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	1	+Framing
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	3	+We must start deliberation from the idea that dialogue is valuable. Liberalist ideologies and mainstream philosophies fail in the context of speech. State intervention is necessary to ensure complete engagement. Hutchinson 89
	4	+Hutchinson, Allan, Talking the Good Life: From Free Speech to Democratic Dialogue (1989). Yale Journal of Law and Liberation, pp. 17-30, 1989. https://ssrn.com/abstract=1577685 EE
	5	+By re-thinking and re-orienting free speech based on the dialogic theory, it becomes possible to go beyond the predictable and stereotyped terms of the contemporary debate. The theory of dialogue goes beyond Dworkin’s preoccupation with speaker autonomy“ and Meiklejohn‘s functional concentration on audience inter- eats.“ Under this theory. value is placed on the dialogue itself, the interaction between people which leads to understanding, and to a new community which is responsive to the needs of everyone in that community. Dialogue turns us away from liberal notions of individual freedom. whether singly or aggregately expressed, and points us to- wards the democratic activities of associations individu- als. In order to promote the equality between participants necessary for an effective dialogue, the state will have to intervene, and the intervention will be based on the value of dialogue itself. The state ought not to be in opposition to the citizenry, but must become an institutional venue through which citizens struggle to reach a common good. In a democracy, there is more than dialogue between the state and its citizens. When government speaks, it ought to be the reverberated outcome of the democratic conver- sation between citizens. By abandoning the stale ethical vocabulary of means and ends, a concern with the formal conditions for conversational encounters embodies a substantive relation- ship between speakers that is important in and for itself. Within a dialogic community, freedom would not be un- derstood as the liberal notion of a splendid. but desolate isolation in which the right to soliloquize might be the extent of freedom. Nor would it be understood as a state- enforccd conformity in which the right to hear another's monologue might exhaust freedom, the danger of a com- munitarian model. In contrast, the regulative ideal of dia- logue incorporates a right to hear, to be heard and to be answered. The goal is to establish and maintain the social conditions for open-ended, continuing and meaningful conversations in which people emerge as equals. In place of the traditional liberal reliance on individual rights to free speech. a dialogic community would rely on Unger- ian-style social entitlements to open discourse.“ Although a reliance on dialogue is richly suggestive in reorganizing the doctrine and practice of ‘free speech’. it is important that it not be treated as an abstract ideal from which a series of pat positions on the traditional range of hard cases can be extrapolated. In contrast to the pseudo-exchanges of a liberal democratic republic." dialogue generates and reinforces its own ethics It not only offers a substantive measure for judging the quality of political life, it also provides the means by which to bridge the normative gap between general ideals and practical application, Conversation is the embodiment of the procedural and substantive goals that a democratic society can aspire to and achieve; it improves and strengthens itself through constant practice and usage. One crucial consequence of such a dialogic understanding will be a reordering of the hard cases to be confronted and resolved by the participants in the dialogue. The dia- logic process recognizes that there are no final or right answers, but different options whose exercise and appro- priateness will depend on the particular problem and its socio-political/socio-economic context.
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	7	+Purely liberal and anti-liberal theories of social relations are overly simplistic – we need an understanding of speech that acknowledges the complex relationship between individuals, rights, and expression. Hutchison 89
	8	+Hutchinson, Allan, Talking the Good Life: From Free Speech to Democratic Dialogue (1989). Yale Journal of Law and Liberation, pp. 17-30, 1989. https://ssrn.com/abstract=1577685 EE
	9	+
	10	+What would a non-liberal theory look like? What is the alternative to a liberal approach to free speech? Unfortunately, the position of radical theorists on free speech has never been entirely satisfactory. Too often, it has allowed liberals to take the high ground and presented its own position as a vulnerable combination of moral ambivalence and political naivete. By countenanc- ing a dangerous romance with state regulation. radicals have raised the Orwellian specter of enforced dogma and official conformity. Good intentions have proved insufficient to bridge the gap between democratic ideals and practical realities. The major difficulty of the left has been the willingness to accept the liberal account of the problem to be solved and to work within its limiting framework. As Fiss’ work shows, liberal starting-points inevitably lead to liberal end-results. In all its different threads and strands.“ the contemporary tapestry of free speech draws on a very inadequate set of premises and, assumptions; it has an impoverished view of human per- sonality and language and, most importantly. the crucial relation between the two. Before the left can offer a viable theory "of free speech. it must re-think the problem from the ground up: the nature of ‘freedom’ and ‘speech’ must be constructed afresh. The first step in this direction is to understand the mutually constituting dialectic between the individual and discourse, which liberalism fails to take seriously and which forms the practical basis of the dialogic commu- nity. Under the liberal theory of freedom, the approach to free speech is premised on a social world compromis- ing an aggregation of distinct individuals with a set of pre-social preferences and values. Social interaction pro- vides opportunities to satisfy better their given prefer- encos and to achieve a desirable level of self-fulfillment: shared values are a possible product of a just society, but not a condition for its existence.” Within liberal society, language is understood as a neutral medium that is available to all and that stands independently of the ideas and world it is intended to convey or depict; it is the postperson delivering a letter or the librarian handing out a book.“ In its various renderings, the liberal objective is to facilitate this intellectual economy of exchange and to en- hance individual choice and self-determination. Conse- quently, the pillars of liberal free speech are the private individual with “different and indeed incommensurable and irreconcilable conceptions of the good”“ and the transparency of language as a public medium through which to communicate them.
	11	+Free speech a crucial way of challenging power – critique and normative standards are only valuable insofar as they can be expressed and engaged. Hutchison 89
	12	+Hutchinson, Allan, Talking the Good Life: From Free Speech to Democratic Dialogue (1989). Yale Journal of Law and Liberation, pp. 17-30, 1989. https://ssrn.com/abstract=1577685 EE
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	14	+Moreover, the vision of a dialogic community “mutual understanding. respect, a willingness to listen and to risk one’s opinions and prejudices, a mutual seek- ing of the correctness of what is said”" - provides concrete guidance to recognize and rectify the prevailing circumstances of social power. Conversation is inimical to hierarchy; it is always critical and challenging, and allows us to create our own conceptions of meaning and rationality, rather than uncover an independent criterion of rationality or objective foundations. Meaning and normative standards will be created and criticized in mutual debate, but will make no claim to universal validity. It will, for example. oblige and empower people to wrest control of responsible decision-making from the technical experts, like lawyers and bureaucrats. Through conversation, criticism can be intelligible, engaged, constructive and authoritative: “we are not left with a nothingness but with our affirmative ability to speak about human things in a human voice.”“ Each citizen is bound by their ac- ceptance of the contingent, yet real, status of their own conversation and its intrinsic dynamic.
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	16	+Racial dialogue in the context of education constitutes a true radicalism – anti-statism embraces an oversimplified view of the state. Leonardo and Porter 10
	17	+Leonardo, Zeus and Porter, Ronald K.(2010) 'Pedagogy of fear: toward a Fanonian theory of 'safety' in race dialogue', Race Ethnicity and Education, 13: 2, 139 — 157 EE
	18	+
	19	+Following Foucault (1980), King’s ‘peaceful’ protest was not an act by the powerless but a resistance that summoned every morsel of power against a repressive State. In other words, it was an expression of power that took the form of resistance, unlike whites’ reactions, which were deployments of power for the sake of maintaining it. This is an important distinction. Using conventional modes of force against a State that monopolizes its legitimate use, as Weber (1978) reminds us, would likely not have succeeded for it would have been overwhelmed by the military, absent of a coup. As Perry Anderson’s (1976) near book-length article on Gramsci makes plain, in modern societies the State becomes an ‘outer ditch’ filled by a complex system of civil institutions. This fact necessitates an equally complex understanding of civil society, which a ‘war of maneuver’ against an all-encompassing State fails to illuminate. Instead, a ‘war of position’ must expose fissures in civil society, exploiting its cultural institutions, such as the media and educational system. We may compare King’s peaceful protest with the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. One may be tempted to suggest that the South African revolution was peaceful, without much bloodshed and ending with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Of course as Fanon might argue, the South African case was violent to the core, particularly to whites, whose entitlements were revoked. The same can be said about the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, which was a massive assault on an entire social system. Likewise, a critical education is radically violent if it expects to shift the racial dialogue. It is a humanizing form of violence that puts people back in their rightful place and restores their dignity, both the oppressor and the oppressed (Freire 1993). A humanizing violence is both necessary and liberatory because the actual system and theoretical backbone of colonialism and systems of domination create unethical situations wherein individuals are relegated to subject positions that make them something below, or other than, human. In Charles Mills’ (1997) understanding, people of color become subpersons within the assumptions of such a system. What it means to be human or what it means to be an actional individual in Fanon’s sense, is defined via the discourse of the colonizer as the embodiment of the western-whiteheterosexual-propertied male (Wynter 2001). Fanon was correct to warn us that nonviolence as compromise, electoral politics, political concessions, and appeal to legality only forestalls the overthrow of a regime of thought that continues to demarcate between the human and the subperson. If dialogue seeks to undo racism, then we must ask if notions of safe dialogue legitimate an oppressive system or if they engage in a process that is creative enough to produce a new social consciousness, a new human subject ‘with a new language and a new humanity’ (Fanon 2004, 2). According to Fanon’s ‘stretched’ materialist dialectic, in order to speak to the issue of colonial classes (see De Lissovoy 2008), liberatory violence is the only way to overcome the system while actively reclaiming one’s humanity.
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	21	+Inherency
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	23	+A culture of safety has swallowed our campuses. It locks out hard conversations about race which dooms any efforts at effective change. Shulevitz 15
	24	+Judith Shulevitz, In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas, The New York Times, March 21, 2015 EE
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	27	+Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material. Some people trace safe spaces back to the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s, others to the gay and lesbian movement of the early 1990s. In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous gatherings of like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism or what they term microaggressions — subtle displays of racial or sexual bias — so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say, a fluid gender identity. As long as all parties consent to such restrictions, these little islands of self-restraint seem like a perfectly fine idea. But the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer. This logic clearly informed a campaign undertaken this fall by a Columbia University student group called Everyone Allied Against Homophobia that consisted of slipping a flier under the door of every dorm room on campus. The headline of the flier stated, “I want this space to be a safer space.” The text below instructed students to tape the fliers to their windows. The group’s vice president then had the flier published in the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, along with an editorial asserting that “making spaces safer is about learning how to be kind to each other.” A junior named Adam Shapiro decided he didn’t want his room to be a safer space. He printed up his own flier calling it a dangerous space and had that, too, published in the Columbia Daily Spectator. “Kindness alone won’t allow us to gain more insight into truth,” he wrote. In an interview, Mr. Shapiro said, “If the point of a safe space is therapy for people who feel victimized by traumatization, that sounds like a great mission.” But a safe-space mentality has begun infiltrating classrooms, he said, making both professors and students loath to say anything that might hurt someone’s feelings. “I don’t see how you can have a therapeutic space that’s also an intellectual space,” he said. I’m old enough to remember a time when college students objected to providing a platform to certain speakers because they were deemed politically unacceptable. Now students worry whether acts of speech or pieces of writing may put them in emotional peril. Two weeks ago, students at Northwestern University marched to protest an article by Laura Kipnis, a professor in the university’s School of Communication. Professor Kipnis had criticized — O.K., ridiculed — what she called the sexual paranoia pervading campus life. The protesters carried mattresses and demanded that the administration condemn the essay. One student complained that Professor Kipnis was “erasing the very traumatic experience” of victims who spoke out. An organizer of the demonstration said, “we need to be setting aside spaces to talk” about “victim-blaming.” Last Wednesday, Northwestern’s president, Morton O. Schapiro, wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal affirming his commitment to academic freedom. But plenty of others at universities are willing to dignify students’ fears, citing threats to their stability as reasons to cancel debates, disinvite commencement speakers and apologize for so-called mistakes. At Oxford University’s Christ Church college in November, the college censors (a “censor” being more or less the Oxford equivalent of an undergraduate dean) canceled a debate on abortion after campus feminists threatened to disrupt it because both would-be debaters were men. “I’m relieved the censors have made this decision,” said the treasurer of Christ Church’s student union, who had pressed for the cancellation. “It clearly makes the most sense for the safety — both physical and mental — of the students who live and work in Christ Church.” A year and a half ago, a Hampshire College student group disinvited an Afrofunk band that had been attacked on social media for having too many white musicians; the vitriolic discussion had made students feel “unsafe.” Last fall, the president of Smith College, Kathleen McCartney, apologized for causing students and faculty to be “hurt” when she failed to object to a racial epithet uttered by a fellow panel member at an alumnae event in New York. The offender was the free-speech advocate Wendy Kaminer, who had been arguing against the use of the euphemism “the n-word” when teaching American history or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” In the uproar that followed, the Student Government Association wrote a letter declaring that “if Smith is unsafe for one student, it is unsafe for all students.” “It’s amazing to me that they can’t distinguish between racist speech and speech about racist speech, between racism and discussions of racism,” Ms. Kaminer said in an email. The confusion is telling, though. It shows that while keeping college-level discussions “safe” may feel good to the hypersensitive, it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it. They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled. What will they do when they hear opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how will they learn to persuade people to join them? Only a few of the students want stronger anti-hate-speech codes. Mostly they ask for things like mandatory training sessions and stricter enforcement of existing rules. Still, it’s disconcerting to see students clamor for a kind of intrusive supervision that would have outraged students a few generations ago. But those were hardier souls. Now students’ needs are anticipated by a small army of service professionals — mental health counselors, student-life deans and the like. This new bureaucracy may be exacerbating students’ “self-infantilization,” as Judith Shapiro, the former president of Barnard College, suggested in an essay for Inside Higher Ed. But why are students so eager to self-infantilize? Their parents should probably share the blame. Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote on Slate last month that although universities cosset students more than they used to, that’s what they have to do, because today’s undergraduates are more puerile than their predecessors. “Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity,” he wrote. But “if college students are children, then they should be protected like children.” Another reason students resort to the quasi-medicalized terminology of trauma is that it forces administrators to respond. Universities are in a double bind. They’re required by two civil-rights statutes, Title VII and Title IX, to ensure that their campuses don’t create a “hostile environment” for women and other groups subject to harassment. However, universities are not supposed to go too far in suppressing free speech, either. If a university cancels a talk or punishes a professor and a lawsuit ensues, history suggests that the university will lose. But if officials don’t censure or don’t prevent speech that may inflict psychological damage on a member of a protected class, they risk fostering a hostile environment and prompting an investigation. As a result, students who say they feel unsafe are more likely to be heard than students who demand censorship on other grounds.
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	29	+Discussions of race have fallen into a colorblind paradigm where white people only acknowledge “race” as a factor that effects minorities while ignoring that it helps them. Only an authentic discussion solves. Leonardo and Porter 10
	30	+Leonardo, Zeus and Porter, Ronald K.(2010) 'Pedagogy of fear: toward a Fanonian theory of 'safety' in race dialogue', Race Ethnicity and Education, 13: 2, 139 — 157 EE
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	32	+There are genuine fears that must be confronted when educators publicly discuss race in the classroom. Both whites and people of color face certain dangers that prevent an authentic exchange. Not only do whites fear that they will be exposed as racist; they also fear being found out as racial beings. People of color already know that whites comprise a racial group, therefore white raciality would not represent a shocking discovery for them. However, whites’ discovery of their own raciality is precisely what is at stake. Hiding behind the veil of color-blindness means that lifting it would force whites to confront their self-image, with people of color acting as the mirror. This act is not frightening for people of color but for whites. In the light of day, this fact of whiteness would have led Fanon to declare, ‘Look a white person!’ Although this pale façade is becoming more difficult to sustain, whites cultivate a color-blind mask that even Fanon would not have predicted. To be clear, color-blindness in a color-obsessed nation appears oxymoronic and whites would have to work hard to maintain the mask. In a race-saturated society, such as the United States, colorblind racism is accurately described as a mode of feigning an oblivion to race. In short, color-blind perspectives are attempts to observe – indeed to see – race in a way that maintains whites’ equilibrium. It is not literally a form of blindness but its precise opposite: seeing race in a selective way that makes whites acceptable, not to people of color per se, but to themselves. It would be a mistake to regard color-blindness as a non-racial move and more accurate to construct it as a particular deployment of race. Authentic race discussions are violent to whites for the very reason that such discussions would expose their investment in race, their full endorsement of, rather than, flippant regard for it. It speaks to the inauthentic education that whites experience. This does not suggest that their fear has no basis. In fact, it has a material basis for it represents one of the many walls that people of color have to scale as they attempt to convince whites that race matters in a manner different from whites’ understanding of it. Some whites who are open minded enough, often feel enlightened and enlivened by discussions that confront racism, vowing their commitment to the cause. That established, whites often conceive of race talks as intellectually stimulating – as in a discovery or another topic in which they can excel – rather than a lived experience that students of color in good faith share with their white colleagues. Meanwhile, students of color walk away from the same discussions barely advancing their understanding of race and racism, sometimes satisfied departing with their legitimacy and mindset intact. After all, these confrontations were not for their benefit; they were not meant to advance people of color. A Fanon-inspired race dialogue is not antiintellectual, but precisely anti-intellectualist. Said another way, it is materialist.
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	34	+Solvency
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	36	+Rupturing the dialogue of safety is good – it opens up space for black agency and allows genuine engagement and empathy. Leonardo and Porter 10
	37	+Leonardo, Zeus and Porter, Ronald K.(2010) 'Pedagogy of fear: toward a Fanonian theory of 'safety' in race dialogue', Race Ethnicity and Education, 13: 2, 139 — 157 EE
	38	+Two, a pedagogue may begin a course simply by having a meta-dialogue (dialogue about dialogue) about the assumptions of safety so pervasive in the academy when it comes to the topic of race. By redefining classroom space as a place of risk, educators encourage students to experiment with their self-understanding, and to promote the audacious notion that they may change their minds by the end of a term. We need to be clear that a place of risk does not promote hostility but growth. It does not promote discomfort for its own sake, as if learning only happens when one is uncomfortable. As we have noted, many students of color experience discomfort in public race forums, which hardly leads to new learning for them. Yes, something is learned, but discomfort is not the precondition to worthwhile learning. Against much of anti-racist writing, we do not suggest that a pedagogue’s goal is to encourage white discomfort. Rather, whites must take ownership of feeling uncomfortable in critical race dialogue. Pedagogues can encourage them to take responsibility for their feelings of inadequacy and defensiveness. When paired with clarity in purpose and solidarity with the other, where judgment is practiced but one is never judged, discomfort can be liberating because it enables whites and people of color to remove the mask. They may end up knowing each other more fully as complex human beings rather than the shell of one: whites assumed to be more superior than they are, people of color more inferior than they are. After many years of experience in the university setting, we have learned that this apostasy – of creating risk as the antidote to safety – leads to more transformative learning opportunities. It humanizes students of color because it legitimates their voice and affirms whites’ incompleteness, for it is guided by an ethic of concern for and not a desire to expose whites as simply racist. Not only does risk discourse encourage looking behind the dialogue (a hermeneutics of suspicion) but it also appreciates what it opens up in front (a hermeneutics of empathy). This lack of safety ironically produces a condition where whites are more able to empathize with people of color as both groups assume the consequences for risk, whereas people of color usually assume the burdens of a ‘safe race dialogue’. A comfortable race dialogue belies the actual structures of race, which is full of tension. It is literally out of sync with its own topic. Finally, violating the discourse on safety means aiming at rigor. It opens up deeper engagements on race, both in the intellectual and practical sense as a lived reality. In an educational system that prides itself on excellence, pedagogues paradoxically aim low when it comes to race dialogue, settling instead for mediocrity. They fail to take advantage of the deep competencies that students of color have to offer and instead rely on the shallowness of whiteness. It is a pedagogy guided by the least competent students in the room, a strategy that most educators would not endorse or tolerate in any other condition. It means helping the children most left behind (and who invest in being the last one in) when it comes to race literacy: mainly, white students. They are often racially illiterate and unable to decode the fundamental racial lessons of daily life. Using a Fanonian analytics of the oppressed to drive race dialogue does not mean that the oppressed are correct most of the time even if it means they are correct more of the time. It does not focus on their individual accuracy but on their collective experiences and the perspectives born from a life of risk. For their important decisions rely on race literacy as if their life depended on it. A humanizing violence would restore their education in the proper sense. This means increasing the violence in education, of disrupting its inhumane dimensions toward new standards of humanity that liberate rather than oppress.
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	40	+Safe spaces are never safe for black people – instead we need to engage in tough racial dialogue – enduring hate speech has to be considered worth it to escape vapid moralizing about race. Leonardo and Porter 10
	41	+Leonardo, Zeus and Porter, Ronald K.(2010) 'Pedagogy of fear: toward a Fanonian theory of 'safety' in race dialogue', Race Ethnicity and Education, 13: 2, 139 — 157 EE
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	43	+It is apparent that both whites and people of color want to avoid violence from being enacted against them. They enter race dialogue from radically different locations – intellectual for the former, lived for the latter – and an unevenness that the critical race pedagogue must accept and becomes the constitutive condition of any progressive dialogue on race. It is the risk that comes with violence but one worth taking if educators plan to shift the standards of humanity. In an apparently common quest for mutual racial understanding, whites and people of color participate in a violence that becomes an integral part of the process and seeking a ‘safe space’ is itself a form of violence insofar as it fails to recognize the myth of such geography in interracial exchange. As it concerns people of color within the current regime, safe space in racial dialogue is a projection rather than a reality. This is the myth that majoritarian stories in education replay and retell in order to perpetuate an understanding of race that maintains white supremacy. Safe spaces are violent to people of color and only by enacting a different form of violence, of shifting the discourse, will race dialogue ultimately become a space of mutual recognition between whites and people of color. If people of color observe the current call for safety, this process defaults to white understandings and comfort zones, which have a well-documented history of violence against people of color. It is a point of entry that is characterized by denials, evasions, and falsehoods (Frankenberg 1993; Mills 1997). Its shell is non-violent for in public most whites prize self-control. Race dialogue within a white framework is rational, if by that we mean a situation that preserves, as Angela Davis (1998) mentioned, peace and order. This procedural arrangement has much to recommend it if we want to avoid uprisings and outright violence. But its kernel is already violent to people of color because a certain irrational rationality is at work. Both parties leave the interaction relatively ‘intact’, which should not be equated with the absence of violence. Whites depart the situation with their worldview and value systems unchallenged and affirmed, and people of color remain fractured in theirs. Whites would need to experience violence if they expect to change. But this is different from a hegemonic understanding that violence is always a form of dehumanization. In our appropriation of Fanon’s dialectics of violence, we find transformative possibilities in violence depending on the political project to which it is attached. Moreover, in this framework violence is not so much a description of this or that act qualifying as a form of violence, but a theoretical prescription of a different state of affairs, a response to oppression that equals its intensity. Thus, we do not describe what violence looks like, but assess its consequences.
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	46	+Uncomfortable conversations are good – administrative control fosters passivity and backfires. Friedersdorf 15
	47	+Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction., 11-12-2015, "Free Speech Is Indispensable to Fighting Racism," Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/race-and-the-anti-free-speech-diversion/415254/
	48	+Students in Ann Arbor were understandably upset and outraged by the racist climate created by these events. Administrators decided to respond by implementing a speech code. Thereafter, racist incidents kept occurring on campus at the same rate as before. And before the speech code was struck down 18 months later as a violation of the First Amendment, white students had charged black students with offensive speech in 20 cases. One “resulted in the punishment of a black student for using the term ‘white trash’ in conversation with a white student,” the ACLU later reported, explaining its position that “speech codes don't really serve the interests of persecuted groups. The First Amendment does.” Over the course of U.S. history, both the protections enshrined by the First Amendment and the larger ethos of free expression that pervades American culture have played a major role in every successful push that marginalized groups have made to secure civil rights, fight against prejudice, and move toward greater equality. Campus Politics Power, identity, and speech in the new American university Read more Despite that history, Jelani Cobb asserts in The New Yorker that to avoid discussions of racism, critical observers of student protests at Yale and the University of Missouri “invoke a separate principle, one with which few would disagree in the abstract—free speech, respectful participation in class—as the counterpoint to the violation of principles relating to civil rights.” The fact that race controversies “have now been subsumed in a debate over political correctness and free speech on campus—important but largely separate subjects—is proof of the self-serving deflection to which we should be accustomed at this point,” he declares. Cobb calls these supposed diversions “victim-blaming with a software update,” and positing that they are somehow having the same effect as disparaging Trayvon Martin, he cites my article “The New Intolerance of Student Activism” as his prime example. He writes as if unaware that millions of Americans believe the defense of free speech and the fight against racism to be complementary causes, and not at odds with each other. The false premises underpinning his analysis exacerbate a persistent, counterproductive gulf between the majority of those struggling against racism in the United States, who believe that First Amendment protections, rigorous public discourse, and efforts to educate empowered, resilient young people are the surest ways to a more just future, and a much smaller group that subscribes to a strain of thought most popular on college campuses. READ FOLLOW-UP NOTES Readers, staffers, and other writers debate the campus controversies Members of this latter group may be less opposed to speech restrictions; rely more heavily on stigma, call-outs, and norm-shaping in their efforts to combat racism; purport to target “institutional" and “systemic” racism, but often insist on the urgency of policing racism that is neither systemic nor institutional, like Halloween costume choices; focus to an unusual degree on getting validation from administrators and others in positions of authority; and often seem unaware or unconvinced that others can and do share their ends while objecting to some of their means, the less rigorous parts of their jargon, and campus status-signaling. For this reason, they spend a lot of time misrepresenting and stigmatizing allies. Cobb misunderstands my motives, my body of work, and my article, which makes it doubly frustrating that he neglects to provide an outbound link to allow his readers to judge it for themselves. His erroneous assumptions render him less able to engage on this subject with millions who reject his ideology but are sympathetic to his concerns. Let me underscore how erroneous his assumptions are. His article is premised on the notion that my piece on Yale and others like one I wrote a day later on Missouri are part of a “diversion,” an attempt to avoid talking about racism through deflection. “The fault line here,” he posits, “is between those who find intolerance objectionable and those who oppose intolerance of the intolerant.” Of course, it’s far more consistent to find intolerance objectionable across the board, and to speak out against it especially when its targets have historically faced discrimination. It’s why I have written not only about recent events at Yale and Missouri, but also about Ferguson’s conspiracy against black residents; racial disparities in police killings; dangers of constructed white identity; the Campaign Zero agenda; the importance of declaring the Charleston attack to be racial terrorism; the long history of thugs attacking black churches; how video is confirming very old claims about prejudice against blacks; the brutality of police culture in Baltimore; radical experiments in converting racists; the importance of grappling with race, even imperfectly; Islamophobia and its deleterious effects; the perils of standing while Hispanic in the Bronx; the harassment of a black man tazed by a white police officer; carnage caused by drone strikes; the horrifying effects of profiling innocent Muslims, etc. Few outside a small part of the ideological left would mistake me for someone seeking to divert discourse away from racism. Moreover, my advocacy for free speech encompasses numerous articles about controversies having nothing to do with race, as well as advocacy for the First Amendment rights of people fighting racism (including high schoolers who sought to wear “I can’t breathe” t-shirts, Black Lives Matter protestors, and Muslims who sought to build a mosque near Ground Zero.) When a staunch defender of free speech in all realms, who writes about racism as often as I do in a national publication, is reflexively cast as using free speech to divert attention from racism, it suggests a charge rooted in ideological blindness, not careful observation. I hope to bridge that gap, and help everyone understand that liberals, libertarians, conservatives, and individualists alike are just as engaged in the fight against racism as the campus left, but in very different ways. We exist. Update the heuristics! Our diverse critiques of the campus left are not a sign that we care too little about fighting racism, advocating for justice, opposing prejudice, or protecting civil rights, or that we’ve yet to be enlightened by the right theorists. They are, rather, a sign that these issues, and concerns that they touch on, free speech among them, are too important to be ceded to a narrow, ideologically insular subculture as prone to blind spots, mistakes, wrongdoing, and excesses as any other; and too fond of jargon that more readily facilitates evasiveness than analytic clarity. The activist left on campus no more benefits from blanket deference than any other political movement, and their defenders should stop conflating criticism of their means and contested assumptions with opposition to or a desire to distract from widely shared ends. My articles “The New Intolerance of Student Activism” and “Campus Activists Weaponize Safe Space” evoked one critique more than any other: that activist excesses at Yale and the University of Missouri are misunderstood by outsiders who are unaware of the nuanced context of fraught race relations on those campuses. I am, however, aware of the relevant context, including the fact that most every college campus in America has some racists; that this is awful, frustrating, unjust, and disproportionately burdens minority students; that eight years ago at Yale, several students painted their faces black on Halloween; that there are plausible—though contested—allegations that a fraternity at Yale turned black students away from a party, and that many black Yalies have, periodically, confronted racist remarks; that the University of Missouri was the site of anonymous hate speech against black students, and that earlier this autumn, in the New York Times’ telling, “the president of the Missouri Student Association, who is black, reported that he was walking across campus when a group of men in a pickup truck yelled a racial epithet at him.” Cobb puts it aptly as he so often does: The upheaval at Yale and the protests that forced the resignation of University of Missouri President Timothy Wolfe and of Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin are both a product of and distinct from the Black Lives Matter moment we currently inhabit. Students from the University of Missouri participated in protests in Ferguson last year; as the climate on campus became more fraught, activists from Ferguson visited and advised the students. Six weeks ago, I participated in a forum at Yale on the massacre in Charleston. When the historian Edward Ball pointed out that the shootings had occurred on Calhoun Street, named for the intellectual godfather of the Confederacy, students immediately pointed out that Calhoun was an alumnus and that a college is still named for him. All of that is correct. Much of it is outrageous. (And really, to hell with John C. Calhoun.) Says Cobb, offering even more useful context, “Faculty and students at both Yale and the University of Missouri who spoke to me about the protests were careful to point out that they were the culmination of long-simmering concerns.” Agreed. Does any of that justify students spitting on people exiting a campus talk just because they object to what the speaker said? Does it mean that a professor should lose a job in residential life over an email about whether administrators or students should opine on costumes? Should it console an Asian American student whose civil right to take news photographs of a public, outdoor event was thwarted by white faculty and white and black activists who intimidated and pushed him? Cobb doesn’t say. Instead, he stigmatizes the positions I’ve taken without bothering to rebut them. In place of a rebuttal are elegantly written but evasive paragraphs. They invoke history as if obvious conclusions follow, but never specify what they are. Here is one of those paragraphs: “To understand the real complexities of these students’ situation, free-speech purists would have to grapple with what it means to live in a building named for a man who dedicated himself to the principle of white supremacy and to the ownership of your ancestors,” he writes. “That this issue has arisen on the rarified grounds of an Ivy League campus doesn’t diminish the example; it makes it a more pointed illustration that no amount of talent or resources or advantage can shield you entirely from the minimizing sentiments so pervasive in this country.” What on earth do “free speech purists” have to do with the controversy at Yale? What wrongheaded claims are they purportedly making? What does it mean to live in that building? How would grappling with it cause one to change an opinion about spitting on lecture attendees or the chilling effect that would be caused by censuring a professor over a mild email? What is “the real complexity” of the situation? I’d gladly grapple with solid positions––when he takes them, I frequently find Cobb insightful––but try as I might, I cannot tell where he stands on any of this. Cobb goes on to report that a Yale student captured on video shouting at a professor has now been subject to online harassment and death threats. That is reprehensible––not least because, as I noted in my article, which deliberately refrained from naming her, she is by all accounts a lovely, intelligent person who had a bad moment. Punishment for those issuing death threats is warranted in any case. “Surely these threats constitute an infringement upon her free speech,” Cobb writes, “a position that has scarcely been noted amid the outraged First Amendment fundamentalism.” I am noting it now, the moment I learned of the threats. But what does he mean when he invokes “First Amendment fundamentalism”?Death threats are not protected by the First Amendment.The Yale professors have no First Amendment right to their institutional positions. And there is nothing “fundamentalist” about criticizing the students trying to get a professor fired, or those who spit on others. This is a strong word with no bearing on the matter at hand. Given the way that Cobb excerpts and characterizes my piece, New Yorker readers will be surprised to learn that I didn’t, in fact, declare a Yale student’s denunciation of her professor, or anyone’s protest against racism, an example of “catastrophizing.” Had Cobb included the very next sentence in his excerpt from my article, they would have seen that I actually asserted that students were catastrophizing not when arguing with their professors, but when, having failed to secure the apology they demanded for an email, they reportedly declared that “they cannot bear to live in the college anymore,” and one Yale student claimed that friends had stopped eating and sleeping and were having breakdowns. As I see it, when middle-aged adults indulge those reactions as reasonable rather than declaring them to be overwrought, they are doing students a disservice. Instead of empowering them they are indulging them, robbing them of resilience they’ll need to navigate society as adults. Does Cobb disagree? Is he not concerned by those reactions? Does he agree with the notion that Yale students would be better off personally and more effective advocates of social justice if they started acting more like adults? Cobb reports that “Erika, the associate master of the college, wrote an e-mail encouraging students to treat Halloween costumes that they find racially offensive as a free-speech issue.” That fundamentally misunderstands the thrust of her position. In fact, she wrote that while one could think about costumes through the lens of free speech, she wanted to look at them “from a totally different angle.” She spent practically the whole email doing just that, then briefly mentioned, near the very end, that her husband had said, “if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society.” Notice that her approach is not inconsistent with students harshly stigmatizing blackface. As I see it, if Yalies wear blackface on Halloween, it should be handled exactly as it was handled in 2007. In the Yale Daily News, Joshua Cox and Sharifa Love concisely explained the history of blackface and why it is offensive. Afterward, they mused about why a white person would possibly incorporate it in a costume: One conclusion we’ve come to is that some white people are passively ignorant of the history of oppression and pain associated with minstrelsy and blackface. Because whiteness is normative, race is not as salient for white people as it is for black people. From early childhood, black children are forced to navigate a racially charged landscape, controlled by people who do not look like them. Black children grow up considering their blackness with every move they make, whereas white children are never forced to consider race because theirs is considered normal. This may explain why some white people are culturally ignorant of the possible ramifications of blackface and other racist actions. This passive ignorance is not an acceptable excuse. Another conclusion we’ve reached is that some white people are consciously, willfully ignorant of the cultural ramifications of their actions. These individuals have some sense of the possible offensiveness of their actions, yet disregard them and decide that they’d rather continue existing in their own normative sphere. This problematic disownment of personal responsibility preempts engagement in offensive actions while shirking social responsibility. This brand of ignorance is more offensive than passivity because one understands the sociocultural ramifications of actions like blackface, but completely ignores them. The last conclusion we’ve come to is that the most heinous brand of ignorance is that of the white person who knowingly takes culturally sensitive material and wields it in an insensitive fashion to openly mock minorities. Those who understand the ramifications of actions like blackface, yet purposefully engage in such actions for the sake of tasteless humor, are utterly despicable. Such premeditated actions are akin to the use of racial epithets because, like slurs, blackface is meant to demean and dehumanize. White people who knowingly commit such actions do so easily from the safety of the racial majority, without regard for those who face the difficulty of life outside of the normative assumption of whiteness. Their analysis is impressive. And it suggests that given the autonomy to shape campus culture, Yale students are as capable of promulgating norms that are opposed to racism as administrators. Because they were empowered to do so on their own, the students presumably accrued knowledge and experience that will serve them well in the future. Yet people arguing for the relative benefits of that demonstrably workable approach are cast as either racially insensitive or ignorant of nuances. In fact, they’re as fully committed to the well-being of students, including those who suffer from racism, as anyone else, but disagree with some student activists and their ideological allies in the press about the best way forward. That is hardly surprising. Examine any cause taken up by 18-year-olds on a college campus and you’ll find ideologically diverse observers who think that they’re mistaken about various assumptions and tactics. I share the notion that young people with stories about racial injustice should be heard, and that their descriptions of their experiences are owed a degree of deference, especially by those of us who’ve never navigated college as the member of a minority group. But thoughtless or patronizing deference can be prejudicial, too; and when activist assumptions and tactics elicit intense disagreement even among members of groups victimized by the racism at issue, the notion that deference to “students of color” is even possible requires one to pretend that they constitute a monolithic group who uniformly agree. Little wonder that black, Hispanic, and Asian American collegians who depart from progressive orthodoxy often keep quiet, knowing that they’ll be called race-traitors (as one student at Yale was just called) if they are more vocal. What should be done about racist acts at Yale and and the University of Missouri? I’ll hazard some suggestions. A student who defaces a dorm with an excrement swastika should be expelled. Anonymous bigots who yell racial slurs from a pickup truck should be condemned. A frat that discriminates on the basis of race at its parties should have its charter revoked by whatever national organization conferred it. Anonymous threats should be reported to authorities; if possible, the perpetrators should be jailed; and the threatened students should be given protection by campus security. I don’t think that Cobb and I disagree about any of that. (And I have no view of whether the president at Missouri was justly removed or not. He may well have been an abject failure.) The thorniest question of all: What should be done about the fact that many black students at institutions as different as Yale and the University of Missouri feel that they inhabit campuses with racist climates where they are less welcome than others? Insofar as free speech is invoked during such controversies about racism on university campuses, it is because many leftist activists believe one necessary remedy for racism is for administrators to punish speech that they regard as problematic. But the First Amendment flatly prohibits that remedy at the University of Missouri and at all public institutions. For observers like me, there is tremendous interest in zealously defending that civil right, not only because it protects the vocation that Cobb and I share, but for a reason articulated most powerfully by the ACLU: Free speech rights are indivisible. Restricting the speech of one group or individual jeopardizes everyone's rights because the same laws or regulations used to silence bigots can be used to silence you. Conversely, laws that defend free speech for bigots can be used to defend the rights of civil rights workers, anti-war protesters, lesbian and gay activists and others fighting for justice. For example, in the 1949 case of Terminiello v. Chicago, the ACLU successfully defended an ex-Catholic priest who had delivered a racist and anti-semitic speech. The precedent set in that case became the basis for the ACLU's successful defense of civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s and '70s. The indivisibility principle was also illustrated in the case of Neo-Nazis whose right to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1979 was successfully defended by the ACLU. At the time, then ACLU Executive Director Aryeh Neier, whose relatives died in Hitler's concentration camps during World War II, commented: "Keeping a few Nazis off the streets of Skokie will serve Jews poorly if it means that the freedoms to speak, publish or assemble any place in the United States are thereby weakened." Cobb would do better to engage that argument, if he finds it wrongheaded, than to charge that free speech is being raised disingenuously to divert attention from racism or to absurdly compare defenses of free speech to defenses of George Zimmerman. The closest he comes to constructively engaging on the subject is here: Last year, at the University of Connecticut, where I teach, white fraternity members harassed and purportedly shouted epithets at members of a black sorority; the incident generated an afterlife of hostility on Internet forums, where black female students were derided and ridiculed. Eight months ago, fraternity members at the University of Oklahoma were filmed singing an ode to lynching. These are not abstractions. And this is where the arguments about the freedom of speech become most tone deaf. The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered. The enlightenment principles that undergird free speech also prescribed that the natural limits of one’s liberty lie at the precise point at which it begins to impose upon the liberty of another. All these incidents should be roundly condemned; harassment should be punished; hostility on Internet forums will exist regardless of what anyone does, as most working journalists can attest; and yes, the limits of liberty do lie at the point where one begins to impose on another. But excepting instances in which protected speech is not at play, blithely declaring a free-speech defense to be “tone deaf” is an evasion, not a position. And it is lamentably familiar to civil libertarians, who often take positions that most of their countrymen regard as tone-deaf. Defending the “Ground Zero mosque” was seen as tone-deaf, but I defended it. Defending accused criminals and their procedural rights is seen as tone-deaf. Should I stop? Defending due process for Anwar Al-Awlaki, an Al Qaeda terrorist, was tone deaf. And it was vital, because a precedent now exists to assassinate Americans without due process. The core liberties that protect all Americans, and that are especially important to the most marginalized, are much more important than “tone.” Suggestions to the contrary speak volumes about the elevation of rhetorical sensitivity over substance among those ostensibly seeking change. To me, it is bizarre that the same campus activists who declare their institutions and the United States to be rooted in white supremacy and hostile to students of color want to empower the very authorities in charge to punish speech at their discretion! The impulse to declare the First Amendment null and void when it interferes with punishing racist, hurtful speech may seem, in the moment, as though it shows compassion toward marginalized groups, salving their anger and pain. But it does so at their ultimate expense, and I’m not even convinced that the immediate anger and pain would be less. My article on the controversy at Yale expressed the belief that people who feel like outsiders and belong to a minority group at the university have the toughest road, all else being equal. ​I agree with student activists that their frustrations should be heard. In the torrent of email I’ve received over the last few days, I heard from one black Yalie who explained that, unlike his white classmates, he is regularly asked to show his ID on campus to prove that he is a student. My suspicion is that he is the victim of unconscious bias, or even deliberate profiling. Of course, there’s a chance he underestimates how often his white peers are stopped, but I doubt he’s wrong. Were I a Yale administrator, it’s the sort of complaint that I’d feel most able to address. I could and would arrange a rigorous inquiry to answer the empirical question: Are Yale security personnel stopping students of color more often than white students? If so, why? What would it take to remedy that prejudicial reality? My notion of how to make racial progress on campus is to tackle as many discrete injustices as possible as a start, knowing that many can’t be so easily studied, and that for multi-faceted reasons, no one can truly be at home while at college. While hardly a cure-all, embarking on a series of discrete improvements strikes me as more beneficial than demanding that administrators validate student pain, especially since students are bound for adult life, where validation of authorities is unavailable. It is with painful awareness of racism’s persistence, not ignorance or apathy or a desire to divert attention from it, that I reaffirm a belief that resilience is among the most valuable things anyone can learn in an institution of higher education. I may be wrong that students are being robbed of resilience and disempowered by mistaken ideological assumptions, as I’ve argued in recent articles. But right or not, my position is not a distraction from the matter of their well-being. It is my notion of how young people might best secure it, and to frame it otherwise is the diversion. As I put it to a roomful of impressive students at Cal State Long Beach, where I spoke last week on some of these themes, “You're all smart people. You're all capable of the strength that it takes to hear a wrongheaded idea, to react intellectually, even if you're also reacting emotionally, and to formulate a logical, persuasive response. Don't let peers, professors, or administrators convince you that you're incapable of that. If you're not there yet, you can get there, and it's worth practicing, because that sort of resilience will serve you well in your career, where no one is going to tiptoe around your feelings. And it is vital in civic life, because America is filled with horrific injustices. We need more people who are willing and able to look at them squarely and to persuade their fellow voters of sound responses.” To me, even after accounting for the history of race in America and racism today, that is still more empowering and validating than, “I feel your pain.”
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	51	+Suppression of speech results in polarization – only having racism out in the open can allow us to challenge it. Nickens 2/6
	52	+Lexi Nickens, 2-6-2017, "OPINION: Berkeley students should have let Milo Yiannopoulos speak," Red and Black, http://www.redandblack.com/opinion/opinion-berkeley-students-should-have-let-milo-yiannopoulos-speak/article_450f6fd6-eaf1-11e6-ad38-4b0a0790bdba.html
	53	+From “10 Things Milo Hates about Islam” to “Here’s Why There Ought to be a cap on Women Studying Science and Maths,” Milo Yiannopoulos’s Breitbart articles reveal his blatantly sexist and racist views of the world. I could not tell you which of Yiannopoulos’s hateful opinions I disagree with most. However, if he were to announce plans to come speak at UGA, I would accept his right to do so. College students have a responsibility to acknowledge radically different ideas, even ones they view as dangerous or personally harmful. Students at UC Berkeley failed to uphold this duty when they prevented Yiannopoulos from speaking on Feb 1. Protests against the speaker turned violent as students attacked cars and set small fires, causing the university to cancel the event. Beyond issues of free speech or violent protests, this incident reveals why this country is becoming increasingly polarized Yiannopoulos represents a small but increasingly vocal portion of the population that perpetuates the notion than white males should be held in higher esteem than other humans. Berkeley students worried that allowing Yiannopoulos to speak takes a step toward normalizing these views. They believe the only way to keep his sexist and racist attitudes out of the mainstream is to battle them at every opportunity. I share these students fears, but I disagree with their methods of handling them. Yiannopoulos and his opinions exist, whether we like them or not. In the age of internet fame and social media, he does not need Berkeley, or any other college, as a platform to share his views. Preventing Yiannopoulos from speaking does not deny him an audience. Nor does it automatically normalize sexism or racism. In fact, letting Yiannopoulos speak will provide liberals with another opportunity to protest these views. It could spark difficult discussion between two people on opposite sides of the spectrum. College campuses are the perfect environment for these discussions to happen. Every day in class, students are challenged to think differently. We are also much less set in our ways than older generations. As students, we are at the ideal place and time in our lives to learn about nuance and refine our opinions. Shutting down other side, even people as radical as Yiannopoulos, will only widen the gap between different ideologies. Liberals often lament how ISIL uses anti-Islamic rhetoric from people like Yiannopoulos to turn others against America. Similarly, Yiannopoulos can use instances such as Berkeley to radicalize otherwise moderate students. Suppressing Yiannopoulos’ voice and views will not make them go away. It will only make these voices louder and feed polarization. Instead, liberal students should want these opinions out in the open where they can more easily challenge them. Debate is the only way to ensure radical views on both sides do not hinder our country’s progression, and there is no better time and place for debate than in college.
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	55	+Underview
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	57	+Specifically in the context of the colleges, discussion and counterspeech are effective measures against racism. The worst kinds of speech aren’t protected. Boler 04
	58	+Boler, Megan. “All Speech Is Not Free: The Ethics of ‘Affirmative Action Pedagogy.’” Counterpoints, vol. 240, 2004, pp. 3–13., www.jstor.org/stable/42978376.EE
	59	+What does it mean to recognize, in the educational practices of college and university classrooms, that all voices are not equal? The solution is neither to invoke an absolutist sense of free speech, not to prohibit simply and absolutely all hostile expressions. The uniqueness of classrooms is that, ideally, they provide a public space in which marginalized and silenced voices can respond to ignorant expressions rooted in privilege, white supremacy, or other dominant ideologies. Unlike many public spaces in which one may encounter hate speech-say, on a street or in a shopping mall-the classroom is one of the few public spaces in which one can respond and be heard. Educators must deal with messy issues that others cannot or do not want to address. Does this prerogative give educators any special constitutional privilege or dispensation? I leave that question open. However, to advocate that we use classrooms to critically interrogate racist and homophobic remarks is not based on an invocation of free speech. Rather, an affirmative action pedagogy recognizes that we are not equally protected in practice by the First Amendment, and that education needs to represent marginalized voices fairly by challenging dominant voices in the classroom. I must also distinguish the public space of higher education classrooms from other public spaces where hate speech occurs. Within the majority of college and university classrooms, we are concerned with statements that are offensive, oppressive, or ignorant and that are supported by dominant admiral values institutionalized and validated through social, legal, and political practices. I distinguish such offensive expressions from what may be termed “verbal abuse” or what are legally referred to as “fighting words”: for instance, name-calling solely intended to denigrate the other. 3 The First Amendment protects the individuals right to free speech against gov- ernment intervention. In the case of publicly funded higher education, the First Amendment protects individual educators' right to set classroom rules. However, to what extent does the First Amendment protect hostile expressions within class- rooms? Within this murky legislative terrain, I set out to examine the ethics of af- firmative action pedagogy. I Wall( to explore a pedagogy that reflects a commit- ment as well to the Fourteenth Amendment and to 'litle IX, to ensure social equity and to create an educational climate that does not replicate the social inequities of the “real” world.
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	61	+Debate norms privilege big ticket impacts of systemic ones which is educationally bankrupt, excludes important conversations and doesn’t standup to basic math. Cohn 13
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	63	+Nate Cohn 13, covers elections, polling and demographics for The Upshot, a Times politics and policy site. Previously, he was a staff writer for The New Republic. Before entering journalism, he was a research assistant and Scoville Fellow at the Stimson Center “Improving the Norms and Practices of Policy Debate,” Nov 24, http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/topic,5416.0.html
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	65	+So let me offer another possibility: the problem isn’t the topic, but modern policy debate. The unrealistic scenarios, exclusive focus on policy scholarship, inability to engage systemic impacts and philosophical questions. And so long as these problems characterize modern policy debate, teams will feel compelled to avoid it.¶ It might be tempting to assign the blame to “USFG should.” But these are bugs, not features of plan-focused, USFG-based, active voice topics. These bugs result from practices and norms that were initially and independently reasonable, but ultimately and collectively problematic. I also believe that these norms can and should be contested. I believe it would be possible for me to have a realistic, accessible, and inclusive discussion about the merits of a federal policy with, say, Amber Kelsie. Or put differently, I’m not sure I agree with Jonah that changing the topic is the only way to avoid being “a bunch of white folks talking about nuke war.”¶ The fact that policy debate is wildly out of touch—the fact that we are “a bunch of white folks talking about nuclear war”—is a damning indictment of nearly every coach in this activity. It’s a serious indictment of the successful policy debate coaches, who have been content to continue a pedagogically unsound game, so long as they keep winning. It’s a serious indictment of policy debate’s discontents who chose to disengage. ¶ That’s not to say there hasn’t been any effort to challenge modern policy debate on its own terms—just that they’ve mainly come from the middle of the bracket and weren’t very successful, focusing on morality arguments and various “predictions bad” claims to outweigh. ¶ Judges were receptive to the sentiment that disads were unrealistic, but negative claims to specificity always triumphed over generic epistemological questions or arguments about why “predictions fail.” The affirmative rarely introduced substantive responses to the disadvantage, rarely read impact defense. All considered, the negative generally won a significant risk that the plan resulted in nuclear war. Once that was true, it was basically impossible to win that some moral obligation outweighed the (dare I say?) obligation to avoid a meaningful risk of extinction.¶ There were other problems. Many of the small affirmatives were unstrategic—teams rarely had solvency deficits to generic counterplans. It was already basically impossible to win that some morality argument outweighed extinction; it was totally untenable to win that a moral obligation outweighed a meaningful risk of extinction; it made even less sense if the counterplan solved most of the morality argument. The combined effect was devastating: As these debates are currently argued and judged, I suspect that the negative would win my ballot more than 95 percent of the time in a debate between two teams of equal ability.¶ But even if a “soft left” team did better—especially by making solvency deficits and responding to the specifics of the disadvantage—I still think they would struggle. They could compete at the highest levels, but, in most debates, judges would still assess a small, but meaningful risk of a large scale conflict, including nuclear war and extinction. The risk would be small, but the “magnitude” of the impact would often be enough to outweigh a higher probability, smaller impact. Or put differently: policy debate still wouldn’t be replicating a real world policy assessment, teams reading small affirmatives would still be at a real disadvantage with respect to reality. . ¶ Why? Oddly, this is the unreasonable result of a reasonable part of debate: the burden of refutation or rejoinder, the responsibility of debaters to “beat” arguments. If I introduce an argument, it starts out at 100 percent—you then have to disprove it. That sounds like a pretty good idea in principle, right? Well, I think so too. But it’s really tough to refute something down to “zero” percent—a team would need to completely and totally refute an argument. That’s obviously tough to do, especially since the other team is usually going to have some decent arguments and pretty good cards defending each component of their disadvantage—even the ridiculous parts. So one of the most fundamental assumptions about debate all but ensures a meaningful risk of nearly any argument—even extremely low-probability, high magnitude impacts, sufficient to outweigh systemic impacts. ¶ There’s another even more subtle element of debate practice at play. Traditionally, the 2AC might introduce 8 or 9 cards against a disadvantage, like “non-unique, no-link, no-impact,” and then go for one and two. Yet in reality, disadvantages are underpinned by dozens or perhaps hundreds of discrete assumptions, each of which could be contested. By the end of the 2AR, only a handful are under scrutiny; the majority of the disadvantage is conceded, and it’s tough to bring the one or two scrutinized components down to “zero.”¶ And then there’s a bad understanding of probability. If the affirmative questions four or five elements of the disadvantage, but the negative was still “clearly ahead” on all five elements, most judges would assess that the negative was “clearly ahead” on the disadvantage. In reality, the risk of the disadvantage has been reduced considerably. If there was, say, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform would pass, an 80 percent chance that political capital was key, an 80 percent chance that the plan drained a sufficient amount of capital, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform was necessary to prevent another recession, and an 80 percent chance that another recession would cause a nuclear war (lol), then there’s a 32 percent chance that the disadvantage caused nuclear war. ¶ I think these issues can be overcome. First, I think teams can deal with the “burden of refutation” by focusing on the “burden of proof,” which allows a team to mitigate an argument before directly contradicting its content. ¶ Here’s how I’d look at it: modern policy debate has assumed that arguments start out at “100 percent” until directly refuted. But few, if any, arguments are supported by evidence consistent with “100 percent.” Most cards don’t make definitive claims. Even when they do, they’re not supported by definitive evidence—and any reasonable person should assume there’s at least some uncertainty on matters other than few true facts, like 2+2=4.¶ Take Georgetown’s immigration uniqueness evidence from Harvard. It says there “may be a window” for immigration. So, based on the negative’s evidence, what are the odds that immigration reform will pass? Far less than 50 percent, if you ask me. That’s not always true for every card in the 1NC, but sometimes it’s even worse—like the impact card, which is usually a long string of “coulds.” If you apply this very basic level of analysis to each element of a disadvantage, and correctly explain math (.4*.4*.4*.4*.4=.01024), the risk of the disadvantage starts at a very low level, even before the affirmative offers a direct response. ¶ Debaters should also argue that the negative hasn’t introduced any evidence at all to defend a long list of unmentioned elements in the “internal link chain.” The absence of evidence to defend the argument that, say, “recession causes depression,” may not eliminate the disadvantage, but it does raise uncertainty—and it doesn’t take too many additional sources of uncertainty to reduce the probability of the disadvantage to effectively zero—sort of the static, background noise of prediction.¶ Now, I do think it would be nice if a good debate team would actually do the work—talk about what the cards say, talk about the unmentioned steps—but I think debaters can make these observations at a meta-level (your evidence isn’t certain, lots of undefended elements) and successfully reduce the risk of a nuclear war or extinction to something indistinguishable from zero. It would not be a factor in my decision.¶ Based on my conversations with other policy judges, it may be possible to pull it off with even less work. They might be willing to summarily disregard “absurd” arguments, like politics disadvantages, on the grounds that it’s patently unrealistic, that we know the typical burden of rejoinder yields unrealistic scenarios, and that judges should assess debates in ways that produce realistic assessments. I don’t think this is too different from elements of Jonah Feldman’s old philosophy, where he basically said “when I assessed 40 percent last year, it’s 10 percent now.”¶ Honestly, I was surprised that the few judges I talked to were so amenable to this argument. For me, just saying “it’s absurd, and you know it” wouldn’t be enough against an argument in which the other team invested considerable time. The more developed argument about accurate risk assessment would be more convincing, but I still think it would be vulnerable to a typical defense of the burden of rejoinder. ¶ To be blunt: I want debaters to learn why a disadvantage is absurd, not just make assertions that conform to their preexisting notions of what’s realistic and what’s not. And perhaps more importantly for this discussion, I could not coach a team to rely exclusively on this argument—I’m not convinced that enough judges are willing to discount a disadvantage on “it’s absurd.” Nonetheless, I think this is a useful “frame” that should preface a following, more robust explanation of why the risk of the disadvantage is basically zero—even before a substantive response is offered.¶ There are other, broad genres of argument that can contest the substance of the negative’s argument. There are serious methodological indictments of the various forms of knowledge production, from journalistic reporting to think tanks to quantitative social science. Many of our most strongly worded cards come from people giving opinions, for which they offer very little data or evidence. And even when “qualified” people are giving predictions, there’s a great case to be extremely skeptical without real evidence backing it up. The world is a complicated place, predictions are hard, and most people are wrong. And again, this is before contesting the substance of the negative’s argument(!)—if deemed necessary.¶ So, in my view, the low probability scenario is waiting to be eliminated from debate, basically as soon as a capable team tries to do it.¶ That would open to the door to all of the arguments, previously excluded, de facto, by the prevalence of nuclear war impacts. It’s been tough to talk about racism or gender violence, since modest measures to mitigate these impacts have a difficult time outweighing a nuclear war. It’s been tough to discuss ethical policy making, since it’s hard to argue that any commitment to philosophical or ethical purity should apply in the face of an existential risk. It’s been tough to introduce unconventional forms of evidence, since they can’t really address the probability of nuclear war

EntryDate

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	1	+2017-04-09 14:37:58.878

Judge

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	1	+Sunhee Simon

Opponent

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	1	+Quarry Lane SK

ParentRound

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	1	+15

Round

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	1	+3

Team

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Engel Aff

Title

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	1	+JAN-FEB - AC - Safety

Tournament

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	1	+NDCA