[eDebate] Right, *Russia* is at the core of everything

[Brent Culpepper]

"How many debaters go on to graduate studies in area studies, poli sci, or
law, and how many pursue studies in racism?"

Not taken as an attack.  I would caution not to think these areas of study
don't have concentrations/classes/contributions to the study of race.  Often
those who go on to study political racism (voting rights, social movement,
representation) do so through one of these graduate/professional programs.





On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 3:49 PM, Tom Meagher <meagher.tom at gmail.com> wrote:


> I really should not be posting to eDebate but can't help myself.

>

> I debated in high school, and this is the sixth spring in a row I've

> considered returning to debate in some capacity. I miss it. I miss it

> painfully, as so many former debaters do. But each time I think about coming

> back, I actually have to do the research - talk to old friends, check out

> case lists, eDebate, et cetera, and see what debaters are talking about.

>

> So yeah, ridiculous though it may be, I've been following eDebate a little

> over the last month, watched CEDA finals, scoured case lists. I'll set as

> many of my opinions aside as possible to focus on the one issue that is

> abundantly clear:

>

> The debate community does a terrible job of researching racism.

>

> I understood why when I would make debates about issues related to racism

> in high school rounds in 2000-2002 the other team only had cards from law

> reviews. Lexis-nexis + a lot of lawyers and people on the legal track in the

> community. Same reason most of the cards I cut were from law reviews,

> especially since it was pretty hard for me to access research libraries at

> the time. But then I went to college, and discovered its limitless research

> potential. I spent the summer after high school excitedly using a research

> university's resources for the first time, and quickly discovered that I

> didn't care much about the treaties topic, especially when my research

> assignment was CO2 Good.

>

> And then TWO of the coaches on my top-ranked college squad told me to

> abandon my plans to make Ethnic Studies my major. And after 50 hours a week

> of CO2 Good for the next five weeks, I decided I'd rather not owe the squad

> anything more, and quit before going to a tournament. Debate was just not

> good for my academic pursuits, and as I stayed close to it as a dedicated

> high school coach for two years, this became even clearer. I'm not saying I

> could not have found a good setup in debate. There was a year in there where

> I'd convinced myself my life would have been pretty good if I'd reached out

> to Fullerton and gone there. But it's basically undeniable that I learned a

> hell of a lot more about racism, colonialism, and a myriad of other issues

> by being a hard-working student and independent researcher in an Ethnic

> Studies department. And I'll go toe-to-toe with any member of this community

> on the value of that education, so if you want to defend your legal studies,

> area studies, political science or postmodern literary or philosophical

> studies against me in front of any damn critic in this community, I'm game.

>

> I look at Calum's arguments for the Russia topic. Russia is foundational.

> Great argument. But can you even produce a decent argument that the history

> of European colonialism since 1455 is not at the core of US-Russia

> relations, and was not the engine of the entire Cold War? Perhaps you'd like

> to engage that debate, but have you actually researched it? Not to mention

> that global coloniality has dictated the course of agriculture, health care,

> education, arms control, genetic engineering, and, of course, reparations.

>

> I'm tempted to make these arguments here. But really, I'd much rather that

> the debaters following this topic discussion ask themselves whether they've

> done any substantial research on the topic of coloniality. And by

> substaintial research, I do not mean asking the scholars wedded to the

> disciplines that have emerged as technologies of coloniality what they think

> of racism. As long as debaters are almost entirely reading from legal

> studies, poli sci, area studies and IR, and Eurocentric philosophy

> (including the 'post-colonial studies' that largely divorces itself from

> centuries of decolonial scholarship and theory in order to appropriate

> Continental Philosophy), they are not going to be able to adequately address

> questions of racism. Period. If you want to take this as cause to research,

> go ahead. If you want to backchannel me for research suggestions, I pledge

> to go out of my way to assist and provide extensive bibliographies and

> support. But I'm not going to post a list of articles to serve as a

> strawperson (given the origins of the term, strawman really is a more

> accurate term, but that's a different though related discussion) for the

> right-wing vanguard. Feel free to try to change my mind.

>

> I am genuinely curious if Calum is willing to make the (correct) argument

> that the Soviet Union profoundly affected the US's racial politics and

> practices without also acknowledging that the US's racial politics and the

> period of global coloniality going back to 1455 are the only historical

> phenomenon that could possibly have caused the Cold War. Are the multitude

> of debaters who make 'capitalism' arguments unaware of a) the historical

> period that created the phenomenon of capitalism, b) the global division of

> labor that served as a prerequisite for it, and c) the intellectual history

> of discourse on capitalism? I think the answer to these question is that

> they are not by and large unaware, but they have been exposed primarily to

> paradigms that preclude an actual examination.

>

> Watching the final round of CEDA online was encouraging and disheartening.

> Please allow me to make an observation about the two main authors used in

> this debate as a comment on phenomena in the debate community. Please, try

> to see what I am saying as a response to the state of the debate community

> and not as a response to the individual teams or squads, who are both

> extremely talented and hardworking and had their reasons for choosing these

> arguments.

>

> Let me first address Towson use of Charles Mills' arguments from the Racial

> Contract. This is indeed a valuable piece of scholarship, and it has

> inspired much discussion. Let me relate the main argument against it that I

> am familiar with. Mills self-consciously adapted his arguments - which of

> course draws heavily from the lineage of decolonial theory and, especially

> for Mills, Caribbean thought - for Eurocentric audiences. Focusing on the

> concept of the Social Contract was a move related to legitimacy, and a close

> reading of the texts makes clear how his arguments are filtered and somewhat

> altered by his attempt to secure relevance to particular intellectual

> communities. Towson focuses on Mills' concept of the White Aesthetic, which

> for strategic purposes makes a great deal of sense. But "the White

> Aesthetic" is only a particular formulation of a concept that is widespread

> in decolonial theory, which is that the categories of thought, intellectual

> traditions, political insitutions, and even basic human ability to perceive

> the world with the senses are profoundly impacted by the completely

> unprecedented phenomenon of global coloniality (this phenomenon emerged in

> 1455 with the papal decree and Portugal's initial foray into African

> slavery, became the first truly global human phenomenon in 1492, and has

> shaped every element of history and nearly every element of human reality

> since). I take no issue with Towson's choice of Mills, and I haven't seen

> their previous debates so I can't offer commentary, but I must ask if it is

> significant that Towson's inclusion of a mainstreamed piece of decolonizing

> scholarship coincided with their ascension in results. Would they have been

> as successful if, for instance, they had based their arguments on a text

> that is denser and more uncompromising but ultimately more true to reality

> and the lived experiences of the underside of modernity? Could they have

> gotten anywhere with 'cards' from a text that was much more groundbreaking

> and influential than Mills' but that does not attempt to address itself to a

> contemporary U.S. white experience (I have in mind, as one example,

> Discourse on Colonialism by the recently deceased Aime Cesaire, which makes

> Mills' main points and many, many more in a much more concise fashion, but

> one surely deemed too out of touch and too easily dismissed for petty

> misunderstandings of meaning to resonate with the bulk of debate judges)?

> None of this, it should be clear, is a knock on Towson. I really

> congratulate you on actually accomplishing something that I chickened out on

> even trying multiple times.

>

> Now, let me bring up something that no one I've talked to seems to be aware

> of (maybe I'm talking to the wrong people). Kansas read alternative evidence

> for its 'love' argument from Sandoval 2000. This is Chela Sandoval, the head

> of UCSB's Chicana/o Studies program, from her hugely influential work

> Methodology of the Oppressed. This text offers a very thorough methodology,

> as the title promises (though I must note that her original title, Theory

> Uprising, better captures what the work is about but was rejected by the

> publisher). READ THIS BOOK. ABSOLUTELY. It is a masterpiece, and especially

> given debate's fascination with Continental Philosophy and her very tolerant

> treatment of it (which has, unfortunately, caused Sandoval's text to be

> misappropriated as a defense of Foucault, Barthes, et cetera when it is

> instead an appreciation of their relation to feminist and decolonial thought

> that offers an explicit challenge to them), it figures to resonate with many

> in the community and hopefully open them up to new areas of study.

>

> So you would expect me to be excited upon hearing this evidence. Except...

> uh, I heard the rest of the 1NC. And it is completely improbable and

> arguably close to impossible for a K alt to be taken more out of context.

> Kansas read a piece of eveidence from the FIRST TWO PAGES of the book, and

> their extension evidence was from Angela Davis' foreword. Did the person

> cutting the book just give up after getting those two cards? Because the

> entire book is about the VITAL NECESSITY of REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS and

> OPPOSITIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. The two main tenets of Towson's aff that Kansas

> was critiquing! Sandoval's entire book outlines what she means by "love,"

> and to synopsize (again, read the book, pretty please with the topping of

> your choice), love is a process, a decolonizing movement that actively

> requires a specific methodology (i.e., the "methodology of the oppressed")

> which itself cannot "solve" without AFFIRMING REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS AND

> OPPOSITIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. This is even in the paragraph that Kansas used

> in this debate (OK, oppositional consciousness is; for revolutionary

> politics, you could have looked at the table of contents or even just

> flipped forward to the concluding sentence of the book).

>

> Love, for Sandoval, does NOT mean, as Kansas stated, "everybody love

> everybody." Unfortunately, Towson was not familiar with that particular

> work, so they were not able to point out the obvious problem early in the

> debate. But then Kansas reads 1nr evidence from ANGELA DAVIS (which does not

> talk about 'love' but about Sandoval's Methodology of the Oppressed!) as an

> extension of their alt and then makes a multitude of nonsensical arguments

> that follow from this:

>

> "We are reading a multitude of authors, including African-American

> activists like Angela Davis which is a reason as to why your argument about

> white supremacy and epistemology of our arguments does not apply to us."

> (The obvious response being that grossly misinterpreting these authors and

> then using their identities as evidence that you are not subject to white

> supremacism is a move inextricable from white supremacism.)

>

> "What is the permutation? It is love and openness but with the infusion of

> revolutionary ethics in the 1ac ... it says that it is open but thrives on

> the rejection of the white aesthetic and potentially revolutionary partners.

> ... The perm is not open or loving." (When Sandoval's entire text is devoted

> to arguing that 'love' cannot exist without movements whose revolutionary

> ethics require that they explicitly reject particular 'aesthetics' and

> revolutionary partners! This is like if an aff running, I don't know, the

> Kyoto Protocol, faced a K that argued for the adoption of an environmental

> ethic using evidence only from someone who said that a) activists should

> lobby the US to ratify Kyoto and b) the US should ratify Kyoto, and then

> asserted throughout the 2nr that the perm could not be an environmental

> ethic because it included a policy.)

>

> "Revolutionary politics are something that she [Angela Davis] turned away

> from because they are not effective, because they were so rejective."

> (Riiiiiiiiight. And they said this after Towson called BS.)

>

> No knock on Kansas specifically. I understand how hard it can be to do this

> research, and I don't really blame anyone for seeing the text and being

> confused and just taking what could be found from its intro. I apologize in

> advance for bringing this up and calling you out, because I have much

> respect for all the debaters and coaches, and fondly remember Scott Harris

> being of amazing help to me at summer camp in 2000. Kansas got crossed up,

> and that happens. But I want to know: on an 11 person panel of major figures

> in debate, not one was able to identify that a major text in ethnic and

> gender studies which has been used at least by Fullerton was taken way, way,

> way out of context? And that none of the debaters I asked about this knew

> what the hell I was talking about? In a hugely publicized round? It's not a

> scandal that a team was able to win four ballots in the national

> championship from judges who voted for their alt card because it avoided

> criticisms that are directly antithetical to the alternative? Is anyone

> willing to take this as evidence that the debate community needs to

> massively upgrade the level of its research on racism?

>

> Andy Ellis and others have called for a topic that will put research on

> racism at the forefront, because debaters desperately need to improve their

> understanding and research of these issues. Calum Matheson makes the same

> argument for Russia. Put aside ground, mechanisms, etc., for a moment to

> consider whether the evidence is stronger for Andy's claim or Calum's. Do

> debaters, by and large, have a better basic understanding of Russia or

> coloniality? And even if Calum is ahead, if I win my 'coloniality influences

> everything about US-Russia relations' argument, shouldn't a research focus

> on coloniality come first?

>

> What's more is that the reparations topic actually does encourage new and

> better research in these areas than any previous topic. The civil rights

> topic, for instance, could be debated with a very high reliance on the legal

> literature, and was limited to a very small portion of the scope of racism

> and coloniality. Reparations actually requires a pretty thorough examination

> of a lot of things. And what's more, it requires a mechanism that has a very

> active solvency debate in concert with a limitless number of CP's with

> obvious grounding in the literature. If you do not think that there is good

> negative ground on a reparations topic, it is straight up because you are

> not familiar with enough relevant research. (I hope it is clear by now that

> the scope of relevant research is not the policy literature on reparations.)

> If you told me I had to go neg every round on the topic, I would be just

> fine, and you will not find people in the community who think that the

> oppressions the topic would address are more influential than I do.

>

> Please do not take this as an attack on anybody personally. I just wanted

> to present some of the evidence that this community has a very different

> depth and distribution of knowledge on race studies than it does for the

> main disciplines it draws upon, and even those who profess some level of

> expertise are often just very familiar with some limited and often

> specific-to-another-discipline scope. How many debaters go on to graduate

> studies in area studies, poli sci, or law, and how many pursue studies in

> racism? If you see that you may contribute to this disparity, are you okay

> with that because you think the other areas are more important? If so, is

> that a result of research or assumption/conditioning? And to the directors

> and coaches of the community: if, for pedagogical reasons, you are opposed

> to a race-focused topic, are you also incorporating or willing to

> incorporate a researched curriculum on race/coloniality in your debate

> program?

>

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