UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,

IRVINE

DEBATING RACE, RACE-ING DEBATE: AN EXTENDED ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE

STUDY OF BLACK INTELLECTUAL INSURGENCY IN U.S. INTERCOLLEGIATE
DEBATE
DISSERTATION
submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in Sociology
by
David Kent Peterson

Dissertation Committee:
Professor Belinda Robnett-Olsen, Chair
Associate Professor Cynthia Feliciano
Professor Frank B.Wilderson III

2014

UMI Number: 3615472

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 2014 David Kent Peterson

DEDICATION

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
LIST OF FIGURES

LIST OF TABLES

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

vii

VITA

viii

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

xi

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

CHAPTER 2: Organizational Context of Intercollegiate Debate

34

CHAPTER 3: It had to be said: Black Intellectual Insurgency in Debate

67

CHAPTER 4: Personalization, Obfuscation and Evasion: White Debaters Account

for and Construct White Identity

116

CHAPTER 5: Abandoning Blackness: Institutional Response to Increased Success of

Radical Black Students

153

CHAPTER 6: Conclusion

189

REFERENCES

203

LIST OF FIGURES
Page
Figure 2.1

Speaker positions and speech titles

41

Figure 2.2

Debate round sequence

42

Figure 2.3

Traditional Debate Speech Outline

46

Figure 2.4

Critical / Performance Debate Speech Outline

52

Figure 2.5

Traditional vs. Critical / Performance Speech Outline

57

Figure 2.6

Graph of Black Representation in Debate (2003-2013)

64

Figure 2.7

Graph of black student representation in top 20 speakers at

64

national championship competitions (2003-2013)

LIST OF TABLES
Page
Table 2.1

Black Representation in Elimination Rounds and Speaker Awards

vi

65

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the participants of the debate activity who cooperated with this project. I
am grateful to have been a part of this vibrant effort and I have been deeply enriched personally
and intellectually as a result of the time I was fortunate to spend with these remarkable young
intellectuals.
I was very fortunate to receive various grants that supported this study. I thank the Department
of Sociology and the University of California Center for New Racial Studies (UCCNRS) for
their generosity and support.
I would like to express the deepest appreciation to my committee Belinda Robnett-Olsen,
Cynthia Feliciano, and Frank B. Wilderson III, who have supported this project at all stages of its
development. In addition, I am grateful to Jared Sexton, Stan Bailey, and David Snow, who
provided direction and valuable advice along the way.
I am particularly indebted to my advisor and chair, Belinda Robnett-Olsen who has continuously
given me her time, encouragement, and guidance. Without her guidance and persistent help, this
dissertation would not have been possible. Belinda has been a dedicated mentor and I am deeply
appreciative of her encouragement, humor, and excellence.
I am appreciative of the friendships and connections I have made with colleagues along the way.
A few people have been especiialy helpful for the writing process. Special thanks to Nalika
Gajaweera, Nader Haddad, Ben Crossan and Rashad Evans. The writing process would have
been much more isolating without them.
Finally, to my family, thank you for your unconditional support. To Jerring, this would not be
possible without you. You have supported at me at every step along the way and I am truly
grateful to have you in my life.

vii

CURRICULUM VITAE
David Kent Peterson
Ph.D. Sociology, University of California Irvine, 2014
With Critical Theory Emphasis.
Exam Areas: Race and Ethnicity; Culture and Social Movements
M.A. Sociology, University of California Irvine, 2010
Thesis Title: Sophisticated Pathways to Colorblindness: Elite White Students Negotiate
Criticism of Whiteness
M.A. Pan-African Studies, University of Louisville, 2007
University of West Indies, Port of Spain, 2006 (Study Abroad)
Thesis Title: Black Power Movement?: The Oakland Chapter of the Black Panther Party
as a Paradigm Case of Social Movement Organization
B.A.

Philosophy, California State University, Long Beach, 2005

RESEARCH AREAS
Race, Class and Sexuality; Black politics; Social Movements; Culture; Education; Qualitative
Methodologies
2012
2011
2011
2010
2007

FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS

Graduate Deans Fellowship (UCI), $5,500
UC Center for New Racial Studies Fellow (UCI), $4,000
Summer Research and Travel Funding, School of Social Sciences (UCI), $500
Summer Research and Travel Funding, School of Social Sciences (UCI), $3,000
Graduate Deans Citation Award (Louisville)

PUBLICATIONS
David K. Peterson. 2013.Slave Rebellions in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and
Political Movements, edited by David A. Snow, Donatella Della Porta, Bert Klandermans, &
Doug McAdam. Wiley-Blackwell Publishers.
Reaction to Natsu Taylor Saito, Colonial Presumptions: The War on Terror and the Roots of
American Exceptionalism, Georgetown Journal of Modern Critical Race Perspectives Vol. 1, No.
1. 2008.
2012
2011

PRESENTATIONS
Debating Race, Race-ing Debate: Preliminary Findings of an Extended
Ethnographic Case Study of Normative Contestation in the U.S. Intercollegiate
Debate Activity. Presented at ASA annual meeting in Denver, CO.
Sophisticated Pathways to Colorblindness: How Racial Questions are Evaded in
Educational Settings. Presented at the Critical Ethnic Studies Association annual
meeting in Riverside, CA.
viii

2010
2007
2006
2005

Argument as Praxis: Examining Methods of Critical Race Pedagogy in Policy

Debate. Presented at the National Race and Pedagogy annual meeting in Tacoma,
WA.
Where is Jonathan Jackson?: The Significance of Black Youth Leadership in the
Black Liberation Movement. Presented at the National Council for Black Studies
annual meeting in San Diego, CA.
White Appropriation of Black Musical Expression: Is Hip Hop Breaking the
Cycle? Presented at the National Council for Black Studies annual meeting in
Houston, TX.
Hip Hop as an Educational Tool: In Search of a Frierian Pedagogy for the 21st
Century. Presented at the National Communication Association annual meeting in
Boston, MA.

2009
2008
2007
2006

TEACHING AND RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

Teaching Assistant: Vietnam War (UCI)
Lecturer, Key Debates in International Politics, MA Program in Financial Law
(East China University of Political Science & Law, Shanghai)
Instructor, Advanced Seminar on Race (University of Louisville)
Teaching Assistant: Introduction to Race & Ethnicity (UCI)
Teaching Assistant: Introduction to Race & Ethnicity (UCI)
Teaching Assistant: Ethnic & Immigrant Americans (UCI)
Teaching Assistant: Race & Ethnicity (UCI)
Invited Guest Lecturer, Black Protest Tradition (UCI)
Invited Guest Lecturer, Key Issues in Social Work (USC)
Research Assistant: Katherine Tate and Belinda Robnett-Olsen.
"Outlook on Life and Political Engagement." Survey construction.
Teaching Assistant: Introduction to Race & Ethnicity (UCI)
Teaching Assistant: Race & Ethnicity (UCI)
Teaching Assistant: Immigrant America (UCI)
Research Assistant: Dominique Apollon & Mark Sawyer.
"Dont Call them Post-Racial: Millenials Attitudes on Race, Racism and Key
Systems in our Society." Focus group facilitator.
Teaching Assistant: Introduction to Race & Ethnicity (UCI)
Teaching Assistant: Probability & Statistics (UCI)
Teaching Assistant: Sociology Majors Seminar (UCI)
Invited Guest Lecturer, White Privilege, White Pleasure & Anti-Blackness
(University of Ottawa)
Research Assistant: Celia Lacayo. "Blurring Boundaries: Latino Racialization in
Orange County." Interviewer.
Teaching Assistant: Probability & Statistics (UCI)
Teaching Assistant: Probability & Statistics (UCI)
Instructor, Introduction to Pan-African Studies (University of Louisville)
Teaching Assistant: Urban Communication (University of Louisville)

2012-

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIP AND SERVICE

American Sociology Association, Section Memberships: Race & Ethnicity

2014
2013
2013
2013
2012
2012
2012
2012
2012
2012
2011
2011
2011
2011
2010
2010
2010
2010
2008

ix

2006-

National Council for Black Studies

2014
2002-2005

UNIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY SERVICE

Signer, James Baldwin Debate Society (UCI)
Debate Coach, Compton Unified School District, Compton, CA

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

DEBATING RACE, RACE-ING DEBATE: AN EXTENDED ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE
STUDY OF BLACK INTELLECTUAL INSURGENCY IN U.S. INTERCOLLEGIATE
DEBATE
By
David Kent Peterson
Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology
University of California Irvine 2014
Professor Belinda Robnett-Olsen, Chair
The following study is an extended ethnographic case study of a black intellectual
insurgency within the predominantly white space of the U.S. intercollegiate policy debate
activity. A growing number of black students are entering the debate activity and insisting that
whiteness be confronted and interrogated and that questions of racial power and privilege
become central objects of thought and research. The present study seeks to address the related
questions of: 1) how black undergraduate students struggle to develop communicative methods
to articulate the increasingly inarticulable manifestation of racial exclusion in the face of the
discursive repertoire so effective at shutting down such discourse; and, 2) how white debate
participants negotiate these efforts and mobilize to secure institutional coherence in the face of
sustained critical challenge that raises the level of abstraction on questions of racial power.
Drawing upon ethnographic data, in-depth interviews, and content analysis of online forum
discussions, I show the ways in which the black insurgency radicalizes over time in negotiation
with waves of white reaction. I outline the deep debates that are taking place among black
students concerning the meaning of blackness, how to be black in a white space, and the role of
black intellectuals in the contemporary moment. In discussing the white reaction to this effort I
xi

compare the two main groups of white participants in the debate activity: white liberals and
white leftists. I show that, in the context of black insurgency, liberal whites attempt to embrace a
multicultural paradigm in which whiteness is viewed as ontologically equivalent to other racial
categories and which charges the insurgency with being unfair, uncivil, and potentially violent.
Leftist whites draw upon critical theoretical resources that deny the salience and stability of
racial categories altogether and charge the black insurgency with being authoritarian and
essentialist. In both cases the structural criticism was personalized, individualized and ultimately
evaded. As the black intellectual insurgency reaches critical levels of competitive success in the
debate activity, I show the ways in which white liberals attempt to construct new rules and codes,
and even a private debate organization, that might contain and sideline black insurgency. I also
show how white leftists, the ostensible allies of black students, ultimately made movements to
abandon the black intellectual insurgency and create a coalition free from black critical
questioning. I argue that the debate activity needs the participation of black students to resolve a
legitimacy crisis but that they have deep difficulties accepting critical assertions of blackness in
the activity.

xii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
One cannot, to be sure, demand of whole nations exceptional moral foresight and
heroism; but a certain hard common-sense in facing the complicated phenomena of
political life must be expected in every progressive people. In some respects we as a
nation seem to lack this; we have the somewhat inchoate idea that we are not destined to
be harassed with the great social questions, and that even if we are, and fail to answer
them, the fault is with the question and not with us. Consequently we often congratulate
ourselves more on getting rid of a problem than on solving it. Such an attitude is
dangerous; we have and shall have, as other peoples have had, critical, momentous, and
pressing questions to answer. The riddle of the Sphinx may be postponed, it may be
evasively answered now; sometime it must be fully answered.
-W.E.B. Du Bois
For W.E.B. Du Bois, the riddle of the Sphinx was the question of how the world might
confront and reconcile the problem of the colorline; whether or not racial hierarchy is intrinsic or
epiphenomenal to modern social and political formation; whether or not the nominally
universalist principles of the modern world could be truly universalized or whether these
principles would remain hollow chimeras. If the latter scenario were the case, Du Bois argued,
then ever more sophisticated mechanisms of control would have to be developed and instituted to
postpone the riddle of the Sphinx and prevent the excluded from effecting a crisis in the lifeworld of state and civil society1. In an age of reason, what prevents such an unreasonable
distribution of power from collapsing of the immensity of its unreason? What are the

See Chapter 1, The Black Worker, of Du Boiss (1998) Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880.
1

mechanisms of control that ensure the continuity of racial domination even against constant and
vigilant resistance and how do these mechanisms evade and postpone apprehension?
These questions have only become more puzzling, and thus more pressing, in the postcivil rights era. Despite the long sought after establishment of juridical colorblindness in the
United States and the removal, in large measure, of outward expressions of bigotry from the
public, front-stage performances of white Americans, a white-over-Black racial hierarchy
persists across the institutional landscape (Lewis & Krysan 2004; Brown et al. 2005; Farley
2008). W.E.B. Du Bois emphasized that the dismantling of racial hierarchy would require more
than the incorporation/integration of black people into the institutions of state and civil society
what he referred to as commerce in bodies. Such dismantling would necessitate a critical
confrontation with dominant institutional norms what he referred to as a commerce in ideas.
Sociological research on the challenges to and maintenance of racial hierarchy focus primarily
on charting demographic challenges to whiteness, e.g. the browning of America and
identifying barriers to expanded institutional access. There are few studies of sustained,
intersubjective criticism and confrontation across the colorline. We have studies of a commerce
in bodies but few studies of a commerce in ideas.
The Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s is widely understood by both scholars and the
general public to mark, if not the end of racism, a fundamental shift in the modality of racial
rule, from coercion to hegemony, and, accordingly, to have opened unprecedented possibilities
for the staging of such a commerce in ideas. Indeed, these openings have allowed black
intellectuals greater access to organs of public opinion and dissemination through which
critical discourses that attempt to chart and deconstruct the machinations of racial domination
have been developed (Spillers 1994). Additionally, the post-WW2 black freedom struggle has

forced concessions from universities which have institutionalized the discipline of black studies
and other critical disciplines that have provided spaces wherein the problem of the colorline is
the central object of thought and analysis. As a result, more intellectual resources than perhaps
ever now exist that could be utilized toward the staging of a commerce in ideas and a reckoning
with the modern worlds riddle of the Sphinx. How can it be the case then that, according to
Charles Gallagher (2008), never before in U.S. history has an honest and frank discussion about
racism or racial inequality and its causes been so difficult to broach (p. 163)?
Post-civil rights American society, despite its expanded commerce in bodies, has seen a
historical retreat from critical confrontation over questions of racial power even as the catalogue
of criticism and complaint has become more extensive and detailed. Pauline Johnson (2006)
argues, following Du Bois, that progress must be conceptualized, not in terms of demographic
representation, but rather in the accumulation of insight into social problems and by the capacity
to deal with these problems at higher levels of abstraction. However, in the contemporary
moment, the discourse of the public sphere has moved away from the structural scale of
abstraction toward the individual and domestic scale (Berlant 1997). The public has become
generally more averse to structural and institutional analysis of broad social problems and is
more likely to avoid contentious, public-spirited issues (Eliasoph 1998; Putnam 2000). This is
particularly pronounced concerning questions of racial power. Critical discourses that breach the
imposed silence on racial matters and gesture toward the persistent significance of race at a level
of abstraction higher than that of the individual bigot is met with, not only outrage and
frustration, but also with a sophisticated discursive arsenal of denial, minimization, and evasion.
The scale of abstraction on which racial questions are considered has been steadily ratcheted
down to the manageable individual realm wherein racists can be separated from non-racists and

good-whites can be separated from the bad. In this way, post-civil rights American society has
not solved the problem of the colorline, but rather has congratulated itself for ridding itself of the
question of the colorline. The consequence is that racial power has become more unintelligible
and unspeakable than perhaps ever before (Martinot 2010; Wilderson 2010). Unintelligibility,
argues Steve Martinot (2010), does not make a problem go away; indeed, it enhances a social
problems tenacity, while its tenacity enhances its unintelligibility (10).
This dissertation attempts to contribute to an understanding of how this epistemological
segregation is maintained by inhabiting a specific context wherein black intellectuals are
demanding that their inclusion into previously white institutional space accompany a critical
confrontation with and reevaluation of dominant institutional norms. Specifically, I explore what
can be considered a black intellectual insurgency within the predominantly white space of U.S.
intercollegiate policy debate that seeks to subvert dominant intellectual practice and create and
augment infrastructures for black intellectual activity (West 1985; 118). In the past decade,
increasing numbers of black students have entered the debate activity and insisted that
whiteness be identified, named and confronted and that (anti-)blackness become a central
object of thought and research. The present study seeks to address the related questions of: 1)
how black undergraduate students struggle to develop communicative methods to articulate the
increasingly inarticulable manifestation of racial exclusion in the face of the discursive repertoire
so effective at shutting down such discourse; and, 2) how white debate participants negotiate
these efforts and mobilize to secure institutional coherence in the face of sustained critical
challenge that raises the level of abstraction on questions of racial power2.

By higher levels of abstraction, I am referring to the ability to think about race beyond the individual level. A
higher level of abstraction than the individual level for example would be a group-level consideration. A higher
level of abstraction from here would be to think about the institutional and structural level. Higher levels of
4

The Literature
The (post-civil rights) American Dilemma: Racial rule by coercion or consent?
The dominant perspective in sociological literature on race and racism is that, whereas
racial rule was once maintained through a racial dictatorship, it is now maintained primarily
through the modality of hegemony (Omi & Winant 1994; Bonilla-Silva 2007). Omi & Winant
(1994) maintain, against those who conceptualize race within either a paradigm of ethnicity or a
paradigm of class, that race must be considered an independent social organizing principle
(20). The contours of racial formation in a given historical moment, in their view, are
contingent on the outcome of racial projects, which they define as simultaneously an
interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and
redistribute resources along particular racial lines (56). Racial formation is thus theorized as
contingent on the outcome of political and ideological contestation. This allows them to explain
what they view as the constant transformations that racial boundaries and meanings have
undergone over the last several centuries. In the analysis of Omi & Winant, the most important
of such transformations is the recent transition from coercive racial rule to hegemonic racial rule
assumed to have been effected by the racial projects on the part of people of color from the
abolitionist movement to the civil rights movement. They argue,
Racial rule can be understood as a slow and uneven historical process which has moved
from dictatorship to democracy, from domination to hegemony. In this transition,
hegemonic forms of racial rule those based on consent eventually came to supplant
those based on coercion.the sheer complexity of the racial questions U.S. society
confronts today, the welter of competing racial projects and contradictory racial

abstraction from here would be to think about race as paradigmatic, embedded within knowledge structures. The
resistive debaters attempted to force a thinking of racial issues at these higher levels of abstraction
5

experiences which Americans undergo, suggests that hegemony is a useful and

appropriate term with which to characterize contemporary racial rule (68)
This perspective and its reliance upon and privileging of Gramscian terms of social
struggle has been challenged by recent scholarship emphasizing the continued and increased
importance of coercive domination i.e. violence to the maintenance of racial rule (Spillers
1987; James 1996; Hartman 1997; Wacquant 2002, 2008; Martinot 2003, 2010; Sexton &
Martinot 2003; Sexton 2007, 2008, 2011; Rodriguez 2010; Wilderson 2003, 2010; Broeck). This
work theorizes violence as foundational not simply to the operation of racial rule, but as
constitutive of racial categories themselves. Jared Sexton (2008) argues, in a reversal of Omi &
Winants formulation, that racial difference issues from direct relations of forcethe scales of
coercionand it is only elaborated or institutionalized within relations of powerthe scales of
consent (9). As such, race is unintelligible within a Gramscian framework3. Loic Wacquant
traces the continuity from slavery to mass incarceration arguing that racial dictatorship has not
fundamentally given way to a racial democracy. Wacquant argues that the novel institutional
complex formed by the remnants of the dark ghetto and the carceral apparatus with which it has
become joined by a linked relationship of structural symbiosis and functional surrogacy has

Wilderson writes, Gramscian wisdom cannot imagine the emergence, elaboration, and stunting of a subject by
way, not of the contingency of violence resulting in a crisis of authority, but by way of direct relations of force.
This is remarkable, and unfortunate, given the fact that the emergence of the slave, the subject effect of an ensemble
of direct relations of force, marks the emergence of capitalism itself. Let us put a ner point on it: violence towards
the black body is the precondition for the existence of Gramscis single entity the modern bourgeois-state with its
divided apparatus, political society and civil society. This is to say violence against black people is ontological and
gratuitous as opposed to merely ideological and contingent. Furthermore, no magical moment (i.e., 1865)
transformed paradigmatically the black bodys relation to this entity. In this regard, the hegemonic advances within
civil society by the Left hold out no more possibility for black life than the coercive backlash of political society.
What many political theorists have either missed or ignored is that a crisis of authority that might take place by way
of a Left expansion of civil society, further instantiates, rather than dismantles, the authority of whiteness. Black
death is the modern bourgeois-states recreational pastime, but the hunting season is not conned to the time (and
place) of political society; blacks are fair game as a result of a progressively expanding civil society as well
(Wilderson 2003; 229).

replaced slavery and Jim Crow segregation is the preeminent race making institution,
functioning to define, confine and control African-Americans (Wacquant 2002). The
preeminence of the necessarily coercive process of hyper-ghettoization and the vastly
disproportionate targeting of African-Americans by law enforcement agents, warns against the
privileging of hegemony as the fundamental modality through which racial rule is maintained.
Wacquant thus urges a rethinking of the race question in the U.S. that displaces a focus on
racial inequality with one of racial domination.
The significance of this dispute over whether or not hegemonic forms of racial rule,
based on consent, have come to supplant forms of domination based on coercion is that it bears
heavily on the extent to which previously excluded groups, particularly African-Americans, can
possibly be accepted and recognized as full persons by the dominant institutions of American
society. If racial rule is maintained through hegemony, then members of subordinate racial
groups are eligible to wage a discursive war of position for full recognition within civil society. I
seek to engage this theoretical dispute by examining the outcome of a specific discursive
intervention, a racial project designed to expose and identify the operation of racial exclusion
within a specific institutional location. Flyvbjerg (2006) argues,
Public life is best cultivated, not in an ideal sphere that assumes away power, but in many
democratic spaces where obstinate differences in power, material status, and hence
interest can find expression. With the plurality that a contemporary concept for civil
society must contain, conflict becomes an inevitable part of this concept.This is not to
reject the importance of the public sphere as a bulwark of freedom.Even if such
ambitions cannot be fulfilled, the history of philosophy and science shows that we have
much to learn from attempts at doing so [emphasis mine] (229-230)

Charting the successes and limitations of specific racial projects can enable an assessment of the
suitability of the modality of hegemony as an explanation for the maintenance of contemporary
racial rule. This study is conducted with the intention of not simply describing the outcome of
and response to the racial project in debate but with returning to a consideration of the
Gramscian assumptive logic of dominant sociological race theory. This study cannot definitively
adjudicate the debate over the modality of racial rule but rather seeks to dialogue with this
theoretical dispute by attempting to identify the limits of this intervention and the moments at
which the discourse deployed to negotiate this intervention breaks down and becomes
incoherent.
Studying blacks as a problem population
African-Americans have been the object of intense sociological study. With few
exceptions, from the 19th century to the 21st, has been to focus on the perceived dysfunction and
danger of black communities (Ferguson 2000). In his Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
(1955) writes,
[The Negro] is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think
of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an
endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtually outraged, helpless,
as though his continuing status among us were somehow analogous to disease cancer
perhaps, or tuberculosis which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured (24-25)
Though, prior to the 1960s, African-Americans were central to American sociology, albeit for
the purposes of surveillance and social control, the Negro problem as such, has, to a large
degree, fallen off the pages of sociology literature (Ferguson 2000). Contemporary scholarship in
the post-civil rights era has gone beyond black and white and now pays more attention to

immigration, non-black racial minorities, whiteness, multi-culturalism and multi-racialism.

Partly in response to the fixation gestured toward by James Baldwin of American sociology on
the perceived deviance and dysfunction of African-American life, scholars have now channeled
their intellectual labor to developing a conceptualization and theorization of whiteness.
Anxious about the risk of reifying the notion of racism as being a problem of racial minorities,
scholars have begun to think of racism as a white problem rather than a problem of racial
minorities. Whiteness studies have proliferated in recent decades. The project of apprehending
whiteness and transforming it is considered by scholars of whiteness studies to be the final task
of anti-racist politics as the inability and unwillingness of whiteness, and those included within
the protective hold of this category (i.e. white people), to self-reflect and confront privilege is
conceptualized as the key barrier to racial redress. Studies of black people are typically restricted
to combatting media stereotypes, debunking notions of black pathology, and moralizing the
behavior of poor blacks (Wacquant 2004). Black people are studied but blackness is not.
Black students in predominantly white institutions
A great deal of research has sought to understand the experiences of black college
students in what are referred to as predominantly white institutions (PWI). The primary concerns
of this research are to understand the reasons for black academic underachievement and to
contribute to policies that might foster greater black institutional access and participation. Most
studies indicate persistent and severe racial hostility directed towards black students on
predominantly white campuses. Though African-American and white students share the space
of the university, in many ways they exist in two separate worlds therein (Morrison 2008).
African-American students face a range of hostile treatment from their peers, professors, and
campus police ranging from a subtle sense of invisibility and neglect to outright hostility and

violent assault (Feagin & Sikes 1994; Feagin et al. 1996; Morrisson 2008; Torres 2009; Gusa
2010; Wilkins 2012). Recent ethnographic research conducted by Wilkins (2012), shows that
Black men in PWIs experience a great deal of anxiety and stress because of constantly having to
moderate their blackness by distancing themselves from the trope of the angry and
oppositional black male. According to Wilkins, this often requires them to ignore manifestations
of racism and attribute benign intentions and consequences to the racial/ist comments of their
non-black peers. As a result , black students face increasing levels of stress in university
environments (Greer & Brown 2011).
Black students are often seen as the victims of hostile and violent campus environments
but rarely as agents of critical confrontation with university practices and norms. The bulk of
research focuses on the coping mechanisms employed by black students to promote their
physical, psychological, and emotional health and well-being (Williamson 1995; 95). The
primary mechanisms identified in the research are various maneuvers of self-segregation,
accomplished primarily through the development of black student unions, black studies
departments, and separate campus facilities (Williamson 1995; Feagin & Sikes 1994). There is a
deep reluctance on the part of sociologists to adopt a conception of black students as
oppositional. A great deal of literature has sought to identify and emphasize black educational
aspirations, the embrace of educational institutions by black students, and their striving for
success against the various manifestations of racial hostility that are experienced in
predominantly white institutional spaces. Fearful of reproducing the conception of an
oppositional culture that would explain black disadvantage as rooted in the dispositions and
orientations of black people rather than in the actions and attitudes of white people has resulted
in an effort to simply moralize and valorize black students as, if not simply non-oppositional,

10

then as model citizens. There is much less attention to the ways in which African-Americans
create contexts of critical confrontation with the everyday operation of exclusionary and antiblack norms within dominant social institutions.
Barriers to the 3rd wave of whiteness studies
Failure to address these questions concerning African-Americans has also limited the
field of whiteness studies. The unique resistive effort on the part of black students within the
intercollegiate debate activity, in forcing students to directly confront critical analysis of the
banal and normal operation of racial domination, allows for several limitations of research on
whiteness, particularly interview-based studies, to be addressed and potentially overcome. The
most fundamental insight of the field of whiteness studies is that racism is a normal rather than
exceptional and deviant phenomenon in the post-civil rights period. The field of whiteness
studies has conceptualized whiteness as consisting of a racial identity, racial ideology and a set
of unmarked cultural norms and practices (Frankenberg 1993; Lewis 2003). The term white
people simply refers to bodies that are coded as white, denoting white racial identity. The
simplicity ends there however, as the range of bodies coded as white has continuously undergone
change throughout its life course (Igniatev 1995; Roediger 1999). Even within a given time
period the precise content of whiteness is difficult to discern as its properties morph across
contexts and in varying environments (Duster 2001). The shifting and morphing character of
whiteness highlights its socially constructed existence and perpetuation. As a myth, however,
whiteness is particularly powerful and those coded as white enjoy a position of structural
advantage and an array of social privileges (Lipsitz 2006, Roediger 1999, Rothenberg 2004).
The first wave of whiteness studies emphasizes that whiteness is fundamentally distinct
from other racial categories in that it operates as a human norm rather than as a designation of

11

particularity (Dyer 1997). According to Richard Dyer (1997), As long as race is something only
applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we
function as a human norm (1). One of the most important privileges of whiteness is its ability to
embody diversity and to be free from restrictive stereotypes, to be normal rather than particular
(Dyer 1997; Frankenberg 1993). Additionally, the social power behind whiteness is such that
whiteness is able to define itself internally rather than being subject to the definitional whims of
external groups. For this reason, whiteness is something, like water to the fish, which most
people coded as white never have to seriously consider (Brown et al 2005). This makes the
project of interrogating whiteness and its reproduction both difficult and crucially important.
The second wave of whiteness studies focuses on the discursive practices and
institutional mechanisms that maintain whiteness as an unspoken cultural center. Ethnographic
research has found that white racial privileges are activated and perpetuated in schools (Feagin
et al. 1996), workplaces (Pierce 2003), political bodies (Hawkesworth 2003) and even
progressive social movement organizations (Ward 2008) through a set of invisible and
unnamed cultural and institutional practices (Frankenberg 1993). This literature defines
dominant social institutions as white spaces (Feagin et al. 1996). The concept of white space
refers not only to spaces in which whites predominate demographically, but which are
characterized by the interpretive frames of whites and governed by an unspoken white
normativity (Ferguson 2004). According to Jane Ward (2008) the concept of white normativity
implies that even in racially diverse environments in which people of color are extended a degree
of institutional power, whiteness may still be a dominant ingredient of the environments culture
and a determinant of prevailing norms for communication and behavior (564). In this
formulation, white normativity does not consist of any positive content but is rather defined by

12

absence: the absence of consideration of whiteness as such, absence of critical discussion about
and concern with racial issues, and an absence of empathy when racial insensitivity rears its
head. Within white spaces, white people can proceed in their normalcy without having to think
about race while non-white racial minorities face a range of treatment from outright hostility to
subtle invisibility and neglect.
The tenacity and contextual heterogeneity of whiteness, is the point of departure for
what Twine & Gallagher identity as the 3rd wave of whiteness studies, which seeks to
apprehend the nuanced and locally specific ways in which whiteness as a form of power is
defined, deployed, performed, policed and reinvented (Twine & Gallagher 2007). In the
contemporary moment, Twine & Gallagher argue, the cat is out of the bag; it is no longer the
case that whiteness is an invisible, unmarked identity. Research in this third wave attempts to
identify the discursive strategies employed by whites as they struggle to recuperate, reconstitute
and restore white identities and the supremacy of whiteness in post-apartheid, postindustrial,
post-imperial, post-Civil Rights contexts (p. 13) in which whiteness is named and moved
against. This third wave of whiteness studies has been limited in important ways which the
present study seeks to address.
One of the central insights of this 3rd wave, though one rarely thematized in empirical
research, is that non-whites, particularly African-Americans, occupy an epistemologically
privileged vantage from which to see and name whiteness. This is not to suggest, in an
essentialist gesture, that all those excluded from the protections of whiteness possess some
natural cognitive superiority, are conscious of the operations of whiteness or that they possess
the communicative competence, or even the desire or willingness to, confront and criticize the
operation of whiteness. What is suggested, following Charles Mills (1998), is that,

13

Differential group experiences issue from the enforcement of racial difference.

These alternative sets of experiences are not epistemically indifferent vis-a-vis one
another but that hegemonic groups characteristically have experiences that foster illusory
perceptions about society's functioning, whereas subordinate groups characteristically
have experiences that (at least potentially) give rise to more adequate conceptualizations.
It is a question not so much of simple oppression, then, but rather of an oppression so
structured that epistemically enlightening experiences result from it[emphasis mine]
(28).
Of white people, Du Bois wrote, I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view
them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign,
bone of their thought and flesh of their language.4 While white people do not have to think
about whiteness, the victims of white attitudes and habits are forced to.
While much of the field has based its analyses on interviews with whites and
ethnographic studies of what have become termed white spaces, scholars have realized that
white people know very little about whiteness and, when asked to discuss the meaning of
whiteness and account for its operation, are either stricken with aphasia (Forman & Lewis 2006),
become inarticulate (Lewis 2004; Gallagher 2008), or resort to what Aida Hurtado (1996) calls
the pendejo game.5 How, in fact, Amanda Lewis (2004) asks, do we conduct research on
whites as racial actors when they not only rarely recognize themselves as such but often also
want to act as if race no longer matters? (Lewis 2004; 637). Scholars have recently questioned
the usefulness of studies that seek to map the contours of white racial discourse based on
4

From The souls of white folk, published in Darkwater: Voices from Inside the Veil, Du Bois (2003)
These responses are not only characteristic of the conservative or uneducated public but also of liberals (BonillaSilva 2006; Ward 2008), the well-educated (Feagin & OBrien 2004), whites with unique interactive experiences
with non-whites (Jackson 1999; Noveske 2006), and even whites who identify as anti-racist and who are active in
anti-racist social movements (OBrien 2001; Hughey 2007).
5

14

interviews with whites (Lewis 2004; Gallagher 2008). This is due not simply to the skepticism
concerning the veracity of statements made by whites the truthfulness of their accounts but
rather to the epistemological limitations of whites in understanding and articulating the meaning
of whiteness. These limitations are: 1) the fact that white people tend to be inarticulate and
stricken with aphasia when asked to discuss race, particularly whiteness; 2) most white people
have very few meaningful equal status contacts with non-whites, particularly AfricanAmericans; and 3) even when whites have experience with such equal status contacts they
rarely involve critical confrontation over issues of racial power and privilege.
First, white people tend to be inarticulate concerning the meaning of their whiteness.
According to Amanda Lewis (2004), whites [are] rarely if ever are asked to articulate or to
examine either their racial identities or their positions within racialized institutions (642).
Scholars have attempted to identify the contours of white racial discourse, by asking white
people how they feel and think about racial issues. Racial attitude surveys indicate that the
proportion of whites who express blatantly derogatory views of racial minorities, views rooted in
biological essentialism, has declined drastically in the wake of the civil rights movement
(Schuman et al. 1998; Quillian 2006). An influential and controversial study by Jackman &
Muha (1984) challenged the notion that such patterns are the result of increased education and
tolerance on the part of whites. They argue that white racial ideology is not becoming more
progressive but rather that whites, particularly educated whites, have learned more sophisticated,
refined ways of defending and perpetuating prevailing racial power arrangements6.
The findings of Jackman & Muha have been confirmed and built upon by studies relying
on in-depth interviews with whites (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Feagin & OBrien 2004; Forman &
6

They write, The more educated are not likely to express attitudes and sentiments concerning blacks that are likely
to incite hostility and resistance. Rather, they will employ more sophisticated attempts to protect privilege and
delegitimize the grievances and resistive efforts of subordinate groups (765).
15

Lewis 2006). These studies criticize the reliance on large racial attitudes and instead work from
the assumption that it is necessary to study racial ideology as it emerges and is expressed in
communicative interaction. From this literature has emerged the conceptualization of colorblind
racial discourse as the hegemonic racial discourse of the post-civil rights era7. Charles
Gallagher (2008) suggests that while such studies have been important in identifying the silence
that surrounds whiteness, they potentially function to reproduce, normalize, and continue to
make whiteness invisible by uncritically validating the version of whiteness [researchers] expect
to hear (176). What is the value of discussing racial oppression with white people, Gallagher
asks, given that the knowledge most whites have of racial minorities is restricted to
representations of these groups on television (Gallagher 2008; 178). Gallagher urges scholars of
whiteness to think ourselves out of an oppositional understanding of whiteness [and break] the
racial template that seduces researchers into asking questions that do nothing more than
reproduce a common sense, neoconservative definition of whiteness and race relations that is
based on Whites perceived marginalization (2008; 174).
Scholars have attempted to overcome this limitation by examining whites who have had
unique interactive experiences with non-white minorities, such as anti-racist whites (OBrien
2001; Hughey 2007), whites who attend HBCUs (Jackson 1999) and whites with non-white
lovers (Noveske 2006). These studies have demonstrated further complexity in the expression of
colorblind racial ideology. OBrien (2003) found that anti-racist whites are race-cognizant on
some dimensions but strategically colorblind on others; they are cognizant of (or at least pay lip
7

Colorblind racial discourse assumes a race-neutral social context and maintains silence on the issue of race and
racial power through recourse to four central frames: 1) abstract liberalism which involves an invocation of
traditional American values of liberal individualism to reject race-based policies, 2) naturalization, whereby racial
inequality is viewed as merely a natural state of affairs, 3) cultural racism, whereby racial inequality is viewed as
rooted in minority culture rather than biology and 4) minimization, whereby the significance and importance of
racial inequality is denied (Lewis 2003; Bonilla-Silva 2006).
16

service to) the racialization of non-whites and structural racism but inattentive to how they are
individually implicated in these structures8. This multi-dimensionality of white racial ideology
was demonstrated in Noveskes (2006) study of whites with non-white lovers which found such
whites to be aware of their whiteness as well as the non-whiteness of their partners but not
necessarily cognizant of the larger structural significance of race.
These studies of unique white people suffer from the third limitation of interview-based
studies on whiteness; even when whites have experience with such equal status contacts they
rarely involve contexts of criticism. It is imperative then to not only conduct case studies of
specific local sites, but also to study sites in which whiteness is being made the subject of public
discourse; sites in which whiteness is being identified, named and criticized9. Very little is
known about the limits of self-reflexivity on the part of whites in accounting for their
unintentional reproduction of racism and the naming practices that emerge when confronted with
criticism, in the context of a commerce in ideas. Criticism is a requirement for thinking about
power at the institutional structural level (Leonardo 2002). According to Raka Shome (2000),
whiteness does not always and necessarily secure itself through a rhetoric of normativity; in
fact, in historical moments in which whiteness becomes contested, its hitherto normalized
practices often become visible. It is in such moments that whiteness begins to mark itself, name
itself, come out of its hiding place (Shome 2000; 368). Though the field of whiteness studies
generally emphasizes the necessity of opposing and transforming whiteness, there are few
empirical studies of situated efforts to confront white people, particularly liberals and

The three dimensions of race-cognizance identified by OBrien are: cognizance of self as white, cognizance of
others as racialized and cognizance of racialized social structures.
9
According to Gallagher (2008) this allows researchers to challenge the tendency of White respondents to validate
and justify White privilege by inverting the questions we ask so respondents are forced to think of the structural
advantages they receive because of their skin color (176).
17

progressives, with criticism of whiteness10. Nina Eliasoph (1998) describes the potential that can
emerge when public-spirited dialogue occurs over questions of power and justice,
Public-spirited conversation happens when citizens speak in terms of "justice," which
forces us to transform "I want" into "I am entitled to," a claim that becomes negotiable
by public standards. In the process [of making such claims] we learn to think about
the standards themselves, about our stake in the existence of standards, of justice, of our
community, even of our opponents and enemies in the community; so that afterwards we
are changed. This does not mean that people will always come to the right decisions
when speaking in a public-spirited way, but that such discussion forces a discussion of
who "we" are and why "we" care, and what "we" can do about it (15-16).
Lack of empirical attention to such contexts of confrontation is due neither to the unwillingness
on the part of researchers to explore such confrontations nor to the unwillingness or lack of
desire on the part of marginalized groups to initiate them, but rather is due most centrally to the
privilege that whiteness grants its beneficiaries to evade such confrontations and to ensure that
they will not be harassed by the riddle of the Sphinx. Still, the consequence of this empirical
lacuna is that an understanding of whiteness, its tenacity, and its material and symbolic
boundaries remains elusive (Lewis 2004).

10

Whiteness studies scholars argue that in order to transform racial hierarchy the destructive consequences of
whiteness must be identified, analyzed, and opposed (Lipsitz 2006). The primary political question with respect to
white hegemonics and supremacism, according to Steve Martinot, is how to transform society and culture insofar
as it is white.If whiteness renders all others an otherness for itself, objects through which it constructs itself as a
social structure and an identity, and racializes itself and its others through that process, then a movement is needed
that would render whiteness an object for itself as other, and would deracialize itself and all of whitenesss others
through that process (Martinot 2003; 204). Similarly, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva contends that whiteness must be
challenged wherever it exists, regardless of the social institution in which whiteness manifests itself (Bonilla-Silva
2006; 214)
18

The Study
In an attempt to overcome these limitations, the present study explores the discursive
maneuvers and naming practices deployed by a unique sample of intellectual white liberals and
white radicals who were confronted with an indictment of and demanding to account for their
collusion in the reproduction of white racial privilege. This is not a gotcha study of white
people that seeks to demonstrate the incompetence of white liberals in talking about and
grappling with the implications of racial domination. I seek to show the ways in which the
discourse in response to this insurgency breaks down. The purpose is not to vilify white people
but rather to identify the patterns of discourse that emerge to stave off critical engagement. The
purpose is to approximate discursive limits that are the effect of structural positions, rather than
individual, or even collective, moral failings. How are black people engaged and, more
importantly, how are blackness and whiteness as categories understood and engaged?
Research Methods & Data
I will explore these questions by conducting an extended ethnographic case study of the
U.S. intercollegiate competitive policy debate activity. The extended case study method has been
articulated and developed most fully by Burawoy (1991; 2002). Burawoy (2002) distinguishes
between two models of social science the positive and the reflexive the coexistence of which
he argues is not only possible but necessary. The extended ethnographic case method operates
according to the logic of reflexive social science. Positive scientific methods are best positioned
to identify broad structural forces and social patterns. The strength of claims made by positive
social studies rest on the extent to which analyses can demonstrate the minimization of
researcher bias and the representativeness and generalizability of findings (Small 2009). The
reflexive approach to science is particularly well-suited to understanding the operation of power

19

and resistance in discursive interaction, the construction of meaning, and the maintenance and
transformation of social norms and symbolic boundaries (Burawoy 2002; Bourdieu & Wacquant
1992). Most studies of racism and racial inequality, even qualitative studies, have relied on the
positive model of science. While these studies have been important in identifying a range of
persistent racial inequalities, patterns of residential and occupational segregation, and shifts in
racial attitudes and ideology they are unable to identify the processes by which the meanings
associated with these broad patterns are negotiated and contested.
Attempts on the part of researchers to arrive at generalizable and monolithic claims about
whiteness are not only dangerous and counter-productive but can only be proffered in bad faith
(Twine & Gallagher 2007). This is because whiteness has what Troy Duster (2001) describes as
morphing properties and is thus fluid and evasive. There is a contextual heterogeneity to
whiteness such that it is janus-faced (Hughey 2009) and appears simultaneously everywhere
and nowhere (Kolchin 2002). The secret of whiteness according to Sexton & Martinot (2003)
is that it has no depthits truth lies in the rituals that sustain its circuitous, contentless logic; it
is, in fact, nothing but its very practices. The extended case method takes context and situation
as its points of departure. Extended ethnographic case studies attempt to identify the social
processes occurring within a particular local context and embed these social processes in the
wider array of social forces (Burawoy 2002; 30-29). This is made possible by taking on the
position of participant-observer, or, as Loic Wacquant prefers, observant participant, in which
the researcher, rather than distancing herself from the object of study, as is demanded by the
positive model of science, attempts to undergo a conversion to the cosmos under investigation
(Wacquant 2004). According to Burawoy, Reflexive science starts out from dialogue, virtual or
real, between observer and participants, embeds such dialogue within a second dialogue between

20

local processes and extralocal forces that in turn can only be comprehended through a third,
expanding dialogue of theory with itself (Burawoy 2002, 5).
Case Selection
Extended case method ethnographers select cases on the basis of their societal
significance rather than their generalizability and transportability to other cases. This often
means that deviant cases are the best cases (Burawoy 2002; Small 2009). Given that white
supremacy is normative and systemic rather than deviant and isolated, the practices that sustain
its circuituous, contentless logic could be mapped in virtually any local site or case.
However, I argue that policy debate activity has a unique societal significance and that it
provides a fruitful empirical terrain upon which to understand the construction and contestation
of racial meanings and norms. The activity of intercollegiate debate is representative in many
respects but is also deviant and unique. The discourses that circulate in policy debate are drawn
from every corner of the academy as well as from the fields of politics and law and thus the
activity reflects the normative structure of the larger intellectual universe of which it is a part.
Debate is unique, per the explanation above, in that it is structured in such a way to enable an
interrogation of and critical discussion of these norms and values that, for a variety of reasons, is
possible in few other institutional locations.
This significance stems from four main characteristics of the debate activity. First,
because the silence around whiteness has been breached and questions of white power and
privilege are made the subject of public discourse, the debate activity provides a unique
opportunity to understand nuances in the way that whiteness as a form of power is defined,
deployed, performed, policed and reinvented. Secondly, this discourse on whiteness is not just
engaged by those shooting from the hip, or speculating on a subject about which they have

21

never been forced to contemplate. On the contrary, in the debate activity, questions of racial
power and privilege have become the subject of research and discussion, not in fleeting
moments, but rather over a sustained period of time. Gary Allan Fine (2001) described
competitive policy debate as a world of talk, the participants of which are trained specifically
to be effective listeners and talkers with the confidence to take on a range of contentious issues.
Also, Fine argues that policy debaters tend to be relatively well informed about social issues and
current events and far more liberal than the general society. As an educational activity, policy
debate is designed to foster the skills to effectively navigate civil society, evaluate argumentation
and arrive at solutions to social problems. These characteristics of debaters and the debate
activity allow for identification of more nuanced and sophisticated racial discourse that operates
at higher levels of abstraction than is typical in other social realms. The debate activity thus
represents a limit-case that enables a closer approximation of the limits of civil society in
grappling with and reconciling racial domination.
Third, questions of racial power and privilege cannot be evaded or ignored by the mostly
white male participants of the debate activity. In many ways, the white participants are placed on
the defensive as demands are made of them to address and account for the operation of white
supremacy. Failure on the part of debate participants to muster an adequate and reasonable
accounting, based in research and a certain degree of thoughtfulness not required elsewhere,
carries tangible consequences, namely the loss of competitive success. Additionally, because
black students in debate focus their criticisms on the normal and embedded, rather than deviant
and spectacular, operation of racial power in the banal conduct of daily institutional life, the
questions were engaged at a higher level of abstraction that required their peers to attempt to
think about structures of power and privilege. Finally, students and teachers in the debate space

22

not only have to think about, conduct research on, and speak about these contentious questions,
they have to do so in dialogical interactions with their black peers in which their accounts and
articulations are criticized. Thus, contestation over the meaning of racial power and privilege can
be examined in situ, in the context of struggle over institutional resources, in specific and
sustained interactions across the colorline.
Data
Several sources of data are brought to bear in an attempt to address these questions: 1)
two years of ethnographic participant observation as a travelling coach and adjudicator on the
national intercollegiate debate circuit; 2) interviews with select participants, past and present,
both debaters and coaches, selected according to the method of sequential interviewing; 3)
content analysis of the debate caselist, where the content of debates, in terms of the specific
literature deployed, is recorded, 4) discourse analysis of internet message board discussions.
Participant observation
In order to approximate the pulse of the contestation over racial meanings in the debate
activity, consistent with the extended ethnographic case method, I attempted to undergo a
conversion to the cosmos under investigation by becoming a coach/consultant for one of the
radical black debate teams. I gained access to the debate community by becoming a part-time
researcher and travelling coach with the Towson University debate team, based out of Baltimore
Maryland. Towson University was selected because they have become one of the most
prominent teams of the black intellectual insurgency. The city of Baltimore has one of the largest
and most well-funded urban debate leagues in the country and, as is outlined in the second and
third chapters, has recruited a team consisting primarily of black students from Baltimore city. I
was allowed to travel with the Towson team to debate competitions around the country. My

23

responsibilities on these trips were to enter the pool of judges and judge debates and to help the
team strategize and research relevant issues. The Towson team already had a coaching staff in
place so my role consisted of giving advice where necessary and attempting to gather
information on the range of arguments that were made by the various debate teams in the field.
Given that the goal of the present study theorizing the operation of racial norms and the
nuanced operation of racial power and privilege was the same as that of the debaters, joining
them in an advisory role enabled me to place the theoretical conceptions I developed in the
course of my field work into dialogue with the practical realities and processes taking place in
the field.
In the 2011-2012 school year I attended eleven debate competitions. These events were
held at Georgia State University, University of Kentucky, Harvard University, Wake Forest
University, University of Southern California, California State University Fullerton, University
of California Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin, Pepperdine University, University of
Oklahoma and Emory University. Each of these competitions with the exception of Pepperdine
was a national competition that fielded the best teams from around the country. The Pepperdine
competition was a regional competition that determined which teams would qualify for the
National Debate Tournament which was held at Emory University in 2012. During the
competitions I was either judging debates, watching debates, or having conversations with debate
participants. I judged 48 debates throughout the school year and watched 51 debates in which
various critical black students were competing.
I also attended a summer debate camp for critical college debaters in the summer of
2011 and the summer of 2012. The program was started by the director of debate at the
University of Oklahoma and was held in a small country town in rural Vermont. At this event

24

dozens of critical debaters came together and prepared for the debate season. This gave me a
window into the motivations of the critical debaters and the various issues that influenced their
interventions. Here my role was as an advisor to the students. Given that I am a doctoral student
in sociology with an emphasis in critical theory I helped to guide the students in their negotiation
of critical theory literature. Attending these camps helped me to understand the events taking
place in the debate activity and the various discursive maneuvers deployed to both challenge and
defend its normative structure.
Sequential interviewing
Small (2009) describes the usefulness of the method of sequential interviewing in
combination with extended ethnographic case study. Most interview based studies rely on
sampling logic to determine the appropriate amount of interviews necessary in order to make
generalizable descriptive claims about extant social processes. The method of sequential
interviewing does not set out with a predetermined conception of how many interviews are
necessary in order to arrive at reliable and generalizable analyses but rather seeks toward
saturation. This means that interviews proceed until they no longer produce new information.
The last interview conducted according to the logic of sequential interviewing should provide no
new information. In an extended ethnographic case study it is expected that an understanding of
the processes and dynamics at work in a given case will develop as participant observation
proceeds. Experience in the field allows the researcher to locate interviewees and anticipate
variation in responses. While the researcher seeks towards saturation, she attempts to identify as
much variation as possible.
Interviews were conducted with four groups of debate participants: 1) the debaters
launching the critical challenge (n=15), 2) the coaches of these debaters (n=8), 3) the debaters

25

responding to the critical challenge (n=20) and 3) their coaches (n=10). In pursuing saturation I
attempted to interview as diverse a set of participants as possible in terms of racial and ethnic
identification, gender, sexual orientation and region of origin. The way in which students
engaged the specific debate rounds was typically the collective product of an entire squad of
undergraduate students, graduate student assistants, and professors. Often, students may have
withheld their viewpoints in the course of the debate rounds for strategic purposes but were
willing to talk about them in the interviews. The interviews enabled me to identify the range of
discursive maneuvers brought to bear in the negotiation of the critical challenges being made in
the debate activity and the way in which these efforts and the larger issues they illuminated were
understood. Most of the interviews were semi-structured, recorded and transcribed. Several
interviews, however, were encounters I had with individuals at the competitions and about which
I took detailed notes upon their completion. In many cases it was unnecessary to interview
particular participants because their viewpoints were elaborated in discussions that took place on
the internet forums and other public venues.
Discussions between participants about the various arguments made and how people
thought about them were common in the debate activity. This was a result, in part, of the effort
of all participants to gain feedback about the debates in order to improve on them. When I judged
debates, for example, it was common for me to be approached by the coaches of the teams I
judged and asked about which elements of their arguments and performance I found to be
persuasive. They asked me how their teams could improve and what I thought generally about
their strategy and performance. For this reason it was not viewed as odd or out of order to
approach members of the activity and ask such questions. Given that the debaters for whom I
was officially a coach were making an ethical indictment of the debate activity, I could ask

26

people what they thought about the critical effort. They often spoke about strategic competitive
matters but also the way in which they felt about the challenge and what it would take for them
to be persuaded.
Participants came from each type of university: community colleges, four-year state
universities, private universities. The Ivy League schools who participate in the debate activity
are Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia & Cornell. The majority of schools are four-year state
universities. The schools who comprise the black intellectual insurgency are: the University of
Oklahoma, Emporia State University, Towson University, Western Connecticut State University,
University of West Georgia, University of Louisville, California State University Fullerton,
Rutgers University, University of Vermont, Fresno State University and the University of
California Irvine. Not all of these schools have a squad comprised solely of radical black
students but they at least provide support for radical black students. Also, some of these
Universities may have a radical black team for a few years and then not have any such team
according to the fluctuations in recruitment and retention. The most dominant universities that
are often seen as representing the debate establishment, who have a great deal of resources and
who field the greatest number of teams are: Northwestern University, Emory University, Wake
Forest University, UC Berkeley, Dartmouth, Michigan State, University of Texas, University of
Southern California and University of Michigan. Interacting with representatives of the diverse
range of universities was made simple in some senses by virtue of the competitive structure of
the debate activity (described in the following chapter) that brought everyone into contact with
one another. Just being a participant in the activity gave me access to these individuals and, in
many cases, urged them to seek out me. In the analysis that follows, I use real names only in
cases where subjects requested I do so and in cases of public utterances in which subjects names

27

are identifiable with their utterances. In most cases, pseudonyms are used. I also use the real
names of universities where such information is public.
Caselist
After each debate, teams are expected to submit a description of their arguments and the
published literature from which they draw their arguments to an online caselist. From this list,
which develops until the end of the year, each team can survey the field of arguments and seek
out literature that engages, answers, or criticizes anything that circulates in the larger field of
argumentation. The time between competitions consists of conducting research on the entire field
of arguments to decrease the likelihood of being caught off guard by particular argument
strategies. Prior to each debate round, debaters are expected to disclose the basic description of
the arguments they intend to make in the debate if these arguments have already been posted to
the caselist. If debaters are introducing new arguments they are not expected to announce them
beforehand but are expected to post them to the caselist promptly afterwards. At the end of the
school year each years caselist is archived. This data archive allowed me to understand the types
of discourse deployed against the black intellectual insurgency in the years before and beyond
my fieldwork as well as the transformations in the discourse of the insurgency. Additionally, in
the last few years it has become common for debates to be filmed and for the videos to be posted
online. This also provided an important source of data.
Online forums
The final source of data analyzed are a series of discussions and debates that have taken
place and continue to take place on an internet message board serving the intercollegiate debate
activity as well as on Facebook. The Facebook group titled, College Policy Debate has over
2000 members, each of whom are past and present debate participants. There are also forums

28

exclusive to the radical black debaters and their allies titled Resistance. There are about 200
members of this group representing past and present debaters who are in critical opposition to the
dominant norms of the debate activity as well as those who express solidarity with this effort.
These forums are important venues wherein general announcements are made about the business
of the debate activity and in which controversies are addressed and discussed. The various efforts
of black debaters have uniquely set off a storm of controversy on these message boards. The
message boards are also important because they enable debate and discussion between
competitions and in the off-season.
Data coding
I was aided in the collection of ethnographic data by the use of a Livescribe Smartpen.
This device is a computerized ball-point pen with a built in recording device. The pen digitizes
written hand notes and transfers them into Microsoft Word format. It also synchronizes the audio
received by the pen with the notes being written at the exact time of the recording. This allowed
my written ethnographic notes to be digitally searchable enabling me to find key words and
phrases. I did not make use of any particular qualitative data gathering software but rather
handcoded my notes, which were actually digitized and thus searchable. Consistent with the
reflexive ethnographic method I was not overly concerned with quantifying discursive content
but rather with identifying the broad discursive patterns and trends that became evident in the
course of my fieldwork.
I utilized the concepts and processes identified in whiteness studies literature as
conceptual guides in coding the ethnographic field notes, interview transcripts and online
discussions. After an initial broad coding, I further identified and refined the variation in themes
that emerged from the texts. Additionally, the debate participants proved a valuable resource as

29

the interviews allowed me to consult them on my provisional findings. This was possible
because a significant portion of the work of an ethnographer in this space overlapped with the
necessary tasks of being a participant. I was attentive, most importantly, to the way in which the
discourse produced in the debate activity departed from these broad discursive patterns identified
in the literature, consistent with the limitations identified above. I was most attentive to the
moments in which blackness and whiteness as categories were discussed and the extent to which
racial hierarchy was grappled with in discourse and the ways in which it was evaded. I was
careful to distinguish accounts of what debaters actually said in the debates from their personal
reflections about the things happening in debate. Close attention was paid to expressions of
acknowledgement of institutional racism as well as the limits of such acknowledgment.
Limitations
The strength of the case being studied also represents important limitations. Participants
of the debate activity represent a unique sample of students and professors. The analysis that
follows does not seek generalizability to all contexts. The debate activity is comprised almost
exclusively of individuals on the left of the political spectrum. The majority of participants are
white liberals though there are a significant amount of radical white students and professors.
Debate represents is a specialized training site in which participants are skilled in argumentation
and public speaking. The strength is that in a social milieu in which racial questions are more
difficult than ever to broach, these individuals are not squeamish in the face of contentious and
confrontational public discourse. Researchers would be hard-pressed to find a case in which the
questions of the radical black tradition are imposed in such a way on a predominantly white
population. White people in debate were forced to engage with critical racial questions, not by
any choice of their own, but because of the unique intervention of radical black students. The

30

entirety of the debate activity was required to engage with critical race theory, a body of
discourse which in other parts of the academy and broader public sphere is eminently ignorable.
For this reason, the discursive struggle in the debate activity represents a natural experiment that
functions as a limiting, best-case scenario for assessing and analyzing the outcome of critical
confrontation across and concerning the colorline. The vast majority white students and
professors in the debate activity embrace the basic tenets of multiculturalism which enabled the
discourse of the debate activity to go beyond the simple and individualized discourse of the
broader public sphere. Additionally, while the critical confrontation in the debate activity was
not exclusively about questions of whiteness and anti-blackness, these issues generated the most
anxiety and stirred up the most intense affective response.
Chapter Outline
Chapter 2 describes the organizational structure of the debate activity. I provide a brief
history of the debate activity, its educational mission, and the way in which the competitive
structure is organized. I provide the reader with an understanding of the types of debaters and
debates that take place in the activity and the ways in which they are evaluated. Most
importantly, I describe the diversity initiative that has resulted in an increase of black
participation which has made possible the critical confrontation that is my central object of
inquiry.
Chapter 3 describes the black intellectual insurgency, the factors that have influenced its
development and the meanings with which black students associate their efforts. I show that the
insurgency began as a multicultural and diversity initiative to expand black student participation
and developed into a radicalized criticism of systemic white supremacy. Finally, I describe the
emergence of Afro-pessimist discourse in the activity that views race as foundational to the

31

modern episteme and which seeks to subvert and disrupt rather than positively transform the
debate activity. I outline the deep debates that are taking place among black students about how
to conceptualize race, the role of black intellectuals, the politics of performance and pleasure
under the white gaze. I argue ultimately that the oppositional effort of black students is not at
odds with the pursuit of academic excellence. Additionally, I identify the deep dilemma faced by
black students in negotiating their white patrons and the simultaneous negrophobia and
negrophilia with which their efforts and their bodies are met.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the way in which the black intellectual insurgency was
negotiated and understood by non-black debate participants. In each of these chapters I compare
two distinct types of whites liberal whites and leftist whites that comprise the majority of the
debate population. I show the differential but homologous ways in which these types of whites
engaged the efforts. Chapter 4 focuses on the ways in which white identity was constructed in
the face of criticism or the outing of whiteness. I show that liberal whites attempted to embrace
a multicultural paradigm in which whiteness was ontologically equivalent to other racial
categories and which charged intellectual insurgency with being uncivil and in violation of
fundamental norms of the public sphere. Leftist whites drew upon critical theoretical resources
that denied the salience and stability of racial categories and charged the black insurgency with
being authoritarian and essentialist. In both cases the structural criticism was personalized,
individualized and ultimately evaded as white participants labored to lower the scale of
abstraction on critical questions of racial power.
Chapter 5 focuses on the institutional crisis, both real and perceived, that the debate
activity is experiencing in the face of the momentum and unprecedented competitive success of
radical black students. I outline the efforts of white liberals to construct new rules and codes that

32

stifle the black insurgency and seek to incorporate and absorb the critical effort into existing
norms. Most importantly, the white liberals struggle with the contradiction between the necessity
of diversification and the desire for normative maintenance. I outline the fear of a black planet
debate and recent moves made to create a private debate organization that excludes black radical
discourses while simultaneously attempting to maintain a positive and progress selfpresentatuion. I also show how white leftists ultimately made movements to abandon the black
intellectual insurgency with which they, at one point, claimed to be in solidarity. I argue that the
energy of radical black criticism motivated an elevated concern with other categories of
domination even as a concern with combatting anti-blackness was abandoned. This is seen in the
very explicit breakdown of the coalition between black radicals and white leftists and the
creation of a white leftist coalition free from black noise.

33

CHAPTER 2: ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT OF INTERCOLLEGIATE DEBATE

One of the things that I learned quickly as a result of the internet is that I started getting a
ton of letters from students who basically were involved in these debate societies. And
theyre saying like things, We use your work. We love this work. And I actually got
involved with one working out of Brown University with high schools in the inner cities
right, and I got involved with some of the students. But then I began to learn as a result of
that involvement that these were the most radical kids in the country. I mean, these were
kids who embodied what a critical public sphere meant. They were going all over the
country, different high schools, working class kids no less, debating major issues and
getting so excited about in many ways winning these debates but doing it on the side of
something they could believe in. And I thought to myself, Wow, heres a space. Heres
a space where youre going to have a whole generation of kids who could be actually
engaging in debate and dialogue. Every working class urban school in this country should
put its resources as much as possible into a debate team.
-Henry Giroux
This chapter provides a description and background discussion of the U.S. intercollegiate
debate activity. I describe the educational purpose and organizational structure of the activity, the
main types of debates and types of debaters, process whereby critical literature came to be
accepted in the debate activity is explained and the factors that contributed to the increase of
black participation in the activity.
The extra-curricular activity of competitive debate in institutions of secondary and higher
education is a unique empirical terrain upon which to examine contentious racial discourse. As a
public, the activity of competitive debate has a unique relationship to the public, and to both the

34

dominant and oppositional discourses therein. Warner defines the public is a social totality.
Publics, reference the totality of people in a given field. Some publics have a concrete audience
bounded by the event or by the shared physical space while others come into being only in
relation to texts and their circulation(50). The activity of debate11 is a public in both senses of
the term. The debate community is comprised of a delimited set of individuals that are known, or
at least knowable, to one another and who meet several times a year to occupy the same physical
space of the debate competition. The purpose of this coming together is to facilitate organized
argumentative exchanges between undergraduate students.
The debate activity is especially important to the present study for three reasons. First, the
activity of debate is a microcosm of the public sphere, embodying principles of rational
argumentation and empowering participants to be skilled agents of civil society. Second, the
unique organizational structure of the activity makes it possible for discourses that are otherwise
confined to counterpublic spaces to circulate and gain a hearing within its public. Debate has
been described as a discursive laboratory in which, unlike other extra-curricular intellectual
activities i.e. Model U.N., Moot Court, Academic Decathlon the only rule, apart from time
limits, is that everything is debatable (Mitchell 1998). Second, the debate activity is the site of a
unique diversity effort that seeks to expand debate participation to previously excluded women
and racial minorities and, through this participation, to diversify the wider public sphere (ReidBrinkley 2008; Mezuk 2010).

11

I use the terms debate activity, activity of debate interchangeably with debate. Most debaters, even the
critical ones, refer to the debate community as the public being referenced. I use all of these terms
interchangeably.
35

Educational purpose of debate

The activity of competitive debate has long been a training ground par excellence in
communicative competence that seeks to strengthen civil society and activate citizenship
(Mitchell 1998). Gary Allan Fine argues that debate represents an ideal type of system in which
persuasion (the decision of the judge) emerges through conflict. As such, debate serves as a
model for knowing in a world in which truth moves ever farther from those who purport to be its
spokepersons (Fine 2001; 66)12. As such, debate strives to embody the principles of the
Habermasian public sphere and to serve as Habermass guardian of reason13. Habermas
believed that the public sphere, a modern invention, was the essential bulwark of democratic
universalism and that it represented the sphere in which normative consensus could be generated
through intercommunicative interactions, argumentation and debate. The debate activity fashions
itself as a space in which the institutionalization of these values is its primary purpose.
The debate activity once had a vibrant life in the world of historically black colleges and
universities (Parker 1940), as dramatized in the Hollywood blockbuster, The Great Debaters,
starring Denzel Washington. According to Parker (1940), Negro colleges recognized the
educational significance of student debate, they introduced it, encouraged it, and numbered it
among their more important non-athletic extra-curricular activities (32). Dean William H.

12

According to Fine, The practice of debate reminds us that this leisure world depends upon the strategic
deployment of rival truth claims. Debate surely is a game a contest but in important ways it mirrors aspects of
the world that are serious. The willingness of speakers to use whatever material they find to support a claim, in the
absence of perfect knowledge is congruent with the world of debate. Further, key institutional structures in
American society most notably the legal and political systems are grounded in a fundamentally adversarial
system, based on the belief that justice or policy will emerge from the clash of opposing ideas presented by intense
defenders, as judged by neutral observers(Fine 2001; 66).
13
According to Gary Fine, Debate is one program through which an often shaky institution encourages adolescents
to acquire culturally valued skills. While debate is not the only activity in which adolescent attachment to
competition is mixed with the acquisition of socially valued skills Model UN, academic bowls, math teams, chess
clubs, and mock trials also have these attributes it provides an exemplary case in its organization, its longevity and
its intensity. High school debate potentially could produce curricular reform based on teaching the conflicts:
learning how to discuss contentious social issues can permit students to engage and confront moral ideals (Fine
2001; 5)
36

Martin of Texas College found that debate and dramatics were ranked as the most popular nonathletic extra-curricular activities in Negro colleges (Parker 1940). I was told by the Director of
Debate at the University of Louisville, who, as will be seen, was the primary originator of the
black intellectual insurgency in debate, that he was approached by the producers of The Great
Debaters and asked to be a consultant for an urban genre educational film that would depict the
efforts of black debaters from inner city high schools. Ultimately, the decision was made to set
the film in the pre-civil rights period and focus on civil rights leaders James Farmer. Apparently,
it was easier to depict debate in a context in which the idiom of power is seen as unarguably
racist. The debaters in the film struggle to navigate a racist social order, attempting to debate in
segregated environments against their white peers. The film culminates in a fictional public
debate at Harvard over the question of civil disobedience wherein the actor playing James
Farmer makes the closing remark that without substantial reform, there could be a violent
uprising of African-Americans. The students from Wiley College ultimately won this debate
deploying unconventional strategies and utilizing African-American speech methods and
winning over their white peers in the process of doing so.
Debate on HBCU campuses declined significantly in the post war period. In 1948, West
Point Academy organized the first centralized national debate circuit by bringing the various
regional college debate societies together into a national network. West Point created the
regional districts and organizational and normative framework for competitive debate that, with
slight variation, still exists today. Ultimately, the organizational structure of debate created at
West Point would exclude black colleges and the activity of debate in the HBCU network would
experience a precipitous decline. West Points purpose of establishing a national debate circuit,
according to Colonel Goerge A. Lincoln, was to open lines of communication between military

37

and civilian elites and provide a rigorous intellectual training ground that could produce
technocrats necessary for the facilitation of post-war US global dominance (Southworth 2001).
In defense of this initiative Colonel George A. Lincoln wrote,
The military academy considers that its forensics program..supports its own basic
mission. That mission, stated simply, is to graduate each year another class of young men
specifically prepared to join the flow of leadership dedicated to our countrys security in
these dangerous times. Their future responsibilities require disciplined, trained minds..
Debating develops the muscles of the mind, increases the power to think and the power to
express thoughts clearly and convincingly.qualities which are essential to the
professional army officer today. The cadet forensic activities are one of the ways in
which West Point deliberately keeps open its windows on the world. Association with
civilian contemporaries broaden the cadet outlook and lay essential groundwork for a
free, articulate, and hence understanding interchange of views between civilian and
military leaders of the future.
Debate, then, for all the benefits it is argued to bestow on its participants, must be seen as an arm
of state power billing itself as an arena of cultural and educational exchange. While the debate
activity undoubtedly produces active and engaged agents of civil society, many of whom
embrace progressive politics, the condition of possibility for doing so is that the activity provide
facilitate the security of U.S. hegemony and the smooth operation and expansion of the military
industrial complex. From such origins, it is not surprising that, as will be discussed in more detail
below, the key ethical dilemma of the discourse that circulates in debate is the question of how to
secure the military, political and economic hegemony of the United States.

38

Structure of the debate activity

From its origins at West Point, academic debate has since become an established fixture
on several high school and college campuses nationwide, including some of the most elite. At the
college and high school level the organizational structure of debate resembles that of most
athletic programs complete with coaches, regular practice sessions, competitions and elimination
brackets. Additionally, college and high school debate are closely linked. Most college debaters
were recruited from the high school debate circuit and many of them receive, if not a full-ride,
substantial debate scholarships. College debate programs are typically directed by full-time
professors of communication studies, with communication studies graduate students serving as
coaches and trainers as part of their graduate teaching assistantship. A few debate programs, such
as UC Berkeley and Harvard, secure funding independent of an academic unit and hire coaches
unaffiliated with academic departments.
Students debate about a single broad topic for the entire school year. The topic is selected
through a democratic process in which anyone can submit a topic proposal paper and each
school gets to vote on their preferred choice. Participation requires a significant commitment of
time and energy, according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the time spent by
most active debaters to prepare for debate competitions exceeds the time they spend on all their
coursework combined (Kay 1991). The same article claims that the average debater in one year
will conduct more research than is required for an average masters thesis.
Participation in policy debate involves frequent travel most debaters attend from eight
to ten competitions per school year. The major national competitions are held at Gonzaga
University, Georgia State University, University of Kentucky, Harvard, West Point Academy,
UNLV, Wake Forest University, USC, CSU Fullerton, University of West Georgia, UT Austin,

39

Northwestern University. These competitions culminate in two national competitions held at

different locations every year. One competition, the Cross-Examination Debate Association
National Championship (CEDA Nationals) is open to all teams. The second, the National Debate
Tournament (NDT), is restricted to only the top 78 teams in the nation. Debate competitions
consist of 6-8 preliminary debates that take place on the first two days of the competition. The
best 16 to 32 teams from the preliminary debates are placed in an elimination bracket which, on
the final day of competition, produces a champion. The champion team at a given competition
will have engaged in 12 to 15 debates over the course of the weekend. Every debate, each of
which take about two hours to complete, is followed by a decision given by the adjudicator, who
is typically a graduate student or professor, and concluded by a discussion period in which teams
can receive specific feedback on their performance.
Types of debate(rs)
Debate has been described as a discursive laboratory in which, unlike other extracurricular intellectual activities i.e. Model U.N., Moot Court, Academic Decathlon the only
rule is that everything is debatable (Mitchell 1998). For this reason the parameters of debate and
criteria of evaluation are constantly contested and undergoing change. There are two general
types of debaters: traditional and critical/performance. Accordingly, there are three general types
of debates: traditional versus traditional, critical/performance versus critical/performance, and
traditional versus critical/performance. Descriptions of these debate types are necessary to
understand the struggle taking place over the activitys normative structure. The following
figures provide a basic outline of the debate structure, the names of the debate speeches and
speaker positions and the time of each portion of the debate:

40

Figure 2.1: Speaker positions and speech titles

Speaker Positions and Speech Titles

Affirmative

Negative

1AC - First Affirmative Constructive - (9 minutes)

1NC - First Negative Constructive (9 minutes)

2AC - Second Affirmative Constructive (9 minutes)

2NC - Second Negative Constructive (9 minutes)

1AR - First Affirmative Rebuttal (6 minutes)

1NR - First Negative Rebuttal (6 minutes)

2AR - Second Affirmative Rebuttal (6 minutes)

2NR - Second Negative Rebuttal (6 minutes)

There are two people on each team and each person is designated first affirmative (1A), second
affirmative (2A), first negative (1N) or second negative (2N). This position indicates which
speeches they will give and in what order during the course of the debate. It is not common to
switch these speaker positions often. Also, it is typical that, for example, if a debater is the 1A
position when on the affirmative side they will be the 2N position when on the negative side. The
final speeches are considered to be the most difficult so a debate team will share this burden
between its two members.
In a given debate there are eight speeches and four cross-examination (C-X) periods.
After each of the constructive speeches the member of the team who is not the next speaker is
designated three minutes to interrogate the speaker about the argumentative content of their
speech. Additionally, each team is allowed ten total minutes of preparation time that they can use
at any point during the debate. Judges typically keep strict time of the debate and attempt to
prevent the debaters from getting free prep time. Figure 2.2 provides an outline of the
sequence and timing of the debate:

41

Figure 2.2: Debate round sequence

Segment

Time (Minutes)

1AC

C-X

1NC

C-X

2AC

C-X

2NC

C-X

1NR

10

1AR

11

2NR

12

2AR

Aff Prep

10

Neg Prep

10

I present a basic outline of the arguments and advocacy contained within the first two
speeches of the three debate types. The figures constructed contain direct reports of student
speeches posted to the online caselist, the central debate community research and intelligence
website. Each point listed represents a particular card or, in some instances, sets of cards. The
debaters speeches are comprised of the high-paced reading of excerpts from published literature.
Debaters call these excerpts "cards" and will accumulate thousands of them in the course of the
school year. The cards include a tagline, written by the debaters, that summarizes the main
argument the card is understood to support. They read the author's name and date and proceed to
read parts of the passage, but only those parts that are carefully highlighted as relevant to
providing a warrant for the main claim being advanced.
The debaters and adjudicators keep detailed notes on the cards that are read and the
analysis made by the debaters comparing the competing arguments. The practice of taking notes
in debate is referred to as flowing and takes a significant amount of practice to master. During
42

my time in the debate activity I struggled with this access of debate participation and, despite my
best efforts, found myself unable to keep up. There is a technical jargon and a common
shorthand that is used and understood by participants such that this jargon, along with the speed
with which debaters debate, make the activity almost completely inaccessible to an untrained
audience. Only during the cross-examination periods do debaters speak at closer to a
conversational rate. In the models of the various debate types outlined, I provide the name of the
author of each card and the type of venue in which it was published. After the first two speeches,
the primary argument pieces are put into play and the rest of the debate involves comparison,
drawing distinctions, analyzing evidence and prioritizing the key issues. Each of the model
debates provided here are debates on the topic:
Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase statutory
and/or judicial restrictions on the war powers authority of the President of the United
States in one or more of the following areas: targeted killing; indefinite detention;
offensive cyber operations; or introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities.
Traditional debate (Figure 2.3)
Traditional debates begin with the affirmative team delivering a nine-minute speech that
describes a social problem and proposes a policy for solving this problem. The negative will then
present a nine-minute case against the plan that could utilize five main types of arguments: 1)
Topicality/theory- the negative argues that the affirmative case falls outside of the topic. This
initiates a debate about the definitions of the words of the topic and how the debate community
should define these terms in order to have the most fair and productive debates. Theory
arguments claim that some other aspect of the affirmative case is in violation of norms necessary
for the maintenance of competitive integrity. There are no established and agreed upon norms

43

and guidelines for how the debate should happen or the criteria that should be utilized by each
adjudicator. The debaters have to argue why the norms they are defending in their theory
arguments would be net beneficial to the norms they are attempting to displace. Topicality and
theory arguments, in some cases, make up 1/3 of the entire traditional debate. 2) Case debate- the
negative directly attacks the content of the affirmative case. They focus on arguing that the
harms described by the affirmative are not severe enough to warrant action. The negative can
simply defend the status quo. The negative challenges the "inherency" of a plan, arguing that the
problem is being solved or is in the process of being solved by means other than the affirmative
plan. They might also argue that the plan may not solve the problem, solve it only minimally or
make the problem more severe. 3) Disadvantage- the negative argues that passage of the
affirmative plan will create an additional problem, whether directly or indirectly, that is more
severe than the problem being addressed by the affirmative plan. 4) Counterplan- the negative
proposes a counter-plan that is net beneficial to and mutually exclusive with the affirmative plan.
The counterplan is typically designed to solve the problem introduced by the affirmative while
avoiding the disadvantage and solve the affirmative harms at the same time. 5) Kritik- the
negative makes abstract arguments that focus on the ethicality of the discourse of the plan
proposal. The affirmative then has to defend the way they defend the plan, the representations
and discourse deployed. The opening speech of the negative always includes a combination of
some, but not necessarily all, of these argument types. The negative typically has a strategy to
use the various arguments in the beginning of the debate, only to draw the team into making
arguments that will help them in another part of the debate. The debaters have to anticipate how
important and compelling each of the various arguments will be and, by the end of the debate,

44

focus on only the most important arguments relevant to their telling a story about how and why
they win the.
After a traditional debate, the judge can choose one of five options: 1) To endorse the
affirmative plan (Affirmative win); 2) Opt for the status quo (Negative win), do not do the plan
because it is not beneficial to do so; 3) Opt for the counter-plan (Negative win); 4) Opt for the
"permutation" (Affirmative win), which refers to the combination of the plan and the counterplan
as a test of mutual exclusivity. The affirmative wins when the judge is persuaded that the plan
and the counterplan are not mutually exclusive and that both occurring together would be net
beneficial to the status quo, the plan alone, or the counterplan alone; 5) Opt for the kritik
alternative (Negative win) which usually urges an ethical rejection of the affirmative discourse.
The judge will then explain to the teams the winner of the debate, i.e. which option was chosen,
and will provide a justification. This is called the post-round discussion.
Figure 2.3 depicts a case in which the affirmative team is defending the plan that,
PLAN: The United States federal government should create a National Security Court (NSC)
with exclusive jurisdiction over the United States indefinite detention policy. In line with the
topic, this team advocates the

45

Figure 2.3: Model speech outline of traditional versus traditional debate

1AC

1NC

CONTENTION 1: LEGITIMACY

TOPICALITY: WAR POWERS AUTHORITY

1. Detention policy is destroying U.S. legitimacy abroad

The Aff must address ALL indefinite detention

(David Welsh, Law Professor, 2011 Law Journal)

2. Court oversight is the only way to restore image of U.S. abroad

KRITIK - HEGEMONY DISCOURSE

(Peter Meyers, American Studies Professor, 2008 Book)

(Glenn Sulmasy, Law Professor, 2009 Law Journal)

1. Their defense of human rights is specifically tied to

3. U.S. legitimacy is the vital internal link to global stability

strategic concern that opens up human rights

(Robert Knowles, Law Professor, 2009 Law Journal)

to substantial manipulation and opportunism

4. Collapse of U.S. hegemony results in nuclear war

(Makau Matua, Law Professor, 2002 Law Journal)

(Yuhan Zhang & Lin Shi, 2011 Blog)

2. And this is a practice in realism-as-dominance-

5. U.S. global hegemony key to solve extinction

it invokes sloppy realpolitik and constructs visions

(Thomas Barnett, Naval Academy Professor, 2011 Policy Paper)

of a violent other to bring third world countries under

6. 2000 years of history prove claims about hegemony

the aegis of civilized American human rights

(William Wohlforth, Government Professor, 2008 Politics Journal)

(Joe Hoover, Cultural Studies Professor, 2011 Politics Journal)

7. War is at its lowest level in history because of US primacy

3. We must reject the linkage of human rights and democracy

(John Owen, Politics Professor, 2011 Cato Institute Article)

with strategy (Joe Hoover)

8. Alternatives to U.S. hegemony doom humanity to deprivation

4. This eliminates our complicity in violence and creates

(Thomas Barnett)

an alternative vision of the world

9. Legitimacy is key in maintaining hegemony

(Frances Hasso, Women's Studies Professor, 2011 Blogpost)

(Barak Mendelson, Political Science Professor, 2010 Politics Journal)

5. We must question knowledge production before assuming the

10. US engagement is inevitable its only a question of making it effective

validity of their strategic games

(Robert Kagan, Brookings Institute Fellow, 2011 Politics Journal)

11. Focus on deterrence and democracy is key to adverting crisis escalation

6. This escalates to extinction

(Roland Bleiker, IR Professor, 2001 IR article)

(John Moore, Law Professor, 2004 Law Journal)

(Ira Chernus, Religion Professor, 2006 Politics Journal)

12. Judicial involvement is key to the credibility of detention decisions

7. Hegemony pursuit leads to dangerous policymaking

(Matthew Waxman, Law Professor, 2009 Book)

(Robert Jay Lifton, Psychiatry Professor, 2003 Book)

CONTENTION 2: DEMOCRACY

DISADVANTAGE: DRONE SHIFT

1. Democratic liberalism is backsliding now

1. Restricted detention leads to increased drone use

(Larry Diamond, Sociology Professor, 2009 Conference Presentation)

(Robvert Chesney, Law Professor, 2011 Law Journal)

2. Democratic transitions are hanging in the balance

2. Increased drone use causes South China Sea conflict

(Center for Justice and Accountability, 2004 Amici Curiae)

(Kristen Roberts, Journalist, 2013 News Article)

3. US detention policy has resulted in democratic backsliding globally

3. South China Sea conflict can result in extinction

(Center for Justice and Accountability)

(Lawrence Wittner, History Professor, 2011 Politics Journal)

4. A detention court preserves US democratic ideals (Glen Sulmasy)

DISADVANTAGE: PRESIDENTIAL POWERS

5. This resolves future GITMO-like problems and is modeled globally

1. Obama's consultation on Syria puts presidential powers in question

(Anthony Kimery, Journalist, 2009 Blogpost)

(2013 Mother Jones Article)

6. The only way for the US to bolster democracies is constitutionalism

2. Restrictions undermine presidential power

(Fareed Zakaria, Journalist, 1997 Politics Journal)

(Robert Turner, Law Professor, 2012 Law Journal)

7. Democratic backsliding causes great power war

3. This can lead to extinction (2000 South China Morning Post article)

(Azar Gat, National Security Professor, 2011 book)

COUNTER-PLAN: Endorse the affirmative plan but exempt sex offenders

PLAN: The United States federal government should create a National

1. Sex offender detention is indefinite

Security Court (NSC) with exclusive jurisdiction over the United States indefinite
detention policy

(Liliana Segura, Journalist, 2010 News article)

2. No political upside to reviewing federally detained sex offenders

CONTENTION 3: SOLVENCY

(Liliana Segura)

1. NSC restores legitimacy in detention (David Welsh)

3. Increasing sex offender rights is political suicide (2012 Blogpost)

2. The courts procedural justice is vital to solve (David Welsh)

(Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform)

3. NSC is the best solution to the detainee issue (Anthony Kimery)

CASE
1. Democracy is strong globally
(Daniel Deudney, Political Science Professor, 2009 Politics Journal)

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increase of restriction on presidential war powers by removing the power of the president to
create indefinite detention policy, placing this power instead in the hands of a National Security
Court (NSC). The affirmative team begins their speech with a discussion of the primary harms
that necessitate such a policy. They argue that the legitimacy of the United States is weakened
abroad because of U.S. detention policy and that this weakens the ability of the U.S. to maintain
its position of political and economic hegemony in the world. They argue as well that the
weakening of democracy is the result of Obamas indefinite detention policy. They present
scenarios for why loss of legitimacy and weakening of democracy could lead to a nuclear war if
not brought under control. Passage of the plan therefore is necessary to stave off nuclear war and
secure the world for U.S. hegemony.
The negative makes use of several different types of arguments. First, they argue
topicality that indefinite detention must refer to all people who are detained indefinitely, not to
those abroad under the auspices of war. The purpose of this is to strengthen their counterplan as
will be seen. They also discuss two disadvantages to the plan. First they argue that decreased
indefinite detention would result in an increase of drone use which would further weaken
legitimacy and democracy and culminate in a global nuclear war. Second, they argue that
weakening presidential power, in the wake of what they argue is Obamas declining legitimacy
as a result of his decisions pertaining to Syria, weakens U.S. hegemony and results in nuclear
war and extinction. They then present a counterplan which advocates the government plan but
retains jurisdiction over the indefinite detention of sex-offenders. This type of counterplan is
referred to as a plan-inclusive counterplan or PIC. This is a common, though controversial,
type of counterplan wherein the affirmative plan is advocated by the negative with one or more
exceptions. In this case, the negative argues that there are a significant number of sex-offenders

47

being indefinitely detained and that the affirmative plan would expand their rights. Any
expansion of sex-offender rights, they argue, would be politically detrimental thus rendering the
counterplan beneficial to and mutually exclusive with the plan. Finally, they argue the kritik
which contends that the way in which the affirmative team advocates for increased rights of
those detained is focused primarily on U.S. strategic advantage rather than on the independent
value of securing rights. They contend that this double-talk in international relations is harmful
and should be rejected by the judge of the debate as unethical discourse. The debate unfolds by
the teams comparing and contrasting competing claims and evidence. Also, the negative team
will begin to narrow down their arguments to focus on just one of them as the key reason to
reject the affirmative plan.
During traditional debates, the debaters are busy listening to the high-paced delivery of
their opponents, taking sufficient notes on what is being said, preparing their counterarguments,
and gathering the necessary cards to be read in the next speeches. Debaters spend a significant
amount of time gathering this research, or "cutting cards" and they develop a very detailed
system of organizing and cataloguing their cards so that they can be easily and quickly accessed
within seconds. To be successful in the traditional form of debate, debaters must possess each of
these technical skills. This is the primary form of debate that was established by West Point
Academy shortly after the 2nd World War. It coincides with new imperatives of an America
gaining unprecedented powers.
During the debates as described above debaters are always seeking to find an argument
that has a greater impact than their opponents. Debaters analyze impacts according to their
magnitude, severity and timeframe. This has created the habit of debaters attempting to create
links between the enactment of the affirmative plan and a number of apocalyptic scenarios like

48

global nuclear war and human extinction. Debaters seek to arrive at the biggest impact in the
shortest period of time. The Affirmative team might argue that failure to invest in fossil-fuel
production in the United States will lead to a decline of U.S. hegemony around the world which
will inevitably result in a nuclear war. The debaters avail themselves of neoconservative technostrategic discourse concerning American power. Much of the content of these debates is neoconservative in origin. The debaters are ultimately arguing for the best way to maintain U.S.
political and economic hegemony on the world stage.
Critical/performance debate (Figure 2.4)
The majority of debates can be described as traditional debates. At one point this was the
virtually exclusive type of debate with only slight variations. However, during the early 1990s,
concomitant with the cultural turn in the academy, some debaters began to challenge
prevailing norms by introducing argumentation drawn from critical theory literature14. The
kritik was deployed to challenge the analytical register of yes/no policy questions and to
interrogate the underlying assumptive logic of the arguments advanced in traditional debates.
Prior to this innovation every debate fell squarely under the epistemological umbrella of political
realism. Subsequent to this innovation, political realism itself, rather than just the details of
specific policy proposals, was fair game for interrogation (Shanahan 1999).
The debate activity has a long history of producing prominent political leaders and
policymakers including such distinguished Americans as Karl Rove, Richard Nixon, and
Samuel Alito, to name just a few. The educational efficacy of the debate activity in producing
such leaders is acknowledged by prominent think tanks such as the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS), which every year reserves a fellowship to one of the top college

14

See Frederic Jamesons (1998) The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998.
49

policy debaters. CSIS has also been active in the crafting of topics that get debated by college
policy debaters. Corporations have also understood the educational importance of competitive
policy debate. In 1997-98 Enron dispatched two executives to travel to several summer high
school policy debate camps in order to distribute free evidence to high school debaters.
Unsurprisingly, the evidence debunked the theory of human-induced global warming (Mitchell
1998). It is precisely this interest in competitive debate on the part of corporations and
conservative policy think tanks that led the proponents of the kritik to argue that the political
realism that dominated the debate activity functioned to indoctrinate students into the logic of
state and capital (Mitchell 1998). Proponents of the kritik questioned the extent to which the
debate activity strengthens democracy by producing knowledgeable and vocal agents of civil
society or whether it weakens democracy by producing verbal tricksters capable of effectively
pushing the anti-democratic agendas of state and corporate forces.
In order for debaters to win debates with the use of critical theory they had to convince
the adjudicators that it was legitimate to hold the opposing team accountable to argumentation at
higher levels of abstraction. This required a certain degree of familiarity with and sympathy
toward critical theory on the part of the adjudicators. Since the vast majority of adjudicators are
either graduate students in or professors of the discipline of communication studies, wherein the
so called cultural turn of the academy was widely debated, postmodern and poststructuralist
discourses were able to gain a certain degree of legitimacy in the debate activity. Though most
debaters did not choose to initiate kritik debates, all it took was one team achieving success
with kritik argumentation to force every other competitive team to be required to develop the
communicative competence to engage the kritik.

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Because critical/performance debates are relatively new they have a less developed and
agreed upon evaluative criteria compared to that of traditional debates. While traditional debates
have very little variation in their structure, there is wide variation within debates that can be
called critical/performance debates. For the most part, however, a constant is that speech order
and time limits are adhered to. The judge can discipline the debaters for violating these rules.
Apart from these rules everything else is up for debate. Substantial segments of the debate
community who engage in traditional debate are opposed to the decision of students to initiate
these critical debates. The primary reason for their opposition is that the role of the negative side
is not clearly defined and predictable. Whereas traditional debates offer a few very clear policy
options for the judge to evaluate, the options for the judge are often more nebulous and less
clearly defined in critical debates. There is sometimes intense argumentative clash and there is
sometimes very little argumentatitive clash in these debates.
Critical performance teams present a 1AC that makes a critical commentary on the topic.
In some instances teams ignore the topic altogether and provide a critical commentary on the
debate activity itself. In most instances the students affirm the topic through some form of
critical commentary. The fundamental point of distinction between traditional and a performance
debate is the question of whether or not the affirmative side defends the hypothetical enactment
of a government policy or reads a plan.

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Figure 2.4: Model speech outline of performance versus performance debate

1AC
INTRODUCTION:
1. I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for
president and I want a fag for vice president and I want
someone with no health insurance and I want someone who
grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic
waste that they didnt have a choice about getting leukemia. I
want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a
candidate who isnt the lesser of two evils and I want a
president who lost their last lover to AIDS (Zoe Leonard,
Poem)
2. Personal experience of growing up queer interspersed with a
2004 passage from Matilda Sycamore on the violence of
assimilation
3. The word queer moves beyond describing sexual
orientation or gender identity. This radical shift is key to
unveiling the multiplicity of ways in which anti-queer violence
operates. (Cathy J. Cohen, 1997 LGBT studies journal)
4. The targeting and killing of queer bodies influences
international relationships, especially to those deemed savage,
terrorist, and dangerous. (Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai write in 2002)
5. The result of this form of bodily destruction is overkill (Eric
Stanley writes in 2011)

1NC
KRITIK: CENTERING ON THE HUMAN
1. The 1ACs insistence upon re-energizing debate ignores
a few truths about theory and debate the movement
toward the body, toward affirming energy and human
potentiality is not a NEW mode of praxis but the subject of
countless academic debates, conferences, books, etc.
Policy debates over identity, bodies, social location have
been around for roughly a decade, theyve caused people
to change how they relate to issues of race, identity,
sexuality. However, today theory is running into a wall:
what do these important investigations mean for a world
dangerously out of sync due to global climate change
which is challenging everything we know about where
were from, who we are, and where were going.
Decentering away from the human is a necessary first step
to solving this. (Claire Colebrook, English professor, 2007
book)
2. This is a derangement of scale their attempt to
empower agency ignores that climate change is nonhuman
to begin with at the individual level scale effects are
invisible their understanding of the body produces a
politics that destroys the biosphere (Timothy Clark,
Professor of English, 2012 article)

ADVOCACY STATEMENT:
I contend, therefore, that the radical potential of queer politics
is the most promising avenue for the destabilization and radical
politicization of these same categories. We are all affected by
the representations of the monster, terrorist, fag and it is
through this that we are able to examine and reveal the bodies
that actually suffer under the foundations of anti-queerness
and the overkill that reveals the queer as the anti-subject of
humanity. Our 1AC promotes a reflectivity from the past that
places queer bodily understanding at the forefront of analysis.

3. The new normal is catastrophe: fracking, drilling,

warming, sovereign debt, inequality, hyper-consumption,
planetary extinction their nostalgic agenda for a praxis of
bodies and genuine feeling only accelerates this. (Tom
Cohen, Professor of Media Studies, 2012 book)
COUNTER-ADVOCACY:
Vote negative to disoccupy the political and theoretical
space opened by the affirmative this act of
disidentification is a prerequisite to revealing the violent
implications of all forms of subjectivity formation in the
context of climate change

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Critical performance teams typically provide a central advocacy statement that is relevant to the
general topic area but they do not initiate a debate about hypothetical government action. The
advocacy statements typically involve some sort of ethical appeal to the judge to intervene in the
traditional performance and discourse of the debate activity in general. Critical Performance
teams primarily utilize scholarship from fields of critical theory, American studies, women and
gender studies, post-colonialism, and ethnic studies. These debaters still typically use cards but
the cards are excerpts from critical theory literature rather than policy literature and they are
often supplemented with the debaters own writing, poetry, or music. Debaters have deployed a
whole range different modes of performance including song, dance, puppet shows, cooking and
served food, and many others. The performance is designed to be the reason for the judge to vote
for the Affirmative advocacy statement. The negative in this case can provide a counter-critique
and/or counter-performance. The question of mutual exclusivity is still operative in these debates
and the negative side often struggles to establish a reason to reject the affirmative.
The judge has three basic options after a critical/performance debate: 1) Endorse the
affirmative advocacy statement (Affirmative win); 2) endorse the negative critique alternative
(Negative win); or 3) endorse the permutation (Affirmative win), which in this case means an
endorsement of both the affirmative advocacy statement and negative critique alternative
together. If the judge is not convinced that the affirmative and negative are mutually exclusive,
they will most likely endorse the permutation which almost always means an affirmative win.
The performance debate is clearly much different in its content than the traditional
debate. In the model provided in figure 2.4, the affirmative team discusses war powers and
targeted killing in relation to what they refer to as a homophobic and anti-queer culture. They
read their own poetry and narratives that attempt to highlight the violence inflicted upon queer

53

individuals and the traumas of being raised in a homophobic society. They draw connections to
this culture and the violent conduct of U.S. military abroad. They then advocate a radical queer
politics that interrogates statements like the topic for the underlying operation of power therein.
Rather than present a specific policy plan to restrict war authority, these students scale back the
level of abstraction and analyze the logic and basis of warfare, specifically American conduct, as
rooted in anti-queer politics. In doing so, they invite a debate about relations of power rather than
strategic options of the powerful. Those holding to the traditional debate form disagree with
advocacies such as these for a variety of reasons to be discussed in chapters 4 & 5. However,
when paired against another critical team as in this model, the negative team seeks to provide a
set of arguments that affirm the type of debate initiated by the affirmative but which provide a
criticism that competes with the affirmative. This is often difficult and it is widely known and
commented that those who are assigned affirmative in such debates will be the likely winner.
This is one of the reasons that this form of debate lacks legitimacy among a significant portion of
the debate community. In this case, the affirmative team addresses the general concept of war
authority but they do not advocate a specific policy proposal. Many teams have refused to debate
the topic altogether or have refused to provide even an advocacy statement, presenting poetry
and performance instead.
The negative in this debate argues that the affirmative reproduces the power
arrangements they seek to address by an over emphasis on human relations. They argue that the
impending catastrophe of global warming is but one indicator of the ecocide that they argue is
the result of modern industrial society. In this way the negative can agree with most of the claims
of the affirmative about the place of queerness and anti-queerness in U.S. military policy but
argue that human society itself is the problem, rather than unequal power relations within human

54

society. The debate will proceed with the affirmative team arguing that they either take the
negative criticism into account or that they do not foreclose a simultaneous embrace of the
affirmative and negative (permutation) criticisms. The negative will argue that the explicit
centering of a queer politics and an elevation of attention to queer subjectivity and queer
subjection cannot occur with a simultaneous shift from human-centeredness to an ecologycenteredness. The challenge for the debaters, unlike in traditional debates wherein the policy
options are relatively clear, is to articulate these competing criticisms together, to isolate the
points of intersection (which almost inevitably exist) and advocate for a particular, and perhaps
even provisional, prioritization of one the sets of analysis, even within the intersection of these
discourses. A debate like this, given the prominence of personal narratives on the part of the
affirmative team is also much different from traditional debate in the emotions and affect
involved. Whereas, traditional debates are largely technical and detached, performance debates
often put a great deal at stake (or at least what is perceived by the debaters to be a great deal at
stake) personally in their disclosure of their own experiences and the ways in which their
experiences lead them to arrive at particular analyses.
Traditional versus critical/performance debate (Figure 2.5)
Clash of Civilizations is the term commonly used by members of the debate activity to
refer to debates between traditional teams and critical/performance teams. These debates vary
significantly according to which of these teams is assigned affirmative. When a traditional team
is assigned affirmative they deliver the same 1AC as in a traditional debate but with a few
alterations. Often, the parts of the speech that talk about U.S. hegemony and nuclear war are
removed and more liberal arguments are made to support their plan. The negative side delivers a
kritik of the 1AC and the debate becomes about whether or not the affirmative plan and, more

55

importantly, the decision of the Affirmative team to present a traditional plan can be defended
against the kritik. Figure 2.3 depicts a clash of civilizations debate in which the
critical/performance team is on the affirmative side.
When the critical teams are affirmative they read their 1AC unaltered. The negative
responds with what is called framework. They simply argue that the judge should reject the
way the critical team chose to debate in the name of competitive equity and the educational
quality of debate. The entire debate becomes, a debate about debate, a question of how debate
should happen. So-called clash of civilizations debates represent the frontline in the struggle
within the debate activity for influence over how debate happens. These debates involve one
team challenging and/or eschewing traditional debate norms, in a manner similar to the queer
politics affirmative outlined in figure 2.4, and the other side argues that such an approach is in
violation of community norms and that the judge of the debate has a responsibility to safeguard
these norms. This debate begins with an affirmative team focused on presidential war powers,
particular pertaining to the killing of black bodies. The students here do not advocate a specific
policy, nor do they read a great deal of published literature in the way that traditional teams and
many other performance teams do. They recite verse over hip hop beats that they play out of a
stereo system. Their advocacy statement is simply stated as war power should not be used
against niggas. Their performance is designed to introduce fundamental criticisms of white
supremacy in the society at large as well as in the debate activity.

56

Figure 2.5: Model speech outline of a performance versus traditional debate

1AC
1. SLAM POETRY INTRODUCTION: "Many debaters haters / Tryna sit down
at the down table / We living this Black shit, and they being some haters
/Revolution is coming, its time we turn tables." (60 lines)
Revolution is coming, its time we turn tables." (60 lines)

1NC

J-Cole, "Rise Above" (lyrics delivered by debaters)

2. ADVOCACY STATEMENT: War powers should not be used against
niggas, that means niggas should not be targeted and/or killed, detained,
cyber surveillanced, or have any hoe-ass law or state forces intervene on
them on some hostile shit. That go for them broke niggas, paid niggas, gay
niggas, straight niggas, disabled niggas and my niggas, my niggas,
however all niggas ain't my niggas but them niggas shouldnt have war
powers used against them either. All Black folks aint niggas, but all blacks
are subject to niggerzation. All it takes is to be identified as such and shit..
You can be Rekia Boyd, or Trayvon Martined. A nigga emerges out of
double consciousness, however you aint gotta be conscious of being a
nigga, to find yourself in conditions of being a nigga. See what you gotta
realize is that anybody can potentially be niggerized, which means that
war powers can be used potentially used on all of us. Dont get it twisted
though I recognize how Blacks are tied to niggadom, see its a non
mutually exclusive, but underprivileged relation to niggadom meaning
that shit always already tied to our presence whether you like it or not.
Niggas and knowledge tho.. Knowledge gives significance to experience; in
so doing it liberates significance from experience.. We call it Nigga Affekt,
basically like Boosie said if you dont know my struggle, you cant feel my
hustle, its embedded in the significance of experience.
Oh I hope yall get it, and I forgot to mention, this shit bigger than the
USFG Nigganess begs to the question of existence, especially for the socalled human because that whole concept is what got the world stupid,
but did you knew it

3. Saul Williams, "Amethyst Rock" (lyrics delivered by debater)

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CASE:
1. Their focus on the body and appeals to personal experience as
the basis for identifying oppression results in a crude form of
biological determinism that results in neo-tribalism and violent
politics
(Craig Ireland, Professor of American Culture and Literature, 2004
book)
2. This ultimately reproduces hegemonic structures forms the basis
for neoconservative violencepolicy debate is neither elitist nor
monologic (Mari boor Toon, Communication Professor, 2005
Communication Journal)
3. This strategy guarantees exclusion instead, embrace whateverbeing and simply debate how you choose, regardless of the ballot.
This creates a radical form of inclusion that rejects the power of
the sovereign
(Karen Shimakawa, Philosophy Professor, 2004 Philosophy
Journal)
FRAMEWORK:
1. Your advocacy should answer the resolutional question: Is the
enactment of topical action better than the status quo or a
competitive option?
2. Statutory means a law by Congress (The Oxford Guide to the
U.S. Government 2012)
3. Judicial means the courts (MacMillan Dictionary)
4. Simulated debates about national security law inculcate agency
and decision-making skillsthat enables activism and avoids
cooption (Laura Donohue, Professor of Law, 2013 Law journal)
5. Legal engagement is good. The law is malleabledebating it is
the only way to affect change (Todd Hedrick, Professor of
Philosophy, 2012 Philosophy journal)
6. Rejecting state-based legal solutions undermines progressive
forces (Orly Lobel, Professor of Law, 2007 Law journal)
7. Debating government policy teaches important decision-making
skills (David Steinberg, Communication Professor, 2013
Communications journal)

In later speeches they will introduce passages from published literature, however they initiate the
debate almost completely in poetics.
The negative team presents evidence defending the benefits of students role-playing as
the U.S. government and debating about government policy. They argue that such ways of
affirming the resolution do not leave the negative reasonable ground to debate and that, as a
result, they destroy the educational value of the activity. These students attempt to make their
disagreement progressive by arguing that, without activities like debate, the power of
neoconservative forces would accelerate. They also argue that the rejection of state-based
policies is harmful to progressive movements. The first point made is that the politics of the
affirmative is one which will inevitably become reduced to biological determinism and tribalism.
I will discuss these discursive moves in more detail in later chapters. Suffice it here to provide
the reader with an understanding of the types of discourse exchanged within debate rounds. This
debate would unfold with the affirmative emphasizing their analysis of institutional antiblackness and urging a more vigilant politics to address it. They would criticize the failure of the
negative team to engage them as an act of racial exclusion attempting to maintain the debate
activity as a white space. These debates typically involve a lot of anger and frustration from both
sides and can become very emotional for the debaters and judge.
Expanded Black Participation in Debate
This debate about debate, motivated by the larger debate within the academy initiated by
the cultural turn, emerged and raged through the 1990s. This was also a period of intense
struggle over questions of representation and affirmative action in the field of higher education.
The interlocutors of the debate were almost exclusively white and predominantly male.

58

Two developments beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s would have a major
impact on the diversification of the debate space which appears, despite its limitations, to have
achieved considerable success in expanding black participation in the debate activity. The first is
the institution of the Urban Debate Program (UDP), an initiative of George Soros Open Society
Institute (OSI). The second is an effort on the part of Dr. Ede Warner of the University of
Louisville to recruit a predominantly black debate team with the goal of intervening into the
debate about debate by focusing centrally on issues of racial exclusion. This effort came to be
known as the Louisville Project. The black debaters who entered the debate activity challenged
both sides of this ideological divide that had developed between traditional debaters and critical
debaters (Reid-Brinkley 2008). The door had been opened to critical literature so black students
began drawing literature from black studies and focused their criticism more directly on the
activity itself and both camps of the ideological divide. These debaters were initially concerned
with expanding diversity in the debate activity and identifying the debate norms as specifically
white. They adopted much of the style of the critical performance teams but included more
performative elements, challenging the lack of representation in the debate activity as well as
intervening in the aesthetics of the activity that were forged in a virtually all white and mostly
male crucible. The following chapter describes these interventions in greater detail.
George Soros Open Society Institute (OSI) is a private grant-making foundation with
the express mission to promote the development and maintenance of open societies around the
world by supporting a range of programs in the areas of educational, social, and legal reform,
and by encouraging alternative approaches to complex and often controversial issues (Breger
2000). OSI has utilized the activity of competitive debate as a civil society building tool in the
former Soviet Union, China, Iraq, Palestine and other nations considered to be in need of

59

democratic resources. The UDP is one of many initiatives funded by OSI with the justification
that because debate provides urban youth with the skills they need to actively participate as
citizens in an open society, so that their voices are heard and their opinions are considered in
public discourse, both in their communities and beyond (Breger 2000; 1). By providing the
opportunity for students of poorly funded inner-city schools to engage in debate, the UDP sought
to give these students a chance to excel in a rigorous intellectual activity which will positively
affect all aspects of their lives (Breger 2000; 1). The activity of competitive debate and the
diversity initiatives taking place therein do not simply view debate as a site deserving of
desegregation, but rather as a site, the desegregation of which, will facilitate the general
diversification of the wider institutional landscape. Today, UDP boasts that more than 40,000
urban public school students in over 30 U.S. cities, mostly African-American and Latino, have
competed in Urban Debate Leagues. The program claims, with backing from peer-reviewed
empirical studies, that policy debate is the most academically rigorous of all interscholastic
speech activities and that expanded participation promotes educational equity and prepares youth
for future success in media, business, law, government and the academy (Mezuk 2009). The
UDP has received investments from urban school districts totaling over eleven million dollars as
well as substantial and growing investment from various private sources15.
Pathways to Participation in Competitive Debate
I focus here on the pathways that led to students becoming involved with high school and
university debate teams. The majority of black students in the debate activity are alumni of the
Urban Debate Program (UDP) and receive full or partial scholarships as members of the debate
team. There are a diverse range of reasons why students joined the UDP. The UDP operates by
15

These figures are taken from the National Association of Urban Debate League (NAUDL) website at
www.urbandebate.org.
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enlisting high school teachers to volunteer to run the mostly afterschool program. In some cases,
there is a debate course that is offered within the schedule of courses, and in many cases it is
simply an after school program. In either case, teachers, whether they have experience with
competitive debating or not, are recruited to operate the program. Several students reported being
approached by the debate teacher and informed about the debate team. Many students were
approached by the teacher who thought the debate team might be a good outlet for them. The
promise of potential college scholarship opportunities was also a strong selling point for many
students that motivated them to become involved with the debate team.
Efforts were made to make debate not be viewed only or completely as a white activity.
An older white debate coach explained that when he was in high school, One day I spotted a
sign on campus encouraging people to come to a reception to join the debate or forensics team.
The sign said Richard Nixon debatedyou should too. White students were being told to
debate because former presidents debated, black students were being told to debate because
Malcolm X debated. In Alex Haleys Autobiography of Malcolm X there is a segment where he
discussed Malcolm X joining the Norfolk Colony prison debate society.
I've told how debating was a weekly event there, at the Norfolk prison colony. My
reading had my mind like steam under pressure. Some way, I had to start telling the white
man about himself to his face. I decided I could do this by putting my name down to
debate Once my feet got wet, I was gone on debating. Whichever side of the selected
subject was assigned to me, I'd track down and study everything I could find on it. I'd put
myself in my opponents' place, and decide how I'd try to win if I had the other side; I'd
figure a way to knock down all those points.

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Several students reported simple motives for initially joining the debate team. As one
student put it when I asked how he came to be involved in debate, trophies and pizza. Several
students explained that the teacher of the debate class in their school provided free food to debate
participants, which was enough to get them involved initially. Also, the potential to earn
recognition in the form of a trophy was attractive to many students. Each of the students I
interviewed, however, became committed participants that were eventually recruited to debate in
college. At some point, regardless of their initial reasons for joining they became gone on
debate. Nearly all students reported that after joining the debate activity they found it to be a
space of relative academic freedom in which they could present ideas and be combative in a way
that they would be punished for doing in a regular course. Debate was an escape from ordinary
classroom settings and many students reported an interest in being able to skip school for entire
days in order to attend debate competitions.
After becoming involved with their high school debate teams the majority of the black
students who are current college debaters were approached by directors of college debate teams
and recruited to join university debate teams. Most of the students were offered scholarships, a
fact which complicates much of their critical efforts as is explained in later chapters. A few
students joined the debate team as walk-on debaters to their college teams. It is common to
learn of the debate team through a public speaking course as most debate teams are housed
within communication studies departments. After learning of the resistive efforts taking place
within the debate activity a few students were motivated to invest their time and energy even
though they did not receive any scholarships. Some students were approached by classmates who
were members of the debate team and encouraged to join.

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Several students who were participants of the UDP reported being inspired upon hearing
about the Louisville Project. Since 2000, the University of Louisville debate team has waged an
effort to call attention to lack of diversity within the college debate activity. The University of
Louisville team, who was influential for the current efforts I discuss here, forced the question of
diversity to the center of public discussion within the debate activity (Reid-Brinkley 2008). They
challenged the debate community to address and account for the ways in which it goes about
ensuring equal opportunity and recruiting a diverse set of students. While most of the resistive
teams today have moved beyond a simple demand for diversity and are indeed critical of such
demands, these early demands for accountability are at least partly responsible for the growth in
recent years in the number of black participants in the debate activity.
Black representation in college debate
The efforts of the UDP would prove to have a profound impact on the amount of students
in the debate activity. It is difficult to identify the precise number of black students participating
in the activity. This is due to the fact that many students do not participate in each national
competition because their universities may not have the funds. Also, there is no central body that
is keeping close tabs on the racial demographics of the activity though, as will be seen, such
efforts to do so are being more seriously considered. In my discussion of black representation in
debate I focus on those who competed consistently at the major national tournaments and who
were in the running to qualify for the National Debate Tournament (NDT). Additionally, my
fieldwork ethnographic fieldwork primarily spanned the years 2011-2013 so it is difficult to
ascertain the numbers of black students prior to this time.

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Figure 2.6: Graph of black student representation in elimination rounds at national championship
competitions 2003-2013

Figure 2.7: Graph of black student representation in top 20 speakers at national championship
competitions, 2003-2013

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Table 2.1: Black student representation in elimination rounds and speaker award recipients

Year
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2013
2013
2013

Event
NDT
CEDA
NDT
CEDA
NDT
CEDA
NDT
CEDA
NDT
CEDA
NDT
CEDA
NDT
CEDA
NDT
CEDA
NDT
CEDA
NDT
CEDA
NDT
CEDA
Kentucky
Harvard
Wake
Forest

% black clearing students

3.1
0
3.9
5.4
3.1
1.8
2.3
0
6.3
1.8
4.7
5.4
4.7
6.7
11.7
0
13.5
5.4
8.8
6.7
11.6
16.1
12.5
3.1
10.9

# black top speakers (out of 20)

0
0
0
2
1
1
0
0
1
0
1
0
2
1
0
0
6
1
4
7
10
6
8
1
9

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Between 2011 and 2013 there were approximately 30-35 students identifiable through their
public pronouncements as black. All but 2 of these students were associated with the radical
black effort. Though I am unable to provide reliable information on the amount of black students
prior to this time, I was informed in the interviews that the amount of black students was much
less. I am however, able to provide an assessment of the amount of black students who cleared to
elimination rounds at the major national championship competitions between 2003 and 2013 as
well as the representation of black students among the top speakers at these competitions. These
data are depicted in figures 2.6 and 2.7 and table 2.1. They show a dramatic increase in the
amount of black students among the most competitively successful students. Clearing teams
refers to the amount of black debaters who advanced to the elimination bracket of the
competition, requiring them to have a winning record in the preliminary debates. The CrossExamination Debate Association (CEDA) is an open competition and the number of clearing
teams is between 32 and 64. The National Debate Tournament (NDT) is an invitational
competition and is thus more prestigious. 16-32 teams will advance to elimination rounds.
Speaker awards are determined by the individual scores (from 0 to 30) that judges give to each
debater in their evaluation of the debate. Table 2.1 includes the two major national championship
competitions of each year as well as the major national competitions (Kentucky, Harvard and
Wake Forest) of the 2013-2014 school year. While these figures do not provide a complete
picture of the total amount of black students they are important in the symbolic representation of
black students in the activity. To have such an increase of successful black debaters, particularly
those waging a black intellectual insurgency, has an important impact on the discourses that
circulate within the activity and on the perception of black representation in the activity.

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CHAPTER 3: IT HAD TO BE SAID: BLACK INTELLECTUAL INSURGENCY IN

DEBATE
There were always reasons why the academy couldn't address race and gender. And so
my anxiety was finding a way to actually be in battle. To actually go to war with a whole
repertoire of violent behavior that was always performed in a very genteel way. You
know, people sitting around tables, sipping wine, eating cheese. They are just the nicest
people in the world, [laughter] but they are carefully cloaking just an incredible hostility.
And so the idea was to break from that barrier.
-Hortense Spillers
African-American students are often seen as the victims of hostile and violent campus
environments but rarely, since the civil rights and black power movements, as agents of critical
confrontation with university practices and norms. This chapter will focus on the ways in which
black undergraduate student debaters create contexts of criticism of and confrontation with the
often subtle and banal operation of racism in the intercollegiate competitive debate activity. I
will outline the discourses brought to bear in this confrontation and the various methods of
conveyance it utilizes. I outline these broad and often overlapping discourses as well as the
factors influencing their emergence. Additionally, I show the contention within the group of
students that has come to be referred to as the Resistance concerning: how to understand the
key modality of racial rule, the meaning of blackness, the role of black intellectuals, and the
politics of performance under the white gaze.
Resistance
I refer to the overall group of black debaters and coaches as the Resistance. This is a
term created by a black woman professor and coach to describe the coalition of students
challenging the traditional format. She created a Facebook group called Resistance where
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discussions about various issues related to debate could be had. In this forum, students and
professors share articles, videos, weblinks and ebooks that are relevant to anti-racist politics,
particularly those that might be relevant to the struggle in debate. This page is also a venue for
strategizing the various arguments made by debaters and the general reaction of the debate
activity to the insurgency. There are debates and discussions that occur on this forum about
various current events, the purpose of Resistance and about exactly what is being resisted. The
forum also serves as a support group for students to get help in various areas of their academic
and personal lives. The group is comprised of around 200 members, mostly black current and
former debaters and coaches, high school students as well as professors whose work is used by
the debaters. The term Resistance has caught on and several debate participants use this term
to refer to the black student effort in debate. Not all critical/performance teams are considered to
be part of the Resistance though there is significant overlap. As I discuss in later chapters, the
Resistance page has also become a site wherein intense debates occur between black students
and white leftists over the legitimacy of the critical race effort in debate. Suffice to mention here,
the Resistance page is an important forum that unifies the various critical black students into a
movement, though, as will be seen below, there is no unified agreement about movement
purpose or goals.
Black coaches
The Resistance group demonstrates the important role played by black professors and
graduate students who serve as coaches in the debate activity. Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley is one
of the more prominent and influential coaches. Though a professor at and coach of the University
of Pittsburgh, she describes herself as a coach of the movement. She and others provide advice
and guidance to all of the members of Resistance who want or need it. Dr. Reid-Brinkley is also

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a leading scholar of the Resistance whose work is widely used by Resistance teams. Whereas the
debaters receive awards and are recognized in various other ways for their success, the black
coaches in the debate activity are particularly invisible as they are typically excluded from
judging debates, particularly the important elimination rounds. The reason for this is that they are
not preferred by significant segments of the community. Each of the debaters are allowed to
assign each judge a rank order reflecting their preference for this judge. Tournament directors
use a software program that assigns judges to debates based upon mutual preference16. Most
debaters do not want to be paired against a black team in the presence of a black judge and
typically view the black judges as incapable of judging the traditional debate format. Even black
coaches who have mastered the traditional debate format are given very low preference by the
debate community.
An important and unfortunate event that highlights judge exclusion occurred at the
national championship tournament in 2008 during which two students from Towson University
(TU) made history by becoming the first team of black students to become national champions17.
In the quarterfinal round of the competition TU was matched up against a team of two white
males from Fort Hays State University who were widely recognized as a leftist team. Following
the quarterfinal debate, a verbal altercation broke out between the Fort Hays coach, a white male
professor, and a black female professor over what happened in the debate. The Fort Hays coach
approached the black woman in a threatening manner and ultimately mooned her and scores of
undergraduate students and professors who were present as audience members.
The dispute concerned the decision made by Fort Hays before the debate started.
Conventionally, in such debate the two teams are each presented with the same list of five judges
16

This system is called mutually preferred judging (MPJ)

The students from Towson U. won the Cross-Examination Debate Association (CEDA) National Championship.
This tournament is the largest college policy debate tournament of its type in the nation.
17

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from which they can each strike one judge, excluding them from the panel18. Fort Hays
decided to strike Dr. Reid-Brinkley, who was also the only black woman in the entire judging
pool. The two white students from Fort Hays State University began the debate on the
affirmative side with a nine minute 1AC (opening speech) composed of a high-paced, poetic
criticism of U.S. foreign policy. They attempted to focus on the violence caused by U.S. foreign
policy and the need to challenge its underlying logic. The team from TU focused their
engagement on why Fort Hays would choose to prevent the only black woman in the judging
pool from judging the debate. Towson implored the three judges to use their authority in that
moment to name and repudiate the decision of Fort Hays as a direct mechanism of racial
exclusion. Upon being subject to this criticism, the students from Fort Hays became irate. They
argued that in making a criticism of U.S. foreign policy they were in solidarity with antiracist
efforts. They also proclaimed that they supported the radical black effort in debate and that they
should be seen as allies. Further, their decision to strike Dr. Reid-Brinkley was framed as
merely a strategic concern and not borne of any specific racial hostility.
The debate was decided in favor of TU, a decision which was met by an angry line of
questioning from the coach of Fort Hays, Dr. Bill Shanahan. Offended by the tone of these
protestations, the Dr. Reid-Brinkley whose alleged exclusion had become the object of the
debate, intervened, telling the Fort Hays coach that it was not his place to criticize the team
from TU. She questioned the white male professor to account for what he does to combat antiblackness in the debate activity and challenged his presumption of being an anti-racist ally. The
altercation culminated in the mooning by Dr. Shanahan of Dr. Reid-Brinkley and the entire

18

Judges are primarily graduate students and professors that work as debate coaches for their respective universities.
They judge debates involving all other teams except for their own or others with whom they may have a conflict of
interest.
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audience, exposing his buttocks and genitalia for all to see. He then came toward the Dr. ReidBrinkley in a threatening gesture, directly in her face to the point where their chests were
touching as if he was prepared to strike her. A few months later, video of the altercation was
posted on Youtube and went viral, receiving national media attention in response to which the
Dr. Shanahan was promptly fired by Fort Hays State University.
What is perhaps most significant about these unfortunate events is that Dr. Shanahan was
widely known as a progressive anti-racist who had for years been attempting to incorporate
critical theory into the debate activity19. He is the main figure associated with the advent of the
kritik in debate. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education described him as a man who
prides himself on promoting social justice and inclusion (Young 2008) Shanahan said of his
actions, to me its a terrible shame its my shame. When asked to account for his behavior he
explained that what happened was part of "a profoundly important conversation about race and
white privilege that has been going on in debate." This event was symbolically important for the
Resistance and would serve as an example of the type of hostility they are often faced with, even
from those considered to be progressive.
One effect of the exclusion of black judges from the debate competitions is that they are
often available to watch the debates of and provide support and encouragement to the
Resistance debaters. One debate coach explained that she sacrifices a great deal of time away
from her family to travel with her team to debate competitions. During the competition at Texas
she was explaining to a group of students that she receives no respect from the debate activity.
19

This professor was described as a controversial and influential figure in college debate for decades, one who,
helped introduce a style of debate that incorporates postmodern theory; in it, debaters question the position from
which their opponents are arguing rather than tackling the merits of individual points. He was described as a A
Nietschean scholar of communications studies and author of several articles criticizing the hegemony of Eurocentric
modern thought, an advocate of critical theory and epistemological and bodily inclusion, he was the last one would
expect of being criticized for colluding in the advance of white supremacy.
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She mentioned that she had been a judge in the debate activity for over 10 years and several
people still do not know her name and do not attempt to converse with her. She looked to her
students and explained, you think I wanna be here and face this disrespect? Im only doing this
for yall. She explained that it is important, despite the difficulties, for her to provide support to
the students and ensure that they receive benefits from the debate activity.
Black academics
A 2008 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education written by a professor of
Communications Don Swanson, describes the discursive transformations in the debate activity as
a result of the changing academic landscape in which debate is no longer a respected academic
institution. Swanson argues,
Debate coaching was once a respected professional responsibility for a tenured professor
in the academy. In the 1980s, that disappeared because of the need to publish or perish,
and debate programs were turned over to graduate-assistant coaches who were eager to
bring about innovation. Sadly, recent decades have emphasized gamesmanship and
"postmodern" techniques that have only a limited relationship to rhetorical standards and
the rigors of realistic policy debate (1).
Interestingly, an important feature of the black student effort in debate has been to forge
connections with black academics outside of the debate activity. The students of the Resistance
have also forged important connections with black academics whose work they study and utilize
in the course of debates. At one national competition at UC Berkeley participants of the debate
activity were surprised to see Angela Davis walking the halls and checking out the debate
competition. One of the black students from Towson University called her and told her they
would be debating so she came to watch them. Most of the black students discussed with her the

72

struggle in the debate activity and received photos with her and autographs. Several other
professors have visited the competitions and have established relationships with the students,
providing them encouragement and support. Dylan Rodriguez describes the struggle in the
debate activity as intellectual guerilla warfare and cites the efforts of debaters as an example of
the importance of academic work and the way in which it is being utilized by college and high
school students in debate. Frank Wilderson has met with groups of debaters, visited competitions
in support of the Resistance and has even given a keynote address at one of the debate
competitions.
Discourse of the Resistance
The discourse of this insurgent intellectual movement can be broadly categorized into
three distinct though sometimes overlapping waves. The first wave focused primarily on
multiculturalism and the strengthening of diversity initiatives in the activity. Though this wave
has sought to identify white norms and practices, the primary political goal was expanded access.
The second wave emphasizes systemic white supremacy and the indictment of core
methodologies and epistemologies that they understand to govern the activity. This second wave
focused on more radical nationalist solutions and attempted to appropriate the space of debate as
a site of radical black discourse. This wave sought, not merely incorporation into the activity, but
more importantly intervention into the educational processes of the activity. The third wave
raised the level of abstraction even further and moved to a more sustained focus on the meaning
of blackness and the parasitic nature of the relationship between blackness and the world. Rather
than attempting to rescue the activity of debate, these pessimistic discourses sought to confront
the debate activity with an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. The third wave involved not
merely a criticism of both the liberal and leftist segments of the debate activity but also criticized

73

presuppositions of black nationalism and Afro-centrism that characterize much of the second
wave. These broad discourses represent the dominant discursive tendencies on the part of the
Resistance movement and loosely correspond with specific time periods.
First wave: multiculturalism and diversity
The first iteration of the black radical movement in debate can be described as relying
upon a multiculturalim/diversity frame. This approach operates primarily within a liberal
democratic framework that supports a general optimism in the capacity of democratic institutions
to resolve differences in racial power. The key goal was to identify and transform any barriers to
the diversification of the debate activity. This approach is also critical of existing institutional
norms insofar as they exclude African-American speaking styles. It seeks to interrogate white
privilege for the purpose of generating support for expanded black participation and allowing
black students a voice in the determination of key debate norms and procedures. While features
of this approach go beyond a simple multicultural framing, I describe it as such because the
primary political objective articulated was to expand meaningful black participation in the
debate activity. The central demand of the debaters made on the community was to work to
increase black participation. The approach was radical in the sense that major transformations of
institutional norms were called for that would make this participation meaningful. Those
leading this approach believed in the capacity of dialogue within a liberal framework, albeit one
that opened itself not only to diverse bodies, but also to diverse communication styles. As will be
seen, later approaches contrasted with this early approach in attempting to hijack rather than
simply diversify the debate space as well as in the embrace of more militant political ideologies
such as Black nationalism, Black feminism, revolutionary Pan-Africanism and Afro-pessimism.

74

This approach marks the initiation of the intellectual insurgency and was pioneered by
Dr. Ede Warner, the African-American director of the University of Louisville Debate Society
(renamed the Malcolm X Debate Society). Dr. Warner was a long time participant, one of very
few African-Americans, of the debate activity as a student and professor. In the year 2000 he
made a decision to take proactive steps to increase black participation in the activity of debate.
Receiving substantial financial support from the University of Louisville, Dr. Warner recruited
several black students, provided many of them with scholarships, and set out to launch a social
movement within the debate activity to expand meaningful black participation. The program
was funded by the University of Louisville, not simply as a debate program, but as a diversity
initiative. The effort was consistently described by Dr. Warner as a new civil rights movement.
The Louisville squad was viewed by Warner as such a movement of which he was the leader.
The argumentative choices of the students were restricted by him unlike later waves of the black
radical effort.
Dr. Warner equipped his students with arguments about the need to both expand black
participation in debate and alter dominant norms and procedures to facilitate black retention. The
outcome of the competitive round was to be the mechanism for effecting expanded access. The
University of Louisville attempted to create competitive consequences for failing to actively
work to expand black participation in the activity (i.e. targeted recruiting, outreach, hiring black
staff). In each of their debates the Louisville squad challenged their opponents to acknowledge
and confront their white privilege. Additionally, they challenged each of the other participating
squads within the national network of debate to adopt a specific diversity initiative that would
increase black participation. Failure to do so, they argued, should result in losing the debate
round.

75

Additionally, they called for a number of alterations to the dominant norms and
procedures of the debate activity that they argued would help to facilitate the recruitment and
retention of black students. They claimed that the norms that govern the debate activity were
forged in a white and masculine crucible with the virtual absence of meaningful participation
from black people and so the inclusion of black people into the activity necessitated the
incorporation of black cultural forms. They argued that methods of speaking that predominated
within the debate activity privileged and reproduced a white habitus. Citing a study of the debate
activity by Shelton K. Hill (1997) Louisville argued that the exclusionary practices of the debate
activity and the lack of black students therein can be explained primarily by the white ways of
speaking and interpreting language. They argued that African-American speaking styles were
not valued in debate and that black students did not want to participate because of a perception
that they could only succeed in the activity by acting white. They were the first group of students
to introduce music, singing and poetry into their debate speeches. They not only refused to speak
in the rapid-paced speech delivery that had become standard in the activity but they argued that
other teams should be penalized for doing so. Secondly, they demanded a de-emphasis on
academic intellectuals as the exclusive source of authority in the debate activity. Third, they
demanded that judges break from the strictly logocentric methods of judging debates and instead
incorporate an ethical component into their evaluative criteria. This approach to debate,
particularly their naming and confrontation of white privilege, generated a great deal of
frustration and resistance from the majority of the activity. Despite this resistance, two black
women on the Louisville debate team, Elizabeth Jones and Tonia Green, emerged as one of the
most successful debate teams in the country between 2002-2004 (Reid-Brinkley 2008). Their
debate career culminated in a quarter-final finish at the National Debate Tournament in 2004.

76

As will be discussed below, the University of Louisville would ultimately energize and
inspire students participating in Urban Debate Leagues around the country. Though most of the
students they inspired would ultimately depart from a multicultural framing, one team from
Emporia State who became influential in the Resistance group would frame their efforts as
seeking toward a multicultural democracy. They both hail from Kansas City Missouri and were
recruited from high school to compete in debate. In the debates, Emporia read passages from
literature on critical pedagogy interspliced with their own written prose and occasional poetry.
They argued that classrooms are the center of democratic practice and they advocated a shift
away from debating about government policy toward a debate relevant to the configuration of the
classroom space. They isolated debate as a potentially powerful site wherein inroads can be
made into challenging larger educational structures. These students made a conscious effort not
to focus their advocacy on specifically racial questions so as to avoid debates devolving into
identity politics. However, their rhetorical choices drew from African-American oral
traditions. As Tara, one of the Emporia students explained to me,
The part of debate that never intrigued me was the argumentative part, I was never really
interested in proving people wrong or being overly strategic. The thing about debate that
roped me in was this thing about oration. I was also a big fan of listening to people speak.
Growing up in the church I was always impressed with the ability of somebody to use
their voice to persuade, to convince people to change their behavior, to motivate people,
to get people live. I was watching one person be able to change the entire atmosphere just
by saying a couple things and using inflection and picking the right words and associating
it with the right situation, I was just captivated by peoples ability to do that so debate for
me was this opportunity to speak for 9 minutes at a time without being interrupted and

77

nobody could stop me, so I was able to express myself and speak my mind so it was the
ability to orate and to speak to persuade.
Tara was motivated by the desire to learn to speak persuasively and passionately and she focused
on attempting to persuade the debate activity of the importance of attending to local concerns.
In describing these efforts as focused primarily on multiculturalism and diversity, I do not
suggest that they were not confrontational and disruptive to the debate activity. There were
confrontational and radical elements of these positions though they often subordinated this aspect
of their performance to a politics of multiculturalism. In describing her purpose for approaching
debate in the way she does, Tara explained,
I would like to think that by the time my debate career was over that I was able to change
some opinions. And so part of my approach was definitely wanting to change the
landscape, the atmosphere, and just straight up the representational numbers of black
female bodies that exist inside of the debate activity. But the other side of that and what I
started to notice as I got older was that you cant change the world and you cant fix
everything. So, if anything, I wanted my presence in the activity to be felt. So if I cant
change your mind, for the next two hours Im gonna pick you off, and make you talk
about something that you would never have had to talk about otherwise. So many people
dont want to talk about the perspectives and ideas of the people that are excluded from
this activity, they dont wanna talk about their privilege, they wanna avoid those
conversations at all costs. when theyre outside of the debate space living in their more
affluent and more secluded lives, in their ivory tower universities, theyre never forced to
dialogue with someone like me. So more than changing your mind, I want to piss you off,
I wanted to make you feel what I feel when I walk around these debate competitions. And

78

so my goal was twofold, it was, one, to introduce ideas to people with the hope of
changing their minds and, two, after realizing that not everyone wanted to be on that
frame of mind, I just wanted to make you feel uncomfortable, I feel that uncomfortability
is good, so for two hours [the length of the debate round] I wanted to make you think
about your very existence the same way I have to think about mine.
In response to efforts such as these, limited as they were within frames of multiculturalism, a
significant amount of the debate activity agreed to speak more slowly and dispense with the use
of jargon in an attempt to make the debate activity more inclusive. However, in response the
black students revamped and raised the stakes of the critical effort.
Second wave: criticism of systemic white supremacy and advocacy of black nationalism and
Afrocentrism
The effort of the University of Louisville galvanized a generation of young students who
had found themselves in one of the many urban debate leagues around the country. As one
student explained, once I saw Louisville [debate] I knew I could never debate the same way
again. An indication of the influence of the students from Louisville could be seen when they,
after several years of being absent from competition (they both graduated in 2004), visited a
major national tournament at the University of Kentucky in 2011. The second they stepped onto
campus they were greeted as celebrities by the many young black debaters who had seen videos
of their old debates. They expressed astonishment at the increase of black participation and the
radicalization of oppositional arguments.
Though the students were clearly inspired by the University of Louisville and eager to
replicate their successes, they pushed the critical envelope beyond the discourse relied upon by
the University of Louisville. They had witnessed and heard stories about the way in which
Louisville challenged the debate activity and the recalcitrance of debate participants to self-

79

reflect. They thus possessed a particularly oppositional orientation when they entered the
activity. They also entered with more experience in traditional debate training than was
possessed by most of the Louisville students. Witnessing the lack of meaningful efforts to
expand diversity, the new cohort of black students de-emphasized the call for inclusion. As one
student told me, we didnt say let us in, we just did us. They were concerned with more
fundamental issues of structural white supremacy that characterized even well-intentioned white
liberal discourse.
The students who entered the activity of college debate wanted the benefits of the activity
but they wanted it on their own terms and the Louisville squad had proven that a debate team
could be black and could be successful. They also saw that the majority of the white students in
the activity were not particularly good at engaging with these issues and that a significant
number activitys gatekeepers could be persuaded of the legitimacy of a critical racial challenge.
So deploying an approach to debate that radically departed from the dominant debate norms was
a way of achieving success, in a sort of guerilla warfare manner, in a competitive activity in
which the success of a given debate team was typically correlated with the amount of money that
teams university spent on researchers and scholarships. By deploying this radical approach,
students from smaller schools with fewer resources (these were the schools to which most black
students were recruited) could compete at higher levels. Critical race theory, broadly conceived,
provided a set of arguments that offered a meta-commentary on the range of arguments
circulating in the debate activity. The students became deeply familiar with these discourses and
argued that a consideration of racial domination was a prerequisite to considering any other
issues. Whereas the traditional debaters came into debates with literally, thousands of documents
that they have poured over, notated, highlighted and meticulously organized, the Resistance

80

debaters could come into the debate with a single folder with hundreds of passages of literature
and they could be victorious despite being outgunned. Success meant recognition on a national
stage, if only to an insular debate activity and it was appealing to many black students from inner
cities around the U.S.
Because of the training that many of the students in this new cohort gained from
participation in the Urban Debate Leagues, they accepted many of the speech practices that the
Louisville squad had abandoned such as speed-reading and deployment of technical jargon.
However, these students were more far-reaching in their criticism. Rather than, and in addition
to, confronting their opponents with the question of white privilege, they confronted them with
an analysis of structural white supremacy. Rather than accepting the assumptive logic of liberal
democracy they advocated Pan-Africanist and other nationalist political solutions. Rather than
seeking to win the hearts and minds of the mostly white debate activity, they sought to reappropriate the activity of debate to make it a space for training in radical community politics.
They radicalized the criticism of speech norms by a more detailed critique of white aesthetics
and Eurocentric epistemologies. Drawing on the work of Afrocentric theorists Maulauna
Karenga, Molefi Asante, Clenora Hudson-Weems, and others, they demanded the creation of
space for a uniquely African centered view of the debate topic and the displacement of
Eurocentric knowledge systems.
Towson University (TU) was at the forefront of this second-wave of radical black
discourse in debate. TU is a predominantly white university in the suburbs of Baltimore. The city
of Baltimore is unique in many respects because of the size and strength of its Urban Debate
League (UDL) compared to those of other UDLs around the country. In the past 8 years the TU
debate team has been comprised primarily of black students from Baltimore City who receive

81

debate scholarships. Two students, Corey and Kevin, were recruited from the Baltimore UDL to
Towson University and, in 2008, became the first African-American duo to win a national debate
title. They both built upon and departed from the approach of the University of Louisville in their
success.
Corey and Kevin argued that the contemporary social world, and the United States in
particular, can best be characterized by practices of white supremacy. To support this
assertion, they read passages from an array of critical race theorists (Charles Mills, Derrick Bell,
Richard Delgado) and black feminist scholars (bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins) and played clips
of music and poetry, in a break from the established norm of relying solely on written academic
literature, from African-American artists such as Lauryn Hill, Nas, and Tupac Shakur. They
argued further that the intercollegiate competitive debating activity functions to perpetuate white
supremacy. To support this assertion they cited the demographic predominance of white males in
the activity and, more importantly (to them), their own feelings of exclusion and the operation of
white normativity and white aesthetics at the heart the debate activitys institutional culture.
Kevin explained,
The debate community, in terms of its norms and procedures and tradition, endorses
epistemologically white European ideas of the world as the best way to engage in
political contestation and this then obscures other approaches to developing ideas about
knowledge that can be beneficial for people outside of the traditional white male
heterosexual framework.
TU refused to engage in a traditional debate about US government policy and demanded instead
that their white opponents critically interrogate whiteness and white supremacy. They proposed a
framework for debate according to which their opponents should be selected the winner only

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on the condition that they could convincingly articulate how their approach to debate, and their
desired framework for debate, accounted for and confronted white supremacy. Kevin explains
that,
We accused the debate community of the crime of commission with white supremacy in
terms of the type of scholarship thats being produced. Because white supremacy is the
status quo, by not deploying any political analysis that takes this into consideration will
then act to extend the invisibility and pervasiveness of white supremacy.
Towson argued they should be selected the winner if they could demonstrate that their
opponents failed to meet this burden. This proposed framework invited a debate about the nature
of white supremacy in the post-civil rights era, the extent of its influence, and the significance of
its social consequences. Ideally, Corey and Kevin hoped the debate activity could be a space
where debates could be had concerning both the nature of social power and privilege as well as
the most appropriate and effective methods of resistance.
Corey and Kevin cited three main objectives in rejecting the traditional debate framework
and confronting their mostly white fellow debaters. Their first objective was, they admitted,
somewhat self-serving. They were both interested in anti-racist political action and community
building outside of the debate activity. Confronting the debate community in an oppositional
manner provided them a political training ground for doing so. Kevin explains,
Knowing the world we live in is run by people who think like many of the people in the
debate community in terms of policy analysis and social issues, I felt it would be
productive to test these ideas in the face of overwhelming opposition in order to get the
best possible test of these ideas. Going somewhere where people might be more friendly

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to the criticism or might feel better about it being in a different form doesnt allow for the
type of test that I think is important.
Thus, they sought to take advantage of the argumentative prowess possessed by college debaters
in order to sharpen their own ability to advocate for oppressed people. The fact that white
students did not volunteer to be faced with such a criticism (as in the case, for example, of white
students electing to take a course African-American studies or attend an anti-racism workshop),
and were unlikely to face such a criticism elsewhere, meant for Towson that the reaction and
response of these students would provide a particularly valuable training scenario.
Like most other students I interviewed, the students from TU were active in their
Universitys Black Student Union (BSU). However, the relationship between the debate team
and the BSU is unique in the case of TU. The debaters at TU, devised a plan to utilize the TU
campus in an effort to effectuate larger social change in Baltimore and beyond. These students,
devised a plan to utilize campus organizations to train themselves to, as one student put it, take
over the city of Baltimore. The plan was to take control of leadership in the BSU, the entire
Student union, and the university debate team.
The debate team was crucial to this plan because it provided a unique site in which to
receive training in public speaking and argumentation. They would use this training to help them
launch a number of political projects outside the debate activity. Kevin, made headlines as one of
the youngest candidates for city council in the citys history and his organization is active in a
number of community-based initiatives. Alumni from TU have recently started a summer debate
training institute at Morgan State University for radical debaters. Additionally, many of them
work as teachers in the Baltimore Public School system, have gained positions of leadership
within the Baltimore UDL and other community organizations and are intent upon utilizing the

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activity of competitive debate to develop local leaders that act in the interests of the Black
population there.
However, Corey and Kevin did not merely seek to gain preparation for a politics taking
place elsewhere. Rather they viewed the debate activity itself as an important battleground in the
war for racial justice. Their second objective was to foster greater African-American
participation in the debate activity, an activity they viewed as providing powerful educational
benefits. Through their style and oppositional approach, they sought to legitimize a method of
debating that would appeal to underrepresented college students, particularly African-Americans.
Corey explains, for black people to be able to come into the debate activity and feel comfortable
is another big thing for me because I dont think they do. And when I look at black debaters I
think they feel like, you know, I dont wanna be here. Similarly, Kevin explained,
In part, I was trying to test methodologies for debate that would help the debate
community orient its scholarship toward challenging structures of domination and
provide a space for people who are typically marginalized, a space that could affirm a
sense of their identity and provide them with useful tools that they would hopefully
utilize outside the debate community.
Towson considered it a travesty that the benefits of participation in debate were being
monopolized by mostly white male college students. Indeed, the debate activity allows college
students a unique opportunity to accumulate cultural capital and develop important skills (public
speaking, critical thinking, research), which are indispensable to any professional field.
Additionally, few (if any) extra-curricular academic activities present the opportunity to
accumulate the quality of social capital provided by debate participation in the form of a
nationwide network of professors, graduate students and fellow undergraduates that meet several

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times a year at universities throughout the U.S to engage in in-depth intellectual interactions.
For Towson, however, it was not sufficient to merely expand the quantity of underrepresented
students in college debate, they demanded that the quality of the activity and the range of issues
addressed therein must reflect more than white masculine concerns.
The third of objective was to educate the mostly white male debaters who, they argued,
will likely enter into positions of institutional power and authority. They wanted to encourage
these students to orient their scholarship towards, in Kevins words, challenging structures of
domination, rather than merely to seek successful careers in academia, law and politics. Corey
explains,
Those people [college debaters] are gonna be the people running this fuckin nation
(laughter). Theyre gonna be politicians, theyre gonna be businesspeople and they need
to be aware of the people they are making decisions for and how and how they feel.
There might even be a president that comes out of debate, all types of powerful people
are produced by the [debate] community and I would want them to have been faced by
[me and Kevin] so they can understand how the people from the bottom actually feel
about race relations and politics.
Corey and Kevin were very specific about identifying white supremacy as an institutional, rather
than merely individual problem. However, they maintained that institutional structures are
reproduced through individual inaction as much as action and that nobody, least of which
educated white males, is free from culpability in the existence and perpetuation of white
supremacy. Corey and Kevin emphasized the danger described by Tim Wise of the way in which
debaters were being taught to think about the world. Tim Wise (2004) writes,

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Because debaters are encouraged to think about life or death matters as if they had little
consequence beyond a given debate round, the fact that those who have come through the
activity go on to hold a disproportionate share of powerful political and legal positionssomething about which the National Forensics League has long bragged- is a matter that
should concern us all. Being primed to think of serious issues as abstractions increases
the risk that the person who has been so primed will reduce everything to cost-benefit
analysis, which rarely prioritizes the needs and interests of societys less powerful.
Rather, it becomes easier at that point to support policies that benefit the haves at the
expense of the have-nots, because others whom the ex-debaters never met and never had
to take seriously will be the ones to feel the damage (72).
The goal of TU was to intervene into this production of knowledge and so they took a
confrontational approach. Kevin, explains of their efforts,
Our emphasis was never on calling people racist, though there were instances where we
felt it was important to implicate individuals more directly. If you relegate these things to
abstract theories then people will just compartmentalize them and it wont actually affect
them. We wanted to affect people so they would actually have to think about their
whiteness. We wanted to agitate; we wanted to make people feel uncomfortable But
the emphasis was never on individuals. The goal was to illuminate larger structures of
domination, but we wanted people to connect those larger structures with their own
behaviors and the things going on in their daily lives.
Another team who has been influential in this second wave has been Oklahoma
University. Compared to all other teams, they placed a greater emphasis on radicalizing their
mode of conveyance. They utilized music, poetry and hip hop expression to make their

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intervention into the debate activity. One of the team members, Tyron, was recruited to attend
OU from the Oakland Urban Debate league and given a full scholarship to debate. The other
member, Jared, is from rural Texas and was a walk-on member of the team who had never
debated in high school. He became familiar with the debate team through one of his classmates
who approached him and told that the debate team is a place that fosters and encourages critical
thought and that he might find a home there. These two students became partners and after a
rocky start became one of the most successful and feared debate teams in the country. Like most
of the other students highlighted here they were very active on campus, organizing various
political events and attempting to bring awareness to issues of race and class domination.
Compared to the other teams they were slightly less rigorous in their handling of the
technical aspects of academic scholarship and came to the activity with very little technical
debate skills. Still, they utilized key literature from the field of whiteness studies, particularly the
work of philosopher George Yancey. Jared and Tyron begin the first 20-30 seconds of their
speeches by mocking the traditional debate speaking style and poise. They transition sharply out
of this by pausing and exclaiming what the fuck do I look like! Their speeches then proceed in
a fast-paced rhyme that, among other things, highlights the social circumstances from which they
come, and attempt to describe the reality of white supremacy mass incarceration, police
violence, drug addiction, homelessness, etc. They then charge debate with being a rigged game
due to its privileging and perpetuation of an unspoken white habitus. In order to describe the
ways in which the debate activity reflects what they call whiteness they continually mimic, in a
mocking way, the speaking styles of the mostly white debaters.
The debaters had a sense that, in their approach to debate, they were confronting
American society. They were confronting the racism of American society which they saw

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embodied in the activity of debate and the demeanor and attitude of the participants. The activity
allowed them an opportunity to compete with and intellectually best wealthy white students from
Ivy League universities. The students who entered the debate activity were familiar with the
outrage created by the University of Louisville and the way in which their efforts were
minimized and ignored. They thus entered the space of debate with the view that it was a space
of struggle, but one in which they could feel a sense of community in struggle. All the while,
they were travelling the nation on their universities dimes, interacting with national network of
students and professors from every range of university (from community college to Ivy League
and everything in between). Jared form Oklahoma described it in the following way,
I describe the debate activity the same way I describe the American dream and the way
American society works. I feel like for a black male, in order to progress you have to be
seduced and you have to give in to whiteness. In debate I feel pressured to suppress all
my beliefs, suppress my style and aesthetics to be successful in the activity. Thats the
same way it is in real life. So I could just say that debate is a straight-up white institution
that debate is purely a space of white privilege, and just say fuck it, pass it up. But debate
allows me to do things like travel the country and do things I would never be able to do
without it. I dont wanna have to suppress the way I wanna say something and the way I
want to describe something, I dont wanna always have to codeswitch. Debate and the
rest of society makes you do that so we were trying to get the benefits of debate but
challenge all that at the same time. The reasons why Im doing that is to come and
confront individuals that benefit from the same institutions marginalize and
disenfranchise me and my community and gave me a space to really be able to articulate
myself, put my thoughts together and verbalize the way I feel about these things. It also

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gives me a chance to travel around the country and see parts of the country that Ive
never seen before. It gives me a space to get deep into literature and philosophies that I
wouldnt be exposed to by just going to regular class or just the shit you get in public
schools. The main thing is that I see the activity how I see American society, the way
debate is constructed is modelled exactly on how society is constructed. So debate is a
place where my activism in debate allows me to sharpen my tools and to take them out to
the next level in the real world, to be able to challenge and speak to those individuals
who have the biggest impact on the way society is organized.
Third wave: Afro-pessimism
The most recent discursive shift of the Resistance in debate has been to the critical
discourse of Afro-pessimism. This involves a fundamental indictment of the ethicality of the
political, social and economic structures that comprise American society. Debaters of this third
wave demand that their opponents either defend the ethicality of these structures or account for
the ways in which they attempt to deconstruct them. This initiates a debate about the potential to
recuperate and recover democracy, the role of violence in black liberation struggle, and the
nature of racial domination in the contemporary moment. The main influence in this debate is
from the critical intervention into the field of critical theory and black studies described by Frank
Wilderson III as Afro-pessimism. Rather than celebrate Blackness as a cultural identity, Afropessimism theorizes it as a position of accumulation and fungibility (Saidiya Hartman); that is, as
conditionor relationof ontological death. Afro-Pessimists are framed as suchbecause
they theorize an antagonism, rather than a conflicti.e. they perform a kind of work of
understanding rather than that of liberation, refusing to posit seemingly untenable solutions to
the problems they raise. In this sense, Afro-pessimism was critical of establishment politics as

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well as the various alternatives presented by the left as holding out the possibility of eliminating
oppression.
The work of Frank B. Wilderson III has emerged as very controversial within the field of
Black studies, challenging each of the major theoretical traditions the predominate therein: Afrocentrism, Black Marxism and Black liberalism. His work goes against the grain of radical
scholarship, both within and without black studies. It is no surprise that his work has been taken
up by so many teams in the debate because of the extent to which it criticizes key assumptions of
Marxism, white feminism and queer theory as well as radical black scholarship for minimizing
the centrality of violence to the issue of racial difference. Additionally, Professor Wilderson is
unique as an academic because he is a critical theorist, filmmaker, and the author of an awardwinning and critically acclaimed memoir of creative non-fiction. At a given debate competition it
is common to see several students, black and white alike, allies and enemies alike, carrying
around a copy of his book, trying to understand his arguments because of how prominent they
have become in the activity of debate.
An important way in which Afro-pessimism departs from the radical optimist discourse is
in its criticism of the presumptions of Afro-centrism. Afro-pessimism is a radical centering of
slavery at the heart of theorizations of racial domination. Drawing upon the work of theorists
such as Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Ronald Judy and
Jared Sexton, this view attempts to understand the profound and unnamable loss marked by the
transatlantic slavetrade. Utilizing and expanding Orlando Pattersons concept of natal alienation,
Wilderson argues that blackness is inseperable from slaveness and that attempts to bridge the
middle passage in cultural terms and attempts to recover an African identity that either precedes
or transcends the brute force of the transatlantic slave trade are politically empty, even if

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psychologically comforting. Those holding to an Afro-pessimist viewpoint argued that asserting

blackness and affirming blackness as absolute vulnerability means the embrace of a politically
enabling subjectivity that can undo, rather than reform the institutions of state and civil society20.
In this way, a refusal to affirm and/or celebrate blackness as a positive cultural identity is not a
simple resignation or defeatism that holds no political purpose. The purpose is to enable a set of
truly revolutionary questions. Afro-pessimism is not simply a nihilism, or a resignation to the
realities of power, but rather attempts to make possible a truly radical politics.
The second wave students were immersed in the field of whiteness studies and the
concept of whiteness was the crucial term that animated their political and scholarly efforts.
Other students insisted on the category of people-of-color as this is the operative term in much
critical race theory. They felt that a black / non-black view of the colorline was itself
exclusionary and hampered the political goal of challenging white supremacy in the debate
activity. Afro-pessimists argued for a black / non-black conception of the colorline argued that
the conceptual lumping together of Latinos, Asian-Americans, and even native-Americans with
blacks functioned to obfuscate the operation of racial power and leave the singularity of
blackness uninterrogated. Additionally, they argued that the colorline represents an ontological
divide and not simply a marker of material inequality.

20

Jared Sexton (2008), discussing the work of Lewis Gordon, explains that a willingness to affirm the absolute
vulnerability that historically structures existence in black (Gordon 2000) on a global scale. Is , Neither
acceptance nor celebration, such affirmation promises something more than resignation or despair, more than the
hopeless attempt at suicidethat Fanons detractors would have defeat the wretched of the earth in advance. This
affirmation unfolds in the space between worlds, the Old and the New, in the time between what has been and what
will bea derelict nonplace, a distorted space-time, anticipating what will have been. Affirming the derangement of
hierarchical social distinctionsof class, gender, sexuality, nationalityall of the official terms of dignity
foreclosed by our massive arrest, our eviction from History. In this uninterrupted state of confinement, we might,
following Spillers (2003), claim the monstrosity of a prerogative to name not only the structures of kinship whose
perpetual disallowance provides the conditions of possibility for all others claims to the universal and the particular,
but also the outrage of personhood that remains the founding anathema of a global civil society.
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One of the recent teams from Towson, Tim and Damian, was one of the leaders of the
Afro-pessimist wave in debate. In their speeches they ask judges to affirm the end of the world
as we know it, indicting the entirety of the modern world as thoroughly racist. They relied
primarily on the written work of Frantz Fanon, legal scholar Anthony Paul Farley, the critical
theory and creative non-fiction of Frank B. Wilderson III, cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman, and
the poetry of Nikki Giovanni. In their speeches they read passages from each of these authors
interspliced with bits of their own written prose and poetry. They attempt to describe the
significance and magnitude of anti-blackness, criticizing both the political right and the political
left in American society and describe the problem of anti-blackness, which is distinct in their use
from the term antiblack racism often used in sociological literature on race and inequality.
Were done singing and dancing and cooning it up for yall they proclaim, prepare for your
white world to be forever shaken. Reading passages from the work of Frank B. Wilderson III
that focus on the crisis to American life that is created by opening a good faith discussion on the
meaning of blackness.
Quoting legal scholar Anthony Paul Farley, they proclaim we are trained to think
through a progress narrative, a grand narrative, the grandest narrative, that takes us up from
slavery. There is no up from slavery. The progress from slavery to the end of history is the
progress from white-over-black to white-over-black to white-overblack. In doing so they
attempt to initiate a debate on the legacy of slavery and its afterlife in the present. This, they
argue, is essential to an understanding of contemporary political conflicts, particularly the
meaning of democracy. They conclude their opening speech cryptically with a quote from Nikki
Giovanni: What can I as a black woman do to destroy America, this question has appropriate

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variations being asked in every black heart and there is only one answer, I can kill, there is only
one cop out, I can encourage others to kill. There is no other way.
One of the most successful and controversial debate teams on the national circuit and an
important part of the Resistance was a team from the University of West Georgia (UWG). The
team was comprised of two black males, Darol and Carlos, from the New York City Urban
debate league who were recruited from high school and given substantial scholarships to attend
UWG. These students are the youngest of those who comprise the resistance. They were both
college freshman during the time that my fieldwork commenced. These students are also unique
because, unlike all others, they competed at the highest levels of national high school debate
competition. While most of the other students discussed here competed in local events through
the UDL in their cities, these students were competitors at the prestigious Tournament of
Champions (TOC) competition and travelled on the national circuit as high school students.
During their time as high school debaters they consistently forced their opponents to engage the
questions of the Black Radical tradition. As high school students they became familiar with the
critical theory of Jared Sexton & Frank B. Wilderson III and they consistently deployed literature
written by these authors in their debates. Their argumentation focused primarily on interpreting
the debate topics and politics generally in engagement with the body of critical scholarship that
has come to be termed Afro-pessimism.
West Georgia chose to adopt the traditional method of delivery and style of debate but
rather than spewing analysis of specific government policies, they read (in a very high-paced
manner) literature that focused on the meaning of blackness, the legacy of slavery in the present,
and the ethical bankruptcy of establishment politics. They are similar to Towson in the subject
matter which they choose to discuss but are different in the way they deliver this subject matter.

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The students who embrace pessimistic discourses are more skeptical of the value of the debate
activity as a site of political activism. In many ways they are resigned to the fact that they are
debaters primarily in order to receive college scholarships. In this way they are more pessimistic
than the Black nationalists in the possibility of a radical alternative emerging from the debate
activity. Still, however, it was important for them to push the critical envelope in the arguments
with which they were confronting the debate activity. Carlos, a member of the West Georgia
team explained,
I do this because its giving me money to go to college. I dont see debate much as a site
for social change, it maybe can be a site for social change but I dont think debate really
is a place where people should put much energy into being revolutionary. I see it as a
training ground for my ideas and it allows me to see first-hand the worlds reaction to my
views, and I think that its a pretty good training ground because you get to debate the
most intense people from the Ivy Leagues, you get to debate the Northwesterns and the
Harvards and you get to see the way the academy and that branch of the world how they
understand the ideas and how they react to the ideas. How they react when we bring up
issues of slavery and all the violence of this country so I guess its a good opportunity, I
view it as a training ground for critical strategies but also a training ground for training
for backlash, frontlash, whatever you wanna call it, to see peoples reactive responses
which I think is important to see.
In this way the pessimistic approach shared features of the nationalist approach in viewing the
debate activity as a training ground. However, the real value of this training site was in enabling
a better understanding of how the world in general, particularly the academic world, respond to
this pushing of the critical envelope.

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The pessimistic approach was also skeptical of the capacity to change the minds of the
people in the debate activity and was content to be confrontational for the sake of being
confrontational and forcing issues to the table that could otherwise be evaded. Carlos explains,
Im not really relying on peoples consciousness to shift because if what Im saying is
true about the world, it is in their nature not to believe any of this shit and just brush it off
so Im not gonna hope that I necessarily change anyones mind but I know if I wasnt in
the debate community, if we werent here, it would mean that the majority of these white
kids could go along with their lives and never have to confront issues of race, so I might
not be changing people s minds but Im making my presence known and my presence is
something that a lot of these kids never have to deal with, maybe they wont engage the
ideas but at least Im throwing shit at them.
The pessimistic debaters sought to create a space that could be reserved for what they called an
unflinching paradigmatic analysis that refused the political question of what is to be done for the
sake of focusing on the question of power and how it operates.
Intramural debates
The diverse teams of the Resistance were by and large viewed as a monolith by the
predominantly white debate community on the basis of their being black, coming from urban
debate leagues, and criticizing the prevailing norms within competitive policy debate. However,
there were profound differences between them that were aired in the course of their debates with
one another, during online discussions, and in social settings at debate-related events. There are
instances in which the teams refused to debate each other, choosing instead to have a discussion
about the issues, or to choose the winner amongst themselves and inform the appointed judge(s)
that they would like one or the other team to be granted the win. Each of these disputes was had

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by black undergraduate students who were close to one another socially. Typically, the students
felt that most of the debates with their white peers were empty and devoid of much political
engagement. They always felt that the way in which students responded to their position was
difficult to engage because they did not necessarily assume the legitimacy of black liberation
struggle as a starting point. In this way they explained that the most meaningful debates were
those that occurred between them and their black peers. Even though there was serious
uneasiness about these debates taking place under the watchful and critical gaze of white
spectators, profound meaning was found in these engagements nonetheless.
Optimism versus Pessimism
One of the major disputes among the students within the resistance movement is whether
or not and how to be optimistic about the prospects of eliminating racial domination. While all of
the students sought to understand and initiate dialogue about the way in which race operates in
society and all of the students were oppositional to establishment politics, there were major
differences in viewpoint concerning the limits and potentials of the social structure in grappling
with questions of racial domination. One incident that powerfully highlights this unease occurred
in a debate between Emporia and Towson at the CSU Fullerton competition in January 2012.
After the preliminary rounds, Towson and Emporia were paired to debate each other in the octafinal elimination round debate. Both of these teams were close friends with each other and both
were upset about having to debate each other in this round because it meant that one team would
be eliminated from the tournament. Once they learned of the pairing they had a discussion about
how to proceed. They were worried that they would be forced to tear each other down in front of
a mostly white audience and in front of a community in general who is eager to identify

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weaknesses in any of the resistance teams. Toya from Emporia explained to me how she felt
about this debate,
That debate was amazing to me because so many times we are pitted against each other
and theres a dynamic in debate that forces you to knock out your counterpart a lot of
times. Especially against a team like Towson, we have to tear each other down and the
image of a unified front is shattered. You know you have differences but you dont want
to say that anybody is wrong, especially in public. We had a conversation with our
brothers the night before, who we consider to be fam [family] and it was like, listen, you
know, in this activity white people tend to hold our success and failure in the palm of
their hands too often. So, were gonna use tomorrow as a chance to tell them that they
dont get to dictate to us our success and failure and assign value to the importance of our
conversation, were just gonna go in there and were about to make them think they have
the power but we are gonna blow up their whole understanding and reorient this
conversation around what it means to have been a part of this in the first place and
include the perspective of everyone participating. So we decided to have the debate
classroom style so we could demonstrate to them an important debate without giving
them the satisfaction of being able to dictate how this debate was gonna turnout. So we
were just reclaiming some of the power that we are usually forced to give up.
They decided that they would not allow their fate to be determined by an all-white panel of
debate judges and that, instead, they would determine the winner of the debate themselves.
However, they did not want to give the impression to the wider community that they were
opposed to debating or that there was not a debate to be had between them. They wanted to take
control of the competitive framework without sacrificing the perceived educational benefit of

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debate. They decided they would have a debate with each other through the first half of the
allotted debate time. After this they would announce that a winner was chosen by the debaters
themselves, in this case they agreed that Towson would advance to the quarterfinal round. They
wanted to use the second half of their debate time to have an open forum in which the entire
audience, which they correctly anticipated would be large, could express their viewpoints about
the current state of the debate activity and about the interventions being made by both teams.
What it seems neither Towson or Emporia anticipated was the profound differences that
emerged during the first half of the debate. These differences revealed widely different
perspectives about the prospects for racial justice and for democratic transformation. The
exchange that took place became quite heated and enthusiastic. As explained above, the
argumentation of the students from Emporia focused on rescuing and resuscitating the institution
of democracy and making the classroom a center of democratic practice. Towson, though their
arguments were typically made against those far less critical about democracy as presently
constituted, interrogated Emporia about their optimism in the possibility of detaching the very
concept of democracy from the structured exclusions that have always attended it (Olson 2009).
Towson criticized Emporia for assuming that such a positive reform of democracy was possible
and they pleaded instead for a paradigmatic analysis of the institution of democracy and its
conditions of possibility, which they argued was slavery and colonization of the European
powers from the 15th century onward. They argued that democracy and the entire social order
could not possibly be detached from these constitutive exclusions and that the entire institution
needed to be interrogated, uprooted and replaced. This entire debate mirrors an important
discussion within the field of critical theory, particularly the field of black studies, concerning
enlightenment principles and how one might orient themselves to these principles.

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Emporia criticized Towsons view of democracy and revolution as detached and

separated from the material lives of ordinary people struggling to make ends meet. They argued
that Democracy has counted us out, but we are counting ourselves back in. Emporia was
content to not focus too much time delving into a detailed analysis of power but rather favored a
motivational approach that sought to expand the diversity of voices and perspectives heard in the
debate activity. A benefit of this approach, they argued, was that it could be motivational for
inner city youth seeking a source of hope and positivity in their lives. Towson felt that a detailed
analysis of power was necessary to truly understand the way the world operates. Emporia urged
an intellectual discussion that could connect with folks on the ground. There was spirited
debate over exactly what this means and exactly who constituted those on the ground. While
Emporia was demanding an accessible discussion, that is, a discussion utilizing terms that could
commonly be understood by the lay person, Towson was demanding the creation of a new
language and the engagement of deeper levels of thought in order to ascertain the nature of
power relations. To Emporia, what Towson described as a paradigmatic analysis was reframed as
an empty intellectual pursuit that has very little ability to spill out into the real world, outside of
the classroom.
While Emporia said it was psychologically unhealthy to be pessimistic and to continually
focus on negativity, Towson countered that it was psychologically unhealthy to maintain a
posture of positivity in the face of a world that does nothing but negate blackness and black life.
Though Towson got Emporia to admit a great degree of pessimism about the world, Emporia
would not change their position that it is best to keep faith that the system can be reformed for
the better. This faith, Towson argued, is exactly what keeps the system alive. Finally, after the
debate elevated to this level, according to the plan made by the debaters, the debate was ended

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and all four debaters announced that Towson should be the winner of the debate. They then
opened the floor for the judges and audience members to discuss their feelings about what was
said and about what is happening in the debate activity.
Politics of black performance in a white space
An important question for the Resistance movement that was deeply embedded in the
larger debate about Afro-pessimism was exactly how to perform under the white gaze. Several
students felt that a rhythmic form of speaking, hip hop and poetic expression, was one of the
ways to disrupt a white normative framework. The politics of these performances became an
important issue of contention. The students are ultimately placed in a damned-if-you-do /
damned-if-you-dont position in that if they dont break the traditional mold they risk reinforcing
standard, white ways of speaking. On the other hand, if they do break the traditional mold they
are easily viewed within a well- worn trope of the anti-intellectual (and anti-social) black. While
some believed that these performances disrupted the white normative framework of debate,
others felt that they reinforced and satisfied white desires by providing a spectacle that pleased,
rather than challenged white sensibilities. Many students felt that the performances were akin to
tap dancing in front of master and feeding white desire to consume the spectacle of black
performance. Others felt that the performances contained the seed of alternative ways of
speaking and arguing that were politically empowering and could open up possibilities of ethical
and inclusive engagement.
In one important debate the team from West Georgia was paired against the team from
Towson. The students from Towson criticized West Georgia for complying with the dominant
speech norms, even if the content of their arguments was disruptive. They explained that this was
akin to acting white and adopting the white speech form. West Georgia explained that they were

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in a double-bind because on the one hand they could attempt to break from the dominant modes
of speaking and deliver their arguments in alternative ways, but this would simply be viewed as a
minstrel spectacle. They argued that Towson was uncritical about the way in which rhythmic
poetry would be consumed and absorbed by the mostly white audience. Towson suggested that
West Georgia was merely acting white and attempting to make critical discourse digestable and
acceptable by delivering them in the standard debate form.
After this particular discussion each of the students struggled with exactly how to
perform. Towson attempted to preempt and disrupt the way in which they might be viewed by
the mostly white community. One of the Towson students had a rap that addressed the ways in
which his performance is viewed as a spectacle, though he too, was never convinced this actually
resulted in the escape of the spectacle. After this debate, West Georgia attempted to with
alternative methods of conveyance in order to disrupt the white normative framework without
being pigeon-holed as a singing and dancing show. They brought a projector to their debates and
transmitted images of various key figures from black history on the walls during their speeches.
At times they even began delivering portions of their speech in rhyme and attempted various
other creative methods of delivering their arguments.
The role of black intellectuals
Related to the debate over the politics of performance was the debate over how students
should orient themselves to critical theory literature. A distinction often made was that between
organic or street intellectuals and academic intellectuals. This played out, as described above in
the debates and discussions between Emporia and Towson but also played out in slightly
different ways by Towson, West Georgia (WGA) and Oklahoma. An important debate occurred
at the 2013 Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) national championship competition

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between West Georgia and Oklahoma. In this debate there was a distinction drawn between
hood knowledge and academic knowledge. Oklahoma insisted on finding a way to speak and
translate academic theory into a form which can be understood by real niggas in the hood.
Their approach to doing so was to embody the knowledge they had learned by delivering it in the
form of verse. They argued that it was not enough to provide an academic analysis of the
problem but rather it was necessary to be disruptive in forms of speaking and ways of being in
the debate space. By the end of the debate OU argued that they[WGA] lose because they
privilege Jared Sexton above Trinidad James. They argued that [rapper] Trinidad James is
smarter than academic intellectuals. The key assumption here is that black students in academic
spaces have a duty to recognize and acknowledge intellectuals, such as rappers and poets, who
are not typically recognized within academic spaces. The goal is to redefine scholarship in such a
way that would consider these artists legitimate intellectuals with important social analyses that
need to be considered. WGA rejected this distinction and cautioned against viewing entertainers
as political and scholarly leaders, even though they liked and appreciated these artists
themselves. WGA responded also, by criticizing the notion of an authentic black person
especially for the conceptualization of authentic blackness as located on an urban-based male.
Sex, Gender, and Race
Additionally, in recent times, prominent black male members of the resistance group
have come out as gay and/or bisexual and have addressed questions of queerness and sexuality in
relationship to blackness. Many students explained that because the primary target of their
critical effort was on attacking white norms, there was an effort to maintain a specific focus on
race against a concern with issues that they considered to receive considerable attention from
their white interlocutors such as class, gender and sexuality. When gender and sexuality was

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discussed by these teams, it was typically against attempts on the part of their white opponents to
decenter a race focus. In these cases, the relationship between race, gender and sexuality was
fleshed out in more detail. Jared from Oklahoma explained that participation in the debate
activity had a profound impact on his views of gender and sexuality,
I feel like before I came into debate I was homophobic, but after being forced to be in
rounds where we talk about quare theory or when I learn about people like Matthew
Shepard, that had a big impact on my life. That had a big impact on how I sit down and
talk to people because I understand how oppression and privilege works. I find myself in
circles with my boys or whoever, and theyre talking about gay this and gay that, and Im
like no, I think differently. And debate teaches me that whatever I believe in, whatever I
know, I stick to my guns. So Ive been more critical about sexism and patriarchy and
misogyny. It forces me to be more conscious all the way around, not only on issues of
whiteness but also heteronormativity and even ableism, Debate encouraged me to
encouraged me to explore these literatures. I was just a stereotypical homophobic black
man where I thought that anything feminine is weak, and anything gay is bad, debate just
encouraged me to think about it differently.
In the years after my fieldwork ended it became clear that Black feminist argumentation was
becoming more prominent and that black women are increasingly becoming the face of the
resistance. Important debates are ongoing concerning the ways in which to address questions of
racial domination without reproducing patriarchy and male domination within social movement
efforts.

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Intervening in the debate activity

The discourses outlined above are those that were delivered primarily in the actual debate
rounds. The interventions of black students in the debate activity, however, were not restricted to
the debate rounds. As one debater put it, we are waging warfare on this space. There are a
range of decisions made by tournament directors, judges, fellow debaters that were subjected to
criticism. This means that any and all decisions and actions that are perceived to be consciously
or unconsciously racially motivated are identified and criticized in any forum available.
One such unique intervention occurred at the annual competition at the University of
Kentucky in Lexington, KY. On the first night of the competition Tyron, one of the team
members from Oklahoma whose last name is Campbell, had a discussion with a black male
janitor of the hotel in which the tournament was being held. The name of the hotel was Campbell
House, and Tyron was told by the janitor that the house was formerly a plantation that was
turned into a hotel. The architecture of the hotel resembled an old-style Kentucky plantation and
several black debaters discussed feeling uncomfortable, both for just being in Lexington
Kentucky and particularly for staying at a hotel that resembled a plantation. To hear that the
hotel actually was a plantation intensified these feelings. In each of their debates, Jared and
Tyron discussed their feelings about staying at a hotel that resembled, and once was, a slave
plantation. They related these feelings to their frustration of constantly debating in white
university spaces where virtually all competitions are held. This is an example of the ways in
which the students would draw upon local conditions or circumstances to attempt to highlight the
larger plight of black students in the debate activity.
Their rising frustration over the general community response to this criticism led OU to
approach one of the teams who made it to the final round (OU was eliminated in the octa-final

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debate) and request that they be permitted to make an intervention in the final round. The
finalists they approached was a team of white males from Loyola Marymount University in Los
Angeles, a team known for espousing post-structuralist critical theory. Loyola agreed to forfeit
the final round to the other finalists from Georgetown, also two white males. They gave the
coveted win to Georgetown on the condition that that Tyron and Jared from OU be given the
floor to address the entire audience of about 60 people and discuss their feelings about the hotel
and discuss the state of the debate activity. By this time in the competition, the majority of the
audience was part of what could be considered the debate establishment. Tyron took the lead,
addressing the entire room of mostly white males about anti-blackness and how debaters should
view their role in the debate activity. Tyron explained how much he loved the activity of debate
but criticized the community for viewing the activity as just a game, talking about lives and wars
and deaths, and doing so for just a game. How do we create something that will solve the
problems that people really talk about? He asked.
This intervention created a tense situation during which people felt uncomfortable. Many
were frustrated about the final round being effectively cancelled. Jared explained that his
intention was to create meaningful change. As a descendant of a slave he explained that he feels
like a Jewish person asked to debate and carry-on as normal in a concentration camp. He
attributed this moment as a profound one that impacted how he views racism in society,
I was feeling like the gods were with me in this hotel, the gods were with me in this hotel,
and I feel like my ancestors were around me, the spirits were around me. It was
paradoxical because it was also powerful to think that Im a descendant of a victim of
democracy and now I get to be in this house, in this spot, and debate about democracy.
But it was still contradictory in a sense, because I feel like there is no way in hell, anyone

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in the debate community would not draw an ethical line about having a debate
competition at Auschwitz about democracy. So Im thinking, how could we be talking
about democracy in a damn slave plantation house, I feel like it just had to be said.
He described a process of constant questioning that he finds himself doing when confronted with
the memory and thought of slavery. In a frustrated tone, he explained to the room that when
modes of oppression are brought people respond with a but-methodology: they always said
yes, but or I agree, but. Im living in a racist world right now, Jared told the crowd, I
cant put that on the backburner. The crowd listened quietly but they were clearly frustrated by
what was happening. Jared expressed frustration that people in the activity seem to love to talk
about oppression elsewhere in other countries but refuse to talk about that which is in their own
backyards. I put myself in a sacrificial position in every debate, attempting to enable people to
see those violations of democracy that characterize the United States. I put myself on a chopping
block, my whole history, my whole art form, I feel like Im cooning, in a minstrel show, my
spirit is uneasy in this hotel, Every debate round he explained that he goes through a question of
whether or not he should quit. How are we supposed to deal with a society that is systematically
structured to capture us he asked?
Uniting to support radical high school debaters
There is a substantial social media component to these criticisms that connects current
debaters and coaches with former debaters and coaches. These connections are also made with
high school students. A powerful example of the strength of social media networks occurred in
the spring of 2013. A high school debate from Bronx Law HS in New York qualified for the
prestigious Tournament of Champions (TOC) competition. This competition is the high school
equivalent of the National Debate Tournament (NDT). However, they claimed that the director

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of the New York Urban Debate League threatened to withdraw their funding for the competition
because they refused to provide him photos that he needed to fundraise for the league. These
students reported being unhappy with the way they were used for fundraising purposes (they
were referred to as the Great Debaters) and framed within an urban redemption narrative with
which they felt uncomfortable. They took to the social media channels connecting current and
former resistance debaters and were able to raise several thousand dollars in one hour from the
supportive resistance debate community.
Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley (2013) has written about the media narrative surrounding
urban debaters.21 Debate has become an especially beloved case for journalists celebrating
perceived black achievement against the odds. Reid-Brinkley demonstrates the ways in which
media depictions of urban debaters are structured by a discourse of redemption that exaggerates
the material depravity from which urban students come to be successful debaters. These
narratives inherently celebrate the status quo as having made possible such access to national
competitive recognition. The high school students from Bronx Law attempted to resist the ways
in which they were used for fundraising efforts and they called upon the college debaters for
help. These efforts set off a debate on the online forums about the way in which the Urban
Debate Program is understood and the paternalistic manner in which young black debaters are
treated. The effort highlights the unity of the Resistance movement and their connection with the
high school debate activity.

21

Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley is the preeminent scholar currently grappling with questions of race and the debate
activity. There are a number of venues for publication within the field of communication studies reserved
exclusively for debate-related scholarship. The struggle within the debate activity has been taken up in this site and
Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley is leading the charge of what can be considered the academic front of the insurgent
effort.
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Emotional toll
All students told stories of being very close to quitting and going through periods of time
where they wanted to quit. There was always a second guessing of the reasons for why they
mount this challenge because of how emotionally draining it can be. There is a widespread sense
that attempting to articulate the pain and suffering associated with racial domination is
exhausting and takes a lot out of you. As one student put it, you feel like you are on trial all
the time. In many ways, even when the emotional hardship of confrontational politics felt
overwhelming the scholarship money was keeping them participating in the activity and making
them feel as if there was no way of going back. Additionally, as will be discussed in the chapter
on white allies there was pressure on the part of the liberal coaches to continue and even
intensify the confrontational politics, even when the energy for it was waning, because of the
competitive dividends it was proving to generate. The competitive component of the activity
both complicated and made possible all of these interventions. Each student had to think about
how to maximize competitive success. This is also a complicated concern because teams had to
rely upon a judging pool comprised primarily of white men, a fact of the activity which was one
of the primary criticisms. In this way, teams felt that they sometimes had to temper their
criticism for the sake of appealing to white male liberal sensibilities.
White enjoyment of black performance
One of the most peculiar features of the relationship of white leftists to the black
intellectual insurgency in the debate activity is the intense enjoyment they seemed to get from
black performance even as they ignored the ethical dimension of the intervention. The coaches
often did not attach the same sense of importance to the critical effort as did the debaters. There
were several instances in which just the ease with which the coaches could discuss and parrot the

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particular arguments about slavery and social death caused uneasiness on the part of the debaters.
The relationship between black students and their white supporters was an uneasy one because
the black students often depended on these benevolent white patrons for scholarships. All
expressed a sense of discomfort at the way their critical performance was received. One
Resistance student explained to me that a performance of poetry contains both profound
happiness and profound sadness but only the element of happiness is absorbed by the white
spectators who were quick to offer their adulations. Some students felt the process of writing and
in many cases performing the poetry in the debate activity to be partly therapeutic but also often
found it to be traumatic as it often seems as if the performance is being enjoyed by white
spectators in the very same way that black cultural expression is voraciously consumed by white
audiences in popular culture. Many students couldnt help but feel that they were tap-dancing
under the gaze of an eager white audience.
There were countless instances when the Resistance members were told by the judge that
their performance was very awe-inspiring but that they just did not win the intellectual contest.
This led many students to feel that they were being told the equivalent of, you are very
articulate but your ideas are not so strong. It was common for these students to receive
individual speaker awards but to exit from the competition early on. They felt that the
community enjoyed them as entertainment but failed to take them seriously as intellectuals.
One white male coach of the Resistance exemplified the fetishization of black debaters in
grotesque ways. He was a very competitive person and tried very hard to motivate the students
for success. This created tension because the debaters were clearly interested in more than
competitive success and they had ethical limits concerning what they thought was appropriate to
say and what they thought should not be said. This coach, like several of the other white coaches,

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saw in Afro-pessimism a set of arguments that could win a lot of debates. However, he did
several things to demonstrate that he thought Afro-pessimism to be ridiculous. During the
Harvard debate competition there was a discussion that took place between this coach and a
black male student of the Resistance. One of the key points of the theoretical tradition that has
been referred to as Afro-pessimism is its postulation that the category of human is one that is
formed in contradistinction to the figure of the slave. The student disagreed with the coach about
a matter of strategy and in response, the coach said, you cant disagree with me, youre not even
a human.
In interviews, this coach spoke about the effort of his students in telling ways. He stated
that his dick gets so hard when he comes across sharp literature from the black radical tradition
that might be useful in debates. During the debate competition he would pace the halls
nervously. Once he saw me and was telling me how good one of the students was doing. He
regularly had a sexual way of explaining things and even explained that when he hears one of the
students speaking in militant poetic verse, it makes my dick hard. In interviews he mentioned,
and even expressed regret about this feature of his coaching. He admitted that at points he would
establish a blackness meter and tell his students how black they should act. Sometimes he
would tell the students they need to coon it up for a particular judge. His goal was to win at all
costs and the students and their radicalism were his tools for doing so. Other coaches did this in a
less blatant way but it was clear that they had an intense enjoyment of black speech as well. They
would encourage more and more radicalism on the part of the students and suggest particular
ways in which they should and could be more radical or militant. Students were also encouraged
to deliver their speeches in rap form, even against the uneasiness they felt. Many students came
to feel that their performances were feeding the white appetite to consume the spectacle of black

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suffering. Also, they felt trapped because they relied on these individuals for institutional support
and could not easily criticize them.
Appropriation of radical black discourse
Many students simply appropriated the discourses of the Resistance, particularly Afropessimism, and deployed this literature strategically to win debates. While several of the students
employing this approach viewed their doing so as an act of solidarity with the black students,
these efforts came to be understood as parasitic. For white students to make such an argument,
especially in the context of debate which, by virtue of its time limitations, requires a great deal of
nuance to be stripped from the literature is that they sound grotesque at times. For example,
Wilderson (2010) argues that the category of human, the central category of modernity, was
formed in contradistinction to the figure of the slave which in the modern era is disimbricable
from blackness. The implication of this analysis is that slavery represents an ontological
condition, rather than an historical event. A careful analysis that is made in the course of
hundreds of pages gets reduced by debaters statements like black people will always be slaves,
or black people are not humans. What to the Resistance debaters are often painful discourses to
articulate, seemed to roll too easily off the tongues of white students in the debate activity.
One episode highlights this phenomenon. My responsibilities as a participant-observer
were to occasionally serve as a judge of debates. I judged one debate between the students from
Oklahoma and a team from West Georgia comprised of a white woman and a black man. During
the debate the team from Oklahoma presented their arguments as described in the previous
chapter. The white woman, Gloria, was offended by their arguments and discussed her position
as queer, woman and immigrant (she was from South America). She suggested that even though
the black students had legitimate concerns about white supremacy in the United States, they had

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the consolation of living in the country of their birth, whereas she and her partner were
immigrants (her partner was from Africa) and were living in a sort of exile. To this argument, the
students from OU took great exception and explained that the effect of the trans-Atlantic
slavetrade was to render black people homeless everywhere in the world. Gloria expressed deep
disagreement with the argument that blackness represents a singular positionality that cannot be
analogized to other subject positions. She expressed disdain for what she saw as the exclusionary
effect of Afro-pessimist discourse.
This team went home after the competition, as all teams do, and reflected on their
experiences, their successes and failures. The young woman, after telling her coaches that she
never wanted me to judge another one of her debates (information which the coaches passed
along to me) approached me at the next competition and thanked me for explaining some of
these arguments to her and her partner. She explained that she had come to see the strategic
potential of such argumentation and she informed me that she and her partner are now running
Wilderson. It is customary at debate competitions, after students have received their matchups
for the students assigned to the negative side to inquire of those assigned to the affirmative side,
specifically what will be the basic subject of their affirmative. It is basic etiquette to inform the
team of what you will discuss on the affirmative side so that they can prepare for a decent
debate. While Gloria was speaking with me her opponent approached her and asked her what
arguments they would be making in the debate. I noticed her with a peculiar smile on her face
and sense of excitement explaining that, we basically explain that black people are socially
dead, that slavery has destroyed black humanity and that blackness and slaveness cannot be
separated. White students, even though averse to the analysis contained within Afro-pessimistic

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discourse could see in it a strategic way to win debates and spoke about it in ways that were
troubling.
Conclusion
Black students deployed several methods to describe the operation of racial domination in
the contemporary period and the specific ways that it manifests in the debate activity. Though the
great majority of black debaters viewed themselves as part of the same project or movement,
there were deep disagreements about how to articulate the meaning and operation of racial
domination. In many ways, the Resistance effort of the past ten years mirrors the post-WWII
black freedom struggle in that it proceeded in progressively radical waves in negotiation with
and resistance to white reaction. Initially focused on calls for increased institutional access, the
intransigence of the white debate activity encouraged a raising of the level of abstraction of the
insurgency to focus on issues of systemic white supremacy and to attempt to hijack the space of
debate and orient it toward radical black activity. As the debate activity adapted to these efforts
without heeding the ethical call being made (as is discussed in more detail in chapters 4 and 5)
the Resistance turned toward Afro-pessimist discourses that explained both white complacency
as well as white pleasure in the face of the critical effort. This pessimism was not a defeatist
resignation but rather insisted on a more radical posing of the questions of the black radical
tradition and an abandonment of a focus on specific policy questions, whether liberal or
revolutionary nationalist. The pessimism certainly represented an oppositional orientation toward
dominant educational practices without an abandonment of the pursuit of intellectual excellence.
These efforts show, among other things, that black students find creative ways to confront and
transform rather than simply cope with dominant institutional norms. They challenge the
preeminent focus of post-civil rights scholarship which is to eliminate barriers to institutional

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access and expand black participation and gesture towards the importance of examining
interrogating seemingly universal institutional norms rather than celebrating and taking them for
granted. Additionally, these efforts point toward the necessity of interrogating, rather than taking
for granted the meaning of blackness and suggest that there is certainly no consensus on exactly
what blackness means or the ways in which and possibilities of being black in predominantly
white institutional space.

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CHAPTER 4: PERSONALIZATION, OBFUSCATION, EVASION: WHITE DEBATERS

ACCOUNT FOR AND CONSTRUCT WHITE IDENTITY
The history of white people has led them to a fearful, baffling place. They do not know
how this came about; they do not dare examine how this came about. On the one hand,
they can scarcely dare to open a dialogue which must, if it is honest, become a personal
confessiona cry for help and healing, which is, really, I think, the basis of all
dialoguesand, on the other hand, the black man can scarcely dare to open a dialogue
which must, if it is honest, become a personal confession which, fatally, contains an
accusation. And yet, if neither of us can do this, each of us will perish in those traps in
which we have been struggling for so long.
-

James Baldwin

This chapter focuses on the ways in which white identity was constructed in the face of
the outing of whiteness effected by the black intellectual insurgency in the debate activity. In
doing so, I compare the two broad categories white debate participants: white liberals and white
leftists22. White liberals distinguished themselves in their defense of the traditional debate
format. Rather than engage the black intellectual insurgency, they simply argued that it should
not be allowed in the debate activity. These debaters marked themselves as such, primarily in the
reliance upon what is called the framework argument. I consider white leftists those who were
critical of the traditional debate format and who attempted to engage the substance of the radical
black discourse. These debaters typically espouse a leftist politics in the debate activity. I pay
attention here to how white identity was conceptualized and understood by both groups. How do
these individuals construct themselves as white and how do they conceptualize what it means to

22

There was not a particularly vocal group of white conservatives in the debate activity, the vast majority were at
different points on the left of the political spectrum.
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be black? What is the extent of the willingness to engage and what are the discursive limitations
of engaging?
I show that liberal whites attempted to embrace a multicultural paradigm in which
whiteness was ontologically equivalent to other racial categories and which charged intellectual
insurgency with being uncivil and in violation of fundamental norms of the public sphere. Leftist
whites drew upon critical theoretical resources that denied the salience and stability of racial
categories altogether and charged the black insurgency with being authoritarian and essentialist.
In both cases the structural criticism was personalized, individualized and ultimately evaded. I
show the ways in which both white liberal and white leftist accounts faltered and became
incoherent in accounting for racial violence which the black insurgency demanded. Both
segments of the activity resisted explicit colorblind framings but they circled back around to the
essential structure of colorblind discourse by personalizing the criticism and ratcheting the scale
of abstraction on racial discourse away from the structural scale down toward the individual
scale.
Responding to an ethical challenge
An ethical challenge was made against the debate activity which implicated all debate
participants. Black students attempted to identify the way in which logics of racial domination
operate in and through dominant institutions in general and the debate activity in particular. The
critical intervention was an urging to self-reflection and a call for a radical transformation in the
discourse of the activity. This was an ethical call and as such it demanded a response. It elevated
an ethical problem, the problem of white supremacy and anti-blackness, as a (if not the) central
question which all participants were required to engage. The intervention appropriated the
competitive process of assigning wins and losses and added an ethical dimension to the

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evaluation criteria. The black intellectual insurgency provided a meta-commentary on the

competitive apparatus but was still a part of the competitive apparatus. It asked participants to
consider the ethics of their orientation to and the nature of their participation within the
racialized social order. Further, the students of the Resistance attempted to identify and
apprehend the common maneuvers of evading these questions and they held individuals
individuals and the community at large accountable for these maneuvers. As one student pointed
out to me,
You do go into these debates against [the Resistance] realizing that you are being spoken
about as a white individual and that white domination is in some way shape or form
something you are responsible for upholding. So it is definitely something (pause) it
would be insane to say you dont realize you are personally implicated if you are
participating in these debates.
Black debaters created precisely such a context the necessity of which Raka Shome (2000)
describes in her conception of outing whiteness. In this context, whiteness had to address
itself, naming practices were called forth, and individuals had to provide accounts of how they
understand and account for whiteness and white supremacy. These issues were addressed in the
debates and were prominent on the online forums. I focus here on the ways in which both
whiteness and blackness were conceptualized. They were often not conceptualized explicitly but
they figured into the accounts of the students. The interview process allowed me to ask questions
about the way in which debaters and coaches understood the critical claims being made about
whiteness.

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Framework argument
An important symbolic marker in the debate activity that designated which teams were
considered to be in ostensible alliance with the black radical effort was whether or not teams
relied upon a framework argument. In relying upon the framework argument, teams are in
effect publicly declaring their lack of support for the black radical effort in debate. Rather than
attempting to engage the substance of the various black radical discourses, the framework
argument evaded this confrontation. The framework argument was a package of discourses
arguing that the black intellectual insurgency in debate violates fundamental community norms
necessary for the maintenance of the competitive integrity and educational benefits of the debate
activity. Debaters relying on framework did not necessarily disagree with the argumentative
content of the insurgency. In fact, in many cases they expressed explicit agreement; they simply
argued it was neither the right place nor the right time for such an intervention. The position was
characterized on several occasions by the black students as, Darkie go home!
The key norm the majority of debaters were attempted to protect was that all debates
revolve around the enactment of a specific government policy. The framework argument posited
that the students simply should not have to address any arguments that were not relevant to a
strict and literal interpretation of the topic23. The fundamental value associated with doing so was
to preserve the debate space as a training ground uniquely structured to prepare students to enter
the world of policy-making. Traditional debate was viewed as educationally beneficial because it
taught students how policy works, and familiarized them with current events and international

23

For example, if the topic was This House Believes the USFG Should Substantially Develop its Fossil Fuel
Industry the only acceptable way to initiate the debate would be to defend the hypothetical enactment of a specific
federal policy proposal such as allowing drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
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political economy. Equipped with this knowledge, debaters could enter the political arena
equipped to maneuver the machinery of state power through its existing levers.
Additionally, such a literal interpretation of the debate topic was understood to guarantee
equal ground and argumentative clash. The fear was that a looser interpretation of the debate
topic, and certainly its abandonment, expanded the parameters of debate in such a way that teams
could not sufficiently prepare, thus weakening the strength of engagement from which the
educational value of the debate activity was derived. The traditional debate framework required
debaters to switch-sides on an issue, affirming in one round and negating in the next24.
Students explained that black radical scholarship is allowed in debate but that it must be
presented on the negative side only, within the framework of a criticism of government policy. In
this way, the critical intervention could at least be evaluated within the context of determining to
pass or to decline the government plan. The Resistance debaters chose to make their
interventions in the actual debate rounds in order to create individual consequences for failure to
confront institutional arrangements.
Another evasive maneuver was to argue that the insurgency was politically and
educationally ineffective because it was focused on the liberal debate activity, comprised of
individuals who generally support diversity efforts in debate. Indeed, the vast majority of
debaters are liberal college students. They defended the importance of the debate activity as a
progressive fixture of the educational landscape necessary for the production of tolerant social
24

The Resistance argued that traditional debate was not actually training students to become policymakers because
of the absurd ways in which debaters always attempted to link their arguments to various scenarios of system
breakdown or extinction could be the result of specific enactments of the affirmative plan. The debate activity was
developed as part of and in service to the imperatives of facilitating unprecedented military, economic, political and
cultural hegemony of the globe. This imperative is the animating concern, not necessarily exclusive concern, of the
debate activity since its inception. This is the enduring element of the debate activity that has become more absurd
as the evaluation criteria of debate has become more technical and logocentric. In response, debaters, distancing
themselves from a neoconservative position would typically maintain that if they do not learn neoconservative
discourses, they will not learn how to challenge them.

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actors capable of overcoming exclusions on the basis of race, sexual and gender differences.
Given that all knowledge claims are subject to challenge within the space of the debate activity
and participants are required to defend their claims with evidence and reason, participants felt
that the debate activity was a liberal oasis in a desert of reaction and unreason that produced
social agents capable of functioning as Habermass guardian of reason. For this reason, to
focus criticism here was simply a wasted effort.
Abstract (multicultural) liberalism
The students who evaded the critical intervention with the use of the framework
argument could not rely upon this approach alone, especially as the Resistance teams became
more successful. White debaters had to address the ways in which the framework argument
accounted for, rather than simply bypassed, the operation and reproduction of whiteness and
white privilege. I refer to the discursive maneuvers deployed by white liberals as abstract
multicultural colorblindness, whereby the principles of liberalism are embraced with an
explicitly multicultural emphasis. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2006) identifies what he terms
abstract liberalism as the foundation of the new racial ideology. Abstract here refers to the
disjuncture between concrete realities of inequality and the non-interference principle of
liberalism, the political philosophy that grows out of the enlightenment tradition. White debaters
were faced with a unique challenge such that the standard abstract liberalism could not be relied
upon in its simplistic form. As one debater, Allan, explained to me, Honestly, I learned from my
experience with [the Resistance debaters] that race is still more of a prevalent problem in the
general societyI think they [the Resistance] brought up a lot of issues and demonstrated very
clearly to us that race is still a problem in society and thats something I would have liked to of
not thought, but they made that pretty clear. These acknowledgements required the respondents

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to expend a greater deal of intellectual labor in attempting to reckon with the reality of racial
inequality in their embrace of liberal principles. This strategy, unlike that of Bonilla-Silvas
abstract liberalism, did not necessarily entail the minimization of racism and racial inequality
in society-at-large, but rather minimized the salience of racism in the activity of debate.
Additionally, those deploying this strategy identified as white and were mostly comfortable with
this identification. They simply viewed whiteness as one of many cultural configurations on the
multicultural landscape deserving of inclusion and consideration. Moreover, the existence of
something called white privilege was adamantly acknowledged but was reduced in discourse
to nothing more than socio-economic privilege which they could claim to not necessarily
possess. Those cognizant of their socio-economic privilege minimized the importance of their
grappling with questions of white privilege by invoking their liberal ideology, experiences of
personal hardship, and/or their advocacy of and activism toward multiculturalism and diversity.
Criticism of whiteness was ultimately viewed as unnecessarily antagonistic, uncivil and thus in
violation of the debate activitys presumed embodiment of the civil public sphere.
In order to establish the uniqueness of the debate activity the debaters often invoked the
existence of neo-conservative and reactionary institutions and ideologies against which the
debate activity and debaters could be favorably compared. As Billy bluntly (and offensively) put
it,
If you dont think that its easier in America to be a white person than a black person
youre probably fucking retarded, I mean probably because coming from such a
conservative state I went to high school with people who were openly neo-Nazi. You
know seeing skinheads in [my state] is not uncommon, so if you think a bunch of liberals
who are already attending liberal universities who are arguing about liberal reforms is

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recreating white supremacy I also think youre equally as retarded. It seems like if your
life purpose is fighting white supremacy then there are better things to do on the
weekends than travel to debate tournaments.
Indeed, every interviewee described the majority of the debate community as liberal and
described themselves as leftist or liberal. Additionally, they believed that racism should only be
attacked insofar as it is expressed through the old racial ideology of blatant bigotry. The
Resistance debaters were attempting to address the way in which the new racism or Laissezfaire racism operated in the debate activity. The white debaters felt that unless expressions of
the old racism were prominent in the debate activity there was no need breach dominant norms
by raising such questions. Racism was viewed as an individual phenomenon. The debate activity
was viewed as a counter-force to this racism because of the way in which it elevated reason and
rationality as its foundational value.
Personalizing structural critique
The black intellectual insurgency was caricatured by several of the interviewees as black
students brazenly entering into the debate rounds and calling white people racist simply on the
basis of their whiteness alone. It was this caricature that was rejected by the interviewees as
antagonistic and crude. What was so difficult for the debaters to comprehend was that they were
not being indicted as individually racist ab initio. In other words, the Resistance did not approach
debate participants as racist individuals who harbored hatred and hostility toward black people.
Rather, white debaters were being called to account for the way in which their actions and
inactions were implicated in structures of racial domination. While several Resistance members
confronted their peers with a criticism of structures of racial power and privilege, the ways in
which their peers responded to this criticism was placed under the hermeneutic spotlight and

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further subjected to criticism. This second level of criticism was a difficult pill to swallow for the
debaters. White liberals can usually avoid being criticized by remaining silent on racial matters.
The debaters, however, had to speak and the way they spoke was criticized. As Kevin from
Towson explained, we criticize the debate community for its crime of commission in terms of
the relationship between white supremacy and the types of scholarship being produced in
debate. Because white supremacy is the status quo, he explained, by not deploying any
political analysis that takes that into consideration will then act to extend the invisibility and
pervasiveness of white supremacy. According to Kevin, Our emphasis was never on calling
people racist, though there were instances where we felt it was important to implicate individuals
more directly based on the way they engaged us.
This description highlights an important pedagogical and theoretical controversy in the
field of whiteness studies concerning the appropriate balance to be struck between institutional
and individual criticism. Ian Haney-Lopez (1999) urges an attack on institutions rather than
individuals in the project of dismantling racial hierarchy. The Resistance grappled with the
question of how an institution could be criticized without, in some form, confronting or
disrupting those with a vested interest in institutional business-as-usual. The efforts to launch a
structural analysis was consistently characterized by white debaters simply as they called us
racist and thus viewed as absurd and dismissed accordingly. When debaters acknowledged that
they were not simply being called racist, they characterized the argument as being simply that
racism is bad and it was thus viewed as obvious and dismissed accordingly.
Several debaters acknowledged themselves as white and acknowledged themselves as
being privileged on this basis. Based on the caricature of the Resistance as blindly accusing
others of being racist, those holding to this explicitly multicultural liberalism could present

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themselves as victims of a gratuitous drive-by criticism that was inattentive to their individual
distinctiveness. As Allan explains,
I certainly think it is valid to accuse me of looking through a white lens because Im
white and I guess thats the only lens Ive got. I dont think its productive to say that that
implicates my politics in a negative way especially when they dont know me as an
individual at all and if they had taken the time to know me they would know that I was
pretty much on their side on most of what they were saying.
In this formulation, whiteness and looking at the world through a white lens is simply
unavoidable. Allan views himself as someone concerned about racism wherever it exists but does
not see whiteness as something that implicates his politics or that necessarily limits his
perspective. In this way, the fact that he is liberal and generally supportive of multiculturalism
and diversity is sufficient to immunize him from criticism. Whiteness is simply an attribute of
himself about which he has no choice but not something that is necessarily epistemologically
limiting.
Allan, in many ways, exemplified the liberal multiculturalist discursive strategy. He
identified as white and expressly avowed the fact that he accrues privileges on this basis.
However, when asked how he understands the operation of white privilege he explained,
I mean obviously whiteness is pervasive in society and its effects are most often invisible.
Its definitely something too that I think is hard to translate over into the debate as
directly as it exists in society.I think that sort of push to say exactly how white
supremacy affects debate is hard to draw out. I dont feel that there needs to be
massive changes in the way debate occurs.. I dont think there needs to be large
changes in the norms and values but more in terms of accessibility.

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Allan, like several other respondents, acknowledged white supremacy in the larger society and
even acknowledged the demographic predominance of white males in the activity of debate.
However, he resented the notion that the debate activity was characterized by a set of white
norms deserving of interrogation and transformation. For Allan and others, the problems of the
debate activity could be solved by diversifying its ranks rather than altering its normative
schema. When asked if he thought there was a set of white norms that governed the activity he
explained that,
Even if there were such white norms, its not something that can really be debated because
I think oftentimes in those debates. when personal politics gets involved it can quickly
become a sort of back and forth where people are really just throwing accusations back
and forth and it becomes personal real fast.
The criticism of racial norms could be easily reduced to a simple matter of personal grievances
that have no place in a space of public discourse and deliberation. Indeed, researchers have found
that it is nearly impossible to have a discussion about race in a multicultural setting without it
being taken personally and hurting the feelings of white people (Leonardo 2002).
When pressed further to explain what he thought would be a more appropriate way to
combat racial inequality in the debate activity and in the larger society, Allan explained,
I think there needs to be a focus on inclusion rather than exclusion. And I think that
some of the arguments they make where they explicitly reject views that were informed
by the white racial aesthetic are a bit anti-productive because they reinforce the binary
division between black and white. What we need is a more inclusive organization of
black and white people fighting together to fight white supremacy.

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The danger of the Resistance for Allan was in the way it confronted individuals. He preferred a
structural analysis to one that focused on individual culpability. When asked if he felt
uncomfortable interacting with the Resistance teams he explained, I think it got more and more
comfortable for me as it became established that the arguments were about structure and not
about individuals. This was a common sentiment expressed throughout the interviews. Students
were comfortable engaging in an abstract discussion of structures of power and privilege as long
as there was no individual accountability. When their interpretations and actions were criticized
the respondents could characterize criticism as a personal accusation that is best replaced with an
impersonal structural analysis, with which everyone claimed to be in agreement. In other words,
structural analysis was met with demands to consider individual variation and agency while
criticism of specific individual actions and speech was met with demands to consider an
impersonal structural analysis that would enable the discourse to remain depersonalized and thus
civil. In this way the debaters staged an evasive relay between structural and individual level
analysis.
Respondents had a difficult time meditating on the meaning of white privilege and
considering the ways in which it might operate in their lives. They had to acknowledge the
concept of white privilege, especially because of how skilled the Resistance students had become
at identifying it. However, they still established themselves as exceptions to the general
association of whiteness and privilege. Another debater, John, explained to me,
Im completely in agreement that there is a white privilege and a male privilegeso yes,
white privilege exists, thats bad. That said, there are lots of other forms of privilege.
Socio-economically, I mean, I may describe myself as middle class but I definitely had a
rocky start being raised in high school by a single parent and a couple of other issues, sort

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of personal issues that I dont want to go into, but I had broken family issues going on. So
I had a lot of other problems and Im sure there were people who had a lot of privilege
over me in dealing with that and I think there are so many issues and people have so
many different things going on in their background. I mean Ive always thought of debate
as a neutral place where everyone has a pretty much equal starting point.
John, by invoking personal hardships in his own life, highlights a common way in which the
implications of the acknowledgement of privilege could be evaded. A privileged subject could
only be conceptualized as one who experiences no suffering at all or undergoes no hardship in
their lives. Operating on the basis of a caricature of the white subject as s/he who does not suffer,
culpability for the perpetuation of white privilege was quarantined to the ranks of the super elite.
Though John could distance himself from a colorblind interpretation of the wider society, he
feels that a colorblind interpretation of the debate activity was valid, given the standards of
fairness and rationality he understood to be built into its organizational infrastructure.
Several of those who held to the strategy of abstract multicultural liberalism felt that the
critical black students had an obligation to become acquainted with them before it was
appropriate to confront them with criticism. They often charged black students with not being
social and not hanging out in the typical places where debaters mingle, such as the hotel bars,
and thus not gaining a sufficient opportunity to get to know them. If the debate community did
not know how to address questions of white privilege, it was viewed as the responsibility of the
black students to teach them and to be patient in doing so. One debate coach explained on the
online forums,
There is a race problem in debate and it's a huge one. But solving that problem will be
more difficult if the white majority is alienatedI have no doubt that most white people

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suck at recognizing their own whiteness and the privileges that inherently accrue from
being white. But exposure to your ideas and to you as a person is an essential component
of overcoming racial ignorance and discriminatory attitudes. Segregating ourselves into
racial niches creates a devastating hurdle to creating an egalitarian debate community.
White people should be taking a lot more initiative towards integration in the activity, but
I hope that when we do you won't give us the cold shoulder even if we don't get it at first.
This coach is expressing a common sentiment that the Resistance debaters are not sufficiently
social. At a given debate competition there are many social events. When hundreds of college
students convene on a city every few weeks and stay together in the same hotel, there is a lot of
partying that goes down. Debaters definitely have a work hard, play hard mentality. The
absence of the Resistance students from the hotel bar, for example, was viewed as anti-social
behavior. The students of the Resistance frequently responded to this and similar accusations by
explaining that they often feel uncomfortable interacting with debate community members, who
dont know how to deal with their whiteness. Members of the Resistance were deploying a
common strategy of self-defense, as identified in the literature on the experiences of black
students in PWIs (Williamson 1999), by foregoing predominantly white social settings. This
self-segregation was understood to cast doubt on the sincerity of their criticism.
Again, we see an individualization of structural critique. The basic assumption is that
differences in racial power and privilege are not so severe that they cannot be worked out in a
civil manner. This highlights the central limitation of multiculturalism and diversity initiatives
that has been identified in recent research. These programs (training programs, workshops,
seminars, etc.) are typically focused on the facilitation of interpersonal harmony rather than on
an interrogation of structures of power and privilege. They thus manage rather than reconcile

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racial antagonisms (McLaren 1997; Ward 1998; Leonardo 2002; Olson 2004; Moore & Bell
2011). When differences are discussed in various multicultural educational initiatives they are
conceived in cultural terms rather than in terms of power and domination. As such, these
programs take for granted and leave unquestioned the universality and desirability of dominant
institutional norms.
White leftists
A significant segment of the debate community, rather than attempting to defend liberal
principles with an explicit emphasis on multiculturalism, drew upon critical theoretical resources
at odds with liberalism altogether. Specifically, interviewees drew from postmodern critical
theory to delegitimize notions of stable identity and grand narratives of oppression, concerning
which they charged black students with being uncritical. The effort to interrogate white privilege
was viewed as an authoritarian ideological maneuver that denied human agency and reified
artificial group boundaries as well as notions of a stable subject. Whereas those reliant on the
liberal multiculturalism strategy identified themselves as white, and viewed whiteness as one of
many ontologically equivalent ethnic constellations in the multicultural milky way, the
postmodern approach rejected the notion of a stable racial identity altogether. They refused the
label of white even as they acknowledged that they are viewed and treated, invariably, as white
in their navigations of the social world. Racial identity was viewed as a simple matter of
performance, rather than ascription. Those deploying this strategy claimed to be politically
radical and drew upon critical philosophers, such as Nietszche, Foucault, and Derrida, to defend
their positions.

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Anti-essentialism critique
As the number of black students in the debate activity increased and the black intellectual
insurgency became increasingly radical it became more common for members of the white left to
be confronted with criticism. They had no choice but to develop ways to engage with the
criticism and address their relation to the insurgency. The dominant response was an antiessentialism critique. I chart this discourse to its moments of break down. The discourse
essentially rejects the ways in which rigid identity categories are formed and embraced. The
advocacy of the Resistance and elements of their performance were charged as reifying and
stabilizing identity categories based in stable and unproblematic notions of race. The central
alternative articulated was essentially to perform ones way out of the imposition of identity
categories. The students deploying this discourse were reluctant to identify as white and assume
any essential meanings about themselves by virtue of their whiteness. Eric was one of the top
debaters in the country. When asked to describe the black insurgency, he responded,
Their overall point was that we should focus on institutional racism. They challenged us
to think about whiteness in debate. They told us that whiteness is a master signifier and it
always fills in any empty space.They also made a big distinction between structural
and intentional racism they say racism is not essentially about people who consciously
think black people are less than white people but its more about structural conditions that
create inequalities for groups of people who are black.
Eric appears to have an understanding of and expresses solidarity with a critical focus on
structural conditions rather than individual dispositions. Still, he expresses fundamental
disagreement with the critical effort and with the central tenets of critical race theory generally.
Eric explained,

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Truly you know Im more in part of the queer theory school of thought which reflects the
idea that that whiteness doesnt always necessarily map identity onto your body that you
do have the ability to choose identity. I think there is a lot of ways that black people can
appear very differently. For example, I have this friend Michael and hes a black guy,
very black, hes got black hair obviously very African-American and he wears skinny
jeans and has a bunch of piercings and stuff and I think people treat him totally different
than they would if he dressed like the stereotypical thug, if he had saggy jeans and a big
afro. I really do think black people have more fluidity and agency over their identity than
they really give themselves credit for. You know I guess theres always the example that
like it doesnt matter what I dress like if I go to a ticket counter and the woman denies
me a ticked because shes racist or something, she wont work with me, I cant
escape that. I dont know thats just so particularized I cant really think of a universal
solution to that.
Though Eric invokes the fluidity of identity (a notion he explained to have learned from his
reading of queer theory) to delegitimize an institutional analysis of white racial privilege, he
expresses the view that race is fundamentally determined by performance rather than simply the
product of external ascription. The story of his friend is intended to support the notion that style
and performance are essential to the assignment of racial identity. However, the obviousness
his friends blackness works against his claim of fluidity, or what he calls the ability to move.
Eric explains, I think your style visually gets you more attention than your skin color, I
used to have a giant red mohawk and I guarantee you I got just as many looks as any black man
would have walking into anywhere, if not more. Eric expresses an acknowledgement here that a
black man, regardless of style or performance, will receive undue attention in the conduct of

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daily life that he, a white person, could only receive by donning a spectacular and unusual hairstyle (i.e. a giant red Mohawk). Not only is racial ascription reduced to a simple matter of
receiving attention (nevermind that such attention is very often deadly) the responsibility for this
attention is located in individual self-stylization. The conclusion of this interpretation is that if
African-Americans experience hostility and discrimination in the public sphere it is due more to
the way in which they present themselves, rather than their being fixed in a visual schema as
phobogenic imagos25. Eric is not so nave to suggest that intransigent white people who ascribe
and discriminate on the basis of racial identities do not exist, i.e. the woman at the ticket counter,
but he is unable to account theoretically for such circumstances. The individual experience with
hostility in public spaces is isolated in his view, or particular to the point of there being no
general solution.
Though his responses seem spectacular, Eric was voicing an interpretation of race and
raciality that was common in the message boards and in the interviews. Another debater,
Stephen, describes his uneasiness with criticism of white racial dominance arguing that racial
categories should be rejected altogether,
Basing a social strategy, a liberation strategy entirely on individuals inherited culture
[i.e. race] as opposed to one thats chosen is problematicwe should abandon a concept
of identity that has rigid lines of intersection like race, gender, etc. but adopt a concept of
identity thats more akin to an assemblage, or more fluid, like a queer identity. A concept
of identity that doesnt require people to determine a set or concrete identity [i.e. race],
even if it is for a short period of time. We should let identities be more shifting and less
25

Frantz Fanon discusses the imago as the package of tropes that attach onto a Black person when they enter
social contexts. Regardless of their dress, performance, education, speaking style, they are fixed as simply, look, a
negro. Fanon explained that he is a victim not of the idea others have of him but of his own appearance. See also,
David Marriots, On Black Men.
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stable. And so. to the extent that race is importantI mean this is hard to
describeits a factor in identity but it cant be determined concretely.
However, when uncritically appropriated and mapped onto the terrain of raciality these
discourses function to silence and evade critical confrontation with manifestations of racial
dominance. Eric explains,
They said pretty explicitly that you should just state what your identity is. I feel like that
is sort of the logic of forcing people out of the closet to say you have to state what your
identity is and you have to attach your strategies to your identity, I feel like there is sort
of a lot of structural utility to the closet there is a lot of utility to not having to disclose
what your identity is especially if you are anxious about it.
This represents a common strategy of cross-applying the politics associated with critical attention
to gender and sex binaries to the field of anti-racist struggle. The assumption is that the
imposition of any rigid identity category can be overcome through subversive performance.
Though sexual orientation is not necessarily a matter of choice, the decision to be open about
ones sexual orientation, i.e. to come out of the closet, is a personal and performative choice.
However, race operates in a fundamentally different manner such that, as Audre Lorde once
proclaimed, your silence will not protect you. Race, unlike sexual orientation, is most centrally
issued on the basis of external ascription rather than a matter of self-stylization (Fanon 1967;
Wilderson 2010).
Eric made some gratuitous comparisons between race and other categories of domination
and exclusion: stylistically I think the debate activity is far more masculinist and
heteronormative than it is white, it is white, but its much more sexist. Though Eric drew upon
neither a criteria for determining the severity of the respective operation of racism and sexism,

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let alone for articulating their intersection, he exculpates himself for the reproduction of
whiteness, a phenomenon the salience of which he acknowledges though the manifestations of
which, he argues, are impossible to identify. He explains, I dont contribute to white norms, I
feel a personal call to challenge heteronormativity and sexism in debate I think people are
more tolerant of black people than queers. Establishing another form of oppression as more
important and preeminent than race was a common way in which the concerns of black students
were minimized. The fact that someone might be focused on other important issues in their
personal activism or even in their orientation to debate scholarship was invoked as a reason or
excuse for not being attentive to the operation of racial privilege. Even if the intervention could
be lauded as progressive, individual accountability for the criticism could be evaded by the
invocation of other oppressions against which, in various ways, the respondents claimed to be
struggling.
When pressed to explain what if anything Eric understood to be distinctive about race or
whiteness, he draws upon his knowledge of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to characterize
efforts to identify whiteness as a form of resentiment,
Whenever you constantly look for whiteness thats all you can really see, you sort of
fetishize whiteness and you always kind of react to it and it means there is nothing really
creative within that strategy of resistance. There is nothing to establish, everything
becomes anti-white and nothing becomes good for its own sake everything becomes antiwhite not good for its own sake. Im not taking a colorblind position here, Im saying
there is no such thing as whiteness; there is no such thing as any overarching system of
domination. Whiteness only exists when you give it power by trying to resist it. Are you
familiar with Nietsche at all? Thats a strategy of resentiment, you resent whiteness and

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as such you make it powerful so you can see it everywhere, you literally, you fetishize it.
So even if you are right that this is whiteness that is whiteness all you can do is see
whiteness everywhere. Thus, you will never be done there is no satisfaction, that strategy
of resistance is constantly trying to find whiteness everywhere.
Nietsche theorized ressentiment as the effort to find a cause for ones frustration and attempt to
aggress against the perceived cause. His distinctive use of the term is unique in relation to the
English word resentment or the French word ressentiment, in that the frustration is linked to a
sense of inferiority and failure (Schacht 1985). For Eric, then, the Resistance effort is rooted in a
sense of jealousy and anger that is targeted towards others unreasonably accused of being the
cause for that failure.
Here, the allure of whiteness rather than whiteness itself must be resisted. As Eric
explains, I think the alternative is to forget whiteness, instead we should just affirm
heterogeneous difference, we agree that we should affirm blackness but not to resist whiteness,
affirm blackness just to affirm it. Erics response highlights the problematic of multicultural
initiatives which typically seek to create contexts of celebration and affirmation rather than
criticism and confrontation. Eric, however, does not use the term multiculturalism but rather
prefers the term heterogeneous difference, which is difference reduced to the level of
individual, rather than group differentiation. Though this is precisely the semantic move that
characterizes colorblind racial discourse, Eric knows better than to use the language of
colorblindness. Eric is aware that references to colorblindness are pass in intellectual circles and
he attempts to distance himself from such language accordingly. Another variation of the forced
outing maneuver deployed in the interviews was the likening of the demand for a public
accounting of white racial dominance with the confessional. This point was supported with the

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use of Michel Foucaults criticism of the disciplinary function of the confessional, a resource
upon which several debaters drew to articulate their criticism of black radical criticism.
Characterizing structural critique as authoritarian
In the face of criticism, debaters expressed a deep suspicion for a structural analysis of
social power. In one high profile debate the effort to force debaters to interrogate white privilege
was framed as akin to communist efforts to annihilate privilege. This was extended to virtually
any attempt to alter structural power relationships. As one student explained,
The quest to annihilate privilege couched in revolutionary terms by Stalin and Lenin
manifested itself in anti-Semitic systematic violence and rape as the soviet army
stormed across the Danube, and fascist governments in Romania where my family
lived, their land was taken from them, they were beaten their wives were pregnant they
were beaten on their feet because they were Jews and they had money, this is the peril
of oppositional and revolutionary politics.
In this way debaters attributed a power to the Resistance that they did not in fact possess. The
call to interrogate privilege, to open oneself to self-criticism was related to a violent effort to
simply get retribution on and eliminate privileged social classes. Pointing to historical examples,
however inapplicable, of times in which an interrogation of privilege is understood to have been
excessive (i.e. Stalinist U.S.S.R.) or became violent was reason to delegitimize any effort to
interrogate privilege. Any identification of privilege was framed as having the potential of
reproducing a history of left authoritarianism embodied by figures like Joseph Stalin and Mao
Zedong, understood to provide a ruthless critique of (material) privilege to the point of becoming
violent and authoritarian. The efforts of the Resistance were also commonly framed as a selfrighteous form of moral posturing. As Jeremy explains, I felt like sometimes it was as if they

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were standing on a soapbox preaching to me. I dont answer the door when someone knocks on
my door trying to save me from going to hell or whatever so I dont need to be talked to about
some equally moral claim about whiteness.
In order to view the intellectual insurgency as authoritarian, the boundaries and meaning
of whiteness had to be framed as indeterminate. The suggestion that white privilege exists was
also commonly caricatured as an argument that white people are nothing but white privilege and
that all white people enjoy lives free from want and suffering. The same student continues,
there are times when they look at you and say your life is easier because youre white and the
first question in my mind is, well what does it mean to be white? How do you draw those
barriers? And, second, like what the fuck do you know about me? This is a dual maneuver
whereby the student suggests that an individual accounting is necessary and also suggests that
the category of whiteness has no meaning. Virtually all students, however, acknowledged that
they are seen as white and most of them readily identified as white. However, when whiteness
was defined, not as a cultural identity, but as a position of unearned power and privilege an
individual accounting was demanded. Jeremy explains,
If we cant define where race begins and ends, like how can we tell people are white, I
mean Italians werent considered white, the Irish werent considered white, I think it is
real racist when [the Resistance] referred to Western Europeans. Western Europeans
isnt a unified identity. In fact the bloodiest wars in history have been Europeans killing
other Europeans. So to homogenize that into a unified identity is the problem with what
happens to a lot of minorities in the status quo. I dont think there are white people I think
there are different nationalities and ethnicities: Basque, French, British, Norwegian if
its all socially constructed and you cant tell me where white people begin and end or

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where Western Europe begins or ends then it seems laughable to me that theres a unified
whiteness or white aesthetic. So, starting from that assumption, I mean yes I think you
can look historically and still today see that most of the congress is white males and yeah,
that should change but I would never assume someone had an easier or harder life
because of their race. Even though if you played the over under theres still statistically I
mean white people have it a lot better but I think more of that is due to class, more due to
social mobility. But you now it is a fact though that Ive never been pulled over by the
cops because I was driving in the wrong neighborhood, and Im sure everyone [in the
Resistance] has.
This response is exemplary of the type of reflexive breakdown that occurred when the debaters
were pressed to think about racial domination at a structural scale of abstraction. This student
draws upon research produced in the field of whiteness studies concerning the historically
contingent boundaries of the category of whiteness (Igniatev 1995; Jacobson 1998). Though
virtually none of this scholarship concludes that race or whiteness is unidentifiable as a construct
or unreal in its social consequences, Jeremy selectively invokes these historical processes to
immunize white racial formation from criticism. What is most fascinating about this maneuver is
the way in which Jeremy acknowledges the differential relationship he has to the police on the
basis of whiteness. It is a matter of common sense to him, not simply that the majority of
political leaders are white males, but that racial profiling on the part of police is so rampant that
he was sure every black student, on the basis of their being black alone, had been unjustly
stopped. This occurred in many of the debaters accounts as they struggled to reconcile their
understandings with the undeniable reality of racial domination represented by things like racial
profiling. Students could typically not sustain a meditation on this relationship between

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whiteness and policing which was a central feature of the white supremacist status quo
articulated by most Resistance teams. The police seem to be untroubled by the expansion and
historically indeterminate boundaries of whiteness in meting out curbside justice. While scholars
have recently theorized police violence and the carceral apparatus of which it is a central
component as the preeminent race-making institution, (Wacquant 2002) it is irrelevant in
Jeremys understanding, albeit unfortunate.
Wise whiteness
Another segment of the white left did not rely on an anti-essentialism critique but rather
argued that a confrontational approach is off-putting to white anti-racists who are in ostensible
solidarity with the insurgency. Matthew Hugheys (2006) work on white anti-racists
demonstrates the ways in which essentialist understandings of race are reified, even on the part
of those who insist on a structural analysis of racial inequality. Several members of the debate
activity, including many people I interviewed, identified themselves as anti-racist and resented
their being criticized for the reproduction white privilege. This strategy was similar to the liberal
multicultural strategy in terms of how those who deployed it understood themselves to be white.
Unlike the liberal multicultural strategy, however, this involves the acceptance of the need to
combat whiteness. This strategy is informed in part by the debate within whiteness studies and
anti-racist social movements concerning whether or not whiteness should be abolished or
reformed and takes the latter position. Several respondents, despite their contradictory verbal
acknowledgements of white privilege conceived of it as privileges that accrue to an advantaged
class position, felt that criticism of whiteness failed to appreciate the diversity of whiteness.
Whiteness was acknowledged as a privileged category only in some instances particularly if

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someone is wealthy or is not politically progressive while generally worthy of embrace26. This
strategy departs from the multiculturalist viewpoint that whiteness is ontologically equivalent to
other categories of racial identification and thus deserving of an equal place among others at the
multicultural table. Instead, it accepts the position of whiteness as one of structural advantage
and seeks to foster an antiracist politics from that position. The strategy is comparable to the
postmodernist approach in its avowal of radical politics and deployment of critical literature,
particularly from the field of whiteness studies. The strategy differs, however, in its general
acceptance of the stability of racial identity categories rather than emphasizing fluidity,
performance and indeterminacy.
This approach was inspired by the work of Shannon Sullivan (2008) who has developed
the idea of developing a wise whiteness against the arguments for the need to abolish
whiteness. Sullivans discussion attempts to provide an analysis that allows white people to
understand the historical oppression that births, fuels and is reproduced by whiteness but
prevents a reactionary turn away from considering critical race theory. Sullivan acknowledges
that the purpose for white people is ultimately to become intimately acquainted with their
whiteness. Ignoring whiteness, she argues, allows unconscious habits of white privilege to
proliferate unchecked, white people need to bring their whiteness to as much conscious as
awareness as possible (while also realizing that complete self-transparency is never achievable)
so that they can try to change what it means (Sullivan 2008; 242).
26

This understanding contradicts the insights of scholars of racial inequality that demonstrates that even racial
minorities who occupy middle and upper class positions receive disparate treatment compared to their white
counterparts (Collins 1997). Even poor whites, whose plight should not be minimized, receive what W.E.B Du Bois
called wages of whiteness, psychological comforts that involve, among other things, never having to consider that
ones disadvantgaed position is due arbitrarily to their racial identity (Roediger 1999). This argument is similar to
and often guided by William Julius Wilsons argument concerning the declining significance of race. While
Wilson argues that class distinctions have become more important for determining the life-chances of African
Americans than racial classification, he does not ignore, as do most of the white respondents, the continued
existence of racial discrimination and the need to vigorously interrogate it.

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During the course of an online discussion that took place, one black student from
Towson, expressed frustration with the slow pace of change in the debate activity. This
discussion took place in the wake of the mooning incident. Paul asked the debate community
why black people receive such hostile treatment in the debate activity, asking sarcastically if
weve been too black for you lately? Or if were not assimilating fast enough for you?
James, a coach who considers himself to be an anti-racist responded by explaining,
I think describing the entirety of debate or the world as white supremacist is, for me,
inaccurate and inappropriate. For me, it is a very different thing to say the white
majority (a fact) maintains structures that are racist than the former. It is a tactics issue,
not content of message. i.e., this doesn't mean don't call out racism at every site
(everyone should), just that the tactic is not something I feel to be productive- the very
same arguments, presented differently without generalizations...but I am also conscious
of social location and would not condemn [the Resistance] for their tactics...However,
regardless of the relative truth, statements like: "Have we been "too black" lately?" "
We're not assimilating fast enough for ya?" are intentionally antagonistic...I realize you
speak from frustration, but presenting your advocacy in ways to expressly just piss
people off does nothing to create change...you might say that just means we have to
speak about racism in a "white" way---I have no idea what this would mean---and I do
not think you would have to sacrifice anything of yourself or arguments to present
them another way that is not universalist, that ignores individual difference within
races and that is not offered as a way to incite equally empty responses.
While the importance of challenging whiteness was acknowledged, James felt that the way in
which this was done by the Resistance was unnecessarily antagonistic. The strategy is framed as

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a tactical rather than substantive dispute. In this way, a confrontational approach was not viewed
as necessarily violating the norms of the public sphere, but was rather viewed as ineffective at
creating white allies.
Additionally, many white debaters felt that placing white anti-racists under the
hermeneutic spotlight denied the possibility that white people could have an ethical orientation to
black liberation struggle. Robert explains,
I guess I agree with the argument that debate and structures outside of debate are
exclusionary and definitely privilege a white position but I dont necessarily agree with
the way they have gone about the politics of ending whiteness because it doesnt leave
space for a non-racist white identity. That approach of trying to kill whiteness doesnt
leave space for an anti-racist white position so it fractures any possibility of having a
political thrust in the [debate] community because it meant that white people would have
to be race traitors and deny our own position. They constructed white versus black in a
way that white people were always racist and in a way where white people always have
the power. I think its important to have a space where white people can be antiracist
otherwise whiteness will be determined by people like the Klu Klux Klan.
Central to Roberts disagreement was the necessary association of whiteness and privilege that
he felt the Resistance to be assuming. I was curious about Roberts anxiety over the denial of his
own position and his aversion to white people being forced into the position of race traitors.
When pressed to describe what he thought whiteness meant, Robert launched into a long
explanation,
Whiteness is something that youre born into so its a biological marker but as a cultural
marker it doesnt have to be something thats privileged. Just because youre white

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doesnt mean that you always get the benefits of whiteness. The benefits they identified
that were associated with whiteness sometimes are racially motivated but are often
economically motivated or class-based. So Harvard, for example, gets a bunch of benefits
because those dudes are rich and theyve had access to good schools, good technology
and good coaching. My being white didnt give me access to those benefits because they
were largely class markers. I mean, I grew up fighting for scraps and wearing hand-medowns. So whiteness can mean white privilege but it can also mean the underside of the
way that class operates so its not just that white people are Bill Gates, there are also
white people who are poor and they dont get the benefits of the way that whiteness
operates. To me, this demonstrates the need to have a white identity that can be
progressive and not just in a class way but also in a specifically racial way.
Like several others, Robert reduces white privilege to class privilege, understanding racial
phenomenon purely in terms of material well-being. I pushed Robert explain what he meant by
this progressive white identity, to which he responded,
Look at my debate coach, I mean hes white as can be, but that dude is constantly doing
things that wouldnt be read as white if it werent for his skin color: he listens to black
music, he dates black girls and does all types of things that are explicitly multicultural. I
think the way white privilege operates is that there are certain benefits you get from class
there are also benefits you get from the way race operates. The police dont fuck with us
nearly as much but that doesnt mean we have to hold on to those positions of whiteness.
I see a lot of white kids that are into hip hop and the cops fuck with those guys, or when
theyre skaters the cops fuck with those guys, I mean that doesnt necessarily equate to

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antiracism but it means there has to be a space for whiteness that doesnt equate with
being racist.
The interviewees commonly deployed narratives to articulate and clarify their positions. In this
case, the narrative of Roberts debate coach reveals a number of troubling assumptions about the
operation of race. The fact that his debate coach, a white man, is viewed as white only because of
the color of his skin even though he does things which Robert understands to be essentially nonwhite, i.e. listening to black music and dating black girls, reveals an understanding of race as
consisting essentially in cultural performance. In this way, the strategy approximates elements of
the anti-essentialism approach wherein skin color is arbitrary while performance is thought to be
the real essence of race. In Roberts view, white people can be ethical in relation to their
whiteness by appropriating what are assumed to be cultural expressions of African-Americans
(i.e. black lingo, black fashion and black music). Also, dating black girls is viewed as a
fundamentally non-white cultural activity, a notion that is contradicted by a long history of white
fetishization of black female sexuality. Roberts acknowledgement that the cops dont fuck us
up nearly as much and his explanation that the cops harass white people contingent on their
symbolic transgressions signals the reflexive breakdown of his grappling with the operation of
privilege. Again, we see the example of the police emerge and trouble the coherence of the
discourse. The example of racial profiling emerged so frequently because of how prominently
the institution of policing figured into the analysis of white supremacy and anti-blackness
articulated by most of the Resistance teams.
The debaters who proclaimed themselves to be anti-racists often claimed that they
simply rejected whiteness in the way conduct themselves in daily life. Whiteness was
conceptualized as simply a state of mind rather than a position of structural advantage. During a

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discussion in the online forums concerning the radical black discourse in debate, Becky invokes
disability, ethnic distinctiveness, and the fact of being female as mitigating any privileges she
might gain on the basis of being white. She ultimately argues that whiteness is something she
simply rejects,
I may be white but I also walk with a cane, which means I get stared at and treated like
a different person, and I have issues accessing the world in the same way as someone
who isn't disabled. I'm also perceived by the world as female, which means I'm more
likely to be sexually objectified and vilified. I am also Celt Irish which is important for
three reasons: 1) Celt Irish were subaltern in this society until assimilation in the mid1950s, 2) We're a completely different cultural background that doesn't reinforce
whiteness, even though our skin tone is fair, and 3) Labeling me as White without asking
is prescribing my identity to me. Just the same as not all black people are from Africa,
not all white people are from Europe. Finally, white = / = whiteness. My fair skin tone
doesn't have any effect on whether or not you're oppressed. Only my actions can do that.
Whiteness power structures are created and reified by white people, but essentializing all
white people and conflating them with whiteness is problematic because then you're
ignoring the complex identities of everyone. I have rejected whiteness and taken
responsibility for my white privilege as an advocate for social justice for the entirety of
my adult life.
Several others expressed this aversion to being identified as white by others without their selfidentification as white. Again, Becky conceptualizes white privilege as only that enjoyed by
straight, able-bodied, wealthy white males. While the students of Resistance never claimed that
white people do not face hardship or experience suffering, they maintained that whiteness is a

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category of privilege regardless of the internal differentiation within whiteness. As Richard Dyer
(1997) writes,
When I first started thinking about studying the representation of whiteness, I soon
realized that what one could not do was the kind of taxonomy of typification that had
been done for non-white peoples. One cannot come up with a limited range of endlessly
repeated images, because the privilege of being white in white culture is not to be
subjected to stereotyping in relation to ones whiteness. White people are stereotyped in
terms of gender, nation, class, sexuality, ability and so on, but the overt point of such
typification is gender, nation, etc. Whiteness generally colonises the stereotypical
definition of all social categories other than those of race. To be normal, even to be
normally deviant (queer, crippled), is to be white (11-12).
It was precisely this feature of whiteness that white people had trouble acknowledging. To be
referred to as white seemed to many debaters to ignore what they understood as their own
internal diversity. They wanted immunity from criticism and they attempted to establish this
immunity by emphasizing their deviance from the figure of the straight, able-bodied, wealthy,
white male. The power relations underlying whiteness were obfuscated by white progressives in
the debate activity by their only being able to acknowledge its operation in and through such a
figure.
Another white student agreed with criticisms that were launched by black students
against the disabled woman, namely that she described the ways in which she lacks certain
privileges but that she failed to talk about the privileges she does gain by virtue of her whiteness.
However, a sort of reverse argument was made against the black students that ignored the

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fundamental distinction between whiteness and other racial categories, particularly blackness,
postulated by Dyer. This debater writes,
Its true that [Becky] doesnt talk about embodying whiteness, but at the same time I
don't see any of you all [black students presumably] describe yourselves as able-bodied,
genotypical, cisgender, or any other strand of privilege that this group never seems to
discuss. I'm sure a lot of you are guilty of reducing yourselves to "black men", "black
women", "black lesbians" or any of many other racial, gendered and sexual minorities.
In this formulation, the failure on the part of black students to discuss features of their identity
beyond or in addition to their blackness (even though all evidence suggests that black students in
debate were consistently talking about other features of their identities) was ethically equivalent
to a white women deflecting a criticism of white privilege by invoking her womanness,
disability, queerness and unique ethnicity. This suggests a desire for coalition but an uneasiness
with and inability to address the complicated question of race. The black students took great
pains to articulate the ways in which blackness was the feature of their identity that was most
salient in their navigation of the social world. They claimed that they face hostility and neglect
regardless of their stylization, performance, or other aspects of their individual identities. They
did not neglect these other features but rather attempted to sustain meditation on blackness and
the question of why it generated so much anxiety in the public sphere. The white leftists, as is
fleshed out in more detail in the next chapter, consistently attempted to steer the conversation
away from blackness to categories which they felt they could have some authority and stability
in discussing.

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Self-critical white debaters

There were some, though very few, white debaters who seemed to be deeply impacted by
the Resistance and to have taken much of the ideas they presented to heart. Derrick explicitly
rejects much of the multicultural liberal strategy. Throughout the interview he was self-reflexive
and thoughtful, exemplifying the possibilities for how the Resistance could be negotiated. He
explained,
One of the easiest things to do is assume that things are all better because weve instituted
some multi-cultural policy or we have a black president now so were in a post-racial era,
thats an easy thing to do to absolve your guilt in that way. So actually making people
address who they are and what they do from the voice that is not actually present is really
important I think.
Derrick understood the significance of such an effort being launched in the debate activity
specifically and he felt that the type of confrontation forced by the Resistance should take place
more widely,
It is so easy to evade in our liberal arts education confronting these types of questions,
you can hear about them in passing, thats one of many things that pluralism and
democracy allow to be heard, but you dont have to confront them personally, which is
what they are meant to do rather than just learning about them in the standard text and
white educational practices that exist in the first place. So that type of confrontation
needs to happen in education generally just as its happening in the [debate] community
I asked him what he thought about the uneasiness expressed by so many others by what they
thought was the uncivil disruption of the debate activity. He explained,

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I think [the Resistance] sometimes personalizes the criticism in a way that might not
necessarily be beneficial but I mean thats something you have to do (laughter) with a
political argument thats trying to effectuate change. I dont think that there is another
way to really make people change their ideas in such a competitive activity without
making it a competitive problem. I dont think that approaching it from a numbers
inclusiveness kind of thing would be very effective. The way most people deal with the
Resistance is just part of that white belief in a post-racial world. Just because people are
included in our count in doesnt mean that there is any change in the way society is set up
economically and politically. Debate is an interesting microcosm of that because it is
filled with people who are very well read and who think a lot. But if the criticism applies
to the people who are supposed to think and argue and have one of the best perspectives
on the way society works and the way society changes, and if they are still pulling that
white guise over it where 95% of the people in the debate community are still white and
the practices are still drawn from the history of white, western argumentation, clearly it is
something that has to be thought about more deeply, especially if our thinkers arent
thinking about it. It is exceptionally important for it to happen in debate where I dont
think the conversation happens nearly enough.
The black insurgency clearly had an impact on Derrick and made him think about issues of racial
power and privilege in ways that he had not been forced to in his life before. Though he had
some uneasiness about elements of their approach he voiced it with a sense of self-reflexive
uncertainty, unlike the brazen certainty of most of the interviewees. Still, he was concerned that
the Resistance was simply substituting a new identity at the top of the racial hierarchy,

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They were talking about the need to confront white oppression as it extends globally
because white oppression is so omni-present that we need a black liberation approach. I
think that sort of substitutes another individual identity at the top of the hierarchy which
is generally the problem of hierarchical power arrangements so if you reposition
something at the top based entirely in identity or something like that it will recreate some
of the problems of systems of inequality.
This was a variant of reverse racism-racism argument, voiced more out of concern for providing
constructive criticism rather than delegitimizing their overall approach. Even in this self-critical
acknowledgement we see this fear of blacks turning the tables on whites and the fear of whites
becoming an oppressed group.
Conclusion
Too often, white racial ideology is studied by interviewing those who have never had to
think about or confront criticism of their whiteness. I explored the discursive strategies that
emerged from a liberal, intellectual context in which the silence around whiteness was shattered.
While white liberals and white leftists differed in the discursive resources they deployed to
account for and discuss racial power, the structure and function of the discourse were the same.
The basic call was for a consideration at the individual level. In the face of a structural analysis
of racial domination, debaters frame such an analysis as inevitably reductive and essentialist.
Further, structural analysis is framed as dangerous and potentially authoritarian. However, in the
face of criticism of individual actions, debaters can characterize such criticism as overly personal
and demand instead for a depersonalized structural analysis. The debaters labor to lower the level
of abstraction on racial questions toward the manageable individual realm or otherwise demand a
structural analysis with zero connection to or implications for the conduct of their daily lives. A

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deep phobia of blackness and of the implications of an unrestrained radical black criticism
provide a common backbone of the discourse of white debaters regardless of their particular
political orientation.

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CHAPTER 5: ABANDONING BLACKNESS: INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE TO

INCREASED SUCCESS OF RADICAL BLACK STUDENTS
In my view the alliance is a ruse at worse, at best it is a provisional liaison until we
reach a point where the alliance partners must make their own anti-Black play, in the way
that the White Supremacist whom were all struggling against, did. Its inevitable,
because the alliance partners, so called, are always in the world and they are struggling
for expanded access on a terrain that they already occupy. Theirs is a totally different
relation than ours. We can pretend that that is not the case when struggling against
immediate discrimination; but reality always comes back to haunt us.
-

Frank B. Wilderson III

This chapter focuses on the way in which both white liberals and white leftists in the
debate activity moved away from an engagement with questions of race and racial power. I focus
on the general institutional response of the debate activity to the momentum and unprecedented
competitive success of radical black students. I outline the efforts of white liberals to construct
new rules and codes that stifle the black insurgency and seek to incorporate and absorb the
critical effort into existing norms. Most importantly, the white liberals struggle with the
contradiction between the necessity of diversification and the desire for normative maintenance.
Additionally, I outline recent moves made to create a private debate organization that excludes
black radical discourses. I also show how white leftists ultimately made movements to abandon
the black intellectual insurgency with which they, at one point, claimed to be in solidarity.
Finally, I show the ways in which the energy of radical black criticism motivated an elevated
concern with other categories of domination sexuality, gender, ability, class, speciesism even
as a concern with combatting anti-blackness was abandoned. This is seen in the very explicit

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breakdown of the coalition between black radicals and white leftists and the creation of a white
leftist coalition free from black noise.
Condemnation, reform, privatization
The institutional response to the recent and rapid increase of successful radical black
debaters which has included calls for negotiation, more aggressive counter-insurgency, calling
for institutional sanctions against uncivil conduct in debate and, finally, the establishment of a
private debate league focused strictly on traditional policy debate. The media coverage of the
mooning incident described in chapter 3 caused the previously insular debate activity to be
scrutinized. Several university presidents, distant supporters of the debate activity and former
debaters learned for the first time about the insurgency taking place in the debate activity. Jeffrey
Young, in a 2008 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, reported on the struggle taking
place in the debate activity suggesting that many university officials are ready to pull the plug on
debate altogether. Young writes,
Competitive debate has traditionally served as a laboratory for the democratic process
and an important training ground for future policy makers. But in recent years, a growing
number of teams have played the game out of traditional bounds. They have turned
events into commentaries on debate itself, in performances that bear little resemblance to
the debating traditions that had a place on campuses for more than a hundred years. But
the freewheeling aspect is what makes debate so exciting and challenging for students,
according to many debate coaches, who say teams should be prepared to respond to any
argument. Now some college officials are asking whether debate is living up to its
original educational mission (1).

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While Young reports on the many debate coaches who are defending the educational value of
what is happening in the debate activity, he explains that many university presidents who are
former debaters do not recognize and do not understand what is happening in the debate activity.
As a result, they are not sure why they should continue supporting such an activity.
In Youngs piece, which is one of the most high profile media reports on the debate
activity, he describes a debate that he watched at Towson University. The debate was between
Towson University and New York University. Young explains,
Most tournaments held by the debate association have very few rules. All a team has to
do to win, other than meet some time limits, is to persuade three judges to vote for them
in any given round. Someone called time. Ms. Jones rolled up the sleeves of her gray
hooded sweatshirt and stood at the front of the room for her six minute rebuttal. She
began with an account of the trading of African slaves in the early years of the United
States. She spoke at normal speed and with emotion. Ms. Jones, who is AfricanAmerican, then read from her own diary, focusing on an entry she had written while
attending a debate tournament this summer. "We had our first full round today and I want
to go the [expletive] home. You should have seen the looks I got from these people. I
even asked this one [expletive] what the [expletive] she was staring at," she said. "In the
debate world, people look at me and what I have to say as if I'm less than [expletive]
human, and this is some serious [expletive]." She accused her opponents of furthering
"white supremacy" by playing by the traditional norms of debate. She urged the judges to
make a statement against such oppressive forces by ruling in her favor in the debate
round Ms. Jones kept the discussion focused on charges of institutional racism, despite
the NYU team's efforts to bring the conversation back to U.S. tariffs on Brazilian ethanol.

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At one point, she put a chair on top of a table and sat on it, reminding judges of the
account she had read them about slaves placed in chairs on tops of tables to be auctioned
off (5).
This reporting, with its simplification of the radical black effort in debate, prompted responses
from many university presidents who were not interested in funding debate if these are the types
of things that happen at debate competitions. These threats to the institutional legitimacy of the
debate activity encouraged many debate educators to chime in and defend the relevance and
educational activity of the debate activity. Tim ODonnell, the director of debate at Liberty
University and the official debate coach for John McCain, Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney during
their respective electoral bids, responded to the way in which the debate activity was framed by
Young. ODonnell writes,
Despite the emergence of novel argument forms, intercollegiate debate is and remains an
unparalleled academic enterprise in which undergraduates routinely engage in civil and
respectful deliberations over the nation's most pressing public-policy issues. Moreover, in
the thousands of intercollegiate debates that occur throughout the academic year,
decorum is more often the norm, rather than the exception. Considering the skills,
knowledge, and fortitude required to successfully compete in the fast-paced world of
intercollegiate debate, it is hard to argue that it is anything but a premier training ground
for the future leaders of this country. To conclude, as some universities seem to have
done, that it is not worth having or supporting as a centerpiece of a college's
undergraduate academic program is terribly unfortunate. Recent graduates of the activity
are hard at work in law school or graduate school, clerking in the court system,
researching at think tanks, working their way up the executive ladder, or grinding it out

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on the campaign trail during this election season. Those who have come through the
ranks of intercollegiate debate in recent years are as well suited to careers of service and
leadership as any of their predecessors. Their number includes leading academics and
journalists, many of our most-brilliant and respected legal minds, justices of the Supreme
Court, presidential candidates and their advisers, and several university presidents (2).
ODonnell describes the effort of black students as novel arguments and maintains that the
debates in which such issues are debated is the exception rather than the norm. He goes on to
describe the important training ground that the debate activity represents and the important work
being done by former debaters.
Boiling point
The efforts to frame the initiative of the Resistance as the exception to the otherwise civil
discourse of the debate activity were troubled by the increased competitive success of the
Resistance. The success of the Resistance reached a zenith when at the end of the 2012-2013
school year two teams, University of West Georgia and Emporia State University debated one
another in the final round of the CEDA National Championship. Emporia would win this debate
becoming the second team of African-Americans to win the national title. What is more, a week
later at the more prestigious, competitive and exclusive national championship event, the NDT,
Emporia became the first African-American champions and the first team deploying critical
literature to win the championship. They thus became not only the first team of black students to
win the NDT, they became the first team ever to, unite the crown, winning both national titles
in the same year. These accomplishments, unthinkable to students who had been part of the
Resistance ten years ago, were continued in the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year during
which black students have dominated major national competitions. A decade of efforts to win a

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war of hegemony within the activity to silence such issues have failed to prevent an increase of
black debaters entering into the activity and demanding that blackness and the network of forces
that create and maintain anti-blackness be central objects of discussion. These unprecedented
successes and the spectre of a black takeover of debate have prompted considerable
institutional anxiety. Several participants of the debate activity felt compelled to make a
comment about these successes and inquire about the direction of the debate activity. A number
of institutional reforms have been called for that might return the debate activity back to its
discursive business-as-usual such as sanctions against uncivil conduct and reform to the system
of assigning judges. Some have made movements toward creating a private debate league, apart
from the existing national network, reserved for debates exclusively about government policy
and devoid of critical literature. These efforts seem to be more about preserving the debate
activity, viewed as home by so many debaters, rather than responding to the call for selfreflection made by black debaters.
Framing black debaters as uncivil and violent
The defeat of Northwestern by the team from Emporia State in the final round of the
2013 National Debate Tournament precipitating a crisis of sorts in the debate activity. Critical
approaches have existed in the debate activity but they have not had a great deal of success at the
NDT. In this final round Emporia took the affirmative position and Northwestern took the
negative position with a classical framework argument as described above. The decision was a 54 vote for Emporia. Scott Harris, one of the judges who voted for Emporia, but who is not
considered to be an ally of Resistance, felt compelled to write a twenty page explanation of his
decision. Scotts meditations provide a window into the larger dilemma that was faced by the

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majority of debate participants. In describing the reasons for why he voted for Emporia, he takes
great pains to indict and discipline the general approach of the Resistance,
First, the explosion of arguments centered in identity makes it difficult to separate
arguments from people. If I argue that a vote for me is a vote for my ability to express my
Quare identity, for example, it by definition constructs a reality that a vote against me is
a rejection of my identity. The nature of arguments centered in identity puts the other
team in a fairly precarious position in debates and places the judges in uncomfortable
positions as well. While discomfort may not necessarily be a bad thing it has significant
implications for what debating and deciding debates means or is perceived to mean in
socially constructed realities. I hope we can get beyond a point where the only perceived
route to victory for some minority debaters is to rail against exclusion in debate.
Interestingly, the majority of the students in Resistance made great efforts to explain that they are
not simply focusing on identity, but more centrally focusing on positions of structural power.
Still, the community commonly referred to the effort as identity politics or characterized the
approach as simply asserting identity and demanding the debate round be a decision about
affirming some identities and rejecting others. Additionally, the effort is reduced to a railing
against exclusion, which characterizes the effort as primarily a diversity initiative rather than a
struggle against institutional norms and procedures. Harris also represents the general desire of
the majority of the debate participants which was simply to discover what it was they could do to
placate the black students and foster a return to normative business-as-usual. It was important for
Harris to justify his decision in such a way so as not to be seen as a pariah to the larger debate
community. He voted on what he considered a rational consideration of the arguments presented

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which is commendable. However, he took great pains to disassociate himself politically from the
efforts which his decision legitimized.
Harris moved to a more direct warning to the Resistance that charges them with being
potentially violent, uncivil and to be threatening the existence of the debate activity,
This is a call for reflection. It is a brief glimpse into my own post-NDT final round
reflection. I hope that the community as a whole will reflect on the positive and negative
lessons to learn from this NDT. I also hope that members of the community who selfidentify with the Resistance movement will be reflexive as well. Any revolution leaves
violence in its wake and there were many signs of violence in the past couple of weeks as
well.There was post round treatment of judges by losing teams that left judges whom I
respect highly devastated and questioning whether or not they wanted to be part of this
community. I have heard from NDT alumni who found the comments made during the
debate so offensive that they questioned whether they wanted to continue considering
debate a home they should be financially supporting. There have been perceptions of
reality produced that leave me puzzled. I heard there were claims of a vast media
conspiracy that Emporias win would be less reported in the media than the wins of other
teams because of the color of their skin. That is so absurd in so many ways that the fact
that anyone would perceive it to be reality leaves me sad, and maybe a little frightened.
If debate is to be truly a home we all need to look beyond our narrow self-interest of
winning debates or pursuing our own social agenda and think about the reality of how we
treat others around us. If this is to be a home we all need to be more reflexive about the
social realities we construct. I am concerned that some members of the Resistance are so
busy socially constructing enemies that they may lose sight of who their allies are as they

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throw them under the bus. I have faith in the people in this community. I have faith in
argument and arguing. I believe that the way to win debates is to make better arguments
and that better arguments are what get rewarded in debates. I believe that debate is
bigger than any one person. I believe in debate. I believe in the debate community. I
believe that debate is one of the most valuable educational programs in the country and I
am proud that it is my home.
There certainly could be cases in which black debaters were excessive in their treatment of
judges after debates. This is a common occurrence, especially at the NDT, and is generally
accepted and forgiven. This competition will be the last competition for many debaters and they
take the decisions very seriously. It is common to see debaters storm out of the room when the
decision is announced and to refuse to hear the justifications of the adjudicators. There are often
heated debates between the debaters and the judges about how particular features of the debate
were judged. The Resistance students were uniquely singled out as being inappropriate in the
post-round discussions and this behavior is often generalized onto the Resistance. In most cases,
their behavior was no different from the majority of the debaters but because the approach of
Resistance involved ethical claims about race and power it was viewed as more threatening. In
many cases, it is the comments of the judges in relation to the insurgency, rather than simply
their decisions, that prompt the criticism by debaters. Also, while Harris thought it was absurd to
suggest that the victory of Emporia would be treated differently by the debate community, he
turned out to be very wrong as will be seen in the case of the Kentucky Round Robin snub27.
The perceived threat of violence articulated by Scott Harris prompted many to call for the
institution of official sanctions against violations of decorum and incivility. The general
27

Round robin refers to an exclusive debate competition to which inly 6-8 teams are invited. Only the best teams are
invited to participate. Each team will debate against the other invited teams.
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discussions concerning the way in which the debate activity could maintain civility and decorum
were seen by the Resistance as targeted directly against the confrontational approach of the
Resistance. In one instance, a black debater from the University of Louisville was debating
against a white debater who used the n-word in the course of the debate. In response the debater
asked the white student to refrain from using the word or I will smack the shit out of you. This
event was viewed as a physical threat which is, of course, illegal and in violation of the
university regulations of the sponsoring institution. While the Resistance debaters were
attempting to describe the micro-aggressions and the hostile way they felt treated and to attempt
to force the debate activity to institutionalize protection from such harassment, the codes would
ultimately be designed to protect the white debaters from what was viewed as an uncivil attack.
The response to the use of the n-word was viewed as harassment and there was widespread
anger over this threat. However, the use of the term itself was not viewed as harassment because
it was said in a civil way. Harassment could only be viewed as violations of basic codes of
incivility. The black debaters were attempting to point out the ways in which harassment could
also be civil, a subtle racial harassment that could be performed in a genteel way. Such
harassment could not be acknowledged by the codes that were called for. Scott Harris also
mentions that he feels the direction of discourse in debate to be headed to a place that is
detrimental to continued funding and institutional support. It is the actions of the Resistance, who
are allegedly concerned with their narrow self-interest, that are damaging the legitimacy of the
debate activity. Harris concludes with the general faith in the debate activity that arguments are
evaluated in an objective manner. Debate is a source of hope because unlike the spaces of civil
society more generally, debate has become an activity which discourse is assumed to be
evaluated apart from assumptions made about the social location of the speaker. These were the

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very assumptions that the Resistance was challenging in identifying and criticizing the white
normativity and institutionalized anti-blackness of the debate activity. It is important to note that
the various violations of incivility that had been occurring and which had been largely accepted
and protected, including the mooning incident, could not precipitate these calls for civility.
Rather, such meditations on civility only occur in the context of the perceived blackening of the
debate activity.
The larger narrative of Harriss ballot is the way in which debate has become his
home28. He describes himself as coming from a poor, working-class background and being
socially awkward as a youngster. Debate was a place that could accept a strange bird like him.
Several other individuals commented on the way in which debate has been a home for them. This
revealed an important feature of the counter-Resistance that was not explicitly voiced during the
debates or other face to face interactions. It became clear that white debaters have deep affective
ties to the activity. For them, the activity is a space wherein they could be affirmed and valued.
The intervention of Emporia was cause for the community to reflect on this, obscuring it from its
basis in an articulation of radical and gratuitous lack of belonging. In this way, the vote for
Emporia, despite being framed as a result of a rational consideration of argument, can be seen as
motivated by affect rather than reason. The debate activity was reminded by black students of
how good it is to have a space of belonging.
Exclusion of black champions from prestigious round robin
A few other controversies occurred that have further elevated the debate about racial
exclusion in the debate activity. The first had to do with the exclusion of the reigning NDT

28

Ballot refers to the sheets which the adjudicators fill out identifying the winner of the debate, assigning speaker
points, and explaining the justification for the decision. In this case, Scott Harris, posted a long explanation of his
decision and referred to it as his final round ballot.
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champions from a round robin competition at the University of Kentucky. This event is one of
the most prestigious round robins of the year in which only the best teams are invited to compete.
The reigning NDT champion would typically be the first to be given an invite. In this case,
however, the reigning NDT champion (Emporia) was not invited to the competition. In response
to this exclusion, a professor associated with the Resistance group posted a comment to the
online forum,
I hardly ever use the following term to describe people or even institutions, I understand
its significance and one should be careful of using it because of its power. But I am
officially and publicly accusing the Kentucky Tournament and the people who run it of
racism. Your tournament and your secret Round Robin policies are RACIST. A refusal to
invite the reigning NDT champion to a tournament that included debaters who were first
years or not as competitively successful at the NDT. No black performance teams
invited to the Round Robin, I call shenanigans. I see no reason why my money should
support this prime example of structural racism. Our community money supports your
tournament, you should be transparent about your RR invitations or you produce a
circumstance ripe for structural racism. I humbly suggest that all nationally traveling
policy debate teams boycott the Kentucky tournament until it apologizes for its oversight
and changes its policy on transparency. This is 2013, not 1947.
This was posted to the online forum and there was no response. It came with a follow up from
the same professor,
Dear [Kentucky], we are still waiting on a response from you all. I'm starting the official
count today in order to have given you some lag time after running the tournament, I'm
sure you all needed time to recover. So, this is Day ONE. We would still like a public

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explanation and apology for the [Emporia] omission from the round robin and a
description of the process for choosing RR participants. Without such an explanation, I'm
wondering if the Kentucky RR results should be precluded from influencing the
competition for first round designation and the Copeland Award29. Racial discrimination
is a violation of community policy and any results from a tournament that practices
discrimination should not be accepted.
This was a community forum of debaters in which an address to a specific person, and certainly a
criticism, usually elicits a response. In this case, no response was given. A person claiming to
have knowledge of the situation explained that the directors of the UK tournament were
remaining silent because of the fear of possible legal ramifications. This was one instance that
was not subtle and which received almost unanimous condemnation by the debate activity. Even
those hostile to the Resistance could not help but see this as a deeply flawed decision on the part
of the directors of the University of Kentucky Round Robin.
The University of Kentucky also hosts an open debate competition with hundreds of
teams directly following the round robin. At this event, several students in the Resistance made
the Round Robin snub a reason to strengthen their claims about racism in the debate activity. In
this competition, the top five individual awards went to members of the resistance, and ten of the
top twenty teams represented the Resistance. This was unprecedented. It was a continuation of
the historic successes at the end of the 2012-2013 school year. However, at the Harvard
competition that followed one month after the UK competition there was only one black debater
in the top twenty speakers and only one black elimination round participant out of thirty two
29

The Copeland Award is given to the one team at the end of the year considered to be the best team throughout that
year. The winner is determined by a vote from the directors of debate teams. The results from competitions such as
the Kentucky Round Robin, even though not everyone is invited to this event, are considered in Copeland Award
voting.
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debaters, a sharp break from the steady competitive inroads been being made. Some members of
the Resistance examined the rankings and scores given to each team and discovered that a group
of about 10 judges, all white supporters of traditional debate, had given drastically higher
speaker points than usual to the teams they judge. Theories emerged that this was a concerted
effort to counter the recent success of black debaters. Finally, one of the individuals who was
accused of inflating his speaker points admitted that he had intentionally done so because of a
concern that the students who were preferring him as a judge were suffering because of his point
scale. He noted a general inflation of speaker points that had occurred in the debate activity that
he was attempting to keep pace with and he admitted that he had spoken to others with similar
concerns but that they did not conspire to adopt this policy. Several black debaters missed the
elimination rounds because of the points given by these judges. Of course, those who admitted to
inflating their points argued that it was not to counter the black insurgency but simply not to
penalize the students who enjoyed having them as a judge, who incidentally were all white
traditional debaters. It was noted as well that this shift in policy came on the heels of two young
black women winning the 1st and 2nd place individual award at the University of Kentucky
competition. A long debate emerged about the politics behind and timing of this effort but little
could be done to persuade the Resistance that this was not an explicit effort to privilege white
students against black advances in debate. Part of this suspicion came because this change in
policy was not announced beforehand, which is common and even expected of judges to do.
Call for negotiations
Contradictions with the larger debate activity have prompted several people who have
been staunch members of the traditional debate camp to call for negotiations. One prominent
debate coach posted to the online forum explaining that, I have come to the realization that the

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form of debate that I know and love is not appealing to black students. He suggested a
compromise between the opposing sides. His proposal was to develop a topic in which the
United States Federal Government was not the primary agent of action, in return for topic
adherence on the part of the Resistance, topic reform for topic adherence. Several progressive
whites associated with the Resistance made assurance on the online forum that the willingness on
the part of the debate establishment to cede ground on the question of the topic was genuine.
They attempted to act as intermediaries between the traditional debaters and the Resistance.
There was a debate on the Resistance page in response to the urging of one white ally for the
group to come together and craft a proposal of specific demands for community reform. The
Resistance resisted these calls, pointing out that there is no single goal of the Resistance and that
there are deep differences about how to proceed in this effort. Additionally, and more
importantly, the question of the purpose of the Resistance divided the group. Several members
commented that the goal was not to produce concrete reform but rather to make debate a site of
critical questioning, to go further down the rabbit hole of critical interrogation.
There was no such proposal and no negotiations, though there are indications that there
were discussions between several individuals across the divide about these issues. An effect of
these conversations was to push for reforms in the way judges are assigned, to guarantee the
representation of the black judges in the pool. It was obvious that as the amount of black debaters
was increasing, there were virtually no black judges among those that judged the elimination
round debates. This was an effect of the system of mutually preferred judging (MPJ) whereby
individual debate teams give a ranking to each potential judge at a given competition. Each team
was allotted a certain amount of judges who they could exclude or strike from judging their
debates. When the pairings of the debate were produced by the debate tabulation software

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program, each debate could be assigned a judge who is equally preferred by the two teams. If
equal preference could not be guaranteed the mutual preference would at least be maximized.
Given the small amount of black judges in the pool and their presumed strike from the lists of
most of the traditional debaters, the only time black judges participated in the elimination rounds
was when two black teams were paired against each other. Since this is typically not the case,
black judges are virtually excluded from outrounds, given their few numbers and the capacity of
debate teams to strike judges. In response, Wake Forest University, eliminated strikes and
assigned teams with similar preferences rather than maximizing preference. Their affirmative
action program was, interestingly, restricted to black and female judges because these were the
only groups for whom there had been evidence of disadvantage. Judges were commonly
preferred across times but not necessarily highly preferred by either. This had a definite
influence on increasing judge placement. Additionally, in the wake of these controversies,
several teams decided to take specific action to heed the ethical call being made. For example,
the UC Berkeley debate team, a traditional team, made a public announcement that they would
no longer make framework arguments against black teams. They promised to work to engage the
arguments being made. This is due in part perhaps to a genuine desire to engage the black
intellectual insurgency. However, given the competitive success of the Resistance there was little
choice but to institute such a policy in order to remain relevant.
Movement towards privatization
The controversies left many with the impression that traditional debate was finally losing
the war for hegemony in the debate activity. In the wake of these various controversies, a rumor
developed and circulated on the online forums that a collection of some of the nations elite
debate programs had been making plans to create a separate debate organization wherein they

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could maintain the space of traditional forms of debate. The initial name of this secret
organization was rumored to be the Policy Research League (PRL). Several individuals
eventually came forward to admit that they had been in such discussions but that the
establishment of a specific organization with a name was denied. Finally, the rumors were
largely confirmed when Aaron Hardy one of the alleged members of this secret planning and a
debate coach at Northwestern University announced the plans to hold a private debate
competition that would adopt strict rules about content that would preclude the approach of the
Resistance debaters. Great care had to be taken to make this effort not seem like a form white
flight in the face of black advances in debate. The announcement of the competition
acknowledges the dispute that has been occurring in the debate activity and is resigned to the fact
that the only solution is a separation,
For all of the debates about framework over the last 10-15 years, it seems that we have
gotten no closer to an actual consensus. Instead, the status quo is failing both sides of the
divide. Policy teams begrudge the number of debates in which they dont discuss USFG
policy, and K[ritik] teams begrudge the number of debates in which they have to listen to
endless variations on you cheated. If a decades worth of meta-debates over the rules
has failed to solve the issue, Im doubtful another ten years will make much difference.
This represents a common move whereby the approach of the Resistance is reduced to being
simply an argument about the rules. It was not simply a dispute over rules but rather a dispute
over privileged modes of speaking, the assumptive logic of the rules (norms is more appropriate)
and the ways in which anti-blackness and white supremacy operate within these norms. This
private competition was to change the feature of debate that everything is debatable and
mandate adherence to a specific and strict topic.

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The announcement of the competition addressed the rumors that a secret group had
formed to begin the process of a separate debate league without black students. According to
Hardy there was never any such organization, secret or otherwise, called the PRL. Rather, he
explained that the process of developing talks about such an event happened organically,
This was not designed as a secret cabal to segregate debate, or any of the other paranoid
conspiracy theories I have heard people spreading. I think that it is worth pointing out
that nearly every conversation about the future of debate that I have been party to has
focused in large part on developing a concrete program for increasing meaningful
diversity in the community, finding a way to incorporate a variety of stakeholders, trying
to ensure that as many programs and debaters as possible are included in any future
vision of debate, and strategizing ways of improving access to policy debate at all levels,
including through changes to current argument practice. These are not a group of racist
illuminati hell bent on destroying debate through segregation and secrecy or clinging to
the vestiges of some dying form of traditional debate, these are well-meaning and deeply
passionate educators who are concerned over the state of the activity and are looking for
ways to make it better.
Hardy guaranteed that everyone involved in the discussion to create a private debate organization
was actually very concerned with expanding diversity in debate and ultimately making the
activity better. The name given to the new organization of these educators is the National
Organization for Policy Debate (NOPD). Such naming did little to ease the concerns of the
debaters that the effort was not an attempt to evade radical black discourse.
The invitation anticipated criticism of this effort as a form of institutional white flight, a
privatization of the debate activity at the very moment when black students were making inroads

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to joining the ranks of the competitively successful,

The most pernicious thing thats being circulated in response to this tournament is the
puerile and offensive comparison to segregation. Hosting a tournament which asks
voluntary participants to please discuss the agreed upon (and democratically chosen)
topic is not on par with whites-only bathrooms, an equation of the two is as inaccurate
as it is trivializing. No one is being excluded. Any program wishing to attend is invited
to the tournament. The only condition of attendance is that you agree to abide by the rules
governing the topic and debate in a civil fashion. If a program is not interested in doing
the style of debate on offer, thats fine. But they are self-selecting out of attendance, not
being told to stay away.
In this case, the rules are clearly formed in response to the situation of the debate activity that has
been created by black debaters. Certainly, nobody in the post-civil rights social milieu wants to
appear to be exclusionary and insensitive. Everyone is free to participate and any lack of
participation would simply be the result of a choice not to join rather than an act of exclusion.
Additionally, the dismissal of any suggestion that this effort represented an attempt to return to
the old racism of an officially segregated past had to rely on caricature. Nobody was arguing
that this was segregation, in a classical sense, rather they were noting the trend in post-civil
rights U.S. society of white people abandoning integrated public spaces for private spaces that
could remain exclusively white. In this way, the move to hold such an event represents a move
toward withdrawal from the debate activity, a turning away from self-reflection and the shutting
down of black critical questioning.
However, Aaron Hardy did not simply evade a criticism of racial exclusion by suggesting
that lack of participation was a choice and that anyone was invited to participate. Additionally,

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he detailed his deep concern for expanding minority participation in the activity. The NOPD
would not only begin the process of hosting private debate events, they would, Hardy promised,
also actively work to increase the participation of minority debaters. A pledge was made that any
profits generated from the competition would go toward a scholarship fund for a traditionally
underrepresented minority. Additionally, the NOPD would attempt to create connections
between urban debaters and various university debate teams, provide funding for minority
students to attend summer debate camps and actively engage in a number of diversity initiatives.
This is the primary response of the white liberal debate activity: rejecting normative
transformations called for by previously excluded groups, while calling for expanded
participation of previously excluded groups.
The invitation to the private debate event concluded with the following assurance to
prospective attendees that attendance is not racist,
A quick reminder to all the students out there who like traditional policy debate and
might be interested in attending, but dont want to get tagged as a social pariah. Enjoying
debates over USFG government policy and wanting to have more of them does not make
you a racist, and its not incompatible with a concern for diversity or inclusion. Its okay
to stand up for a kind of debate you think is meaningful, even if people say inflammatory
and condescending things to you on the internet.
In order to create such a private organization and not have this viewed as a specific effort to
exclude black students, the initiative contains pronouncements for the support of various
diversity initiatives. It remains to be seen how successful such efforts at privatization will be.
However, given the increasing lack of interest on the part of many university officials along with

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the general financial conditions of U.S. universities today, there is reason to believe that such
efforts could be successful.
Left abandonment of blackness
While the white liberals in debate were mobilizing for institutional reform and even
privatization in a move to avoid engaging with critical racial questions, the white left also began
abandoning a concern with blackness though in a different way. As I show in the previous
chapter, when the black intellectual insurgency shifted to an expanded interrogation of whiteness
that included segments of the white left, the response was an anti-essentialism critique. As the
success of black students reached a critical point and as their discourse radicalized to become
more focused on the white left, the response was a more proactive crowding out of black radical
discourse and a rejuvenated concern with various other axes of domination such as capitalism,
anthropocentrism, speciesism, ableism, sexism and colonialism. These critical disputes
culminated in a breakdown of the coalition between radical black students in debate and their
ostensible white allies.
Crowding out a concern with blackness in favor of other axes of domination
The Resistance was studying and researching the best possible way to engage white
leftists and expose the ways in which they evaded confrontation with the operation of racial
power. As the Resistance began to be more successful in combatting these discourses the general
left response was a move toward elevating other concerns as having primacy over racial
questions. Race was viewed as an important concern but other forms of domination were viewed
as more essential concerns and understood to be the foundation of the racial structure. One
debate coach opened a discussion on the online forums describing the way he understood and
grappled with the insurgent effort,

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Ive been thinking over what it means to be an ally for a while. Particularly, I have been
thinking over what it means to participate in anti-blackness struggles while being white
and assuming the privilege that comes along with it. To me, it seems that to be an ally
to anti-blackness movements that I need to first and foremost bring advocacy back to how
I coach, how I judge, and how I approach the [debate] activity. While my advocacy is
not centered (exclusively) on the context of race, I think that the starting point of
injecting my values into the community is a crucial first step to change the way debate
functions in order to make it more relevant to those people who dont benefit or enjoy
participating in traditional debate structures.
This sentiment was expressed by several others when explaining their understanding of the black
radical movement. The radical effort in debate most certainly had a galvanizing impact on white
progressives in debate. Nearly all the progressive students I spoke with attribute the radical black
movement in debate with their own becoming progressive. In a few cases this meant sincere
efforts to understand and criticize whiteness and an opening on the part of many white people to
criticism from across the color line. For many, it is clear that the black radical effort in debate
encouraged them to become more passionate and interested in combating the particular features
of social reality that they felt to be the most salient, pressing and disagreeable. For some this
meant a focus on womens or LGBT students concerns within the debate activity. For others this
meant a focus on workers oppression and capitalism. Some focused on animal rights,
environmental issues, food politics, Latino politics, Asian-American politics, indigenous politics,
immigrant. This same debate coach continues,
So what is my central advocacy and concern? Put simply, animal rights. Our community
is profoundly anthropocentric despite the increased popularity of the kritik. While there

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are structural issues in debate that need to be addressed to increase participation there are
structural issues that not only preserve but enable the anthropocentric tendencies of the
debate community at large. Every tournament on the circuit uses registration fees to pay
for the flesh of animals to be served. Even if vegetarians and vegans can opt for fleshfree selections, large portions of our fees still goes to fuel the factory farm industry,
which is also profoundly racist in its employment and distribution practices. Just as
Africans went into the ships and came out as blacks, cows go into the slaughterhouse and
come out burgers, pigs go in and come out bacon, and so on. They are the absent referent
of our tournaments. These animals not only experience social death (since they all have
complex relationships) but also a literal death that the debate community directly pays
for. Supposedly we all care about the environment, our world, injustice, etc. but as a
community we do very little. As pointed out by recent discussions this is true for the
majority in relation to anti-blackness. It is equally as true for our treatment of the nonhuman.
Interestingly, this focus on animal suffering and anthropocentrism had to legitimize itself
through an analogy to and ultimately displacement of black suffering. In this case, the suffering
of animals is worse and more severe.
There were a few primary sets of intellectual resources and distinct packages of discourse
that were employed to crowd out the Resistance efforts in this way. One of the most common
strategies is referred as the Cap K, or capitalism critique. This was the well-worn argument
that the identity-politics of the black insurgency created unnecessary divisions and weakened
the possibility of a coalition that could defeat capitalism, the true cause and lynchpin of the racial
structure. They would advocate the alternative of a rejection of capitalist logic to which they

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would attempt to link the Resistance teams. This strategy, in a variety forms, was deployed in
nearly 50% of the debates against the Resistance teams.
Another common strategy came to be referred to as Anthro, or the anthropocentrism
critique. This set of arguments was based in the literature of radical ecology and environmental
studies. This argument is homologous to the Cap K in that it argues that the Resistance has
missed the true cause of racial domination. The anthropocentrism critique, expressed by the
coach quoted above, posited that the oppression of animals was the foundation of the racial
structure and that any politics that did not take this into account would reproduce whatever social
phenomena, in this case racism, that was attempting to be displaced.
Another common strategy has come to be known First Peoples, Natives First,
Give Back the Land, and RTI, or Return Turtle Island. This position argues that the focus on
blackness and the question of an equitable reorganization of political power in the United States
ignores and erases the fact of indigenous genocide. They argue that the positionality of Native
Americans should be the center of an analysis of any effort to understand the operation of racial
and economic domination in the United States. Arguing that colonization of Native Americans
was prior to and the necessary prerequisite for the institution of the African holocaust. In this
view, any politics that does not focus centrally on the position of indigenous people in North
America, genocide and the question of land dispossession was doomed to reproduce racial
domination. These various strategies emphasized the same point, namely that you dont need to
talk about race and blackness in order to undo racism and anti-blackness. Discussion of other
categories of oppressed groups was understood as preferable to and more foundational than a
discussion of anti-blackness.

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Breakdown of coalition
Several important discussions concerning the debate activity and the various conflicts and
controversies among participants occurred on Facebook. A large Facebook group of current and
former debaters and coaches had over 2,000 members. Also, a Facebook group was created
called Resistance for debaters who challenge the exclusionary norms of the debate activity.
This group had over 200 members. Members to this group can only be added by current
members. The group started from about ten people who began adding others they felt to be
suitable to the group. The group is basically for leftist debaters and coaches, the majority of
whom are black and other people of color. Several of the original members of the group were
given administrator status which meant that they had the power to delete group members and
also to delete posts. A controversy arose on this group that sparked an intense debate among
Leftist debaters concerning the significance of (anti)-blackness to the power structure that was
being resisted by this group and about what it meant to be an ally in anti-racist struggle. The
controversy ultimately revealed the uneasy alliance between the majority of radical black
students and the various non-black students who understood themselves as being in solidarity
with them. The key controversy centered on what several members who eventually left the group
felt was an overemphasis on blackness and a corresponding silencing of issues and discussions
that did not focus on blackness.
The controversy was initiated by one of the leaders of the group inquiring about why
some individuals had been purged. She sent out a post asking why a particular individual was
kicked out and asked that she be informed privately or publicly of the reasons for why this
person was removed. It is unknown who exactly removed some people from the group but there
were several complaints from group members that people they added were removed from the

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group by one of the many administrators. There was not an initial accusation that this person was
kicked out for the wrong reason, just a desire for an explanation as to why certain people were
removed. In response to this message, several white members posted expressions of frustration
that people who they added had been kicked out and a feeling that they were being excluded.
Several people, all white incidentally, expressed concerns over the secrecy of the group and its
lack of openness to a range of diverse perspectives. Claims were made that the Resistance
needed to be as inclusive as possible and attempt to not alienate potential allies. In response to
these various expressions of frustration one black member of the group, Will, asked,
Who cares really? None of you are the primary constituents of this group. I think that
the right to arbitrarily exclude white people from this group superseded the right of those
individuals to be here and their right to know why they have been excluded. In addition, I
wonder if our allies spend as much time investigating our exclusion as they do our
resistance.
This caused anger among several white student members of the group who claimed that an
exclusive focus on blackness was harmful to the project of forming coalitions with other
progressive people seeking change within the debate activity. Though an examination of the page
and the various posts within show that a diverse range of oppressions gender-based, sexual,
class and race were discussed, they were discussed in a framework that emphasized the way in
which racial domination, specifically anti-blackness, operated in and through these oppressions.
This initiated a heated exchange concerning the claim among many of those offended by
the purge that several people who are being disregarded have actually contributed a great deal to
the Resistance in debate. The question became one of what exactly Resistance was and what
were the key issues of the Resistance. Several debaters posted expressions of their dissatisfaction

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with what they perceived as a myopic focus on blackness and they announced their departure
from the group. David explained,
..I cant justify staying in this group any longer. Resistance is important and I will still
continue to be a part of what I thought this group was in my mind supposed to represent.
I believe this has devolved down to a white people witch hunt, and I dont think that is
productive or useful. I reject the idea that certain identities or social locations are the only
type of oppression that matters, and all other issues of oppression in debate must be
subservient to the oppression of black bodies.
Another member, Tori, said, I cant be in a group that requires no reflexivity on the basis of one
identity [blackness] Others left, citing the incivility with which they felt they were being treated
by their black interlocutors.
Several members of the Resistance group welcomed the departures but expressed
annoyance with the fact that the deserters felt the need to announce their desertion and send
words of caution to the black students who, by and large, felt as if they were grappling with a
range of oppressions and identity categories and their complicated intersections. Others were
disappointed that a disagreement over important issues such as the relationship between race,
class and sexuality would be the cause for individual members to leave. They viewed the page as
precisely the place where such disagreements could and should play out. That the wounded white
participants could leave so easily was seen as a sign that these white allies were never committed
to or sincere about the black radical effort in debate. In response to the disciplinary remarks of
the deserters from the Resistance group, Malik explained,
Resistance would be more effective if white people stopped threatening to leave,
backlash or break the coalition when they hear something they don't like or agree with.

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Resistance would be more effective if these white allies voiced their concerns and
threatened to leave their white friends behind when they say racist things and make racist
deviations. If these white allies were really allied they would still be here. ALSO, note
how quickly your white allies denounced this group publicly and complained to their
white friends on Facebook in order to demonize the group and reaffirm their whiteness.
They always have and always will pick the other side when things get tough. That's
exactly why they cannot have any control over the agenda. None of them are bout that
life and if you ain't bout that life you fucking up the hustle.
Some people chose to leave the group in what they considered to be an act of solidarity with the
requests of the black students. Though nobody was arguing that white people should be excluded
from the group (rather they were arguing that some white people should be excluded). Some
white people commented to say that they should not be a part of the group because of the
potential damage that could be caused by their whiteness. One white student, Anthony, posted
the following to the Resistance page,
Part of me wants to say something about this line of posts, but another part of me knows
that to do so would only perpetuate the problem. From classes I attended in the past, I
have started to recognize that even my presence as a privileged white male can affect
how a conversation can go down, and, in turn, can change what topic(s) of conversations
come up. I respectfully remove myself from this group. I wish everyone here the best of
luck in coming to some resolution.
These excessive apologetics were represented by several other students who chose to remove
themselves from the group in-line with what their reading and understanding of the dangers of

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whiteness even though this was never requested by any significant number of the Resistance
group.
This general discussion which involved hundreds of posts and dozens of participants
encouraged many students to express dissatisfaction with black radicalism that they had, until
this time, kept to themselves. A significant number of students did so on the basis of an
understanding that the radical black movement in debate was hostile to queer students. They
suggested that those focused on anti-black oppression were ignoring what they viewed as the
more fundamental and more ignored oppression based on sexuality. One student, Omar, who
identifies as transgender, directed the following comment towards the black students,
To even have white people know what your positionality is (how many people even
know what intersex, genotypical or cisgenderism is?) is a form of privilege that not
all positionalities have. Some of us are not only marginalized, we are erased. People
dont even know what our bodies are or what they mean..White people in debate know
what "black person" means. They know what whiteness, white supremacy, Afropessimism and some of them even know what Afro-futurism is. Sure, they homogenize
them and answer them with the same generic strategy in every debate, but a black person
doesnt have to answer the question what is a black person?.....There is a difference
between having privilege and being privileged. Black people have the privilege of being
known. Im implying that black people dont feel the same kind of erasure in this
community. PEOPLE DONT KNOW WHO/WHAT SOME OF US ARE. THAT IS
VERY DISTINCT FROM BEING AN ERASED GROUP. To have people
address your marginalization is a form of privilege....You all should stop assuming that
just because youre black you dont have a single shred of privilege. You all have a

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Resistance page on Facebook that a lot of white people engage you in. Thats a form of
privilege, and until you admit that to yourself you are not much better than they are.
This student suggests that because there is discussion of blackness in debate, a discussion
initiated at no small cost by black students, that it was a sign that society had made more
progress towards dealing with racial oppression. This was a common sentiment among white
progressives in the debate activity, mainly that discussions of race had been thorough and thus
there was not as pressing as discussions of other categories of oppression like gender and
sexuality. This initiated further discussion in which several black students commented that those
most actively engaged in this discussion were in fact black but also as queer. Also, black hypervisibility, understood by Omar as a form of privilege, was framed by black students as a source
of oppression in that it manifests itself as surveillance, violence against black bodies and a
general exclusion. What is interesting is the frustration expressed by white students who want to
establish that black students are in fact privileged in many ways. While these claims were not
necessarily denied, the main goal of the black students was to draw attention to institutional
white supremacy and anti-blackness.
Another white student Tim, who identified as queer, posted a response in the ensuing
discussion that charged the Resistance with a general homophobia,
I've posted elsewhere how debate became a space where I could explore my sexual
identifications outside of the hostility of living in the Bible belt, how it gave me the
courage to organize, how it has set me on my path in a way that interrogates the
assemblage of various categories - including race and sexuality. But in that same post I
mentioned how debate was also a site of pain: I was outed to my school by teammates,
beaten, hazed and forced to identify as a "fairy princess" while wearing a tutu during

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debates. In college I was initially mocked for having the nerve of wanting to base
arguments on queer theory and was faced with a multitude of aggressions. Then, when I
transferred schools with hope that I would be able to have support in participating in
counter-public strategies, I found that members of "Resistance" treated myself and others
with many of the same aggressions. My queerness became a disease and male debaters
who ran Wilderson would REFUSE to sleep in the same bed with me, although they
would share beds with other men. At Harvard my last year of debating one anti-blackness
debater had the nerve of separating the covers to build a wall so there would be no risk of
the fag touching him in bed at night.
What is interesting about this post, aside from the blatant generalization of all radical black
debaters based on this students experiences with one, is that a significant number of the most
vocal black debaters identify as queer. As Malik pointed out, What is very odd about this
exchange is that it is not a black-white thing. You queers are talking to queers. How can you
leave in the name of queerness! Why do you think I speak for Black people and not queer
people? Ain't I a queer? Additionally, what is clear from Tims angry post is the eagerness with
which the many white progressive students were to engage with axes of power that they felt to be
most operative in their lives and the importance they attached to the debate activity as a venue
for allowing them to do so. Additionally, each of these students understood themselves to be in
solidarity with radical black effort but they expected this solidarity to not have any effect on how
they conduct themselves in debate or understand their position in the world.
It is important to note that the black students who participated in this discussion also
disagreed on many points. Some black students chimed in criticizing the tone with which the

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various disgruntled white students were engaged. Malik responded to these criticisms,
highlighting some of the frustration with the ostensible white allies,
These traitors would sell each and every one of us out to protect their friends in this
community.Will any of these people jeopardize their standing in the white debate
community like they will risk their standing here? Do they disagree as quickly with their
white peers as they do us? Do they defend us as quickly as they defend each other? They
risked nothing to be here because it required no action and they gain everything because
here we are thinking they down AND they think they have the power to denounce the
group and so that once again we assumed all of the risk of their presence and received
zero benefit. We can't even have radical discussions because they are always trying to
tame the beast with their coalition talk which does nothing but maintain the status quo.
So, tell me what good are they really? Why do we need them here?
Some students, disagreeing with this sentiment, pointed out that several of the white allies had
helped to expand debate opportunities to students of color and that some had provided material
and emotional support to black debaters. Debate on this issue is ongoing among the students who
represent the Resistance in debate.
Creation of a new coalition group
To address the perceived shortcomings of the Resistance group a new group was created,
interestingly titled Coalitions, that could serve as a new venue of exchange for progressive
students within the debate activity. The students who created this group described its purpose in
their invitation,
Whatever your chosen relationship to difference is, we can work around points of stasis
(such as MPJ, participation, CEDA conventions on sexual harassment, etc.) to work

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towards a common goal30. Power is diffuse and particular; it requires that we disagree on
strategy. Monolithic solutions fail and keep us thinking within power. The question is
how to be able to coalesce regardless.
While this purpose speaks in general terms of coalition it is clearly a response to the perceived
too-blackness of the Resistance page and, generally, of the progressive movement within the
debate activity. Interestingly, though the group was founded by students who had abandoned the
Resistance page, the majority of the members of the Resistance group actually joined the
coalitions page. Several posts were made to this group that dealt with issues such as the status of
LGBT students on campus, questions of veganism and speciesism. Links were posted to various
feminist and queer theory blogs and discussion on these issues was generated.
After the group had been operating for several weeks, Omar posted an initiation to
discussion about the questions and dispute that led to forming the group in the first place.
Though several black students joined the coalition page they were not engaged in the discussions
that were taking place there. Omar wrote,
So this group has existed for a while now. I'm not sure that I mean to bring back all the
fighting that brought this group to existence, but am I the only one who's bothered by the
fact that not one black person posted in this group yet?.....the about page says that this
group is supposed to represent intersections between blackness, queerness and quareness.
People think that the Resistance page didn't focus on queerness enough. Maybe this is
proof that they were right that we can't have a discussion without them. We need them whiteness has already filled in.

30

MPJ refers to the system of mutually preferred judging which several students were calling to be reformed for its
exclusionary function. CEDA refers to the Cross-Examination Debate Association and the discussion of developing
more stringent codes against sexual harassment.
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This post set off an intense discussion addressing the questions of why there was no black
participation in the group and whether or not their own theorizations of blackness were
sufficient. Several members of the group defended and reaffirmed their purpose which was to
foster a truly progressive coalition focused on the intersection of a number of oppressions. They
dismissed the absence of black commentary in the group as merely a choice of the black
students. In response to the charge that black students were excluded from the group, one of the
group leaders, Tim, urged black students to speak up if they feel excluded and he assured them
that he would address their concerns,
If representation is the issue then please - as I have asked before - let the group know if
you don't feel comfortable making it public. If you don't feel comfortable with either
option, then I'm sorry. Like Anzaldua, I believe that dialogue is essential, not
shouting at each other from across the river. Hopefully what we can gain from this
critical moment is the need for this group to engage in more productive activities that
encourage home-making for quares/queers of color, and the many Othered others who
make our [debate] community diverse and great.
Omar, for suggesting that the coalitions group was a white space, was dismissed and charged
with paternalism. Tim suggested that he was speaking for the excluded and thus silenced their
voices. Just curious, Tim asks, How do you think your whiteness implicates your ability and
desire to speak for others? Omar was additionally labeled a troll and accused of attempting to
sabotage and derail the critical discussions assumed to be taking place on the Coalitions page. In
response to the one student who attempted to initiate a self-critical discussion about the way in
which many white students engaged the debate that lead to white flight out of the Resistance
page, the response was hostile and indicated that to even speak up to address questions of white

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privilege was to speak for and in the place of non-whites who had chosen not to engage. Omar
finally explained that,
I love everyone in this group, but whether they mean it or not, a coalition without black
people is not a coalition. You all have been complaining about[Frank] Wilderson for a
long time but this is proof that he's right...
The new Coalitions group faced a troubling problem. While they wanted to create a group where
all categories of domination and their intersection could be discussed, there were no discussions
of racial issues and there was no participation of black students. The group became a place where
white students could discuss issues of importance to them without being harassed with questions
of racial power.
Conclusion
At the very moment in which the white liberals who comprised the majority of the debate
activity were thinking about and experimenting with methods of stifling and short-circuiting the
black insurgency in debate, white leftists, who at one point expressed solidarity with the critical
effort, abandoned a concern with blackness and black struggle. It appears as though the critical
success of black debaters has alarmed many in the activity that the central rule of debate that
there are no rules provided too much freedom to black students and was threatening the
institutional coherence of the debate activity. As university presidents and other funders and
supporters of the debate activity began withdrawing or considering withdrawing their support
from the debate activity, debate participants scurried to justify the educational value of the
activity despite its perceived blackening. If the black insurgency had remained competitively
marginal, it could probably have been allowed to silently linger on the margins. However, nonblack participants of the activity conservative, liberal and leftist alike are, in a variety of

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ways, coming to the position that enough is enough. Black people are allowed in the activity,
indeed their participation is encouraged, but the critical questions of black people must be
contained. It remains to be seen whether the debate activity will suffer the same fate as the precivil rights movement public swimming pools that, in the wake of desegregation, were drained of
the resources that made them valuable. This draining has to occur by framing black students as
uncivil and potentially violent. Even where black criticism is accepted, it is only accepted in civil
forms, delivered with a smile, which denies the very impetus behind the intervention in the first
place. At the very moment in which the black insurgency could use the support of white leftist
allies, these allies retreat to white spaces where they will not have to address and be confronted
with critical questions of racial power. In this way they are in political solidarity with the liberal
debate establishment in that they just want questions of blackness, if not black people, to go
away. This disavows, among other things, the openings created by black insurgency that have
galvanized and made possible white leftist efforts to seek recognition and incorporation within
the debate activity. Both sides are in a double bind: they need black people but they cannot stand
blackness.

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CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION
In every realm of social organization, the same problem is presented by racism to those
who seek to confront and dispel it. They find themselves in a dead-end street, beset by an
illogic that resists articulation, inverts ethics, rejects historical experience, and turns
political principle against itself. And none of it is new.31
-

Steve Martinot

This study has sought to contribute to an understanding of the capacity of racial hierarchy
to come out of round after round of contestation with more vigor and strength as the dominant
racial narrative(s) diverge further and further from racial realities. Sociological literature too
often interprets indications of the getting rid of questions of racial power as an index of racial
progress. The irony is that expanded access to civil society coincides with a getting rid of the
question such that critical questions of racial power become unintelligible, even as they are
possible for the first time in the ostensibly multicultural and universally accessible post-civil
rights public sphere. Across the institutional field there is a push for diversity and increased
representation of women and racial minorities in the institutional life of state and civil society.
However, the dominant norms of major social institutions were formed in a context of racial
(specifically anti-black) exclusion and both de facto and de jure white supremacy. Thus, those
whose incorporation is being sought after in order for these institutions to resolve a legitimacy
crisis are entering into institutional settings the norms of which were formed with neither their
consent nor consultation. The primary focus of most studies of racial inequality is on identifying
barriers to incorporation and to understanding the coping mechanisms deployed by the newly
included within what are often, and often extremely, hostile settings. This study has sought to

31

(Martinot 2010; 3-4)

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explore a context in which a voice in the formation of institutional norms was demanded by
those whose inclusion was actively pursued.
The activity of U.S. intercollegiate debate provides a unique site wherein to explore the
tension between inclusion and transformation. The debate activity has made good faith efforts,
however limited, at diversification and, more importantly, has viewed this diversification as
crucial to the wider diversification of the public sphere. These efforts, however, though designed
to resolve a crisis of legitimacy, have produced a more profound crisis for the debate activity
which it has had significant difficulty in controlling. Black students who have entered this
predominantly white institution over the last 10 years have initiated critical discourse concerning
the operation of power and exclusion at the heart of the institutions culture and norms. The
existence of such critical discourse is certainly not unique to the activity of debate. What is
unique is that these discourses could not be completely dismissed or ignored by any of the
participants. This specific challenge to the debate activity cannot be seen as isolated, random or
coincidental because if its uniqueness. The impetus that gives rise to the challenge exists across
the landscape of post-civil rights integrated social institutions, but the specific structure of the
debate activity enables such discourses to be imposed upon all participants in a way that is
unthinkable, if not impossible, in other settings such as the workplace or even in classroom
settings. While there are certainly movements for racial justice on college campuses, these
movements typically only gain a hearing in the context of outbursts of the old racism, clearly
identifiable racial hostility such as hate crimes, blackface fraternity parties, and other outbursts
of racial hostility that the post-civil rights institutional landscape has struggled mightily to
suppress. The struggle in the debate activity is not directed to such blatant individual racists or to
clearly identifiable racist speech and behavior, rather, the focus is on the subtle, every-day,

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normalized way in which racial power operates within seemingly universal institutional norms.
Raka Shome (2000) argues that,
whiteness, as an institutionalized and systemic problem, is maintained and produced not
by overt rhetorics of whiteness, but rather, by its "everydayness," by the everyday,
unquestioned racialized social relations that have acquired a seeming normativity and
through that normativity function to make invisible the ways in which whites participate
in, and derive protection and benefits from, a system whose rules and organizational
relations work to their advantage.
It is precisely this seeming normativity that was vigilantly scrutinized by black debaters and
which forced those who are typically immune from criticism white liberals and leftists to
account for the everydayness of racial power and their relationship to it.
In studying this unique racial project I have sought to understand the limits of
integration and the mechanisms through which normative transformation is sidelined even
amidst increased diversification. This study troubles the assumptive logic of the conception of
racial rule theorized in the majority of sociological literature on race and ethnicity, namely that
hegemony is the key modality of racial rule. While this study cannot adjudicate definitively on
the debate concerning the modality of racial rule it can, in dialogue with this dispute, suggest
directions for future research. The primary suggestion is that studies of racial discourse concern
themselves with the limits. Rather than presuming that race operates fundamentally as a
hegemonic formation and attending to the project of exposing and unlocking hegemonic
discourse, studies might seek out the limits at which, when it comes to accounting for questions
of racial power, public discourse breaks down. This study shows that what can be considered a
racial project, attempting to identify and transform the operation of white norms and

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institutional white supremacy finds itself in an impossible situation. Black students attempting to
wage this challenge face the difficulty of articulating black suffering and the parasitic
relationship between this effort and their white patrons. The white students who are criticized
attempt, in a variety of ways, to individually evade criticism and they ultimately falter
discursively when it comes to an attempt to account for violence. Finally, mirroring the post-civil
rights movements toward privatization and suburbanization in response to the spectre of
integration, a concern with racial questions is abandoned and ignored by liberal and leftists alike
as black inroads are made. This abandonment is an abandonment of black questions, but not
necessarily black people. The participation of black people is sought after both in a left coalition
as well as in a private debate organization with strict rules concerning the boundaries of
discourse. In both cases black participation is sought after insofar as black people are unwilling
or unable disrupt normative business-as-usual with radical black questions.
In Chapter 3 I outlined the ways in which black students attempt to articulate black
suffering within both intramural black conversations as well as to a set of non-black
interlocutors. Black students initially focused on institutional access and discriminatory
mechanisms and then moved to a deeper focus on systemic and epistemic racism. Black students
challenged the norms and procedures of the debate activity for speaking centrally to a white
habitus and criticized the activity for excluding African-American speaking styles. They
demanded the alteration of judging practices to take into account ethics above competition. They
urged the acceptance of the knowledge claims of organic intellectuals and introduced poetry
and music as legitimate ways of making an argument. They argued for the legitimacy of a
metaphorical interpretation of the debate topic according to their understanding of AfricanAmerican oral traditions. In doing so, they sought to decenter the state as the primary agent of

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political action around which debate is organized. They demanded freedom of expression and
freedom of form of expression. The radicalization of black discourses in debate has involved a
steady elevation in the conception of the extent to which violence figures in the issue of racial
difference. This discursive intervention, particularly in its Afro-pessimist wave, eventually came
to conceptualize the futility of discursive intervention in altering the racial order without
abandoning the discursive intervention. Black students in debate began to identify and criticize
the ways in which the racial order positions them outside of civil society even as efforts are made
to include their bodies within the institutions of state and civil society.
The significance of this effort lies not simply in the fact that black students are opposing
institutional norms against the picture painted in a preponderance of sociological literature that
focuses on the struggle of black students to cope with discriminatory treatment and struggle for
institutional access. The significance lies in the deep disputes among black students concerning
the meaning of blackness and the politics of being black in white spaces. There is reluctance on
the part of sociologists to adopt a conception of black students as oppositional. A great deal of
literature has sought to identify and emphasize black educational aspirations, the embrace of
educational institutions, and the striving for success against the various manifestations of racial
hostility that are experienced in predominantly white institutional space. Anxiety over
reproducing the conception of an oppositional culture that would explain black disadvantage as
rooted in the orientations of black people rather than in the actions and attitudes of white people
has resulted in an effort to simply moralize and valorize black students as, if not simply nonoppositional, then as model students and citizens. I have shown an oppositional orientation to
civil society in that black students are identifying the ways in which civil society is in opposition
to them and the ways in which their participation in the debate activity must involve their being

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treated and considered in bad-faith as agents of the public sphere on a plane of ontological parity
with all others. The debaters attempted to problematize these assumptions, identifying the ways
in which the world excludes them, not necessarily from participating in the public sphere, but
from being recognized as subjects within the public sphere. They utilized the activity of debate to
learn about these questions, to sharpen their ability to articulate the ways in which racial
domination operates, and to confront a privileged population with these discourses. This is not
simply a question of acting white or resisting educational practices that force students to adopt
white ways of speaking and behaving. More importantly, it is a question of what it means to be
black, particularly in an all-white educational space. This did not involve a simple conception of
what blackness is, but rather involved deep uncertainty and contention over the very meaning of
blackness. This required a deep engagement with literature that undergraduate students do not
typically explore. It involved attempts to access the black radical intellectual tradition and to
pursue academic excellence within this tradition.
Additionally, this unique movement in the debate activity allows an ability to understand
the ways in which racial domination operates through those who express solidarity with as well
as those who oppose critical black discourses. On one level, the effort of black students to
articulate black suffering created anxiety and generated a reactionary response from the debate
activity, the participants of which largely view themselves as tolerant and in support of a
multicultural democratic society. On another level, these articulations generated enjoyment and
fascination on the part of the debate activity. Several white coaches have attempted to recruit
black students and have supported the black intellectual insurgency for the competitive dividends
it has proven capable of generating. Black students were often urged to articulate black suffering,
even as students expressed frustration with the emotional toll of doing so. Additionally, they

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were encouraged to articulate this suffering in what are considered to be black forms of
communication, rapping and poetry. Interventions that often attempted to create discomfort were
often the source of pleasure and enjoyment for white participants, even as they were being
criticized. This generated a sense of the futility of these efforts on the part of black students and a
damned-if-you-do / damned-if-you-dont mentality that highlight the paradox described by
Frantz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks when he wrote, to us, the man who adores the Negro
is as sick as the man who abominates him (8). It is within this context that Afro-pessimist
discourse has come to be the dominant discourse of the black movement in debate, because it
explains the relationship between blackness and civil society as one of parasitism rather than
simply inequality. Additionally, it identifies radical white discourses as ethically indistinct from
liberal and conservative discourses. It explains the increasing frustration that results from
competitive inroads being made into the debate activity. While the majority of the community
seemed to hope that having black national champions and increased representation of black
students among the ranks of the top debaters would ameliorate the general black opposition to
the debate activity. The result of increased competitive success, however, has been an
intensification of critique and a surge in the motivation of more black students to join the
insurgency.
The effort of black students in the debate activity has, among other things, created a
context that is precisely what is called for in the majority of whiteness studies, namely to
interrogate whiteness, force questions of race into public discourse and to confront racist norms.
The struggles in the debate activity represent a prime example of outing whiteness, particularly
because, unlike in other locations where such an outing might be attempted, such an outing
cannot be easily ignored in the debate activity. White participants had to think about these

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questions and speak about these questions in interactions across the colorline. Chapter 4
highlights the ways in which the discourse that emerged from this context to account for and
construct white identity departs from the familiar discursive mechanisms identified in the field of
new racial studies, or the 3rd wave of whiteness studies. My goal was not simply to map the
terrain of white discourse and add to the repertoire of generative mechanisms of whiteness, but to
examine the way in which white people engage and negotiate intellectual confrontation and in so
doing to attempt to approximate the limits of white self-reflexivity. Ultimately, this study
highlights the paradox of whiteness. Rather than revealing some deeper truth about whiteness or
capturing it as it is brought to the surface and unmasked, this study allows whiteness to be seen
as eminently meaningless. As Steve Martinot argues,
To call upon whites to stop doing what they do to be white, and to stop identifying with
what constructs them as white, would mean a tremendous conceptual leap, because to be
white means to inhabit a conceptual circle that continually reconstructs itself. That circle
has the following form: the meaning of whiteness is already supremacy, the meaning of
supremacy is already privilege and the meaning of privilege is already whiteness. As a
circle, it is hermetic, and self-insinuating against argument, experience, or critiques such
as that of white skin privilege. At whichever point antiracism addresses racism on the
circle, there is a preceding point for racism to fall back on that then directly regenerates
the substance of the point on the circle attaced by antiracism. The insularity of this circle
is precisely its resistance to argument; that is, its form as a circle is an essential
dimension of its conceptual presence in the world (Martinot 2010; 202)
The strength of criticism forced white debate participants to acknowledge the existence of
something called white privilege. This privilege, however, always existed elsewhere,

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everywhere but here; it was acknowledged in the abstract but any concrete manifestations were
denied. Whiteness was always located elsewhere, though its existence was not altogether denied.
This is done in differing but homologous ways by the two main types of white participants
liberals and leftists. All participants were aware of the illegitimacy of explicit colorblindness and
so they sought alternative discursive routes to account for whiteness. Ultimately, they circled
around to colorblind framings though they did so through sophisticated pathways. The key
function of colorblindness is to obfuscate the operation of racial power and to make it
unintelligible. This is typically done through simplistic presumptions that race no longer matters
and that specifically class-related mechanisms are the cause for any inequality that might exist.
While the white debaters did not deny the existence of racism in the wider social order they
believed that the debate activity was an exceptional space by virtue of the rationality that was
institutionalized within its structure. They acknowledged themselves as white but resisted a
critical confrontation with white privilege by caricaturing the concept as located elsewhere, in
the realm of the super-elite. Their presumed deviation from the ideal-type of privilege the ablebodied, upper-class, heterosexual white male disqualified them in their own minds from having
to expend intellectual and emotional energy to understand how whiteness operates in their lives.
They resisted identifications of themselves and their behaviors as white because this seemed to
be too totalizing and confining. Though they acknowledged that they are treated as white and
though most of them even referred to themselves as white, whiteness seemed to be an irrelevant
feature of their identities insofar as they could see themselves as people who do not harbor any
racial hostility, engage in explicitly racist actions or behavior, or oppose liberal measures toward
racial redress. Accordingly, black criticism could be framed as a waste of time, uncivil, overly
personal and in violation of norms necessary to maintain a civil public sphere.

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The white leftists were opposed to the liberal presuppositions of the debate activity, they
advocated a radical politics and rejected many of the presuppositions of liberal multiculturalism
to which the white liberals held. Still, however, they evacuated meaning from the concept of
whiteness and white privilege with the use of critical theoretical resources. They rejected
structural critique for its potential to be totalizing. They privileged performance and chosen
identity over structural position and ascription in their conception of power. They explicitly
rejected and were familiar with the danger of colorblind discourse but they arrived at colorblind
conclusions, primarily by invoking post-structuralist and queer critical theory to deny the
stability of identities, particularly those based on race. They demanded an individual accounting
of themselves and reserved the right to choose the extent to which they are white rather than
having whiteness imposed upon them by black students. They obscured the ability to identify
something like whiteness in a meaningful way and conceptualized efforts to do so as
authoritarian and essentialist. Both the liberals and leftists faltered when it came to accounting
for violence which the black debaters were demanding they do. They acknowledged that police,
and others, operate with a certain racial understanding that is not determined by individual
performance and self-stylization but they could not sustain meditation on this acknowledgement.
The political answer for them was to intensify their efforts to pursue theorization of and activism
toward a range of other concerns: LGBT and womens liberation, animal rights, anti-capitalism,
access for the disabled, etc. Doing so was understood to provide immunity from criticism. The
ethical dimensions of the critique appear to be ignorable. Concerning the possibility of a white
ethical discourse on race, Jared Sexton & Steve Martinot (2003) write,
It is, of course, possible to speak out against such white supremacist violence as immoral,
as illegal, even unconstitutional. But the impossibility of thinking through to the ethical

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dimension has a hidden structural effect. For those who are not racially profiled or
tortured when arrested, who are not tried and sentenced with the presumption of guilt,
who are not shot reaching for their identification, all of this is imminently ignorable.
Between the inability to see and the refusal to acknowledge, a mode of social
organisation is being cultivated for which the paradigm of policing is the cutting edge.
(172)
It was the very paradigm of policing that white debate participants approached but which
threatened the coherence of their discourse. They could not deny the fact of disparate police
attention and repression but neither could they think through and acknowledge the ethical
dimension of this paradigm.
The threats to the institutional legitimacy of the debate activity, which I describe in
chapter 5, are leading to a crisis management effort wherein debate participants are scurrying to
explain what is happening in debate, and to describe the critical effort to media outlets as an
anomaly. Attempts are being made to establish rules and codes that would undercut and sideline
radical black discourse. Those segments of the debate activity who were in support of the critical
effort, particularly when it was primarily focused on the more conservative segments of the
activity, abandoned the effort as it became increasingly directed toward leftist discourses.
However, the relationship of emancipatory critical discourses in the debate activity to the radical
black effort was not one of simple evasion. The radical black effort had an energizing effect on
feminist, anti-capitalist, animal rights and radical queer activism and scholarship. While white
leftists acknowledged being inspired by these efforts, they ultimately came to posit the issues of
concern to them (i.e. animals, ecology, etc.) as being more important than black liberation
struggle and would come to think that an over-emphasis on blackness was preventing a robust,

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intersectional, leftist movement. The coalition formed to represent this movement, however, was
devoid of black participation. White leftists ultimately sought to find a space in which their
political efforts and theoretical presuppositions were not criticized for the way in which they
reflected and reproduced racial domination.
From these spaces of immunity from radical black criticism, white leftists could work to
make the debate activity a true embodiment of what they understood to be the critical public
sphere; they could work to deconstruct sexism and patriarchy, homophobia and
heteronormativity, the domination of non-human life forms, and classism within debate.
However, this required that critical discourses around blackness be pushed to the wayside and
silenced. This indicates a parasitic relationship, as opposed to merely a relationship of
differential power or an evasion from critical race discourse. Debate tournaments were pressed to
more diligently work toward to supplying vegan meal options, expanding accessibility to
disabled bodies, deconstructing heteronormativity, and working to expand the inclusion of
women and LGBT students. Black students were on board with each of these initiatives but few
were on board with them. This general expansion of the strength of debates civil society is
threatened by radical black discourses which cannot be satiated by increased access or even the
alteration of norms, but which ultimately seek for an ever deeper questioning of the relationship
between the debate activity and the operation of power in general. This represents a discourse
ethics in the most thorough form. And, as Seyla Benhabib (1990) argues, upholding any concrete
institutions to the demands of discourse ethics would paralyze institutional life to the point of a
breakdown. There are certain limits at which a discourse ethics must be cut short in order to
maintain institutional integrity. The radicalization of black discourses in the debate activity,
sustaining ever deeper layers of criticism, appears to have pushed the debate activity to such a

200

moment of crisis. The paradox is that this crisis can only be solved by advocating for and seeking
the inclusion of black bodies in white institutional space. Steve Martinot argues,
Indeed, any gesture of inclusion by whites assumes white hegemony, since it is made
from within white corporate society. It relies on, rather than contests, the structure of
racialization from which that hegemony emerges. It is thus always already racially
corrupt, a form of reracialization, deigning inclusion in an uncontested structure built
through exclusion (Martinot 2010; 200)
The institutional response to the black intellectual insurgency in debate is to demand greater
black representation but to tighten controls on black discourse.
The question of how such a group, regardless of how seemingly deviant or unique,
negotiates these efforts is a matter of no small significance. Challenges to the normative order of
dominant institutions are ongoing. The question of how these demands will be responded to
looms large. Is it enough to simply advocate and work for increased diversity or must those with
a secure foothold within dominant institutions also work to guarantee the interrogation of
institutional norms forged in a crucible of exclusion? The field of sociology is certainly not
immune from such criticism. In 1973 Joyce Ladner proclaimed the death of white sociology.
Three decades later, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva & Tukufu Zuberi (2008) described the field of
sociology as dominated by white logic and white methods. What is unique about the debate
space is that such criticisms of white norms and practices that exist across the institutional field
were forced to the center of discussion such that they could not be ignored by any of the
participants within that field. What would it mean for such confrontation to take place within the
field of sociology? How would sociologists negotiate criticism of their methodology and
analysis, or indeed criticism of the entire field of sociology, as governed by white norms and

201

aesthetics? What would it take to nurture an environment in which such criticism is fostered and
valued, particularly on the part of those whose inclusion is being scurried after through myriad
diversity and multiculturalism initiatives? What would it take for such criticism to break the
bonds of ignoribility and be met with good-faith engagement? The only thing certain is that these
questions, like the riddle of the Sphinx, cannot be postponed forever.

202

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