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+Qualified immunity allows for the continuation of government self checking, which fuels legalized oppression and creates an illusion of change. |
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+Bernick’15 |
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+(Bernick, Evan is Evan Bernick is the Assistant Director of the Center for Judicial Engagement at the Institute for Justice, the national law firm for liberty. “To Hold Police Accountable Don’t Give them Immunity.” Foundation for Economic Education. https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ . 2015) |
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+In the wake of the tragic deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Harris, Freddie Gray, and others at the hands of police officers, it’s a question that many Americans are asking themselves. It’s a question that the Institute for Justice is familiar with. In 2005, we litigated the case of Kelo v. City of New London, which dealt with the question of whether a private developer, exercising the government’s power of eminent domain, could bulldoze an entire working-class neighborhood for so-called “economic development.” The Supreme Court said yes. And Americans were outraged — how could that happen in this country? Susette Kelo, who lost her home, might not seem to have much in common with Freddie Gray, who lost his life. But both were victims of unchecked government power. For decades, we have had rights without remedies. The sad fact is that it is often effectively impossible to hold police officers accountable for unconstitutional acts. That fact is attributable in large part to a potent well of unchecked power that many Americans have never heard of. You will not find it in the Constitution. You will not find it in any federal law. It is a judge-made doctrine, invented by the Supreme Court. It is called qualified immunity. Section 1983, the federal law that allows citizens to sue for constitutional violations, is broad, unequivocal, and unambiguous. It says that “every person” who is acting “under color of” law who causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws” “shall be liable to the party injured.” Section 1983 embodies a foundational principle of justice that resonates with Americans who have never heard of Marbury v. Madison: where there is a right, there is a remedy. But for decades, we have had rights without remedies. In the 1967 case of Pierson v. Ray, the Supreme Court held that police officers sued for constitutional violations can raise “qualified immunity” as a defense, and thereby escape paying out of their own pockets, even if they violated a person’s constitutional rights. This decision was unabashedly policy-oriented: it was thought that government officials would not vigorously fulfill their obligations if they could be held accountable for actions taken in good faith. Under current law, the general rule is that victims of rights violations pay the costs of their own injuries. In practice, qualified immunity provides a near-absolute defense to all but the most outrageous conduct. The Ninth Circuit has held that throwing a flash-bang grenade “blindly” into a house, injuring a toddler, isn’t outrageous enough. Just last year, in Plumhoff v. Rickard, the Supreme Court decided and firing 15 bullets at a motorist is a reasonable method to end the driver’s flight from the police. So much for “every person” “shall be liable.” Qualified immunity shields police misconduct not only from liability but also from meaningful judicial scrutiny. Private lawsuits are an essential tool in uncovering the truth about police misconduct. The discovery process can yield information that makes broader policy changes within police departments possible. At trial, judicial engagement — an impartial, evidence-based determination of the constitutionality of the officer’s actions — can take place. Qualified immunity can cut this search for truth short. If qualified immunity is raised as a defense before trial and the judge denies it, that decision is immediately appealable. If it is granted, discovery stops, and there is no trial on the merits. |
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+The system of self regulation halts any real change from occuring and covers up violations in rights for the convienience of those in power. The main problem is that there is no way for the public to check the police themselves. |
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+Madar 1 |
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+(Madar, Chase is a civil rights attorney in New York and the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower. “Why it’s Impossible to Indict a Cop.” The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/why-its-impossible-indict-cop/ . 2014) |
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+The lethal use of police force typically sets off an internal police investigation to determine if departmental regulations were violated. The regs and the law are not the same thing. Case in point: the chokehold that NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo used to strangle Eric Garner, suspected of selling loose cigarettes, on Staten Island last July. (The grand jury bill on that case has still not been decided.) The chokehold is not prohibited by law, but it is by departmental rules. The violation might earn a departmental censure of some kind, from like a loss of vacation days to getting fired, but they tend to be radically mild, when not nonexistent. What about internal affairs investigations? On television they are aggressive, dogged, uncompromising. In real life they tend to insulate the police from serious external sanction. “I stopped cooperating with the IABInternal Affiars Bureau ten years ago,” says Jason Leventhal, a former assistant district attorney in Richmond County, Staten Island who now works as a civil rights litigator, often suing the police. “IA will never, ever credit the claim of police abuse. They hide witnesses, they push witnesses around. The only time I cooperate with them is when I know I have their hands tied behind their back.” Are there any effective civilian oversight systems at any major police department in the US? Nobody I interviewed for this article could name one. New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board occasionally docks vacation days from police officers but the board has no real teeth. Even staffers at the New York Civil Liberties Union have candidly told me that the board more or less worthless. “I don’t have any faith in the CCRB or the Internal Affairs Bureau or any other internal mechanism,” says Ron Kuby, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer in New York. Civilian complaints rarely even get in the way of an individual officer’s career. In New York, CCRB complaints don’t even go in a police officer’s file, says Kuby. “The PBA just says that the more aggressive officers will get excessive force complaints.” Firing a police officer with a record of abusive behavior (or worse) is often extremely difficult and can carry a heavy political cost. Patrolmen Benevolent Associations, which have escaped the kind of resentment directed at other public-sector unions, tend to be powerful players in local politics able to inflict pain on any politico who would cross them. (Remember when Sarah Palin struggled to fire a state trooper and ex-brother-in-law who had allegedly acted like a thug towards her sister?) The reality is, it is extremely difficult to get law enforcement to police itself, and self-regulation is here, just as it is in poultry processing or coal mining, a sick joke. |
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+Next, standards for qualified immunity are based on oppressive statues that are getting worse for police action determined by those in positions of power. Standards of objective reasonableness originates from the indictment of a police officer in an unarmed shooting of a 15 year old, unarmed, black kid. |
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+Madar 2 |
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+(Madar, Chase is a civil rights attorney in New York and the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower. “Why it’s Impossible to Indict a Cop.” The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/why-its-impossible-indict-cop/ . 2014) |
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+Chapter 563 of the Missouri Revised Statutes grants a lot of discretion to officers of the law to wield deadly force, to the horror of many observers swooping in to the Ferguson story. The statute authorizes deadly force “in effecting an arrest or in preventing an escape from custody” if the officer “reasonably believes” it is necessary in order to “to effect the arrest and also reasonably believes that the person to be arrested has committed or attempted to commit a felony…or may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.” But this law is not an outlier, and is fully in sync with Supreme Court jurisprudence. The legal standard authorizing deadly force is something called “objective reasonableness.” This standard originates in the 1985 case of Tennessee v. Garner, which appeared at first to tighten restrictions on the police use of deadly force. The case involved a Memphis cop, Elton Hymon, who shot dead one Edward Garner: 15 years old, black and unarmed. Garner had just burgled a house, grabbing a ring and ten bucks. The US Supreme Court ruled that a police officer, henceforth, could use deadly force only if he “has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The ruling required that the use of force be “objectively reasonable.” How this reasonableness should be determined was established in a 1989 case, Graham v. Connor: severity of the crime, whether the suspect is resisting or trying to escape and above all, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to the safety of officers or others. All this appeared to restrict police violence—even if, in the end, Officer Hymon was never criminally charged for fatally shooting Edward Garner. “Objectively reasonable”—what could be wrong with that? But in actual courtroom practice, “objective reasonableness” has become nearly impossible to tell apart from the subjective snap judgments of panic-fueled police officers. American courts universally defer to the law enforcement officer’s own personal assessment of the threat at the time. |
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+These low standards for “objective” reasonableness only serve to reafy and justify police brutality against the black body. |
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+Madar 3 |
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+(Madar, Chase is a civil rights attorney in New York and the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower. “Why it’s Impossible to Indict a Cop.” The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/why-its-impossible-indict-cop/ . 2014) |
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+The Graham analysis essentially prohibits any second-guessing of the officer’s decision to use deadly force: no hindsight is permitted, and wide latitude is granted to the officer’s account of the situation, even if scientific evidence proves it to be mistaken. Such was the case of Berkeley, In Missouri, police officers Robert Piekutowski and Keith Kierzkowski, who in 2000 fatally shot two unarmed, black men, Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley out of fear that the victims’ car was rolling towards them. Forensic investigations established that the car had not in fact lurched towards the officers at the time of the shooting—but this was still not enough for the St. Louis County grand jury to indict the two cops of anything. Not surprisingly then, legal experts find that “there is built-in leeway for police, and the very breadth of this leeway is why criminal charges against police are so rare,” says Walter Katz, a police oversight lawyer who served on the Los Angeles County Office of Independent Review until it disbanded in July of this year. According to Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine Law School, recent Supreme Court decisions are not a path towards justice but rather a series of obstacles to holding police accountable for civil rights violations. An officer’s personal threat assessment is often bolstered by the fact that there are between 270 million and 310 million guns in the United States. Take a grand jury’s failure to indict the police officers who fatally shot John Crawford III, the black man holding a BB gun in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. In a country where shooting sprees are a regular occurrence, where guns are widely available at Walmart and where fake guns that look very similar to real guns are sold in the same store, the police officers’ fears were deemed reasonable enough for the grand jury to find no probable cause of criminal wrongdoing. That is how the Supreme Court police violence jurisprudence works, and it was firmly on the side of officer Sean Williams, just as it has now been found to be on Darren Wilson’s. Given the deference and latitude hardwired into the law, “there is just an underlying assumption that the officer did not engage in criminal activity,” says Katz. The first step to controlling the police is to get rid of the fantasy, once and for all, that the law is on our side. The law is firmly on the side of police who open fire on unarmed civilians. |
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+Thus, the advocacy: The United States ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers. |
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+Limiting qualified immunity allows individuals to use civil litigation to hold police officers accountable. |
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+Wright |
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+In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly established law of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a constitutional violation, there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid liability — will avoid accountability. To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this needs to change. And change should begin with an act of Congress rolling back qualified immunity. Removing the “clearly established” element of qualified immunity would be a good start — after all, shouldn’t it be enough to deviate from a basic standard of care, to engage in conduct that a reasonable officer would know is illegal, without having to show that that conduct’s illegality has already been clearly established in the courts? That’s just a start. There are plenty of other reforms that could open up civil rights lawsuits and help ensure police accountability for bad conduct. Two posts (one, two) at Balkinization by City University of New York professor Lynda Dodd provide a good overview. Campaign Zero should consider adding civil rights litigation reform to its platform, our policymakers should consider making civil rights litigation more robust, and, if we want to see justice done, we should push to make it happen. |
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+Individual attempts to hold the police accountable is key to solvency |
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+Glasser 97’ |
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+Glasser, Ira, 1997, Fighting Police Abuse: A Community Action Manual, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union |
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+police abuse is a serious problem. It has a long history, and it seems to defy all attempts at eradication. The problem is national: no police department in the country is known to be completely free of misconduct. Yet it must be fought locally: the nation's 19,000 law enforcement agencies are essentially independent. While some federal statutes specify criminal penalties for willful violations of civil rights and conspiracies to violate civil rights, the United States Department of Justice has been insufficiently aggressive in prosecuting cases of police abuse. There are shortcomings, too, in federal law itself, which does not permit "pattern and practice" lawsuits. The battle against police abuse must, therefore, be fought primarily on the local level. THE GOOD NEWS is... the situation is not hopeless. Policing has seen much progress. Some reforms do work, and some types of abuse have been reduced. Today, among both police officials and rank and file officers, it is widely recognized that police brutality hinders good law enforcement. To fight police abuse effectively, you must have realistic expectations. You must not expect too much of any one remedy because no single remedy will cure the problem. A "mix" of reforms is required. And even after citizen action has won reforms, your community must keep the pressure on through monitoring and oversight to ensure that the reforms are actually implemented. Nonetheless, even one person, or a small group of persistent people, can make a big difference. Sometimes outmoded and abusive police practices prevail largely because no one has ever questioned them. In such cases, the simple act of spotlighting a problem can have a powerful effect that leads to reform. Just by raising questions, one person or a few people — who need not be experts — can open up some corner of the all-too-secretive and insular world of policing to public scrutiny. Depending on what is revealed, their inquiries can snowball into a full blown examination by the media, the public and politicians. |
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+Communities must strive to create accountability to reduce police abuse, even failed cases can be enough to solve the problem |
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+Glasser 97’ (2) |
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+Glasser, Ira, 1997, Fighting Police Abuse: A Community Action Manual, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union |
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+Police business is generally shrouded in secrecy, which conceals outdated policies and departmental inertia, encourages cover-ups and, of course, breeds public suspicion. But remember: Police departments are an arm of government, and the government's business is your business. Police policies, procedures, memoranda, records, reports, tape recordings, etc. should not be withheld from public view unless their release would threaten ongoing investigations, endanger officers or others, or invade someone's personal privacy. Demanding information about police practices is an important part of the struggle to establish police accountability. Indeed, a campaign focused solely on getting information from the police can serve as a vehicle for organizing a community to tackle police abuse. Regarding all of the following categories, one of the tactics your community could employ is to interest a local investigative journalist in seeking information from the police for a series of articles. Once in hand, the information your community has collected or helped to expose is a tool for holding the police accountable for their actions. |
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+The role of the judge is to be an educator concerned with including multiple perspectives in the debate round. The judge is in a position to be an inclusive educator, and has an obligation to open up the space for multiple pedagogies, or polyvocal debate. |
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+Koh and Niemi |
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+For as long as there has been debate, there has been the debate about what debate is. We are not against a discussion of what constitutes debate. In fact we are absolutely for it. We argue that this is a crucial debate within debates. The question should not be “what is debate?” The proper question is “what can debate do?” The constitutive feature of debate that we are most abstractly interested in is the precise one that is so often banished by debate pundits – the possibilities of what it can do. We do not yet know what debate can do. All are welcome to accept the challenge of forcing debate into a linear and instrumental framework, but be warned it will certainly fail. Debate is a process and a field, not a mechanism. This is the case for polyvocal debate. Our current definition (which is open to redefinition) is that debate should be thought of as a complex assemblage of voices (the debaters, the judge, audiences, coaches, the authors quoted, and so on), and that it is wrong to limit the possible voices or the possible enunciations of those voices. Debate is always about multiple voices – multiple ways of sensing/expressing. Even non-sense and non-expression have their own voices. This is not a paradigm. It is a hypothesis about the system of relations that co-creates debate. The power and potential of polyvocal debate is not located in some far-off future. It is right here right now, and it is also capable of contact with the outsides of one perspective on time and space. To paraphrase June Tyson – Don’t you know? It’s after the end of the world. Within the system of relations composed by polyvocal debate, we always have the ability to ask “should we believe in something in the first place?” as well as “if we believe it, what are its normative implications?” These questions, in whatever form they take, are some of the most primal elements of debate. Restricting the scope of debate to only some of these questions is a serious loss. More absurd is the justification for restriction based on the value of being able to ask and engage with these questions in the first place. It is wrong to assume that chaos and doubt are bad. It is even worse to argue for a progressive fallacy that chaos and doubt can be removed from debate without debate ceasing to be debate at all. Debate is not soccer, or chess, or playing the trumpet. Perhaps it can do similar things to those activities, but if so it is because it does not feature the limits that define soccer or chess or playing the trumpet. They continue Paradigms of debate that stop at the moment of rational justification treat the issue of what world we create for ourselves as an unnecessary step, but this conversation is what must happen in our lives and further what must happen in debate. Polyvocal debate allows for this discussion. We should not just ask “is deontology true” but further “is it good for me to believe in deontology” or util or contractarianism, etc. They continue Debate is foundationally about empathy. Arguments are only persuasive in the ability for their to be foster a shared experience of understanding. Judges vote for arguments that have a particular effect on them – the effect of “being convincing.” Arguments that win send the judge on a path of becoming-convinced. In order for this to happen, the debater must actually get through to the judge on some level, whether intuitively, emotively, via rhetoric, the flow, or explanation. The best debating promotes empathy. Not empathy defined by biased terms – empathy defined by actual contact with actual others, perspectives, and ways of expressing oneself. It is not that young people are in need of moral training or must be told what is right and wrong or that debate should erase and conquer disagreement. Rather, it is that we should strive to learn to live with disagreement. For it is too simple and brute to believe in a monovocal system of thought – that your language is the only Rosetta Stone to translate the world through. Debate must be a place to see how to live with ourselves and live among others. If being the better debater means being the worse person, we should NOT endorse this conception of better debating. |
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+The role of the ballot is to vote for the best liberation strategy for the oppressed. |
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+Questioning existing structures of oppression is the only way to fix a broken educational system. We should use the resolution as a starting point for debate on how we can reduce an aspect of status quo oppression. That means endorsing the role of the ballot is the right place for solvency. |
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+Polychroniou, CJ, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Higher Education: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux, Truthout, March 26, 2013, http://truth-out.org/news/item/15237-predatory-capitalism-and-the-attack-on-higher-education-an-interview-with-henry-a-giroux. DR. |
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+Giroux: Higher education must be understood as a democratic public sphere - a space in which education enables students to develop a keen sense of prophetic justice, claim their moral and political agency, utilize critical analytical skills, and cultivate an ethical sensibility through which they learn to respect the rights of others. Higher education has a responsibility not only to search for the truth regardless of where it may lead, but also to educate students to make authority and power politically and morally accountable while at the same time sustaining a democratic, formative public culture. Higher education may be one of the few public spheres left where knowledge, values and learning offer a glimpse of the promise of education for nurturing public values, critical hope and a substantive democracy. Democracy places civic demands upon its citizens, and such demands point to the necessity of an education that is broad-based, critical, and supportive of meaningful civic values, participation in self-governance, and democratic leadership. Only through such a formative and critical educational culture can students learn how to become individual and social agents, rather than merely disengaged spectators, must be able both to think otherwise and to act upon civic commitments that demand a reordering of basic power arrangements fundamental to promoting the common good and producing a meaningful democracy. |
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+Putting ethical theories on a pedestal serves only to abstracify oppression and get out of the discussion. |
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+Matsuda |
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+The multiple consciousness I urge lawyers to attain is not a random ability to see all points of view, but a deliberate choice to see the world from the standpoint of the oppressed. That world is ac- cessible to all of us. We should know it in its con- crete particulars. We should know of our sister carrying buckets of water up five flights of stairs in a welfare hotel, our sister trembling at 3 a.m. in a shelter for battered women, our sisters holding bloodied children in their arms in Cape Town, on the West Bank, and in Nicaragua. The jurisprudence of outsiders teaches that these details and the emotions they evoke are relevant and important as we set out on the road to justice. These details are accessible to all of us, of all genders and colors. We can choose to know the lives of others by reading, studying, listening, and ventur- ing into different places. For lawyers, our pro bono work may be the most effective means of ac- quiring a broader consciousness of oppression. ¶ Abstraction and detachment are ways out of the discomfort of direct confrontation with the ugliness of oppression. Abstraction, criticized by both feminists and scholars of color, is the, method that allows theorists to discuss liberty, property, and rights in the aspirational mode of liberalism with no connection to what those concepts mean in real people's lives. Much in our mainstream intellectual training values abstraction and denigrates nitty-gritty detail. Holding on to a multiple consciousness will allow us to op- erate both within the abstractions of standard jurisprudential discourse, and within the details of our own special knowledge.¶ Whisperings at Yale and elsewhere about how deconstructionist heroes were closet fascists remind me of how important it is to stay close to oppressed communities. High talk about language, meaning, sign, process, and law can mask racist and sexist ugliness if we never stop to ask: "Exactly what are you talking about and what is the implication of what you are saying for my sis- ter who is carrying buckets of water up five flights of stairs in a welfare hotel? What do you propose to do for her today, not in some abstract future you are creating in your mind?" If you have been made to feel, as I have, that such inquiry is theo- retically unsophisticated, and quaintly naive, re- sist! Read what Professor Williams, Professor Scales-Trent, and other feminists and people of color are writing.' The reality and detail of oppression are is a starting point for these writers as they enter into mainstream debates about law and theory. |
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+Alternative styles of debate have been especially forgone in the LD community. In round practices create a culture of exclusion that locks minority students out of the debate space by elevating the value of abstraction in the face of real conversation. |
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+Smith |
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+At every tournament you attend this year look around the cafeteria and take note of which students are not sitting amongst you and your peers. Despite being some of the best and the brightest in the nation, many students are alienated from and choose to not participate in an activity I like to think of as homeplace. In addition to the heavy financial burden associated with national competition, the exclusionary atmosphere of a debate tournament discourages black students from participating. Widespread awareness of the same lack of participation in policy debate has led to a growing movement towards alternative styles and methods of engaging the gatekeepers of the policy community, (Reid-Brinkley 08) while little work has been done to address or even acknowledge the same concern in Lincoln Douglas debate. Unfortunately students of color are not only forced to cope with a reality of structural violence outside of debate, but within an activity they may have joined to escape it in the first place. We are facing more than a simple trend towards marginalization occurring in Lincoln Douglas, but a culture of exclusion that locks minority participants out of the ranks of competition. It will be uncomfortable, it will be hard, and it will require continued effort but the necessary step in fixing this problem, like all problems, is the community as a whole admitting that such a problem with many “socially acceptable” choices exists in the first place. Like all systems of social control, the reality of racism in debate is constituted by the singular choices that institutions, coaches, and students make on a weekly basis. I have watched countless rounds where competitors attempt to win by rushing to abstractions to distance the conversation from the material reality that black debaters are forced to deal with every day. One of the students I coached, who has since graduated after leaving debate, had an adult judge write out a ballot that concluded by “hypothetically” defending my student being lynched at the tournament. Another debate concluded with a young man defending that we can kill animals humanely, “just like we did that guy Troy Davis”. Community norms would have competitors do intellectual gymnastics or make up rules to accuse black debaters of breaking to escape hard conversations but as someone who understands that experience, the only constructive strategy is to acknowledge the reality of the oppressed, engage the discussion from the perspective of authors who are black and brown, and then find strategies to deal with the issues at hand. It hurts to see competitive seasons come and go and have high school students and judges spew the same hateful things you expect to hear at a Klan rally. A student should not, when presenting an advocacy that aligns them with the oppressed, have to justify why oppression is bad. Debate is not just a game, but a learning environment with liberatory potential. Even if the form debate gives to a conversation is not the same you would use to discuss race in general conversation with Bayard Rustin or Fannie Lou Hamer, that is not a reason we have to strip that conversation of its connection to a reality that black students cannot escape. |
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+If we force debaters to adhere to a strict interpretation of what debate is then the interpretation will be decided by the majority group excluding minority debaters. |
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+Warner : |
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+More often than not, talk about privilege in debate is relegated mostly to economic and occasionally gender- or race-based discussions. Refocused recruiting efforts and accomplishments like Urban Debate Leagues and Women’s Caucuses at tournaments are addressing more overt concerns in an effort to create more equal playing fields, yet tremendous inequities remain that require explanation. Over twenty years of various diversity efforts, especially in CEDA, have failed to substantially change the racial, gender, social and economic composition of interscholastic policy debate at its highest levels. The reason is simple: privilege extends much further than just acknowledging overt and obvious disparities. Privilege creeps into more subtle, covert spaces, like the essence of why and how people “play the game,” recognizing that the rules and procedures are created by those carrying that privilege. Snider argues that the greatness of debate as a game is in his belief that it is short on inflexible rules and long on debatable procedures. However, if procedures are functionally not debatable and begin to look more like participation requirements than starting points of discussion, the quality of the game, is “not as successful and well-designed” (Snider, 1987, p. 123). Privilege envelopes both substantive and stylistic procedures, increasing the likelihood that supposedly debatable conventions become rigid norms, preventing achievement of a “more thoughtful” game and creating entrance barriersto successful participation. Here’s how. Snider (1987) says that evaluation of a “winning” procedurals argument occurs through the lenses of determining which procedures best facilitate achieving the goals of the debate activity. Snider offers three such goals: 1) education of the participants; 2) discussion of important issues in the resolution; and 3) creation of a fair contest. He concedes that some may be missing. Of course, interested participants with lesser privilege might select different goals as more important, such as having a voice to discuss the topic through the perspective of their social concerns, even if this perspective doesn’t fit nicely with some of the other goals. More often than not, the creation of a “fair contest” is given an absolute priority relative to other goals and justifies ignoring attempts to achieve other game objectives. At least one implicit goal deserves mention: incorporation of the cultural and social values of the participants. It makes sense that the like-minded values of the largest participating class will dominant procedural and rule development of a game simulation. Cultural and social values may appear to have little or no relationship to the first three goals of debate. But in fact, the cultural and social values will in many ways dictate the meaning of Snider’s goals. What types of education do the participants’ value? Who decides what the important issues are—the participants? The communities most directly related to the topic? Do cultural and social values privilege any notions of “fairness”? Cultural and social background surely impacts each of these areas tremendously. If there are cultural or social disagreements over what constitutes “education,” what “issues” are important, or what is “fair,” then privilege plays a much larger role in game development than has been acknowledged to date. |
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+You should ignore their seemingly objective arguments concerning fairness in the debate space. Fairness is tangential on an individual’s interpretation of what debate is and this interpretation is always subjective and thus affected by social and cultural backgrounds as we are given very little confines to what we can be. Instead you should view it as a weapon for the majority to stomp on the interest of people not like them. |
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+Olson : |
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+ (3) That is, whoever is attempting to define "fairness" or "mutual respect" or any other such principle will necessarily be doing so from a particular context, which includes one's personal system of values. It is impossible to rise above one's context in order to fill in the content of so-called neutral principles. Fairness, for example, will be defined differently by different people, and this abstraction will not be intelligible unless and until it is anchored in a specific standpoint. One person may feel that fairness means admitting someone to college solely of the basis of test scores, whereas another may feel that fairness means also taking into account the fact that a student comes from a context of poverty and disadvantage. No definition of fairness exists independent of the kind of conditions or substance that must be supplied by necessarily interested parties (since all parties are necessarily interested). Once some kind of substance is supplied, however, neutral principles by definition lose their neutrality. That is, the oft-touted virtue of neutral principles is that they are supposedly devoid of substantive commitments; they purportedly afford a space within which "substantive agendas can make their case without prior advantage or disadvantage" (3). Yet, some substance must be supplied in order to make the principle—fairness, in this example—intelligible. Hence, there really is no such thing as a neutral principle; there is no such thing as a principle not already informed by the substantive content of the person appealing to the principle. While questions of fairness are central to intractable policy debates, invoking the principle of fairness will not advance these debates because at a certain level such debates are about "what fairness (or neutrality or impartiality) really is" (3). In effect, a contest over the content of a particular issue is also a contest over two or more contending notions of fairness (or impartiality or whatever principle is being invoked). Even if it were possible to produce a general principle devoid of specific content—a notion of fairness, say, untethered to any specific perspective or ideological orientation—it would be of no use, says Fish, because it would by empty. That is, appealing to it would not point you in any specific direction in relation to other possible directions. Its very emptiness renders it useless as a moral compass. In effect, a neutral principle is a floating signifier, an "unoccupied vessel waiting to be filled by whoever gets to it first or with the most persuasive force" (7). In fact, it is exactly this condition of emptiness, its status as a floating signifier available for people to invest with substance, that makes neutral principles so politically useful—and even potentially dangerous, since they can be employed to further evil (as defined by you) ends just as easily as more positive (as defined by you) goals: It is because they don't have the constraining power claimed for them (they neither rule out nor mandate anything) and yet have the name of constraints (people think that when you invoke fairness you call for something determinate and determinable) that neutral principles can make an argument look as though it has a support higher or deeper than the support provided by its own substantive thrust. Indeed, the vocabulary of neutral principle can be used to disguise substance so that it appears to be the inevitable and nonengineered product of an impersonal logic. (4) In other words, a general principle such as fairness is deployed as a weapon in political, legal, and ethical struggles precisely because it masks the interestedness of those appealing to it and cloaks the fact that the actual policy, law, or proposal being advanced in the name of the principle is embedded in specific historical circumstances and furthers the interests and objectives of one set of individuals over and against the interests and objectives of others. |