ac—Fugitivity = In Between

Suggesting that performance is “bad for debate” only reinforces neutrality and causes a vicious cycle of violence

Finally, situation or context is the third aspect of genre and our attempts to find meaning in genre. The context embraces content and form and “enable[s] interpretation of the action resulting from their fusion” (ibid). What is the context that enables interpretation of critical debate? I think that is a contested question. Many members of the traditional debate community find critical debate “bad for debate.” Performance debate proponents might say that they are directly challenging traditional debate conventions that have become mechanistic and are inherently racist, and that debate must find new ways of becoming less exclusive and more relevant. Specifically, many debate community members such as Preston (a coach and author) suggest that traditional debate practices and pedagogy result in difficulty recruiting minority debaters. He cites Hill as having “noted that learning and communication styles of African Americans may differ from the learning and communication norms of the policy debating community” (Preston, Jr., 2006, p. 162). A call to solve this problem becomes one of the foundations of performance debate practice. Through content and form, performance debaters call for and demonstrate a practice that is inclusive and challenges the norms of the community. Reid-Brinkley quotes a Louisville debater in-round: The university of Louisville enacts a full withdrawal from the traditional norms and procedures of this debate activity. Because this institution, like every other institution in society, has also grown from the roots of racism. Seemingly neutral practices and policies have exclusionary effects on different groups for different reasons. These practices have a long and perpetuating history. (Reid-Brinkley, 2008, p. 114) Reid-Brinkley argues that many performance debate tactics are rhetorical strategies “designed to disrupt the normativity of traditional debate practices.... genre violation [is] a means of using style and performance to combat the social ideologies that result in unequal power relations across race, gender, and class within the national policy debate community” (pp. 78-79). Reid-Brinkley identifies four types of genre violations in critical debate: sonic and spatial disruption, violations of strategic norms, violations of expectations regarding the resolution, and violations of the policymaker debate persona. We can see here the interplay of content, form and context in her argument. The disruptive aural presence of rap music in a debate round, for example, is not coincidental to a substantive message critiquing Eurocentric epistemology and white-normed debate practices, for example. I will discuss such genre violations much more in Chapter 5, as I explain performance debaters’ attempts to do debate rather than just talking about it [social change].

A2 Self-Serving

Not sure how you argue this with a straight face – is it that shocking that someone would finally attempt to develop a framework to serve the interests of black students and black scholarship which were erased for this activity’s entire philosophical generation?

A2 What’d *We* Do?

Commission is a crime and your ballot matters – reject their episteme – it only reifies Eurocentric ways of knowing the world – only our approach can produce exchange for those left outside this schema

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 activity’s 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 83 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 that’s 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.