1AC “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” This was once said by Dr. Martin Luther King, one of the most iconic figures in the topic of racial justice and segregation in the United States. The struggle that he and his followers endured brought us to where we are today. Although we have made leaps and bounds from the era of slavery and segregation, we are not finished yet. Racism is still prominent and still very much around in the United States. Unsurprisingly, it has also decided to resurface in the topic of Transportation Infrastructure: specifically in the mass-transit system. It was upheld in the Supreme Court in 1969 that the fourteenth amendment protects the right of Americans to travel. The fourteenth amendment, an amendment that was written in the Constitution, in the article that governs the base of the laws for the United States of America. If this was the case, then our transportation system should be perfect, right? False. People face the challenge of getting where they need to go every day due to the vast amounts of inadequate mass transportation within the United States—specifically inner-city mass-transit systems, in which reside the low-income areas. These low-income areas are the areas that contain a large amount of impoverished people and people of color. It is the result of poverty that generates the divide. It is the result of America’s dark dealings with slavery that generates the racism and it is the result of the “politically popular” choices that generates the transportation inequity that rejects our right as Americans to travel. An article written by Sanchez and Brenman on March 31, 2007 illustrates the problems that are facing minorities in the field of transportation The case of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina represents the chronic neglect of warnings about inevitable disaster and, in this case, the lack of attention devoted to clearly foreseen risks and the planning to deal with them. Particular examples include the lack of foresight in evacuation planning for people in New Orleans who did not own cars or who could not afford gas. One could argue that this was a completely unique set of circumstances; however, some South Florida cities that have extensive experience with disasters ranging from fire to hurricanes actually monitor car ownership statistics and have emergency plans that feature sending public transportation to neighborhoods with low car ownership rates. The information from public transportation route planning (which often takes into account mobility levels) could be easily used to identify the locations of residents likely to need assistance during evacuations. Related to these planning efforts should be the coordination and use of existing infrastructure, such as fleets of school buses. This would result in the consequent need for legal liability safe harbors that are common barriers to interagency sharing of resources. In this paper we discuss a variety of other issues that could also be used to inform future planning efforts, many with political implications, thus requiring a larger dialogue and potentially significant changes to governance or bureaucratic structures. INTRODUCTION Transportation plays a vital role in our society. In fact, the Supreme Court recognized that the right to travel is one of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.1 Given the important role of transportation, it is quite understandable that transportation policy can be contentious. Too often, however, fights over what specific projects will be funded and in which states or congressional districts, and scant attention is paid to the larger social and economic effects that transportation policies have. Americans have become increasingly mobile and more reliant on automobiles to meet their travel needs, due largely to transportation policies adopted after World War II that emphasized highway development over public transportation. According to Census 2000 data, less than 5 percent of trips to work in urban areas were made by public Minorities howeverare less likely to own cars than whites and are more often dependent on public transportation. transit; however, this varies significantly by race and location.2 The “transit-dependent” must often rely on public transportation not only to travel to work but also to get to school, obtain medical The transit-dependent are often people with low incomes, and thus, in addition to facing more difficulties getting around, they face economic inequities as a result of transportation policies oriented toward travel by car. Surface transportation policies at care, attend religious services, and shop for basic necessities such as groceries. the local, regional, state, and national levels have a direct impact on urban land use and development patterns. The types of transportation facilities and services in which public funds are invested provide varying levels of access to meet basic social and economic needs. The way communities develop land dictates the need for certain types of transportation, and, on the other hand, . In an examination of the evacuation failures during Hurricane Katrina and Rita, Litman suggests that many of these failures can be attributed to a lack of resilience, or ability to absorb unexpected circumstances through redundancy within the transportation system. Litman notes that the tragedies of Katrina are “simply extreme examples of the day-to-day problems facing non-drivers due to inadequate and poorly integrated transportation services.”3 He suggests, failures can be attributed to a lack of resilience, or ability to absorb the transportation options in which communities invest influence patterns of urban development unexpected circumstances through redundancy, within the city’s transportation system.4 What is Transportation Equity? Transportation mobility is a hallmark of American society; without it, one cannot be a full member of this society. The early challenges related to racial discrimination and segregation discussed above involved discriminatory practices that directly limited The effects of limited transportation mobility persist. The lack of mobility helped create ghettos, de facto segregated schools and housing, and social and community isolation. To cure these ills, many promises have been made by the leadership of the dominant society. These promises are often unfulfilled, as have been promises for housing to replace that destroyed in “blight clearing” projects. These were sometimes referred to as “negro removal,” sometimes considered synonymous with “urban renewal.” Whites in suburbs have foregone physical mobility for a lack of social cohesion, while destroyed inner-city neighborhoods have been left with neither mobility nor social cohesion. Efforts to challenge discrimination, segregation, and transportation access and mobility of people of color. inequitable transportation policies have become increasingly sophisticated to encompass a broad range of related social impacts. The term transportation equity refers to a range of strategies and policies that aim to address inequities in the nation’s transportation planning and project delivery system. We are trying to get others to see, acknowledge, address, and discuss the issue at hand. If we cannot fix the demanding issue of racism present in transportation, then we will not be able to fix the infrastructure. Freedom is not free, however we are already taking steps toward the tithes that we must pay in order to obtain freedom from racism, by the debate, which we are doing. We challenge the Negative team to debate us in this round not on the topic of Masstransit, but on the topic of Institutional Racism instead, for not only is Institutional Racism a more pressing issue, but it is the root from which all of the problems in our mass transit systems stem. Therefore, we, the Affirmative will affirm the topic as an act of re-conceptualizing transportation infrastructure by provoking discussion within debate, addressing the problems of transportation inequity, institutional racism, and those persons affected by transportation inequity who have been rendered invisible by the scholarship produced by this very activity. Furthermore, it is our duty as debaters to argue the resolution and it cannot be achieved until the walls created by institutional racism are broken. Although we continue to uphold the resolution, as the resolution says nothing about racism, it is indeed our need and our goal to discuss the topic of racism, as it is a key factor that plays in to the enactment of our plan to fix mass transit. Therefore, we view that the resolution and a topic are two completely separate entities, and we will uphold the resolution by debating about the topic of racism, from which originates the barriers preventing us from reaching the resolution. Contention one is institutional racism—a problem that not only destroys the meaning that our forefathers set of “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” but also reveals an imposing hole in our democracy, through the form of transportation inequity. The majority of wayfarers on the buses and taxis that run throughout a number of cities in the United States are generally people of lower class. These people are usually almost forced to take public transit due to the lack of resources available for them to bus themselves around town. We saw in the Montgomery Bus Boycott that when the main passengers on the buses refused to ride, then the buses were ran out of business. If they do indeed make up the majority, then wouldn’t the companies who need their business treat them with more respect? The fact is that they do not. In comparison, the buses that run through the inner city, in the ghettos and the barrios, and the buses that cater through the suburbs, where the majority of the middle and upper middle class reside have completely different calibers of buses and systems. It is not simply a coincidence that the ones that cater to the suburbs are nicer; it is transportation inequity that stems from the racism of a post-1960s era. We must put institutional racism and the transportation inequity that follows at the center of the topic, for if we cannot solve the problems at the core, and then we cannot solve transportation inequity, nor can we racism and therefore cannot repair our broken mass-transit system. In their book, Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism & New Routes to Equity written in 2004, Robert Doyle Bullard, Glenn Steve Johnson and Angel O. Torres present to us the issues that others have dismissed, disdained or are ignorant thereof, specifically pertaining to racism, in the following excerpts: “More than one hundred years ago, in the foreword to his classic book The Souls of Black Folks, W.E.B DuBois declared that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”DuBois’s diagnosis came seven years after the infamous U.S Supreme court decision regarding the Plessy vs. Ferguson , case codified “separate but equal” as the supreme law of the land. Sadly, in the twenty first century, the problem still exists. Highway Robbery weighs in a half-century after the landmark US Supreme court case Brown vs. Board of Education decision overturned Plessy and outlawed “separate but equal” decades of court rulings and civil rights laws have not eradicated the historic disparities between races or the in 1954. Unfortunately, discrimination that perpetuates them. The United States remains a racially divided nation where extreme inequalities continue to persist in housing, school, employment, income, environmental protection, and transportation. Discrimination still places an extra tax on poor people and people of color who need safe, affordable, and accessible public transportation. Many root causes of this nation’s transportation injustices have not been evaporated in the past six years. Many of these nation’s transportation-related disparities accumulated over a century. Even with sufficient resources and coordinated commitment of the public in partnership with the it will likely take years to dismantle the deeply ingrained legacy of transportation racism. White racism shapes transportation and transportation-related decisions, which have consequently created a national transportation infrastructure that denies many black Americans and other people of color the benefits, freedoms, opportunities, and rewards offered to white Americans.” corporations and the government, In contention two, we discuss agency, or the importance of the arguments that we cover in this debate and how that leads to action. Discussing what the United States might do only leads to more debating about hypothetical solutions. The United States as an entity, or Capitol Hill as an entity is not responsive to us nor will it ever be. Therefore, it is more effective and more educational for us to discuss what we can and should do regarding the topic of the debate. When I first started with this topic, I was asked the question, “What does Debate mean?” When I was asked, I had the answer that I was given when I first started Debate. It was a good vs. bad kind of game. You face someone who will directly oppose you and what you stand for in the round in order to win the debate. Debate has turned into a game of finding the biggest impact, while we commonly hear the “my impact outweighs” statement; this is drawing away from the core of debate, which is to discuss issues. The proof that this exists is proof that the institution of Debate has been corrupted by impacts and soulless arguments. We do not actually STAND for what we are saying; we are only talking about what was given to us as the resolution of the 2012-2013 school year. The discussion of Institutional Racism in regards to this debate is far better for the scholarship of this debate rather than mass-transit. Our debating the topic of racism at hand gives representation to those who do not have it—it is not simply a mock plan for Congress that is given no thought other than a game, it is a view of the slanted and bigoted issues that people of color face daily. It is an issue that we as the citizens can be empowered to fix. It is our duty and our goal as the Affirmative to show you just how we can go about doing this. Therefore, it is beneficial for both us and the Negative team to discuss the topic of Institutional Racism, as it allows for both sides to discuss a topic with actual implications to the world here and now. We will discuss with the Negative the aforementioned implications as well as solvency of institutional racism, and in doing so, we will discuss the agency pertaining to international racism. Traditional Debate causes an insane mindset Mitchell 1998 (PEDAGOGICAL POSSIBILITIES FOR ARGUMENTATIVE AGENCY IN ACADEMIC DEBATE, ) The sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture is highlighted during episodes of alienation in which debaters cheer news of human suffering or misfortune. Instead of focusing on the visceral negative responses to news accounts of human death and misery, debaters overcome with the competitive zeal of contest round competition show a tendency to concentrate on the meanings that such evidence might hold for the strength of their academic debate arguments.For example, news reports of mass starvation might tidy up the "uniqueness of a disadvantage" or bolster the "inherency of an affirmative case"(in the technical parlance of debate-speak). Murchland categorizes cultivation of this "spectator" mentality as one of the most politically debilitating failures of contemporary education: "Educational institutions have failed even more grievously to provide the kind of civic forums we need. In fact, one could easily conclude that the Argumentation & Advocacy, 1998, Vol. 35 Issue 2, p41-60; Gordon R. Mitchell, Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh principle purposes of our schools is to deprive successor generations of their civic voice, to turn them into mute and uncomprehending spectators in the drama of political life" (1991, p. 8). In closing, we must continue to fight the shackles of institutional racism. It is only when we sever the binds of transportation inequity, that we can fix the mass transit system…It is only when we abolish the chains of prejudice that we can realize our faults and mistakes. And finally, it is only when we let go of racism that we as a nation will be truly united not only by the land that we live on, but the past that we overcome, and the buses we ride.