Part One is Framing
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best recognizes and identifies a solution to oppressive structures. The Debate space is key to analyze questions of oppression
Reid-Brinkley, ’08 (Dr. Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, professor at the University of Georgia focusing on racial studies, argument and performance, and black feminist theory, she is also the director of debate, “The Harsh Realities of" acting Black": How African-American Policy Debaters Negotiate Representation Through Racial Performance and Style”, https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/reid-brinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf SP
The attempts at educational reform are not limited to institutional actors such as the local, state, and federal governments. Non-profit organizations dedicated to alleviating the black/white achievement gap have also proliferated. One such organization, the Urban Debate League, claims that “Urban Debate Leagues have proven to increase literacy scores by 25%, to improve grade-point averages by 8 to 10%, to achieve high school graduation rates of nearly 100%, and to produce college matriculation rates of 71 to 91%.” The UDL program is housed in over fourteen American cities and targets inner city youths of color to increase their access to debate training. Such training of students defined as “at risk” is designed to offset the negative statistics associated with black educational achievement. The program has been fairly successful and has received wide scale media attention. The success of the program has also generated renewed interest amongst college debate programs in increasing direct efforts at recruitment of racial and ethnic minorities. The UDL program creates a substantial pool of racial minorities with debate training coming out of high school, that college debate directors may tap to diversify their own teams. The debate community serves as a microcosm of the broader educational space within which racial ideologies are operating. It is a space in which academic achievement is performed according to the intelligibility of one’s race, gender, class, and sexuality. As policy debate is intellectually rigorous and has historically been closed to those marked by social difference, it offers a unique opportunity to engage the impact of desegregation and diversification of American education. How are black students integrated into a competitive educational community from which they have traditionally been excluded? How are they represented in public and media discourse about their participation, and how do they rhetorically respond to such representations? If racial ideology is perpetuated within discourse through the stereotype, then mapping the intelligibility of the stereotype within public discourse and the attempts to resist such intelligibility is a critical tool in the battle to end racial domination.

Debate should deal with the real-world consequences of oppression through tangible policy options
Curry 14, Tommy, The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century SP
Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory  “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, there is a conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. As Mills states: “What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual,” so what we are seeking to resolve on the basis of “thought” is in fact incomplete, incorrect, or ultimately irrelevant to the actual problems which our “theories” seek to address. Our attempts to situate social disparity cannot simply appeal to the ontologization of social phenomenon—meaning we cannot suggest that the various complexities of social problems (which are constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are totalizable by any one set of theories within an ideological frame be it our most cherished notions of Afro-pessimism, feminism, Marxism, or the like. At best, theoretical endorsements make us aware of sets of actions to address ever developing problems in our empirical world, but even this awareness does not command us to only do X, but rather do X and the other ideas which compliment the material conditions addressed by the action X. As a whole, debate (policy and LD) neglects the need to do X in order to remedy our cast-away-ness among our ideological tendencies and politics. How then do we pull ourselves from this seeming ir-recoverability of thought in general and in our endorsement of socially actualizable values like that of the living wage? It is my position that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking about the need for a living wage was a unique, and remains an underappreciated, resource in our attempts to impose value reorientation (be it through critique or normative gestures) upon the actual world. In other words, King aims to we must reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the oppressed worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters
The standard is minimizing oppression.
a) Social inclusion is a rational precondition to debate itself. Debate necessitates discussions between people with distinctive views. If this was not the case, then only the affirmative would come up here and just speak the truth. So, just by speaking, the negative concedes the AC Framing.
b) Having a debate before recognizing the importance of structural violence is moot because structural violence causes us to divide others into categories that are worthy and unworthy of our values. 

Advocacy Text
Resolved: Public Colleges and Universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech.

Part Two is Counter-Speech
Hate groups are growing at their highest rates ever—current restrictive speech codes prove ineffective. Heller 16
Heller 12/6 (Dave, staff @ NewsWorks, “Examining the rise in hate groups”, http:www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/newsworks-tonight/99466-examining-the-rise-in-hate-groups)
More than 900 hate groups are operating around the U.S., including many around our region. While numbers went down slightly earlier in the decade, they have rebounded, said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama."We're still looking at counts that are around 900, which is vastly higher then what we saw during the 1990s," he said. While a number of factors may account for the increase, politics clearly seems to be a motivating factor, Potok said, citing the rise in Ku Klux Klan groups. "Our analysis of that is that came largely as a result of the backlash against the Confederate battle flag" that followed the mass shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015, he said. In this region, neo-Nazi groups are gaining strength. "Over the last few years, we have seen an awful lot of skinheads, neo-Nazis, neo-Nazi skinheads," Potok said. "New Jersey, in particular, had a very real problem for quite a while." During a talk with NewsWorks Tonight host Dave Heller, Potok also called out Donald Trump's campaign and the media for not doing enough to push back against hate.
They will be emboldened with the new administration. Trump just announced that he will focus soley on Muslim terrorists
Pyke 17 [Deputy Economic Policy Editor, ThinkProgress. Poverty, criminal-justice profiteering, police violence, & robber barons.] February 3, 2017 Date Accessed: Febraury 4, 2017]
Online neo-Nazi and white supremacist forums have been unmistakably jubilant lately, as web chatter moved from celebrating President Donald Trump’s electoral victory to celebrating individual cabinet appointments and policy proposals. On Thursday, internet racists celebrated another perceived victory: Reports that President Trump will soon remove white nationalist groups from a federal effort to study and neutralize extremist radicalization, and rebrand the program to focus solely on groups associating themselves with Islam. “Yes, this is real life. Our memes are all real life. Donald Trump is setting us free.” The Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program partners government agencies with community organizations in hopes of preventing people from being radicalized into various types of terror and hate groups. Its primary focus has always been in Muslim communities, but the Obama administration designed it to also encompass the American far-right groups that propagandize to people like Dylann Roof.News of Trump’s plan to reverse that symbolic recognition of right-wing threats prompted a wave of celebration in white nationalist circles. “Donald Trump wants to remove us from undue federal scrutiny by removing ‘white supremacists’ from the definition of ‘extremism,’” the founder and editor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer (which takes its name from a Nazi propaganda publication) wrote in a post on the site. “Yes, this is real life. Our memes are all real life. Donald Trump is setting us free.” This interpretation overstates the scope of Reuter’s report somewhat. The meme-filled Daily Stormer post alleges that changing the CVE program and renaming it to focus solely on “Islamic extremism,” as Trump puts it, would also extend to to calling off FBI scrutiny and taking white supremacists and neo-Nazis off of extremist databases. That would actually require separate action from Trump. But in Trump’s move to take even some measure of scrutiny off of far-right extremism, The Daily Stormer sees a direct parroting of their own writing and a reward for the far-right’s role in getting Trump elected. “It’s fair to say that if the Trump team is not listening to us directly (I assume they are), they are thinking along very similar lines. We helped get Trump get [sic] elected, and the fact of the matter is, without Alt-Right meme magick, it simply wouldn’t have happened,” the post continues. “This is absolutely a signal of favor to us.” Another neo-Nazi site that associates itself with the so-called “alt-right,” Infostormer, celebrated the news and took it as a sign of support. “We may truly have underestimated President Trump’s covert support of our Cause (at least in some form), but after this proposal, I am fully ready to offer myself in service of this glorious regime” the post reads. This celebratory coverage of the news spread widely through white nationalist forums and chat rooms. Commenters at Stormfront rejoiced. “Amazing my government no longer targets me as an enemy,” wrote one. “It’s now officially understood at the the highest levels that we are soooo much better than the kidnapper terrorist pedophile left,” wrote another. On the messaging service Gab, which has become a favorite of white nationalists after Twitter started closing some high-profile accounts for hate speech, users gleefully posted links to the Infowars coverage of the news, mainstream news coverage, and the Daily Stormer article, often tagging the posts #MAGA and editorializing their celebration of the news. Trump’s presidency has been met with widespread celebration by white supremacist groups, many of which recognized Trump’s “America first” rhetoric as their own. Civil liberties organizations and libertarian observers have long criticized the CVE program as a counterproductive whitewash of government surveillance of Muslim communities. A former official with the program told CNN that in practice, the controversial program has always focused on Muslim communities, and thus that Trump’s most substantial proposed change is the renaming of the program. According to Reuters, Trump would rechristen it the “Countering Islamic Extremism” or the “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism” program. Much of the white supremacist celebration seems to revolve around the proposed name change alone. Only one organization has thus far won a CVE grant for work focused on hate group de-radicalization. Life After Hate, founded in 2009 and run by a small staff of men and women who were once part of skinhead, Aryan, and other violent extremist organizations, has yet to receive the grant it was awarded last summer. Life After Hate co-founder Christian Picciolini called Trump’s reported plan “extremely troubling,” citing the signal it sends to hate groups. “It sends a message that white extremism does not exist, or is not a priority in our country, when in fact it is a statistically larger and more present terror threat than any by foreign or other domestic actors,” LAH’s Christian Picciolini told ThinkProgress. “We have hundreds of thousands of homegrown sovereign citizens and militia members with ties to white nationalism training in paramilitary camps across the U.S. and standing armed in front of mosques to intimidate marginalized Americans.” “It sends a message that white extremism does not exist.” With the proposed change, Picciolini worries Trump could even end up increasing the likehood of violence within our borders if he does alter the program to ignore white supremacists, militia groups, and so-called “sovereign citizens.” Since 9/11, attacks from right-wing organizations have killed far more Americans than groups claiming to be Islamic, according to data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The move “could bolster and legitimize violent white extremism while also potentially serving to radicalize disaffected fringe elements within Muslim communities,” he said. “This decision, if true, would severely harm or destroy any community-led efforts to helping people disengage from violent extremism and potentially stop future terrorist acts.”
Free speech neutralizes hate groups and speech restrictions—the “real discussion” we need to have about race doesn’t happen because we censor those that we disagree with. Malinowski 16
Malinowski 11/17/16 (Jacob, staff @ The Politic.org, ““White Pride Online”: The New Face of America’s Racism, thepolitic.org/white-pride-online-the-new-face-of-americas-racism/)
To appeal to ordinary citizens, the alt-right refrains from using racial slurs and appeal to people’s logic instead of their emotions. “Race realism,” for example, argues that races are biologically different. The concept invokes themes seen in Social Darwinism emphasizing white superiority. Such rhetoric couches historically offensive language under a modern guise. And while misleading, race realism appeals to some Americans because it seems to normalize their racism and make it acceptable. Some members of the alt-right, however, believe the public restricts their speech. “If I were a junior faculty at Yale, and I said some of the things publicly that I said to you, I would be fired,” said Jared Taylor ‘73, founder and editor of American Renaissance, a race realism publication that advocates white dominance. While some critics have called him a “crudely white supremacist,” Taylor, a Timothy Dwight College alum, says this name-calling underscores the intolerance of American culture. “Everyone should speak as candidly as possible. However, we live in a society that is far from being free,” Taylor explained to The Politic. “People can lose their jobs simply because they express a certain point of view.” Taylor highlights a discussion of free speech and race relations—one that Yale students and others around the country are having today. It’s difficult to hear every voice while maintaining a respectful and safe environment. So can Americans discuss race fairly? “Leftist groups repress dissent on campus, but that’s been going on for years because it’s enabled by the university administrators,” said Peter Brimelow, author and founder of VDARE, in an interview with The Politic. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has labeled Brimelow’s anti-immigration publication VDARE a “hate website.” “It’s now essentially impossible to write frankly about immigration, let alone race, and remain in the mainstream media,” said Brimelow. “The simplest thing is to assume you live in an occupied country and speak only to people you trust.” Over the past few years many Americans have begun to discuss their ideas online, and hateful comments have multiplied in those environments. “Blacks are dangerous by nature and the last thing you want is a black in your neighborhood,” commented “awakenedrealist” on Stormfront. On an American Renaissance, article about illegal immigration, one user named “DP” commented, “I am so sick of these 3rd worlders from who knows where destroying our country.” Since most comments are anonymous, anti-hate groups sometimes struggle to identify the person behind the computer screen. They have instead published personal information – home addresses and private emails – of more public individuals like Taylor and Brimelow. “Our goal is to not merely chronicle these groups, but to destroy them. We say this openly, not as a secret,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow at SPLC Intelligence Project, in an interview with The Politic. Potok, who once reported on the Oklahoma City Bombing, says SPLC primarily fights hate groups through the press. “We frequently publish things that are very embarrassing and harmful to them,” said Potok, “and if we can’t destroy them this way, we marginalize them politically.” Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of One People’s Project (OPP), agrees. Its mission aligns with those of other anti-hate groups, but OPP takes a more direct approach; it has interfered with various rallies and conferences. Jenkins recently helped cancel one of Taylor’s American Renaissance conferences in Washington D.C. In an interview with The Politic, Jenkins elaborated on OPP’s methods. “We have basically been able to neutralize a number of well-known hate groups. Because [they] we were able to take the [white nationalist] conferences out of Washington D.C., it neutralized them somewhat,” explained Jenkins. But Jenkins is also open to acceptance. “It’s like a ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’ policy with us,” he said. Jenkins believes people are not born to hate. Rather, they come from abusive homes and hateful parents. “You have individuals who are trying to make their lives worth a damn. It’s only a matter of who got to them first: The more positive elements or the more negative ones,” Jenkins remarked. Andy Friedland, assistant regional director for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has a plan to fight white supremacy. “We can have an open conversation with people where we don’t punish, but instead work together with them,” he said to The Politic. “When we see something we disagree with, we speak up and we speak up loudly,” said Friedland. Groups like the ADL, Stormfront, and OPP, however polarized they may seem, agree on the importance of free speech. “I probably value the First Amendment more than almost anyone. I would grant those privileges to everyone,” said Taylor. Friedland and the ADL agree. “We don’t believe in suppressing other people’s right to speech. We understand it’s one of the most important parts of the U.S. Constitution,” he said. While some might argue that alt-right speech is hate speech, Potok disagrees. “To call something hate speech is to describe speech you don’t like,” he said. His focus is not hate speech but what he labels “bogus speech.” “The most important thing is to show that their propaganda is absolutely false,” explained Potok. “Surprise, surprise, the Holocaust actually happened. It’s an absolute falsehood that gay men molest children at a higher rate than straight men, and it’s utter hogwash that Muslims have a secret plan to implement Sharia law.” But Jared Taylor says his allies are not the ones who restate falsehoods. He claims instead that many liberals use faulty logic to discuss failed race relations and “fall back on all these ad hoc explanations that blame white people.” And because his enemies restrict his right to speech, he has no platform to properly defend himself. “My view of the world explains reality. Their view doesn’t,” asserted Taylor. It’s possible that voices are stifled or silenced — even at Yale. “I think younger people are in an impossible position,” said Brimelow. And while young adults do write for his website, “all of VDARE.com’s younger writers are pseudonymous,” Brimelow continued. Taylor agrees and said he is frustrated, but “[wishes] for a United States in which there is a genuine tolerance of dissent.” Even Jenkins, who cancelled one of Taylor’s conferences, agrees with him on this point. “The racism discussion has been ignored,” he explained. It’s possible that when an entire viewpoint is crushed, it removes the chance to fully debate the differences in opinion. And differences are important to Jenkins. “Yes, we’re going to come from different backgrounds. My vision of a perfect society is that we learn from them, that we appreciate them, that we don’t disparage you, and that we don’t deny you your freedoms,” Jenkins stated. Potok says demographic change has made discussions on race more difficult. “In 2043, we will be in a position [in the US] where no one race dominates,” Potok explained, which could complicate how diversity is viewed in America. It is not perfect, he said, and “we’ll never live in a world without hate.” But with open minds, American students might soon lead a new national conversation on the role of race in society
Counter-speech works to combat hate speech—empirically verified. Davidson ‘16
The Freedom of Speech in Public Forums on College Campuses: A Single-Site Case Study on Pushing the Boundaries of the Freedom of Speech A Senior Project presented to The Faculty of the Journalism Department California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor of Science in Journalism By Alexander Davidson June 2016
All experts agreed that negative speech creates awareness that surrounds a certain topic. They all noted that “good speech” surfaces to combat the “bad speech.” Humphrey notes that, “We have seen a lot of students stand up and say that this isn’t welcome in this community. It galvanized a movement that said we need to do better” (Appendix A). Den Otter notes something very similar, stating that, “I think any time that there’s some kind of racist incident on campus, people start talking about it. They’[a]re made more aware of it” (Appendix B). And Loving advocates for people to not just stand idly while hate speech is taking place around them, that, “If racial slurs were met with more conversation, evil councils being remedied by good councils, then how long would that atmosphere remain on campus?” (Appendix C). The research shows that these suggestions and statements are true, if history is used as an indicator. Various incidents that have occurred, such as the California Polytechnic State University College Republicans Free Speech Wall, the Crops House Incident and the Charlie Hebdo Attacks have created movements against the negative speech that took place. Many times when “bad speech” shows its face, there are people who use “good speech” to combat the issue. Recommendations for Practice Following completion of the study, substantial data has been collected and analyzed on the topic of freedom of speech and public forums on college campuses. Given the information present, it is vital to highlight the most important content and present it for further practice for freedom of speech and public forums on college campuses.
Counter-speech can solve oppressive beliefs while mustering college campuses to truly deal with violence instead of just shutting people up—empirically proven 
Calleros 95 (Charles, Winter, Professor of Law, Arizona State University, 27 Ariz. St. L.J. 1249, “PATERNALISM, COUNTERSPEECH, AND CAMPUS HATE-SPEECH CODES: A REPLY TO DELGADO AND YUN”) SP
Delgado and Yun summarize the support for the counterspeech argument by paraphrasing Nat Hentoff: "[A]ntiracism rules teach black people to depend on whites for protection, while talking back clears the air, emphasizes self-reliance, and strengthens one's self-image as an active agent in charge of one's own destiny."50 Delgado and Yun also cite to those who believe that counterspeech may help educate the racist speaker by addressing 51the ignorance and fear that lies behind hostile racial stereotyping. But they reject this speech-protective argument, stating that "it is offered blandly, virtually as an article of faith" by those "in a position of power" who "rarely offer empirical proof of their claims. _{52 The authors argue that talking back in a close confrontation could be physically dangerous, is unlikely to persuade the racist speaker to reform his views, and is impossible "when racist remarks are delivered in a cowardly fashion, by means of graffiti scrawled on a campus wall late at night or on a poster placed outside of a black student's dormitory door." 53 They also complain that "[e]ven when successful, talking back is a burden" that minority undergraduates 54 should not be forced to assume. In rejecting the counterspeech argument, however, Delgado and Yun cast the argument in its weakest possible form, creating an easy target for relatively summary dismissal. When the strategies and experiential basis for successful counterspeech are fairly stated, its value is more easily recognized. First, no responsible free speech advocate argues that a target of hate speech should directly talk back to a racist speaker in circumstances that quickly could lead to a physical altercation. If one or more hateful speakers closely confronts a member of a minority group with racial epithets or other hostile remarks in circumstances that lead the target of the speech to reasonably fear for her safety, in most circumstances she should seek assistance from campus police or other administrators before "talking back." Even staunch proponents of free speech agree that such threatening speech and conduct is subject to regulation and justifies more than a purely educative response. The same would be true of Delgado's and Yun's other examples of speech conveyed in a manner that defaces another's property or invades the privacy of another's residence. 56 When offensive or hateful speech is not threatening, damaging, or impermissibly invasive and therefore may constitute protected speech, 57 education and counterspeech often will be an appropriate response. However, proponents of free speech do not contemplate that counterspeech always, or even normally, will be in the form of an immediate exchange of views between the hateful speaker and his target. Nor do they contemplate that the target should bear the full burden of the response. Instead, effective counterspeech often takes the form of letters, discussions, or demonstrations joined in by many persons and aimed at the entire campus population or a community within it. Typically, it is designed to expose the moral bankruptcy of the hateful ideas, to demonstrate the strength of opinion and numbers of those who deplore the hateful speech, and to spur members of the campus community to take voluntary, constructive action to combat hate and to remedy its ill effects. 58 Above all, it can serve to define and underscore the community of support enjoyed by the targets of the hateful speech, faith in which may have been shaken by the hateful speech. Moreover, having triggered such a reaction with their own voices, the targets of the hateful speech may well feel a sense of empowerment to compensate for the undeniable pain of the speech. 59 One may be tempted to join Delgado and Yun in characterizing such a scenario as one "offered blandly, virtually as an article of faith" and without experiential support. 6° However, campus communities that have creatively used this approach can attest to the surprising power of counterspeech. Examples of counterspeech to hateful racist and homophobic speech at Arizona State and Stanford Universities are especially illustrative.61 In an incident that attracted national attention, the campus community at Arizona State University ("A.S.U.") constructively and constitutionally responded to a racist poster displayed on the outside of the speaker's dormitory door in February 1991. Entitled "WORK APPLICATION," it contained a number of ostensibly employment-related questions that advanced hostile and demeaning racial stereotypes of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. Carla Washington, one of a group of African- American women who found the poster, used her own speech to persuade a resident of the offending room voluntarily to take the poster down and allow her to photocopy it. After sending a copy of the poster to the campus newspaper along with an opinion letter deploring its racist stereotypes, she demanded action from the director of her residence hall. The director organized an immediate meeting of the dormitory residents to discuss the issues. In this meeting, I explained why the poster was protected by the First Amendment, and the women who found the poster eloquently described their pain and fears. One of the women, Nichet Smith, voiced her fear that all nonminorities on campus shared the hostile stereotypes expressed in the poster. Dozens of residents expressed their support and gave assurances that they did not share the hostile stereotypes, but they conceded that even the most tolerant among them knew little about the cultures of others and would 62 benefit greatly from multicultural education.
The need for multicultural education to combat intercultural ignorance and stereotyping became the theme of a press conference and public rally organized by the student African-American Coalition leader, Rossie Turman, who opted for highly visible counterspeech despite demands from some students and staff to discipline the owner of the offending poster. The result was a series of opinion letters in the campus newspaper discussing the problem of racism, numerous workshops on race relations and free speech, and overwhelming approval in the Faculty Senate of a measure to add a course on American cultural diversity to the undergraduate breadth 63 requirement.
The four women who initially confronted the racist poster were empowered by the meeting at the dormitory residence and later received awards from the local chapter of the NAACP for their activism.64 Rossie Turman was rewarded for his leadership skills two years later by becoming the first African-American elected President of Associated Students of A.S.U.,65 a student body that numbered approximately 40,000 students, only 66 2.3 percent of them African-American. Although Delgado and Yun are quite right that the African-American students should never have been burdened with the need to respond to such hateful speech, Hentoff is correct that the responses just described helped them develop a sense of self-reliance and constructive activism. Moreover, the students' counterspeech inspired a community response that lightened the students' burden and provided them with a sense of community support and empowerment. Indeed, the students received assistance from faculty and administrators, who helped organize meetings, wrote opinion letters, spoke before the Faculty Senate, or joined the students in issuing public statements at the press conference and public rally.67 Perhaps most important, campus administrators wisely refrained from disciplining the owners of the poster, thus directing public attention to the issue of racism and ensuring broad community support in denouncing the racist poster. Many members of the campus and surrounding communities might have leapt to the racist speaker's defense had the state attempted to discipline the speaker and thus had created a First Amendment issue. Instead, they remained united with the offended students because the glare of the public spotlight remained sharply focused on the racist incident without the distraction of cries of state censorship. Although the counterspeech was not aimed primarily at influencing the hearts and minds of the residents of the offending dormitory room, its vigor in fact caught the residents by surprise. 68 It prompted at least three of them to apologize publicly and to display curiosity about a civil rights movement that they were too young to have witnessed first hand. 69 This effective use of education and counterspeech is not an isolated instance at A.S.U., but has been repeated on several occasions, albeit on smaller scales.7°One year after the counterspeech at A.S.U., Stanford University responded similarly to homophobic speech. In that case, a first-year law student sought to attract disciplinary proceedings and thus gain First Amendment martyrdom by shouting hateful homophobic statements about a dormitory staff member. The dean of students stated that the speaker was not subject to discipline under Stanford's code of conduct but called on the university community to speak out on the issue, triggering an avalanche of counterspeech. Students, staff, faculty, and administrators expressed their opinions in letters to the campus newspaper, in comments on a poster board at the law school, in a published petition signed by 400 members of the law school community disassociating the law school from the speaker's epithets, and in a letter written by several law students reporting the incident to a prospective employer of the offending student.71 The purveyor of hate speech indeed had made a point about the power of speech, just not the one he had intended. He had welcomed disciplinary sanctions as a form of empowerment, but the Stanford community was alert enough to catch his verbal hardball and throw it back with ten times the force. Thus, the argument that counterspeech is preferable to state suppression of offensive speech is stronger and more fully supported by experience than is conceded by Delgado and Yun. In both of the cases described above, the targets of hateful speech were supported by a community united against bigotry. The community avoided splitting into factions because the universities eliminated the issue of censorship by quickly announcing that the hateful speakers were protected from disciplinary retaliation. Indeed, the counterspeech against the bigotry was so powerful in each case that it underscored the need for top administrators to develop standards for, and some limitations on, their participation in such partisan speech. 72 Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out against intolerance when it is isolated as an issue rather than diluted in muddied waters along with concerns of censorship. Just as the nonviolent demonstrations of Martin Luther King, Jr., depended partly for their success on the consciences of the national and international audiences monitoring the fire hoses and attack dogs on their television sets and in the print media,73 the empowerment of the targets of hateful speech rests partly in the hands of members of the campus community who sympathize with them. One can hope that the counterspeech and educational measures used with success at A.S.U. and Stanford stand a good chance of preserving an atmosphere of civility in intellectual inquiry at any campus community in which compassionate, open minds predominate. On the other hand, counterspeech by the targets of hate speech could be less empowering on a campus in which the majority of students, faculty, and staff approve of hostile epithets directed toward members of minority groups. One hopes that such campuses are exceedingly rare; although hostile racial stereotyping among college students in the United States increased during the last decade, those students who harbored significant hostilities (as contrasted with more pervasive but less openly hostile, subconscious racism) still represented a modest fraction of all students.74 Moreover, even in a pervasively hostile atmosphere, counterspeech might still be more effective than broad restrictions on speech. First, aside from the constitutional constraints of the First Amendment, such a heartless campus community would be exceedingly unlikely to adopt strong policies prohibiting hateful speech. Instead, the campus likely would maintain minimum policies necessary to avoid legal action enforcing guarantees of equal educational opportunities under the Fourteenth Amendment 75 or federal antidiscrimination statutes such as Title V176 or Title IX. 77 Second, counterspeech even from a minority of members of the campus community might be effective to gradually build support by winning converts from those straddling the fence or from broader regional or national audiences. Such counterspeech might be particularly effective if coupled with threats from diverse faculty, staff, and students to leave the university for more hospitable environments; even a campus with high levels of hostility likely would feel 78 pressures to maintain its status as a minimally integrated institution.
The A.S.U. and Stanford examples illustrating the efficacy of counterspeech also lend support to the argument that "[f]ree speech has been minorities' best friend ...[as] a principal instrument of social reform."79 In both cases, demonstrations, opinion letters, and other forms of counterspeech dramatically defined the predominant atmosphere on each campus as one that demanded respect and freedom from bigotry for all members of the community; it is doubtful that passage of a speech-restrictive policy could have sent a similar message of consensus any more strongly. Moreover, in the A.S.U. case, the reasoned counterspeech, coupled with the decision to refrain from disciplining the hateful speaker, persuaded the Faculty Senate to pass a multicultural education proposal whose chances for passage were seriously in doubt in the previous weeks and months.8 The racist poster at A.S.U. may have been a blessing in disguise, albeit an initially painful one, because it sparked counterspeech and community action that strengthened the campus support for diversity.
The alt, censorship, has been used by oppressors far more than the oppressed
Strossen, N.  (1990) [Professor of Law, New York Law School], “Regulating Racist Speech on Campus: A Modest Proposal?” Duke Law Journal, 1990.
The civil libertarian and judicial defense of racist speech also is based on the knowledge that censors have stifled the voices of oppressed persons and groups far more often than those of their oppressors.422 Censorship traditionally has been the tool of people who seek to subordinate minorities, not those who seek to liberate them. As Professor Kalven has shown, the civil rights movement of the 1960s depended upon free speech principles.423 These principles allowed protesters to carry their messages to audiences who found such messages highly offensive and threatening to their most deeply cherished views of themselves and their way of life. Equating civil rights activists with Communists, subversives, and criminals, government officials mounted inquisitions against the NAACP, seeking compulsory disclosure of its membership lists and endangering the members’ jobs and lives.424 Only strong principles of free speech and association could-and did-protect the drive for desegregation.425 Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his historic letter from a Birmingham jail,426 but the Birmingham parade ordinance that King and other demonstrators had violated eventually was declared an unconstitutional invasion of their free speech rights.427 Moreover, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which these demonstrators championed, did become law.}

Censorship promotes exclusion.
Rosenberg, D. (1991). Racist Speech the first Amendment and Public Universities: Taking a Stand on Neutrality. Cornell Law Review.
Certainly, the presence of one-sided racist speech harms the goal of inclusion. But the underlying philosophy that compels the university to allow racist speech is one whose primary values are tolerance and inclusion. While the immediate message the outsider student receives is one of hate, the overall message is one in which he should take comfort: that he too has the opportunity to think and to say whatever he wants with absolutely no fear of official condemnation. The university’s value of inclusion is truly all-encompassing. Matsuda’s proposal, although it means to protect racism’s victims, is actually one of exclusion. Contrary to Matsuda’s assertion, allowing racist speech does not ultimately hinder the development of ethics. Even if we argue that racist speech has no discernible content, we cannot deny that it exists and that it will not disappear in the near future.212 When the Supreme Court in Sweezy argued that free speech must reign at universities in order to allow students to “gain new maturity and understanding,” 213 it had difficult questions of ethics in mind. To ignore the ethical problem of the existence of racism by suppressing its expression hides from the real problem.