Why Does the judge vote aff

We begin with the introduction to Afrolantica Legacies by Derrick Bell

The only ethical demand available to modern politics is that of the Slave and the Savage, the demand for
the end of America itself. This cry, born out of the belly of slave ships and the churning vertigo of
constitutive genocide, exposes the grammar of the Affirmatives calls for larger institutional access as a
fundamental fortification of White Settler and Slave Master civil society by its diversionary focus on the
ethicality of the policies and practices of the United States as opposed to the a priori question its very
existence. This silence of the Affirmatives assumptive logic renders them unaccountable to the
revolutionary political ontology of Redness and Blackness and thereby sets the stage for the various
dramas of conflictual relationships i.e. class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights, etc. that are
made possible by the antagonism between Settler and Savage, Master and Slave.
Wilderson 2010 (Frank B., killed apartheid officials in South Africa, nuff said, Red, White & Black: Cinema
and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 1-5)
WHEN i WAS a young student at Columbia University in New York there was a Black woman who used to
stand outside the gate and yell at Whites, Latinos, and East and South Asian students, staff, and faculty as they
entered the university She accused them of having stolen her sofa and of selling her into slavery She always
winked at the Blacks, though we didn't wink back. Some of us thought her outbursts bigoted and out of step
with the burgeoning ethos of multicultural-ism and "rainbow coalitions." But others did not wink back because
we were too fearful of the possibility that her isolation would become our isolation, and we had come to
Columbia for the precise, though largely assumed and unspoken, purpose of foreclosing on that peril. Besides,
people said she was crazy. Later, when I attended the University of California at Berkeley, I saw a Native
American man sitting on the sidewalk of Telegraph Avenue. On the ground in front of him was an upside-down
hat and a sign informing pedestrians that here they could settle the "Land Lease Accounts" that they had
neglected to settle all of their lives. He, too, was "crazy. "Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it
would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demandsand,
by extension, the grammar of their sufferingwas indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps it is the only
ethical grammar available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for it draws our attention not to
how space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the
violence that underwrites the modern world's capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally.
The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage on which other violent and
consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the
actions of the world but the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia
was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place
within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a
triangulation between two things. On the one hand was the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her
corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a "being for
the captor,"1 the drama of value (the stage on which surplus value is extracted from labor power through
commodity production and sale). On the other was the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body,
fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity
and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the worldnot its
myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itselfwas unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without
the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her "crazy." And to what does the
world attribute the Native American mans insanity? "He's crazy if he thinks he's getting any money out of us"?
Surely, that doesn't make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun.
What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence?
What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that

they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematicallyunless they are posed obliquely and
unconsciously, as if by accident? Give Turtle Island back to the "Savage." Give life itself back to the
Slave. Two simple sentences, fourteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global)
antagonisms would be dismantled. An "ethical modernity" would no longer sound like an oxymoron.
From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of
antagonisms, such as class struggle, gender conflict, and immigrants' rights. One cannot but wonder why
questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in
intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly
they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an
activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clearif the filmographies of socially and politically engaged
directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of left-wing broadsides are anything to go byis
that what can so easily be spoken is now (500 years and 250 million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously
unspoken that these two simple sentences, these fourteen words not only render their speaker "crazy" but
become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, left-leaning
scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable.2 In the 1960s and early 1970s
the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not Should the United States be overthrown? or
even Would it be overthrown? but when and howand, for some, what would come in its wake. Those
steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the United States writ large
(and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden
wing of Students for Democratic Society, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to Bobby Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical
machinations, to the paradigmatic Zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the
Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle
mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of "success," but they could not
dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing caseby way of a paradigmatic
analysisthat the United States was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals
and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (as a U.S. attorney general) mused that the law and its enforcers
had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.3 One could (and many did) acknowledge America's
strength and power. This seldom rose to the level of an ethical assessment, however, remaining instead an
assessment of the "balance of forces." The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians,
circulated too widely to wed the United States and ethics credibly. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end
to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness
and Redness to pose the questionand the power to pose the question is the greatest power of allretreated as
did White radicals and progressives who "retired" from the struggle. The question lies buried in the graves of
young Black Panthers, AIM warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of
them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, or thirty years, and at the gates of the
academy where the "crazies" shout at passersby. Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices that effected a
seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of
feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a
revolutionary Zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and
the Slave estate's destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse when this dream
is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets or of intellectual discourse in the
academy? The answer is "no" in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political
discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed on in screenplays and in scholarly prose, but "yes" in the sense that
in even the most taciturn historical moments, such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on
this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptomsit registers in both cinema and
scholarship as a symptom of awareness of the structural antagonisms. The election of President Barack
Obama does not mitigate the claim that this is a taciturn historical moment. Neoliberalism with a Black
face is neither the index of a revolutionary advance nor the end of anti-Blackness as a constituent element
of U.S. antagonisms. If anything, the election of Obama enables a plethora of shaming discourses in
response to revolutionary politics and "legitimates" widespread disavowal of any notion that the United
States itself, and not merely its policies and practices, is unethical. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think

cinemati-cally and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses.
From 1980 to the present, however, Blackness and Redness manifest only in the rebar of cinematic and
intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic
strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic design), even when the script labors for the
spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (i.e., a rubric of problems that can be posed
and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or
positions, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions). In other
words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script
insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of "family values"), the
nonnarrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable
questions of Red and Black political ontologyor nonontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the
mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken.
Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible.5 Likewise, the
grammar of political ethics the grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of sufferingwhich
underwrites film theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical
action), and which underwrites cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid1960s to the present) is also unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema
assume an ontological grammar, a structure of suffering. And this structure of suffering crowds out
others, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in
question. To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then
conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the
ontological position from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step
claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political
theory that follows.
The affirmative's active choice to remain complicit with this police impunity represents the ignorability of
the legal system that reifies anti-blackness. An affirmative ballot means affirming the banality of events
like Trayvon and Diallo's death and ignoring them as okay in white civil society. By staying complacent
with the system in the status quo, the affirmative acts as though that system is so normal and obvious that
there is no reason mentioning it. This represents an affirmation of the banality of white supremacy and is
the source of White tenacity and power. That said banality is how and why Whiteness operates.
Martinot & Sexton 2003 [Steve & Jared, Steve is a lecturer at San Francisco State University in the Center for
Interdisciplinary Programs Jared is Associate Professor African American Studies School of Humanities
Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies School of Humanities at UC Irvine Ph.D., University of California,
Berkeley, Comparative Ethnic Studies, The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy, Social Identities, Volume 9,
Number 2, 2003 p.171-172]
Most theories of white supremacy seek to plumb the depths of its excessiveness, beyond the ordinary; they miss
the fact that racism is a mundane affair. The fundamental excess of the paradigm of policing which infuses
this culture is wholly banal. Those theories overlook that fact in favor of extant extravagance, spectacle,
or the deep psychology of rogue elements and become complicit in perpetuating white supremacy. The
reality is an invidious ethos of excess that, instead, constitutes the surface of everything in this society. For
some time now, the intellectual quest for racisms supposedly hidden meaning has afforded a refuge from
confrontations with this banality, even its possible acknowledgement. The most egregious aspect of this
banality is our tacit acquiescence to the rules of race and power, to the legitimacy white supremacy says it
has, regardless of their total violation of reason and comprehensibility. Our "tacit acquiescence" is the
real silent source of white supremacist tenacity and power. As William C. Harris, II wrote in the aftermath of
Tyisha Millers murder by the police: It is heartbreaking to be an American citizen and have to say this, but I do
have to say this. We have almost, and I stress almost, become accustomed to police shooting innocent, unarmed,
young, black males. That in itself is bad enough, and one was at one time inclined to think it couldn't get any
worse, but it gets worse. Now we have police killing our young black females. It can't get any worse than

that. Harris is right; yet he also sells himself out because he acquiesces in the process of decrying acquiescence.
He does not draw the line between respect for persons and impunity. He continues: "Even if she grabbed
a gun, was it necessary to shoot at her twenty-seven times? I know its less than 41, but that's still too
many times to shoot at a sleeping femaleblack, brown, yellow or white" (emphasis added). Why isnt
one bullet too many times to shoot anybody? It is the job of the spectacular (and sensational reports about
the subtle) to draw attention away from the banality of police murder as standard operating procedure.
Spectacle is a form of camouflage. It does not conceal anything; it simply renders it unrecognizable. One
looks at it and does not see it. It appears in disguise. Harris, for example, looks at acquiescence and cannot see
it. Camouflage is a relationship between the one dissimulating their appearance and the one who is fooled, who
looks and cannot see. Like racialization as a system of meanings assigned to the body, police spectacle is
itself the form of appearance of this banality. Their endless assault reflects the idea that race is a social
envelope, a system of social categorization dropped over the heads of people like clothes. Police impunity
serves to distinguish between the racial uniform itself and the elsewhere that mandates it. They constitute
the distinction between those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom it
goes without saying. Police spectacle is not the effect of the racial uniform; rather, it is the police uniform
that is producing re-racialization.
...
The gratuitousness of its repetition bestows upon white supremacy an inherent discontinuity. It stops and
starts self-referentially, at whim. To theorize some political, economic, or psychological necessity for its
repetition, its unending return to violence, its need to kill is to lose a grasp on that gratuitousness by
thinking its performance is representable. And therein it hides. If the hegemony of white supremacy is
already (and only) excessive, its acts of repetition are its access to unrepresentability; they dissolve its
excessiveness into invisibility as simply daily occurrence. We can, for example, name the fact of Albert
Woodfoxs nearly 30-year solitary confinement in Angola Prison, but it exceeds the capacity of representation.
(The ideological and cultural structure that conceives of and enables doing that to a person in the first place is
inarticulable.) The inner dynamic of our attempts to understand its supposedly underlying meaning or purpose
masks its ethic of impunity from us. White supremacy is nothing more than what we perceive of it; there is
nothing beyond it to give it legitimacy, nothing beneath it nor outside of it to give it justification. The
structure of its banality is the surface on which it operates. Whatever mythic content it pretends to claim is a
priori empty. Its secret is that it has no depth. There is no dark corner that, once brought to the light of reason,
will unravel its system. In each instance of repetition, "what is repeated is the emptiness of repetition," an
articulation that "does not speak and yet has always been said" (Foucault 54). In other words, its truth lies in the
rituals that sustain its circuitous contentless logic; it is, in fact, nothing but its very practices.
Their nationalist call for hegemonic power is not colorblind. Nationalism is rooted in a mentality to
further a White Nation. America was founded on slavery and its advancement is therefore an ontological
re-entrenchment of the enslavement of the black body. When we claim that the U.S. will surpass other
states, it is a claim to the individuality of the state in comparison to other nations. However, that
individualism is characterized by the slave economy that allowed America to thrive.
Martinot 2003 [Steve, lecturer at San Francisco State University in the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs,
The Cultural Roots of Interventionism in the US, Social Justice Vol. 30, No. 1 (2003), pp. 19-20]
Nationalism first took form in the U.S. as the desire to separate from England in the mid-18th century,
and the defense of slavery after the Revolution. Both reflected the distinct economic development of the
continental colonies, and both expressed a consciousness of the U.S. as a "white nation." The English had
discovered and seized two vast sources of wealth on the American continent. While the Spanish found riches
in gold they could transport to Europe, the wealth the English "found" was more stationary, and could
not be transported. It resided in the seemingly endless land to be transformed into property, and in the
wealth of slavery. The land of the American continent was seized from its indigenous inhabitants; that seizure
did not consist in a change of ownership. That act of seizure created the land as property in the first place; it was

not a transformation of property as such, but a transformation to property of that which was not. The property
relation is not inherent in things; it is a juridical structure, a social relation. The indigenous people's
relation to the land was not one of property; it was incommensurable with the property relation, and was erased
by the land's transformation into property at English hands. In effect, the seizure of the land was a juridical act
(backed immediately by military force). The wealth of slavery, however, did consist in the seizure and
transportation of what contained its riches? the labor of Africans taken from their distant land, uprooted
from their cultural and economic origins and foundations, and transformed into bond-laborers, again as
property. Nevertheless, it also resided in the act of seizure, the slave trade, and third, in the market value
calculated for their persons, their chattel existence as a category of self-augmenting capital. In sum, the
wealth the English "found" lay not in what it was, but in the peculiar (European) manner of its seizure ? the
transformation of what was not property into property. Only by adjoining one to the other were this seized labor
and endless land made into wealth. All the crops by which the continental colonial economy established a major
position in international markets ? tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton ? depended on their mass production by
plantation agro-business deploying huge labor forces. Moreover, the endlessness of the land made slavery
possible as a system of production (its "necessity" was a different ethical question for the settlers).
Indeed, it was the condition on which the slave trade itself became the most profitable of all the colonial
industries
Our affirmation of creating Afrolantica within the debate space is a call to create a mental liberation of
blackness. The recitation and alignment with Bell's legal narrative of Afrolantica reorients our legal
scholarship in the debate round to destroy the form of knowledge production that re-entrenches
whiteness by disorienting the dominant narrative of whiteness. It is this performance of the narrative that
forces people to be aware even when they refuse to care or listen. This is also a reason to forget
framework for the round, Atchison and Panetta, Shively, and Boggs are on the bench for this round.
Taylor 05' (George H. Taylor, Professor of Law at University of Pittsburgh, "Transcending the Debate on Legal
Narrative", University of Pittsburgh School of Law Working Paper Series, 2005)
Bluebeards Castle comprises one of Bells Afrolantica Legacies in the book of the same name. Afrolantica is
a fictional creation of Bells that first appeared in the tale, The Afrolantica Awakening, a chapter in Faces at the
Bottom of the Well. 241 Afrolantica was a giant land mass that arose unexpectedly in the middle of the
Atlantic Ocean.242 As explorers to the land found, it had a special pecularity: its air could be breathed
by blacks but not whites.243 In fact, blacks venturing on to the land underwent an experience of
heightened self-esteem, of liberation, of waking up.244 Many blacks contemplated migrating to
Afrolanticas shores, but when the first group of ships arrived, they were met by the entire land mass
sinking back into the ocean.245 As the ships turned around to go back to the United States, people on
board discovered they were not in fact dismayed. [T]he miracle of Afrolantica was replaced by a greater
miracle. Blacks discovered that they themselves actually possessed the qualities of liberation they had
hoped to realize on their new homeland. Feeling this was, they all agreed, an Afrolantica Awakening, a
liberationnot of place, but of mind.246 As an Afrolantica legacy, Bluebeards Castle intends to elicit a
similar liberation of mind. The liberation is one of openness and of possibility. In the concluding pages of
Afrolantica Legacies, Bells fictional counterpart, Geneva Crenshaw, says to narrator Bell that
Afrolantica is real. Unlike Camelots and Shangri-las, which all are envisioned as escapes from the real
world, Afrolantica is instead a reflection of that world: one offering a perspective that enlightens and
encourages people wherever they are.247 Bells fictions are parables: they have poetic power, they
transform, they reorient by disorienting. They manifest both what isthe realities now unfolded by critiqueand
the possibilities of what may be.248 What Bell ascribes to critical race theory in general applies directly to
his own work: it is transformatively aspirational.Narratives can operate in a number of ways.276
Given the emphasis on parables including Bellsas reorienting through disorientation,277 I particularly
want to attend the function of disorientation as explored in general narrative analysis. Kathryn Abrams
and Richard Delgado, two of the most prominent scholars of legal narrative, describe variously how
narratives can act as paradigm-shifting,278 as rupturing 279 and revelatory,280 as jarring or

displacing,281 as shatter[ing] complacency and challeng[ing] the status quo.282 In part legal narrative
acts to disrupt the doctrinal form of analysis of legal discourse; stories challenge nonstories.283 Legal
narrative acts as well as a counterstory to jar majoritarian stories.284 The challenge posed by these
counterstories is twofold. First, they unmask as stories what the racial majority deem to be truths285 and
objective standards.286 Second, the counterstories displace or overturn . . . [these] majoritarian myths and
narratives.287 Counterstories can expose the lie contained in majoritarian narratives.288 They challenge
accounts by which majoritarians make sense of their world; stories such as: without intent, no discrimination;
outright racism is rare and sporadic; we have all the civil rights legislation we needany more would
disadvantage innocent whites; some cultures unfortunately have less ambition and ability than others; and so
on.289 Counterstories provide a means for undermining the presuppositions, received wisdoms, and shared
understandings that on the one hand are little attended and simply presumed and that on the other form the
cognitive grounds on whose bases legal and political decision occurs.290 Narratives also operate differently
than arms-length, objective doctrinal analysis. They seek from their readers more than simple rational
or abstract understanding; understanding of a narrative is affective, more lived, visceral.291
Narratives as well seek to lure the reader into a story; they work noncoercively 292 and insinuatively 293
as they ask the reader to suspend judgment. 294 Narratives ask the reader to reconcile two worlds: the
texts and the readers. 295 If, however, the reader refuses to be open to the texts world but stands steadfast in
his or her own, 296 the storys goalto make one see 297 will fail.298
Our discussion of the discursive constructions that make racial domination possible is key to stop it and
spills over into the broader educational space. The racist disciplinary power of the debate community
that marginalizes blackness can only be sustained and instituted by those within itwe all must say NO
MORE and shed the chains of exclusionary white oppression.
Reid-Brinkley 08 (Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and
Communications as well as the Director of Debate at the University of Pittsburgh, THE HARSH REALITIES
OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE
REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, 2008.
http://www.comm.pitt.edu/faculty/documents/reid-brinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf)
The attempts at educational reform are not limited to institutional actors such as the local, state, and federal
governments. Non-profit organizations dedicated to alleviating the black/white achievement gap have also
proliferated. One such organization, the Urban Debate League, claims that Urban Debate Leagues have proven
to increase literacy scores by 25%, to improve grade-point averages by 8 to 10%, to achieve high school
graduation rates of nearly 100%, and to produce college matriculation rates of 71 to 91%. The UDL program
is housed in over fourteen American cities and targets inner city youths of color to increase their access to
debate training. Such training of students defined as at risk is designed to offset the negative statistics
associated with black educational achievement. The program has been fairly successful and has received wide
scale media attention. The success of the program has also generated renewed interest amongst college debate
programs in increasing direct efforts at recruitment of racial and ethnic minorities. The UDL program creates a
substantial pool of racial minorities with debate training coming out of high school, that college debate
directors may tap to diversify their own teams. The debate community serves as a microcosm of the broader
educational space within which racial ideologies are operating. It is a space in which academic achievement is
performed according to the intelligibility of ones race, gender, class, and sexuality. As policy debate is
intellectually rigorous and has historically been closed to those marked by social difference, it offers a unique
opportunity to engage the impact of desegregation and diversification of American education. How are black
students integrated into a competitive educational community from which they have traditionally been
excluded? How are they represented in public and media discourse about their participation, and how do they
rhetorically respond to such representations? If racial ideology is perpetuated within discourse through the
stereotype, then mapping the intelligibility of the stereotype within public discourse and the attempts to resist
such intelligibility is a critical tool in the battle to end racial domination. Education theorist Ludwig Pongratz
argues that the testing focus in the standards and accountability movement is probably the most effective
means of realizing disciplinary procedures. 11 He argues further that the contemporary reformist drive

sweeping western nations is a tool designed to replicate normative practices, values, beliefs and behaviors
consistent with the broader society. In other words, building on the work of Michel Foucault, Pongratz argues
that the educational system, including reform efforts, function as a disciplinary apparatus that shapes and
molds social bodies into normalized social systems. 12 The disciplinary character of modern education
systems do not operate through institutional control, but instead through the positioning of social bodies to
engage in self-control, an internalization of the discourse of institutional power. Pongratz notes that in this
way, it becomes possible to integrate school pupils into the schools institutional framework more effectively
than ever before. 13 Acclaimed French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu theory of habitus is useful here. For
Bourdieu, habitas represents the incorporation of the social into the corporeal. 14 Gender theorist Terry
Lovell argues Through habitus, social norms are incorporated in the body of the individual subject. 15 An
institution, like those attached to public education in the U.S. can only be efficacious if it is objectified in
bodies in the form of durable dispositions that recognize and comply with the specific demands of a given
institutional area of activity. 16 In other words, the disciplinary character of the school system only
functions in so much as disciplinary parameters can be internalized by the members of a social body. What is
missing from the study of education reform and the black/white achievement gap is an analysis of the
discursive construction of racial images and stereotypes with which the public is confronted. 17 Public
discourse about education reform, particularly that which revolves around the black/ white achievement gap,
requires the use of race, class, and gender imagery that is intelligible to the general public. In essence, from
experts to politicians to the news media, public representations of black underachievement and reform efforts
depend on the versatility of social and cultural stereotypes consistent with the argumentative structures and
social ideologies that make rhetorical efforts at reform intelligible. Education reform engages in a discourse of
paradigm shift. 18 In essence there is a discursive consistency amongst education reform proponents for
characterizing reform efforts as a change in perspective from previous values and beliefs about how best to
educate Americas youth. Philosophy of education scholar Jeff Stickney argues that scholars interested in the
production of education reform discourse should be concerned with how a change of perception is to be
brought about or secured. 19 In other words, Stickney argues that the discourse supporting educational
reform functions to discipline educators into a compliance that belies any attempt to critique and engage the
viability of the reform effort to the specific contexts educators find themselves working within. 20 While
Stickney is interested in engaging such discourse for the purpose of furthering theoretical scholarship on
curriculum development, his study raises the question of how the public discourse surrounding education
reform may function to discipline its differently situated stakeholders.
It is your responsibility as an intellectual to map out the structures that support social dominance
because it is individual participation that sustains it. The affirmative has made an active choice in the 1ac
to endorse an ideology that discursively advances the basis of white privilege. Instead of realizing that
they have endorsed a system of discursive violence, they have reapplied a complete eradication of
difference within the debate sphere by running framework.
Reid-Brinkley 08 (Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, Assistant Professor of African American Studies
and Communications as well as the Director of Debate at the University of Pittsburgh, THE
HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE
REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, 2008.
http://www.comm.pitt.edu/faculty/documents/reid-brinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf )
To begin an investigation of these questions of race, representation and performance, I utilize
ideological criticism as a rhetorical method. This project is interested in the ideological
discourses and representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality within the public
conversation about race and education. The dominant narratives, bred within institutional
structures, must be interrogated for processes of normalization implicated in the success and
achievement of minority students in American society. In other words, an ideological analysis
provides us with an opportunity to critically analyze the networks of power through which
ideologies flow and gain discursive and representative dominance. The Marxist conception of
ideology, reformulated and popularized by Louis Althusser, revolves around the assumption that
social bodies are trapped within a false consciousness that blinds them to the truth. Althusser

argues that ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real
conditions of existence. 66 Such a conception of ideology was necessary to explain why the
working class did not rise up against the ruling class. Such ideologies were theorized as part of
the superstructure resulting in the limited ability of subjects to exercise agency. For Althusser,
dominant ideologies allowed the social structure to reproduce itself without ensuing conflict.
Ideology functioned to naturalize the dominant structure encouraging individuals to participate
by engaging in practices and behaviors designed to maintain that system. More importantly,
ideologies were thought to construct an imaginary reality by which social beings became
dependent on the structure as it functions, in order to make sense of their very lives. In
essence, ideology was considered to be deterministic, binding individuals to the imaginary
reality. However, current scholarship has been expressly critical of such a conceptualization of
ideology, particularly, within the field of cultural studies, as it made the critical turn away from
the study of dominant ideology and toward the cultural and everyday practices by which
subjects engage ideological domination. Noted theorists, including Michel Foucault, Raymond
Williams, and Stuart Hall have offered significant critiques of such a view of the relations of
power in social system. One criticism of this version of ideology is that it assumes there is a
truth, somewhere out there, that we are unable to ascertain because of the false consciousness
produced through ideological discourses. 67 Second, as Foucault argues, ideology stands in a
secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material,
economic determinant, etc. 68 In other words, ideology is defined as a result of economic
structures. Thus, the economic structures are pre-existent and thus, uninfluenced by ideology,
but simply productive of it. And, third, if the individual or the subject is not critical to the
development of such ideological structures, but are instead determined by them, then social
subjects become agent-less. They become simply social beings produced by the superstructure.
Despite significant criticism of the concept of ideology, it remains significantly useful in the
study of social domination. We can agree that there is not some true expression of reality out
there that we are somehow blinded from seeing. We can agree that ideology is both produced
by and produces economic and social structures. And, we can agree that social actors and their
actions are not determined by ideology as much as social actors are strongly influenced toward
accepting those ideologies as within their best interest, an internalization of ideological
discourse as inscribed through various apparatuses of power. Yet, as media and
communications scholar Nicolas Garnham cautions, the focus on resistance in cultural studies
can prevent us from studying the manner in which dominance is maintained, both through
structure and discourse. 69 He notes that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to map out
structural and social dominance. Social actors participate in the production and maintenance of
culture, both dominant and subordinate. In any given situation, both dominance and resistance
are likely to be active in varying degrees. Thus, this project is not simply interested in the study
of the production and maintenance of dominant ideologies; simultaneously, we must look to the
manner in which social actors engage in resistance efforts within and through such dominant
ideologies. Contemporary racism is reproduced and maintained through discursive
constructions that are circulated through ideologies. Ideologies help to make stereotypical
representations intelligible to an audience. As long as racism remains a social phenomenon in
our society, racial ideologies will likely remain a critical tool by which racial difference is
signified. All racial ideologies do not function the same way; they are often complicated by
intersections of class, gender, sexuality and context. And, as ideologies often function to
dominate, they also create circumstances for resistance. This project seeks to engage both
dominance and resistance; how racial ideologies reproduce social dominance, and how those
affected by that dominance attempt to resist it. The rhetoric surrounding race and education
offers one space from which to analyze the social reproduction of racial dominance .
Looking to specific contexts through which we

analyze the significance of racial ideologies allows us as scholars to map out the forces of power active through racial difference. Specifically, a rhetorical focus can map the public discursive maneuvers that (re)produce and resist these social ideologies. The rhetoric surrounding race, culture, and performance within educational discourse is of critical importance to the future course of educational opportunity in American
society. We must understand the strategies of signification that are most persuasive and powerful to the general public audience. What representations of racial others are most intelligible to the public and how might racial others respond to that intelligibility? As our previous discussion of the acting white thesis and the rise of cultural explanations of racial difference indicate, contemporary ideological representations
of race have changed and in some ways remained the same. We must interrogate the use of ideological representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality as rhetorical strategy in public deliberations. And, it is important to read the social actors involved and watching as embodied. It is quite clear, that the public discourse surrounding race and education is extensive and far beyond the space allotted for this project.
Thus, I have chosen a localized context from which to interrogate the ideological representations of race that may operate in any given American educational context. Academic policy debate is a competitive activity available to high school and college students. The activity dates back to the early 1900s in American history. 70 It is an extracurricular activity that pits students against one another in a rigorous mental and
verbal challenge. To engage in the ideological analysis of race and education discourse, I analyze three case studies within American policy debate and its representation. Chapter Two is an analysis of a non-profit organization for minority, inner city youths, the Urban Debate League, that has received wide media representation. I analyze the representation of UDL participants in local and national newspapers, as well as,
an extended primetime story by 60 minutes on the Baltimore Urban Debate League. In this chapter, I argue that successful black students are scapegoated in news media representation and then redeemed by their debate participation. More specifically, I argue that the news media relies on racial stereotypes of black youths to make the UDL participants intelligible to the viewing and reading audience. It is necessary for
the audience to view the students as at risk in order to later demonstrate their exemplary status. It is the students ability to mimic the performative dynamics of success that allows their race, class, and gender status to be redeemed in news media representation. I conclude that such a practice demonstrates the social significance of the stereotype even in positive portrayals of inner city black youths. Chapter Three
is an analysis of race and performance in national college policy debate. The rising interest in diversifying policy debate at the high school level through non-profit organizations has fueled attempts to diversify at the college level. This chapter analyzes the University of Louisville Malcolm X debate program as it pushes the debate community to confront its race and class privilege. In this chapter, I ask how do black
students respond to the racial ideologies surrounding their debate participation? What are the rhetorical strategies by which they engage a majority white audience in public discussion about race, privilege, and performance? I argue that these students use black sub-cultural styles, including signifyin, and black popular culture such as gospel and hip hop, to engage in a critical re-negotiation of intellectual knowledge
making practices within the debate community. I argue further that the Louisville students engage in rhetorical practices that violate the genre of policy debate speechmaking. To engage in this investigation I review three elimination round debates at the Cross-Examination Debate Associations National Championship Tournament. I specifically focus on the most successful of the Louisville teams made up of the

In this chapter we are

interested in how a majority white community responds to confrontational protest rhetoric in
resistance narratives centered around racial representation and performance. I argue that the
debate community engages in anti-movement resistance strategies. Instead of an outright
partnership between

Elizabeth Jones and Tonia Green. I argue that the use of subcultural style offers a means for the Louisville students to resist the norms of white privilege that permeates the traditional debate

landscape. Chapter Four is an analysis of the debate communitys response to the Louisville Project.

rejection of the Louisville Project, the debate community attacks the Projects violation of the
communitys notion of order and decorum. Through these three case studies, I seek to
demonstrate the connection between the public representation of blackness and the
performative strategies engaged in by Blacks in the attempt to resist the stereotypes
associated with such representations. This project takes seriously the use of performative and
cultural style as a strategic and rhetorical engagement with contemporary racism in America.