debaters from different experiences, that have different position in the world,
have different educational needs” (Duane Hartman, group interview, p. 7). This is the view of an African American coach
and former debater. I think he gets at a crucial issue for anyone interested in the failure of most schools to educate African
American students, especially but not only poor ones. We believe, and seem to want to believe, that the same education
we provide successfully for middle-class white children is appropriate for children of color. In this perspective, status-quo
schooling is neutral; it is a level playing field on which all should be able to compete. [end page 290] Having to attend to
any differences of race or culture must mean that the different are less able. They should be able to do just as well as the
white children; we should not have to provide extra services or different services. Therefore, we tend not to want to
identify cultural or racial difference: we want to ignore it in favor of a colorblind approach. Another participant
explained, “One of the popular responses on a high school level to race-based arguments is, you know, colorblindness.
‘It’s when you talk about race that gives it power.’ And, it’s sorta like, to not discuss race is a privilege” (Andre Rubens,
group interview II, p. 4).
There is a specific way that people use colorblindness to argue something along
the lines of “Black debaters can do just as well as white debaters. If they choose
not to, that’s on them.” This viewpoint avoids some areas that some people would
just rather not talk about. A parallel is a hiring question that asks teacher job applicants what they know
about teaching African American children. In my 10 years of school hiring experience, a majority of respondents will say
something like, “I don’t see color when I look at children. I teach them all the same.” What this perspective misses is that
there may be something race-related about schooling as it is usually practiced in the 21st century USA and also that there
may be something related to race, ethnicity, and culture in how children learn best. I would argue that that has nothing to
do with biology or one’s color but everything to do with the historical, cultural, and social locations of African Americans
in the U.S.—not only the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and continuing and well-documented structural and institutional
racism, but also with the rich and varied African American cultures continued and created in the United States. [end page
291]
But as we saw in Chapter 1, an
ideology of liberal integrationism counsels us to reject the
idea that race matters. Remember Peller’s claim that “Integrationists are committed to the view that race makes
no real difference between people, except as unfortunate historical vestiges of irrational discrimination” (p. 130). For
integrationists, it behooves us to avoid talk about distinctions surrounding race, and to insist on neutrality and
colorblindness. I
believe that this is one of the roots of the resistance to performance
debate. Indeed, I think this ideology requires that debaters of color “prove”
themselves in a traditional debate style. I have not heard it stated as such specifically, so I’m
extrapolating so that we can notice the enthymemes:
1. Policy debate is a race-neutral and colorblind activity that has a long and stellar history of producing excellence in
academic debate skills in a variety of mostly white male people who go on to important positions in government, the
corporate world, and the public sector.
2. There is a standard of excellence in the policy debate world in which speed-reading, spread, a technocratic mindset,
and a Eurocentric epistemology are normative. This standard and these norms produce excellent thinkers and debaters.
There are content standards for the resolutions that ensure that debaters are debating about worthwhile topics—big
issues, foreign affairs, policy wonk stuff. That the USFG is the actor legitimates the endeavor with a sense of importance.
3. We should want to keep the activity in the form and content that is worthwhile and that produces excellence. This is a
standard to which all should aspire. The style is part of the activity and inseparable from the excellence achieved. [end
page 292]
4. People of color, white women, and other students who are in some way not the debate norm all have an equal place at
the debate table. There is no reason for them not to join in the activity as it exists. They can achieve excellence the same as
any other [white, male] debater.
5. The fact that statistically, non-white, non-male students do not join debate is attributable to lack of interest. The fact that
non-white, non-male students do not achieve success, for the most part, in the debate world, is attributable to lack of
effort, or perhaps lack of talent.
6. Because we secretly worry that the lack of joining is due to the lack of success that is due to a deficiency of some sort on
the students’ part, we white people need to prove that Black students can make it in the traditional debate world, as is.
We do so by insisting that they debate the way the white-normed debate world does, by portraying that world as raceneutral and colorblind.
That’s the argument. Where does it fall apart? If
certain givens are seen to be illusory, then the
argument does not make sense. So if the debate world is not as described, then
perhaps non-white, non-male, non-privileged debaters might benefit from a
different debate world or space or norms than the prevalent ones. If debaters
are not all the same, if there are cultural differences in communication styles,
learning styles, speaking styles, performance styles, epistemology, etc., springing
from differences in cultural styles often related to race/ethnicity or gender, then
the world normed to the white, male cultural styles would indeed exclude
others. [end page 293]
Instead of attempting to prove that Black debaters can debate just as well in
traditional styles, we might want to instead take a different stance.
Acknowledging different communication styles, historical circumstances, and
culture is crucial, Hill says:
Debate...is grounded in Western ideology and frowns upon the African
American communication style.... African Americans see the activity as
reflecting the opposite of what they believe in. And it becomes difficult for
African American competitors to stay in the activity when they must
suppress or give up their cultural beliefs in order to be
successful.....African Americans are unique. They are unique because of the set of
circumstances they have experienced since coming to America. African
American culture is tied together with the strings of cultural experience. If
that experience is denied, ignored, or devalued, then the culture itself is
denied, ignored, or devalued. (Hill, 1997, p. 230)
Perhaps instead of wondering why we should pay attention to the differences
and circumstances that Hill points out, we should wonder why we choose not to.
Research into multicultural education by scholars including Janice Hale and Gloria Ladson-Billings has been available for
many years, and yet it still seems regarded as somewhat fringe by many white educators—including, for a long time,
myself.
And yet, choosing
not to think about these distinctive characteristics means
choosing not to activate agency and empowerment for minority debaters, according
to Duane Hartman:
You know, traditional debate...[I think] is for a particular person with particular experiences. ... our form of
debate is activates, you know, a notion of one’s own agency and power that traditional debate I don’t think
does (Hartman, group interview, p. 9).
Therefore I
am arguing here in support of a culturally- and racially-inflected
approach to debate that addresses the needs of students in particular historical
and social locations. Performance debate provides a very specific example of
how such an approach can be achieved, and it has succeeded spectacularly for
many students who otherwise might never have had their agency activated in
such a way. Investigating the implications of this approach and its success for schooling would be a fascinating and
necessary task.
* Hill = Hill, S. (1997). African American students’ motivation to participate in intercollegiate debate. The Southern
Journal of Forensices, 2, 202–235.
9. No “deliberation skills” impact. Students already learn decision-making skills in
school and through life experience — reading a topical plan in a particular debate
doesn’t matter.
10. Switching Sides Bad — defending “both sides” of the topic makes students
complicit with dehumanizing violence. Their interpretation creates indifference, not
engagement.
Spanos 13 — William V. Spanos, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the State
University of New York at Binghamton, interviewed by Christopher Spurlock, 2013 (“William V. Spanos: An Interested
Debate Inquiry,” kdebate, Volume 1, Issue 1, Available Online at http://kdebate.com/spanos.html, Accessed 07-09-2014)
CS: When we had our discussion in Binghamton, you asked me if teams were ever marginalized or excluded for reading
arguments based on your work. Some have argued that this move is most frequently enacted during debates with an
argument aptly referred to as "framework" where one team will define and delimit their ideal 'world picture' of a
carefully crafted resolution and then explain why the opposing teams argument have violated the parameters of this
'frame.' In earlier comments on debate you had criticized the disinterested nature of the activity and its participants - the
detached model of debate where anything goes so long as you "score points" and detach yourself from the real (human)
weight of these issues. How might debaters approach debate or relate to our resolutions in a more interested sense?
WVS: The reason I asked you that question is because I've always thought that the
debate system is a
rigged process, by which I mean, in your terms, it's framed to exclude anything that the
frame can't contain and domesticate. To frame also means to "prearrange" so
that a particular outcome is assured," which also means the what's outside of the
frame doesn't stand a chance: it is "framed" from the beginning. It was, above all, the
great neo-Marxist Louis Althusser's analysis of the "problematic" - the perspective or frame of reference fundamental to
knowledge production in democratic-capitalist societies -- that enabled me to see what the so called distinterestness of
empirical inquiry is blind to or, more accurately willfully represses in its Panglossian pursuit of the truth.
Althusser's analysis of the "problematic" is too complicated to be explained in a few words. (Anyone interested will find
his extended explanation in his introduction --"From Capital* to Marx's Philosophy" -- to his and Etienne Balibar's book
*Reading Capital*. It will suffice here to say that we in the modern West have been *inscribed* by our culture -"ideological state apparatuses (educational institutions, media, and so on)-- by a system of knowledge production that
goes by the name of "disinterested inquiry," but in reality the "truth" at which it arrives is a construct, a fiction, and thus
ideological. And this is precisely because, in distancing itself from earthly being --the transience of time --this system of
knowledge production privileges the panoptic eye in the pursuit of knowledge. This is what Althusser means by the
"problematic": a frame that allows the perceiver to see only what it wants to see. Everything that is outside the frame
doesn't exist to the perceiver. He /she is blind to it. It's nothing or, at the site of humanity, it's nobody. Put alternatively,
the problematic -- this frame, as the very word itself suggests, *spatializes* or *reifies* time -- reduces what is a living,
problematic force and not a thing into a picture or thing so that it can be comprehended (taken hold of, managed),
appropriated, administered, and exploited by the disinterested inquirer.
All that I've just said should suggest what I meant when, long ago, in response to someone in the debate world who
seemed puzzled by the strong reservations I expressed on being informed that the debate community in the U.S. was
appropriating my work on Heidegger, higher education, and American imperialism. I said then – and I repeat here to you
– that the
traditional form of the debate, that is, the hegemonic frame that rigidly determines its protocols—
is unworldly in an ideological way. It willfully separates the debaters from the world as it
actually is—by which I mean as it has been produced by the dominant democratic I capitalist culture—and it
displaces them to a free-floating zone, a no place, as it were, where all things, nor matter how
different the authority they command in the real world, are equal. But in *this* real world produced by the combination
of Protestant Christianity and democratic capitalism things – and therefore their value – are never equal. They are framed
into a system of binaries—Identity/ difference, Civilization/barbarism I Men/woman, Whites/blacks, Sedentary/
nomadic, Occidental/ oriental, Chosen I preterit (passed over), Self-reliance I dependent (communal), Democracy I
communism, Protestant Christian I Muslim, and so on — in which the first term is not only privileged over the second
term, but, in thus being privileged, is also empowered to demonize the second. Insofar
as the debate world
frames argument as if every position has equal authority (the debater can take
either side) it obscures and eventually effaces awareness of the degrading
imbalance of power in the real world and the terrible injustices it perpetrates.
Thus framed, debate gives the false impression that it is a truly democratic
institution, whereas in reality it is complicitous with the dehumanized and
dehumanizing system of power that produced it. It is no accident, in my mind, that
this fraudulent form of debate goes back to the founding of the U.S. as a capitalist
republic and that it has produced what I call the "political class" to indicate not only the basic sameness
between the Democratic and Republican parties but also its fundamental indifference to the plight
of those who don't count in a system where what counts is determined by those who are the heirs of this
quantitative system of binaries.