Performance 2AC Blocks (ADI)

Performance aff 2AC Blocks
2AC OVERVIEW – ALWAYS READ THIS PAGE...............................................................2

AT: FRAMEWORK.................................................................................. ......................4
SPEED BAD....................................................................................... .........................7
AT: Switch Side........................................................................................................12
A2: No Plan text........................................................................................... ............13
A2: FARMWORKERS WANT STATE ACTION................................................................14
A2: AT: You’re too subjective/can’t judge a performance debate.............................16
AT: Just Read Plan....................................................................................................22
A/T ROLE PLAYING GOOD.................................................................................... .....25
A2: YOU ESSENTIALIZE............................................................................................29
A2: FORCED CONFESSIONS.................................................................................... ..30
A2: CRITIQUES.................................................................................... .....................31
A2: Speaking For Others..........................................................................................39
A/T: Just add a plan.................................................................................. ................40
FREIRE: WE GET BETTER EDUCATION; WE PRODUCE BETTER KNOWLEDGE............41
....................................................................................................... .........................53
....................................................................................................... .........................53
....................................................................................................... .........................54
A/T: PEOPLE OF PRIVILEGE CAN’T PARTICIPATE........................................................55
A/T: MUST FOCUS ON CAPITALISM...........................................................................56
A/T: WE JUST ALL AGREE............................................................................... ...........61
KNOLWEDGE PRODUCTION SOLVES.........................................................................62
A2: GOTTA FOCUS ON CAPITALISM/UNIVERSAL ISSUE.............................................64
DESCRIPTION OF COLORBLINDNESS........................................................................69
AT: CP and DA’s / Experts Bad.................................................................................71
A2: IDENTITY POLITICS........................................................................................... ..80
1
2AC OVERVIEW – ALWAYS READ THIS PAGE
THIS IS OUR ARGUMENT: Subsidies are bad because they are part of a system of
identities and material conditions that result in the oppression of migrant farm
workers.
THIS IS OUR INTERPRETATION: The USFG is us, the people in the room. After all, the
Constitution that created the USFG in the first place places sovereignty with the
people, not the government. The topic asks whether we as individuals should
eliminate our support of subsidies, and we should. Even if we don’t directly give the
monetary subsidies, our identities and the choices we make in this room about how
to construct them are complicit in them. This complicity is ours to remove.
THIS IS OUR FRAMEWORK: Seemingly normal and race-neutral governmental

actions are not neutral. White is a race too. Given the patterns of exclusion in
society and in debate, there is a massive presumption that so-called “normal”
practices are colored by whiteness. The remedy is a critical historical analysis of
government policies, debate practice, and identity, and how those inter-relate.
Debate is about knowledge production, and all arguments are evaluated in terms of
how progressive or regressive their knowledge-value is. The topic gives us a subject
about which to produce knowledge, but we should follow wherever productive
knowledge takes us, and not have educationally counter-productive debates
because of hegemonic and flawed believes about the rigidity of language.
So what about counterplans and disads? In simple terms, we’re not linking out of
them, we’re turning them. Make any argument you want, but you will have to prove
that it doesn’t uncritically reproduce a system of whiteness.
We want to debate what we call material conditions and you call policy, and policy
and identity CAN be debated together, but they CANNOT be separated. Nobody but
college debaters thinks the world is divided into policy- and non-policy arguments.
It is divided into identities and material conditions, and the two are always inter-
related.
And, in our framework you can run: Subsidies good for farm workers, high prices
help workers, an alternative critical history, colorblindness good (where most of the
media and think tank literature goes your way), identity doesn’t cause material
conditions to change, critical histories bad, or any of the various critiques. You can
defend debate as it happens now, if you wish.
Our framework would be like inviting Malcom X, Zizek, and Gramsci to a room and
asking them to debate subsidies. The idea that they would have nothing important
to say or no area of rich disagreement is ridiculous. The only thing that would make
that debate stupid is if you made them all defend a plan text.
2
[Any argument that uncritically accepts seemingly normal assumptions that are
steeped in institutional whiteness are bad arguments. We believe that material
conditions – what are called polices in traditional debate terms – can and should be
debated. BUT, if the evidence used to justify those positions is ahistorical, relies on
a so-called “expert” or media opinion, and/or has been arrived at without a serious
consideration of identity, there is a massive presumption that it will re-produce
inequities.
Remember that history is full of well-meaning policies imagined by elites to help the
oppressed; they almost universally fail and make things worse.]
3
AT: FRAMEWORK
The 1AC has already answered this. Everything they are defending here is business
as usual and it is definitively color-blind; there is no attempt to identify how people
of different identities might want different types of education, different ground, or
might have broader concerns about fairness.
Given that the type of debate they are prescribing has produced a community that
is over 60% male and about 80% white, I have no idea how they can say that this
type of debate does not encode a system of whiteness.
This is never more true than of their predictability argument. We probably ARE
predictable even in their framework – about 2/3rds of all farm workers are migrant
laborers, so unless you didn’t think labor had anything to do agriculture I don’t know
how you could say it wasn’t predictable to research.
BUT, more importantly, if you were a farm worker, or had family who was, or people
of your social location had and knew friends who were farm workers, the FIRST thing
that would pop into your mind at the mention of agriculture would be the working
conditions in the fields.
On the first Saturday of the institute the performance lab went to the corner of 35th
and Thomas, a spot the NYT identified as the hotbed of migrant labor. We met Juan,
Rosario, and Gustavo, three day laborers. We tried asking them about our questions
about the topic, and we generally felt like idiots because none of our issues were
relevant to them. They didn’t know or care at all about what the New York Times
had identified as the central issues at that intersection. But, it is impossible for me
believe that any of them had ever once thought of agriculture without immediately
thinking about the conditions of the workers, and not just because they were
uneducated and didn’t understand other issues. Gustavo had been an educator for
30 years in Mexico and also worked for the Department of Justice. And believe me,
they were fully aware of the skin color of the workers and the bosses. For them,
that was the MOST predictable issue.
The idea that you could debate agriculture and call those issues peripheral or
unpredictable is purely a product of a system of whiteness – only those of privilege
can think of agriculture as a question of economics or politics and not as – most
centrally--a question of migrant labor.
And that kind of proves our whole point – predictability is a question of identity and
social location. If you are a migrant worker, working conditions is the most
predictable topic for agriculture. If you are an elite policymaker, journalist, expert
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or, I guess, a college debater, it’s evidently unpredictable. But what is predictable
depends on who you are, and we are not ready to exclude the perspectives of Juan,
Rosario, and Gustavo with our privileged academic gaze.
Finally, I guess I’ll say that all of their arguments, including what they call impacts,
assume that we aren’t topical. We think we are.
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PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS IS A SHAM; IT’S ONLY A WAY TO MAKE THE SYSTEM’S
LOSERS FEEL LIKE THEY GOT A FAIR SHAKE WHILE HIDING THE OVERALL
OPPRESSION OF THE SYSTEM. IF THESE PROCEDURAL ARGUMENTS GUARANTEE
GROUND AND FAIRNESS TO EVERYONE, WHY ARE 80% OF THE TOP SPEAKERS
ALWAYS WHITE MALES?
PAUL G. CHEVIGNY, Professor of Law, New York University, November, 1989 (64
N.Y.U.L. Rev. 1211)
The finding of disputants' satisfaction with outcomes, together with Lind's and
Tyler's evidence of acceptance of institutions, willingness to comply with rules, and
other attitudes resulting from procedural fairness, n36 might conveniently be
grouped by a phrase such as "the legitimation effect." It raises the knot of political
problems that are always presented when institutions or structures of belief within a
modern state are viewed as serving symbolic or ideological rather than material
needs.
On the one hand, fair procedures may give an important sense of satisfaction to
disputants; on the other hand, the symbolic value of fairness may be something
that can be put on the scale of justice to bring satisfaction to less powerful litigants
when in fact the material outcomes are consistently skewed against them. This is
one aspect of the problem of false consciousness, often raised as part of a "left"
critique of the legitimacy of law. n37 Legal historians unsympathetic to this critique
have sometimes viewed "legitimation" as an attempt to explain away procedures
which would otherwise have to be accepted as lacking any class bias. n38 One thing
that the experiments and field studies relied on by Lind and Tyler suggest is that the
legitimation effect is real, even if it does not quite establish a false consciousness.
6
SPEED BAD
The education we focus on must be libertory for everyone. However, the education
that the negative wants us to focus on such as reading fast, assumes that English is
the first language for everyone and that everyone has the same resources of going
to a privileged school that has many researchers. It assumes that everyone has the
same time to do debate work without understanding that people have to manage
time between a full time job, school, and family.
In their form of debate, the best thing that can happen is that the judge can flow
you but the other team can’t. We think that the first duty of debaters is to
communicate their ideas to one another. Speed IS THE SINGLE GREATEST
TECHNICAL BARRIER TO MORE PEOPLE JOINING DEBATE.
The debate community suffers from what Paulo Freire calls the banking system of
education where we are rewarded for compartmentalizing and repeating arguments
without understanding what those arguments really mean, or the potential
revolution that that education can create. “Education becomes an act of depositing”
turning us into “containers” of information, and whoever has more information wins.
We are obsessed with depositing information that we “are filed away through the
lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this misguided system”. Freire,
in his book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, says that the more we work at storing
and depositing the less we develop critical consciousness and the less we intervene
in the world to transform it; and that is because this activity does not experiment
education through praxis. Education, instead is used to store up in our boxes and
use as much of it to read in debates without taking that education to transform
ourselves. This is evident when they speak extremely fast which not only excludes
Yamuna and Tara but destroys any education we can have in this round. Hence, we
become passive objects and necrophilic, obsession with death.
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Your fast spreading is another way that our activity subtly excludes women and
minorities and a form of disciplinary power that we are choosing to break out of. A 2001
study by STEPP + GARDNER show that people other than white males actually want to
debate --- in fact, 51% of the competitors in the novice division are females or minorities.
40% get past the first elim round and many win top speaker awards. But in the open
division, less than 20% of combined females and minorities are represented. Why?
STEPP + GARDNER ’01 [Pamela and Beth, “Ten Years of Demographics: Who Debates in
America”, Argumentation and Advocacy, 38(2)]
Ninety-seven schools responded to a survey that explored why

novices leave debate (Steep, 1994). The three most frequently cited
reasons included other activities, too much research, and the rapid
speaking delivery of junior and varsity debaters (Steep, 1994). Other
significant reasons were emphasis on the game of debate, competitiveness, concerns about
social life, excessive coaching time, a lack of fun or rewards from debate, and perception of
racism.
And not just that; there’s a reason why our activity is so obscure and hardly
publicized. It’s simply because any other individual outside the community can’t
understand what the crap we’re saying! MICHELLE BOORSTEIN, a journalist and an
outsider to debate, watched some rounds and concluded that speed and inaccessibility
have led to cynicism from outsiders --- the very people’s lives we wish to eventually
change through our activity,
You may be asking, “How fast is too fast?” Well, the normal speech rate is
between 130-200 words per minute. We clocked at just over words
per minute. Look, we’re not going to quibble if you speak 202 words a minute and the
normal range is 200, but you’re making no serious effort to
Any desirable feature of speed talking can be had in a slower debate by simply making
the choices before the round instead of in rebuttals. We think that creating a sexist and
racist activity is worse than any loss of skill we suffer because we don’t talk fast. And we
refuse to answer any argument made at a rate we can’t understand.
Look, if they’re really serious about creating change through massive agents like the
USFG, let’s see them try it at a micro-level first --- that is what WE’RE doing.
8
Normal speech rate is 130-200 WPM.
ARONS, ‘92 [Barry; Speech Research Group; MIT Media Lab; “Techniques, Perceptions, and
Applications of Time-Controlled Speech,”]
The normal English speech rate is between 130-200 words per minute (wpm).
When speaking fast, a talker unintentionally changes relative attributes of his speech such as pause durations,
consonant-vowel duration, etc. Talkers can only compress their speech to about 70% because of physiological
limitations.
Policy debate is in a state of 9-1-1.
BOORSTEIN ’04 [Michelle, “Falwell’s Fast Talkers for Christ”, The Washington Post, A1, February 16]
Liberty’s success comes while the college debate universe is accused of straying too far
from its moral ancestry. Critics argue that the traditional form of college debate in
this country – policy style, the style in which Liberty competes – is inaccessible to
the public, specialized, expensive and focused solely on winning. Worst,
they fear that it creates cynics who believe in nothing.
Policy debate today looks almost nothing like it did when it took root in
the United States about a century ago with the aim of informing audiences
about civic issues. Since the 1950s – regarded as debate’s heyday in this
country – it has become increasingly irrelevant to the university
community, and the number of debaters has nose-dived. Because the
debates are impossible to understand, the events aren’t publicized on
campuses, and students don’t go.
Womyn and minorities are underrepresented in debate.
STEPP ’97 [Pamela, “Can We Make Intercollegiate Debate More Diverse?”, Argumentation and
Advocacy, 33(4)]
In his presidential address to the Speech Communication Association (SCA) in 1993 David
Zarefsky, scholar and former debater, announced that the public sphere must be revitalized
by welcoming a more diverse population. He stated, "The day is past when race,
gender, class, religion, or any other demographic variable can be allowed
to deny anyone the chance to be involved in meaningful public discourse"
(1994, p. 312).
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Academic debate is heralded as an educational activity that prepares our
students for future careers, leadership positions and participation in the
public sphere. When we glance at the faces of the students who participate in this
important activity, it is obvious that women and minorities are missing the
chance to learn public discourse in intercollegiate debate. Demographic
studies indicate that those who participate in debate do not represent the
number of women and minorities who attend colleges and universities. As
intercollegiate debate rapidly approaches the 21st century, more educators are concerned in
knowing how far we have come in making our debate community more diverse and
representative. What can be done in the future? The purpose of this paper is to share the
demographics that pertain to women and minorities at five national CEDA (Cross
Examination Association) tournaments from 1991-1995, examine barriers that prevent
diversity and representativeness, describe actions taken, and propose solutions for the
future.
Novices quit cuz of debate’s speed and racism.
Ninety-seven schools responded to a survey that explored why

novices leave debate (Steep, 1994). The three most frequently cited
reasons included other activities, too much research, and the rapid
speaking delivery of junior and varsity debaters (Steep, 1994). Other
significant reasons were emphasis on the game of debate,
competitiveness, concerns about social life, excessive coaching time, a lack of fun or
rewards from debate, and perception of racism.
Equality in debate is possible --- just look at this tournament’s novice

participants. Here’s some stats.
A serious problem that has plagued the debate community is

retention of women and minorities. Although research about beginning debaters
is limited, several individuals have addressed the issue of novice retention of women and
minorities.In a study of judging bias against women and minorities by
the dominant white male culture, the novice division of debate was
reportedly much more diverse than junior and varsity divisions
(Rogers, 1997). The study tracked the participation rates of women and
minorities at 17 tournaments and revealed that at 12 regional
tournaments 43% of the competitors in the novice division were
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females and minorities. Women and minorities dominated the
championship elimination rounds and represented 51% of the
competitors. After the first elimination round, women and minorities
comprised 40% of the competitors, and 20% received speaker
awards in the top five. These numbers come much closer to
representing the 1999/2000 college student population (55.8% women
and 26.2% minorities according to The 1999/2000 Chronicle of Higher Education: Almanac
than the Open Division participation rates, which included
Edition)
less than 20% female and minority participation combined.
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AT: Switch Side
Their view of switch sides debate is that we can run this on the negative. This
completely guts their predictability argument because if we were negative and ran
the same thing, they would still have to research us on that.
The need to demonstrate the knowledge production value of your arguments does
not depend on sides; if an argument is intellectually destructive it should never be
introduced into debate.
In our framework, we set aside the state and offer competing critical histories,
narratives, and ideas for emancipation. It would be like a debate between Gandhi,
MLK, Derrida, and Malcolm X. None would defend the state, but the debate would
be awesome.
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A2: No Plan text
We cannot reduce our whole project to a 2 sentence plan text. We will defend the
entirety of our affirmative and this is not abusive, our whole affirmative is the plan.
A text is used to classify, control and limit education; a text becomes the only way
to allow for a legitimate debate. And in this exact way the government utilizes
documents to separate between individuals who are legal and deserve a humane
life. For those who do not carry this text, become unidentifiable, illegitimate and a
threat to the ordered system. We become exterminated in the excuse of that sacred
order. Text becomes a reductionist tool where we never get to debate about the
affirmative case but just the two sentences in the text. We cannot reduce
oppressed people’s experience in two sentences and those two sentences will not
find a solution to their problem.
To demand that a critical project reduce itself to a 2-sentence statement of

advocacy is just plain ludicrous. We defend the critical history of the 1AC.
13
A2: FARMWORKERS WANT STATE ACTION
Our argument is not that material conditions should not change, but that identity
and material conditions must change together. Changing individual policies without
transforming identity is like putting a band-aid on a broken leg and trying to walk –
farm workers are still subordinate identities and growers are still dominant
identities.
For Chavez, the UFW was always more about transforming identity than political
action. He saw and we see the processes as inseperable.
Cesar Chavez, Founder of the United Farm Workers, November, 1984

(http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/cesarchavezcommonwealthclubaddress.htm
The union's power in agriculture has nothing to do with the number of farm workers
under union contract. It has nothing to do with the farm workers' ability to
contribute to Democratic politicians. It doesn't even have much to do with our
ability to conduct successful boycotts.
The very fact of our existence forces an entire industry --unionized and non-
unionized--to spend millions of dollars year after year on improved wages, on
improved working conditions, on benefits for workers.
Cesar Chavez, Founder of the United Farm Workers, November, 1984

(http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/cesarchavezcommonwealthclubaddress.htm
You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the
person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.
Our opponents must understand that it's not just a union we have built. Unions, like
other institutions, can come and go.
But we're more than an institution. For nearly 20 years, our union has been on the
cutting edge of a people's cause--and you cannot do away with an entire people;
you cannot stamp out a people's cause.
Regardless of what the future holds for the union, regardless of what the future
holds for farm workers, our accomplishments cannot be undone. "La Causa"--our
cause--doesn't have to be experienced twice.
The consciousness and pride that were raised by our union are alive and thriving
inside millions of young Hispanics who will never work on a farm!
14
A2: ESSENTIALISM
A2: SPEAKING FOR OTHERS
15
A2: AT: You’re too subjective/can’t judge a performance
debate
Short version: Look, we’re the ones who want this debate to be about evidence quality; listen to the
arguments and evaluate the evidence just like every other debate. Our standards for evidence is that it
must include factual warrants that involve first-hand information about the subject. In a disciplinary power
framework, you vote for the team that provides the most effective micro-political resistance, and as in all
debates the negative has the burden of clash.
Long Version:
They say that we’re too subjective. Welcome to the world of Republican America. Ronald Reagan
consulted a psychic to make policy decisions, George Bush appointed Bolton the UN and invites Christian
groups to pray with him, our nation decided that Nixon bombing Cambodia illegally and Ronald Reagan
selling arms for hostages was OK but we had to impeach Bill Clinton for having sex with Monica, and
OUR framework is too subjective?
Is their argument describing traditional politics or is it presenting an ideal? If it’s supposed to be

descriptive, how do they account for the massive amount of subjectivity in current politics?
If they’re not saying that current politics is objective, but it should be, they’re in even deeper trouble.
Frederich Nietzsche proved over a century ago that language is NEVER objective, we see, hear, and feel
the world, form word patterns which make languages and finally cultures; every step on the way has
distortions and subjective interpretations. Language is inherently biased; just a set of metaphors. In a
similar way, Sausser showed that all signs are arbitrary.
History shows that what gets called “objective” is usually just the dominant viewpoint calling it’s subjective
biases the objective truth and counting out everything else as just subjective and emotional. It was the
so-called objective IQ studies that proved that blacks were genetically dumber than everyone else last
century. It was white male objectivity that said it proved that womyn were inherently emotional and not to
be taken seriously. Many of these points have been made by international relations theorist Roland
Bliekert.
The first fight for every oppressed group is to create a new category that doesn’t exist. This new
language never fits in the existing scheme, and therefore cannot be expressed in the so-called objective
ways the negative wants.
We will win offense against taking one view of debate or politics and calling it objective to the exclusion of
all others.
This is not different from so-called straight-up debates; decisions at the NDT where Ross Smith and
Dallas Perkins spend 45 minutes reading cards after the round are not objective in any sense. If
traditional debate is so objective, why are there so many split decisions? 55% of the college student
population is female; but its only 35% in debate. Is that because womyn objectively aren’t as good at
debate as men. The college student population is 25% ethnic; in debate its only 10%. Are white people
objectively better at debate? If not, isn’t something subjective going on that we need to come to terms
with?
And our defense of disciplinary power isn’t some emotional experience that’s impossible to research.
Type “disciplinary power” into google or the ASU library’s search engine and you’ll get 50,000 hits. And
our 1AC is about (sex trafficking, child labor, genocide), which is something you can research and argue
16
about. All we’re saying is that after this research is done we should explore how the arguments we make
about these policies can be made the most effectively. Our framework is as clear and as objective as
any: The team that shows that its arguments do the best job of creating useful resistance in a system of
disciplinary power should win. They can win that the disciplinary power model is a bad one, or that their
arguments make more sense in a disciplinary power context.
17
Embrace sensual arguments, don’t reject them as subjective: The human mind is equal parts
rational and aesthetic, it is far more subjective to arbitrarily exclude half of the human brain. Our
Blieker cards prove that combining both forms of evidence gives us a better shot at solving world
problems, not a worse one. They have to win that a debate that is rational only can better explain
the way the world really works and help us understand and avoid big impacts.
ALL KNOWLEDGE IS FRAGMENTED AND SUBJECTIVE, INCLUDING THEIRS AND THE

PLAN VS. STATUS QUO FRAMEWORK. YOU’RE ONLY FOOLING YOURSELF.
Roland Bleiker, Coordinator of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of
Queensland, “Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics”, 2000, pg 218
Nietzsche played an important role in the debate about language, for he opened up,
Foucault stresses, the possibility of connecting philosophical tasks with radical reflections on
language.' Language, Nietzsche argues, can never provide us with pure, unmediated know-
ledge of the world. Thinking can at best grasp imperfect perceptions of things because a
word is nothing but an image of a nerve stimulus expressed in sounds. It functions, to simplify
his argument, as follows: a person's intuitive perception creates an image, then a word,
then patterns of words, and finally entire linguistic and cultural systems. Each step in this
chain of metaphors entails interpretations and distortions of various kinds. When we look at
things around us, Nietzsche illustrates, we think we know something objective about them,
something of 'the thing in itself'. But all we have are metaphors, which can never capture an
essence because they express the relationship between people and things.' For
Nietzsche, language systems are sets of prejudices that are expressed via metaphors,
selectively filtered images of objects and phenomena that surround us. We cannot but live
in conceptual 'prisons' that permit us to take only very narrow and sporadic glimpses at
the outside world, glimpses that must entail, by definition, fundamental errors of judgement.'
18
FORM DICTATES THE CONTENT OF PLAN VS. SQ DEBATES; IT IS JUST AS
SUBJECTIVE AND OPEN TO INTERPRETATION
Bleiker in 2001 (Roland Bleiker, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2001. ISSN 0305-8298.
Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 509-533)
Consider, by way of illustration, the similarities between the work of a painter and a social scientist.
Both portray their objects through particular modes of representation. Even a naturalistic painting
is still a form of representation. It cannot capture the essence of its object. It is painted from a
certain angle, at a certain time of the day, and in a certain light. The materials are those chosen by
the artist, as are the colours and size of the painting, even its frame. Recall for a minute the
famous painting by the surrealist Rene Magritte: the one that features a carefully drawn pipe
placed above an equally carefully hand-written line that reads `Ceci West pas une pipe' ('This is
not a pipe'). What becomes obvious fairly soon-that the painting is not a pipe itself, but only an
artistic representation thereof-challenges the very notion of mimesis. It draws attention to what, in
Saussurian language, is called the arbitrariness of the sign: the fact that the relationship between
signifier (the drawing of the pipe) and the signified (the pipe) is contingent on a range of
interpretative steps. A photograph is no different, even though its seemingly authentic
reproduction of external realities may deceive us initially. It too is taken at a certain time of the
day, with a certain focus and from a certain angle. Indeed, these choices make up the very
essence of the photograph: its aesthetic quality. But, of course, they result from artistic and
inevitably subjective decisions on form taken by the photographer; decisions that have nothing to
do with the essence of the actual object that is photographed. The very same principles engulf our
attempts to analyse and understand the realities of world politics. No social scientist can ever
represent a political event or issue independently of the form chosen for this task. Even the most
thorough empirical analysis cannot depict its object of inquiry in an authentic way. It too reflects
colour choices, brushstrokes, angles, framing. It too remains a form of interpretation, and with that
an inherently political exercise. It too says just as much, if not more, about the artistic choices of
the interpreter than the object of interpretation.
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YOU CAN EVALUTE DEBATES USING THE CRITERIA OF UNDERSTANDING RATHER
THAN EMPIRICAL OUTCOMES
Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 509-533)
How, then, is one to legitimise approaches to thought, knowledge and evidence that contradict
virtually every central principle that has guided it scholarship since its inception as an
academic discipline? Knowledge communicated through artistic, philosophical and historical
insights cannot always be verified by methodological means proper to science. Indeed, the
significance of aesthetic insight is located precisely in the fact that it `cannot be attained in any
other way'.47 It produces what can be called an `excess' experience; that is, an experience,
sensuous at times, which cannot be apprehended or codified by non-aesthetic forms of knowledge.
Indeed, aesthetic understanding is based on the very acknowledgement that signification is an
inherently incomplete and problematic process.48 And this is why aesthetic truth claims need to
be validated by means other than empirical evidence and scientific falsification procedures.
They require productive and respectful interactions among different faculties or, as Hans Georg
Gadamer puts it, an investigation into the very phenomenon of understanding.49 The remaining
parts of this essay now explore efforts at such forms of legitimisation in the context of it
scholarship.
Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 509-533)
The power to raise subjective interpretations to a level of objectivity is rooted in a variety of

factors other than the mere persuasiveness of the respective perspective. Time is one of these
factors: a simple but important one. Realist theories of (anti)representation have been around for so
long that the metaphors through which they legitimise their political view of the world (from the
primacy of the `national interest' to the dictates of 'Realpolitik') no longer appear as metaphors.
Through decades of dominance in academic scholarship, policy formation and public discourse,
the anti-representational values of Realism have shaped how we perceive the boundaries
between the rational and the irrational. As a result, we have forgotten whether we understand
Realist interpretations by noticing resemblances to the world or whether we notice resemblances
as a result of having internalised such interpretations.
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We have a better impact calculus (a) You should view impacts as representative
practices, not as realities (b) your representations are necessarily distorted, and
(c) its impossible to understand the realities of war without aesthetics, which
proves our framework is a pre-requisite to yours and we are a better
representational practice.
Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 509-533)
An aesthetic move beyond the comfort of academic disciplines inevitably highlights the
problematic dimensions of representation. Indeed, the closer one observes political struggles on the
ground the more one realises the manipulations of realities that are part of the very essence of
politics. Look at how Michael Ignatieff has learned not from academic ruminating, but from
extensive on-the ground experiences that `all exercises in political judgement depend on the
creation of "virtual realities", abstractions that simplify causes and consequences'.61 Indeed, the
unproblematised understanding of reality-as-it-is, which permeates all mimetic approaches,
can make sense only as long as it stays within the detached and neatly delineated
boundaries of academic disciplines. As soon as one confronts the actual realities of conflict
zones, it becomes evident that `war is the easiest of realities to abstract', and that this
abstraction process is intrinsically linked to whatever representational practices prevail at the
time.62 Nowhere are the representational dimensions of politics, and our mimetic attempts to
conceal them, more evident than in the domain of television; perhaps the most crucial source
of collective consciousness today. Abstractions about war are intertwined with representational
practices that are increasingly shaped by the dictates of the entertainment-oriented media
industry. Consider the fact that `the entire script content of the CBS nightly half-hour news
would fit on three-quarters of the front page of the New York Times'.63 Or note how in the
period from 1968 to 1988 the average sound-bite during televised coverage of US elections
decreased from 43 to 9 seconds.64 Figures are probably even lower today, and whatever
substance can still be packed into what remains is likely to get further blurred when presented in
the context of other news and no-news, from drive-by shootings to touch-downs, famines, home-
runs and laundry detergent adds. The numbing regularity and the mimetic conventions with which
these images and sound-bites are communicated to great masses soon erases their highly
subjective and problematic representational form.
21
AT: Just Read Plan
SHORT VERSION: If we win our 1AC, we’ve won that state-level action is both un-
necessary and dangerous. There is no remaining reason that we’d need a plan text.
Plus, we don’t defend fiat, so unless they can win that fiat is good there’s no point
to a plan text. And, seriously, we conceded all your links. Our point is to criticize the
way politics-as-normal authors reproduce whiteness, not to dodge the links.
LONG VERSION:
We need a plan? We gave you 9 minutes worth of sentences that includes our
advocacy, you can argue against any of it. Plan texts are technical pieces of jargon
used to divert useful discussions about ourselves into abstract discussions about
what a state should do.
They’re the ones complaining that we don’t leave them any good ground, but the
ground that they claim they lose is actually bad ground that produces dysfunctional
debates. Politicians and elites create artificial rules like needing a plan text in legal
language to undermine public interest in the world around them.
Disciplinary power means that it is what we do in every day discourse that

establishes social norms, and a plan text is irrelevant to that.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
They will never win that we shift anything. Our advocacy is just as stable if not
MORE than plan text, plans are useless without justifications and meaning, our 1ac
is an ethnographic investigation of what is going on in the world. We will defend
through out the round ethnography and disciplinary power as a means to change
social norms that establish problems in the world, this is your ground.
You have to uniquely prove that we are a moving target. We advocate ethnography
and disciplinary power in 1AC and will continue to do so until the 2AR. As long as we
do that you can’t win this argument.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
22
You can’t combine the two methods. Forum dictates content. The restriction you
place upon us restricts the emancipatory potential of our speech. The dominant
discourse is always going to crush the marginal one just by sheer size.
You’re buying into the social norms that controls our society. That is exactly what
Habermas is talking about as to why social norms dictate our society. You are
attempting to control us by impressing you views/norms upon us. Us presenting a
plan would be buying into the concept that your version of the game is correct.
WRONG.
Performative Action breaks down the normalizing rules that state we have to have a
plan
Kulynych. Jessica J. 1997 Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas, and

postmodern participation. FULL CITE.
Participation as resistance compels us to expand the category of political

participation. Whereas traditional studies of participation delimit political
participation from other "social" activities, once participation is defined as
resistance this distinction is no longer tenable. Bonnie Honig suggests that
performative action is an event, an agonistic disruption of the ordinary sequence
of things, a site of resistance of the irresistible, a challenge to the normalizing
rules that seek to constitute, govern, and control various behaviors. And,
[thus,] we might be in a position to identify sites of political action in a much
broader array of constations, ranging from the self-evident truths of God, nature,
technology and capital those of identity, of gender, race and ethnicity. We might
then be in a position to act--in the private
Kulynych. Jessica J. 1997 Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas, and

postmodern participation. FULL CITE.
A performative concept of participation as resistance explodes the

distinction between public and private, between the political and the
apolitical. As Foucault explains, what was formerly considered apolitical,
or social rather than political, is revealed as the foundation of
technologies of state control. Contests over identity and everyday social life are
not merely additions to the realm of the political, but actually create the very
character of those things traditionally considered political. The state itself is
"superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that
invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology and
so forth."(72) Thus it is contestations at the micro-level, over the
intricacies of everyday life, that provide the raw material for global
23
domination, and the key to disrupting global strategies of domination.
Therefore, the location of political participation extends way beyond the
formal apparatus of government, or the formal organization of the
workplace, to the intimacy of daily actions and iterations.
24
A/T ROLE PLAYING GOOD
Short version:
We are four college students talking about government actions being good or
bad – for this we do not need to pretend that we are USFG. Our solvency
evidence documents the value of our discourse – it reverberates inside and
outside the academy. Our speech on inequality of women, workers, and child
labor. They can role play when they’re aff.
Long version:
Question of role playing is irrelevant in our framework where we believe personal

is political – it is our daily activities and personal stories and experiences that
create new categories within the existing social norms that shape our legal
system. We have a better view of politics through the political debate which is
the focus on our everyday activities like Rosa Park refused to sit in the back of
the bus to break down the existing categories of racism that formed a new
culture that fought for the legal equality – it was her personal action that sparked
that social change - not government or economic action. We don’t have to fiat
to be USFG to spark a discussion or a change. Gandhi did not pretend to be the
British Government in order to spark the change that lead to India’s
independence or Equal rights for Indians in Africa – his informal environment
sparked a political and cultural change. Culture doesn’t follow laws, rather laws
follow culture.
State is nothing but an abstraction. It is the people that take actions, it is the
people that create law or fight wars – Not state. Our stance in debate is to
discuss the disciplinary power that creates our desires and shapes the social
norms in which we live in and govern ourselves – it is the intricacies of daily life
that’s important more than pretending to be the state. Role Playing to be USFG
leaves us with nothing but pretending which distracts us from the locality of
communal problems. We become displaced agents and we never achieve
anything. This is the worst form of education.
25
Individuals can change reality through their actions and a perfect example is the
Trench Warfare in World War One where both German and British fought the
trench war for 10 years until the Christmas night where both sides dropped their
weapons - sang, danced and shared pictures of their loved ones with each other.
They ignored the order of their commanders to fight and refused to kill and were
shipped out. This proves that no matter where the order comes from, no matter
how much the legal system pressures – Individuals have the power to break
down those categories through the personal connection and create a change in
their informal agency. According to Bleiker, they engage in everyday forms of
resistance that allow them to reshape the social context in which they are
embedded. Such forms of discursive dissent can be found in countless seemingly
insignificant daily acts of defiance. They transform values, transgress boundaries
and may eventually promote social change far more effectively than the so-called
great events of international politics.
Our discussion is more inclusive. According to Kulynych, Participation is not

limited to large, organized discussions in formal settings; it also includes "simple
and episodic encounters" in which actors "reciprocally [attribute] communicative
freedom to each other." This abstraction makes participation easier and
extremely inclusive. To do this we don’t have to fiat that we are federal
government or talk extremely fast where others cant understand us. In your
framework exclusion is inevitable.
26
ROLE PLAYING IS THE WORST POSSIBLE EDUCATION; we are more likely to
fall prey to tyrants. Also, the method outweighs the substance, so if we
win the framework they lose their impacts
ANTONIO IN 1995 [Robert Antonio; Professor of Sociology at the University of

Kansas; “Nietzsche’s Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History”;
American Journal of Sociology; Volume 101, No. 1; July 1995]
According to Nietzsche, the "subject" is Socratic culture's most central, durable foundation. This prototypic expression
of ressentiment, master reification, and ultimate justification for slave morality and mass discipline "separates
strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum . . . free to express strength or not to do so.
But there is no such substratum; there is no `being' behind the doing, effecting, becoming; `the doer' is merely a
fiction added to the deed" (Nietzsche 1969b, pp. 45-46). Leveling of Socratic culture's "objective" foundations
makes its "subjective" features all the more important. For example, the subject is a central focus of the new
human sciences, appearing prominently in its emphases on neutral standpoints, motives as causes, and selves as
entities, objects of inquiry, problems, and targets of care (Nietzsche 1966, pp. 19-21; 1968a, pp. 47-54). Arguing
that subjectified culture weakens the personality, Nietzsche spoke of a "remarkable antithesis between an interior which
fails to correspond to any exterior and an exterior which fails to correspond to any interior" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 78-
79, 83). The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest time. "12 He considered
"roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed close personal identification with them
matrix of
as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists saw differentiated roles and professions as a
autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male professionals)
in specialized occupations overidentify with their positions and engage in gross
fabrications to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion of others,
asking themselves, "How ought I feel about this?" They are so thoroughly
absorbed in simulating effective role players that they have trouble being anything
but actors "The role has actually become the character." This highly subjectified
social self or simulator suffers devastating inauthenticity. The powerful authority
given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's already self-indulgent
"inwardness." Integrity, decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure are undone by
paralyzing overconcern about possible causes, meanings, and consequences of acts
and unending internal dialogue about what others might think, expect, say, or do
(Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4,316-17). Nervous
rotation of socially appropriate "masks" reduces persons to hypostatized "shadows,"
"abstracts," or simulacra. One adopts "many roles," playing them "badly and
superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche asked, "Are you
genuine? Or only an actor? A representative or that which is represented? ... [Or]
no more than an imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so pervasive that it is
hard to tell the copy from the genuine article; social selves "prefer the copies to
the originals" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136; 1974, pp. 23233, 259;
1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness and aleatory
scripts foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type of actor cannot plan
for the long term or participate in enduring networks of interdependence; such
a person is neither willing nor able to be a "stone" in the societal "edifice"
27
(Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules in the arid
subjectivized landscape. Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One thinks with a
watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest
news of the stock market; one lives as if one always `might miss out on something.'
`Rather do anything than nothing': this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all
culture. . . . Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their
spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and
anticipating others." Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an
inflated sense of ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous
circumstances that contribute to role attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity). The
most mediocre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural
leadership. Nietzsche respected the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like
Socrates, and praised their ability to redirect ressentiment creatively and to
render the "sick" harmless. But he deeply feared the new simulated versions.
Lacking the "born physician's" capacities, these impostors amplify the worst
inclinations of the herd; they are "violent, envious, exploitative, scheming,
fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to circumstances." Social selves are
fodder for the "great man of the masses." Nietzsche held that "the less one
knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who
commands, who commands severely a god, prince, class, physician, father
confessor, dogma, or party conscience." The deadly combination of desperate
conforming and overreaching and untrammeled ressentiment paves the way for
a new type of tyrant (Nietzsche 1986, pp. 137, 168; 1974, pp. 117-18, 213).
28
A2: YOU ESSENTIALIZE
This is knee-jerk argumentation at its worst. OF COURSE not all farm

workers are the same. Our argument is that a white power structure
through its normal operations has created an under-class that is racially
coded. Obviously, not every farm worker is oppressed as much or in the
same way. But, as a group, most people with dark skin and non-white
culture face more hurdles and share a generally common experience.
Race IS a fiction, but it’s one used by a white power structure to make life
harder on most non-white people. Not one piece of our evidence nor one
claim we’ve made has claimed anything else.
And, they don’t even have a reason that essentialism is bad, or that its
better to avoid essentialization – whatever that is—than it is to ignore race
and thus reproduce whiteness.
(see also the ID politics answers)
29
A2: FORCED CONFESSIONS
Nobody should say anything that they are not comfortable with. You can certainly
research identity without revealing anything about yourself. We’ve listed lots of
ground and none of it requires that you discuss any topic you don’t like.
30
A2: CRITIQUES
Our framework is that you fundamentally misrepresent, misunderstand, and
ultimately reproduce the oppression of the marginalized unless you consult their
voices first hand and show your personal engagement with them.
The gateway is for the negative to show that their authors have consulted the
oppressed and demonstrated a personal reaction to their concerns. The negative
should then go on to show THEIR personal engagement with their philosophers and
how they relate to us.
31
And, a reason we distrust this philosophical approach is that these philosophers
can’t accomplish our performative ends. Philosophers haven’t done any better at
listening to the oppressed than aid workers.
Ronald J. Grele. 2006 (Handbook of Oral History, pg. 55-56)
32
33
THERE IS NO VIEW OF THE TRUTH THAT ACCESSES A UNIVERSAL VIEW. ALL
KNOWLEDGE IS SITUATED, INCLUDING THAT IN THEIR CRITIQUE. YOU SHOULDN’T
USE THE PERSPECTIVES OF ONE GROUP TO EVALUATE ANOTHER’S.
Patrica Hill Collins, Associate Proffesor of African American Studies University of Cincinnati,
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. 1990.
p.225.
Despite African-American women's potential power to reveal new insights about the matrix of domination,
a Black women's standpoint is only one angle of vision. Thus Black feminist thought represents a partial
perspective. The overarching matrix of domination houses multiple groups, each with varying experiences
with penalty and privilege that produce corresponding partial perspectives, situated knowledges, and, for
clearly identifiable subordinate groups, subjugated knowledges. No one group has a clear angle of vision.
No one group possesses the theory or methodology that allows it to discover the absolute "truth" or,
worse yet, proclaim its theories and methodologies as the universal norm evaluating other groups'
experiences.
THEORIES OF ELITES CAN’T PRODUCE AN ADEQUATE THEORY FOR EMANCIPATION; YOU

NEED THE VOICES OF THE OPPRESSED
Patrica Hill Collins, Associate Proffesor of African American Studies University of Cincinnati, Black
Feminist Thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. 1990 p. 223-232.
Domination is also experienced and resisted on the third level of social institutions controlled by the
dominant group: namely, schools, churches, the media, and other formal organizations. These institutions
expose individuals to the specialized thought representing the dominant group's standpoint and interests.
While such institutions offer the promise of both literacy and other skills that can be used for individual
empowerment and social transformation, they simultaneously require docility and passivity. Such
institutions would have us believe that the theorizing of elites constitutes the whole of theory. The
existence of African-American women thinkers such as Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Zora Neale
Hurston, and Fannie Lou Hamer who, though excluded from and/or marginalized within such institutions,
continued to produce theory effectively opposes this hegemonic view. Moreover, the more recent
resurgence of Black feminist thought within these institutions, the case of the outpouring of contemporary
Black feminist thought in history and literature, directly challenges the Eurocentric masculinist thought
pervading these institutions.
34
TECHNICAL CRITIQUES BY ACADEMICS WITHOUT DIRECT EXPERIENCE WITH THE SPECIFIC
OPPRESSED GROUPS IN QUESTION ONLY ENTRENCHES WHITE SUPREMACY
BELL HOOKS POSTMODERN BLACKNESS Oberlin College Copyright (c) 1990 by bell hooks, all rights
reserved _Postmodern Culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (Sep. 1990).
[5] During the Sixties, black power movements were influenced by perspectives that could be easily
labeled modernist. Certainly many of the ways black folks addressed issues of identity conformed to a
modernist universalizing agenda. There was little critique among black militants of patriarchy as a master
narrative. Despite the fact that black power ideology reflected a modernist sensibility, these elements
were soon rendered irrelevant as militant protest was stifled by a powerful repressive *postmodern* state.
The period directly after the black power movement was a time when major news magazines carried
articles with cocky headlines like "what ever happened to Black America?" This was an ironic reply to the
aggressive unmet demand by decentered, marginalized black subjects who had at least for the moment
successfully demanded a hearing, who had made it possible for black liberation to be a national political
agenda. In the wake of the black power movement, after so many rebels were slaughtered and lost, many
of these voices were silenced by a repressive state and others became inarticulate; it has become
necessary to find new avenues for transmitting the messages of black liberation struggle, new ways to
talk about racism and other politics of domination. Radical postmodernist practice, most powerfully
conceptualized as a "politics of difference," should incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized,
exploited, and oppressed black people.
[6] It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the
decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its critical
voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master
narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then
a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a rhetorical device, it
must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. Third-
world scholars, especially elites, and white critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and
therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with
their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge racist
domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality, ways of
constructing aesthetic theory and practice. From a different standpoint Robert Storr makes a similar
critique in the global issue of _Art in America_ when he asserts: To be sure, much postmodernist critical
inquiry has centered precisely on the issues of "difference" and "otherness." On the purely theoretical
plane the exploration of these concepts has produced some important results, but in the absence of any
sustained research into what artists of color and others outside the mainstream might be up to, such
discussions become rootless instead of radical. Endless second guessing about the latent imperialism of
intruding upon other cultures only compounded matters, preventing or excusing these theorists from
investigating what black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists were actually doing. Without
adequate concrete knowledge of and contact with the non-white "other," white theorists may move in
discursive theoretical directions that are threatening to and potentially disruptive of that critical practice
which would support radical liberation struggle.
[9] "Yearning" is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us,
cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice. Specifically in relation to the
postmodernist deconstruction of "master" narratives, the yearning that wells in the hearts and minds of
those whom such narratives have silenced is the longing for critical voice. It is no accident that "rap" has
usurped the primary position of R&B music among young black folks as the most desired sound, or that it
began as a form of "testimony" for the underclass. It has enabled underclass black youth to develop a
critical voice, as a group of young black men told me, a "common literacy." Rap projects a critical voice,
explaining, demanding, urging. Working with this insight in his essay "Putting the Pop Back into
Postmodernism," Lawrence Grossberg comments: The postmodern sensibility appropriates practices as
boasts that announce their own--and consequently our own--existence, like a rap song boasting of the
35
imaginary (or real--it makes no difference) accomplishments of the rapper. They offer forms of
empowerment not only in the face of nihilism but precisely through the forms of nihilism itself: an
empowering nihilism, a moment of positivity through the production and structuring of affective relations.
Considering that it is as a subject that one comes to voice, then the postmodernist focus on the critique of
identity appears, at first glance, to threaten and close down the possibility that this discourse and practice
will allow those who have suffered the crippling effects of colonization and domination to gain or regain a
hearing. Even if this sense of threat and the fear it evokes are based on a misunderstanding of the
postmodernist political project, they nevertheless shape responses. It never surprises me when black folk
respond to the critique of essentialism, especially when it denies the validity of identity politics, by saying
"yeah, it's easy to give up identity, when you got one." Though an apt and oftentimes appropriate
comeback, this does not really intervene in the discourse in a way that alters and transforms. We should
indeed suspicious of postmodern critiques of the "subject" when they surface at a historical moment when
many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time.
[10] Criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that
open up our understanding of African- American experience. The critique of essentialism
encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with
reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed upon us, both from
the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of
essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within
mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the
self and the assertion of agency.
36
MUST START WITH YOURSELF; SEE YOUR OWN PRIVILEGE AND RENOUNCE IT; DON’T TELL
MINORITIES TO SEEK COMMONALITY WITH YOU.
Patrica Hill Collins, Associate Proffesor of African American Studies University of Cincinnati, Black
Feminist Thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. 1990 p. 223-232.
Domination operates by seducing, pressuring, or forcing African-American women and members of

subordinated groups to replace individual and cultural ways of knowing with the dominant group's
specialized thought. As a result, suggests Audre Lorde, "the true focus of revolutionary change is never
merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is
planted deep within each of us." Or as Toni Cade Bambara succinctly states, "revolution begins with the
self, in the self." Lorde and Bambara's suppositions raise an important issue for Black feminist
intellectuals and for all scholars and activists working for social change. Although most individuals have
little difficulty identifying their own victimization within some major system of oppression--whether it be by
race, social class, religion, physical ability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age or gender--they typically fail to
see how their thoughts and actions uphold someone else's subordination. Thus white feminists routinely
point with confidence to their oppression as women but resist seeing how much their white skin privileges
them. African-Americans who possess eloquent analyses of racism often persist in viewing poor white
women as symbols of white power. The radical left fares little better. "If only people of color and women
could see their true class interests," they argue, "class solidarity would eliminate racism and sexism." In
essence, each group identifies the oppression with which it feels most comfortable as being fundamental
and classifies all others as being of lesser importance. Oppression is filled with such contradictions
because these approaches fail to recognize that a matrix of domination contains few pure victims or
oppressors. Each individual derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of
oppression which frame everyone's lives.
37
38
A2: Speaking For Others
PERFORMANCE ETHNOGRAPHY DOES NOT SPEAK FOR THE OTHER
BUT SPEAKS TO AND WITH THE OTHER.
Denzin— professor of Sociology, Cinema Studies, and Interpretive Theory at the

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign—2K3 (Norman K., Performance Ethnography:
Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture , p. 55)
This means that the writer-performer must always respect the differences between him- or
herself and the other that define the other’s world. There is no null point in the moral
universe. The other always exists, as Trinh would argue, in the spaces on each side of the
hyphen. The performance text can only ever be dialogic, a text that does not speak about
or for the other, but rather “speaks to and with” the other. It is a text that reengages the
past and brings it alive in the present. The dialogic text attempts to keep the dialogue, the
conversation, among text, and the past, the present, performer, and audience ongoing and
open-ended. This text does more than invoke empathy; it interrogates, criticizes and
empowers. This is dialogic criticism. The dialogic performance is the means for “honest
intercultural understanding”.
39
A/T: Just add a plan
The warrant for affirmative is that state-centered debates are bad. We can’t just incorporate a
state-based plan in that framework.
40
FREIRE: WE GET BETTER EDUCATION; WE PRODUCE
BETTER KNOWLEDGE
What the affirmative calls “education” is merely exposure to facts. This style of
education dehumanizes debaters; only the affirmative style of education truly generates
knowledge.
Freire 1979
Paulo Freire (Brazilian educator and theorist of education). Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Chapter 2. http://www.marxists.org/subject/education/freire/pedagogy/ch02.htm
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the
teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and
makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the
“banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends
only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity
to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the
people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and
knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry apart from the praxis,
individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention,
through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry, human beings pursue in the world,
with the world, and with each other.
41
OUR END GOAL FOR EDUCATION IS DEEPER SELF-CONSCIOUS UNDERSTANDING
[Peter Roberts 2000 [Education, Literacy, and Humanization: Exploring the Work of Paulo
Freire]
42
HUMILITY IS THE KEY; SINGLE FRAMEWORKS AND BUREAUCRATIC PROCESSING CAN
NEVER ATTAIN IT
Paulo Freire 1998 [Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage]
43
THE BANKING METHOD PERPETUATES OPPRESSION, DISABLES LEARNING, AND IS
THOROUGHLY DEHUMANIZING. DIALOGIC EDUCATION SOLVES.
Peter Roberts 2000 [Education, Literacy, and Humanization: Exploring the Work of Paulo
Freire]
44
45
TRANSMISSION OF CONTENT IS NOT EFFECTIVE EDUCATION.
46
PERSONAL ENGAGEMENT KEY TO DECOLONIZATION/Can personally engage a text
Locating your own position within the issues attains a type of education that can be
decolonizing.
Hooks 1994
Bell Hooks (African-American intellectual, feminist, and social activist) Teaching to Transgress
p. 47
Because the colonizing forces are so powerful in this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, it
seems that black people are always having to renew a commitment to a decolonizing political
process that should be fundamental to our lives and is not. And so Freire’s work in its global
understanding of liberation struggles, always emphasizes that this is the important initial stage
of transformation- that historical moment when one begins to think critically about the self and
identity in relation to one’s political circumstance. But while to say the true word — which is
work, which is praxis — is to transform the world, saying that word is not the privilege of some
few persons, but the right of everyone. Consequently no one can say a true word alone — nor
can she say it for another, in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words.
WE MUST ACTIVELY ENGAGE WITH THE TEXT AND APPLY IT TO OUR PERSONAL
EXPERIENCES.
Peter Robert [Educational Review 50(2), 105-114, Jun 1998 ]
The immediate physical presence of other human beings is thus not a prerequisite for all forms
of dialogue. Hence it becomes possible to speak of a dialogical relation between readers
and texts. Books, from Freire's point of view, ought to be actively engaged: this means
entering into a relationship of a particular kind with the text, allowing, in a sense, the text
to 'talk' to us while we simultaneously 'talk' to it. Readers ought to both apply the ideas
they encounter in books to their own struggles and material circumstances and bring
their personal experiences to bear in interpreting and 'rewriting' texts. Reading, for
Freire, entails 'seizing' or 'grappling' with the text, both challenging it and being prepared
to be challenged by it (Roberts, 1993). The respect for others necessary for Freirean dialogue
is enhanced in a truly critical situation, for to wrestle with a text is to indicate the worth of
engaging an author's ideas.
47
PERSONAL ENGAGEMENT IS KEY. ALL KNOWLEDGE IS ALREADY SOCIAL; THEIR
POLY SCI LITERATURE IS NO MORE OBJECTIVE THAN OUR SUBALTERN TEXTS
Freire]
48
49
Naming the world in a different way transforms it.
Freire 1979
Human existence cannot be silent nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true
words, with which men and women transform the world. To exist humanly is to name the world,
to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and
requires of them a new naming. Human beings are not built in silence,[3]but in word, in work, in
action-
If it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world, transform it dialogue imposes
itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings.
Solutions can only come from the oppressed themselves. This is a warrant for the 1AC
engagement with subaltern texts.
Freire 1979
Paulo Freire (Brazilian educator and theorist of education). Pedagogy of the Oppressed chapter
1-http://www.marxists.org/subject/education/freire/pedagogy/ch01.htm
This lesson and this apprenticeship must come, however, from the oppressed themselves and
from those who are truly in solidarity with them. As individuals or as peoples, by fighting for the
restoration of their humanity they will be attempting the restoration of true generosity. Who are
better prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressive
society? Who suffer the effects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better
understand the necessity of liberation? They will not gain this liberation by chance but through
the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight for it.
50
Giving voice to the subaltern is a necessary first step to liberation.
Freire 1979
Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do
not wish this naming — between those who deny others the right to speak their word and those
whose right to speak has been denied them. Those who have been denied their primordial right
to speak their word must first reclaim this right and prevent the continuation of this
dehumanizing aggression.
51
WE MUST ADMIT THAT OUR APPROACHES MIGHT BE WRONG FOR TRUE EDUCATION
TO OCCUR. THIS MITIGATES DEBATING IN THE SAME FRAMEWORK FOREVER AND
ESTABLISHES THE DIALOGICAL IMPERATIVE.
52
53
54
A/T: PEOPLE OF PRIVILEGE CAN’T PARTICIPATE
WE ALL HAVE PERSONAL EXPERIENCES TO WE CAN SHARE
Peter Robert [Educational Review 50(2), 105-114, Jun 1998, ]
“This does not mean that personal experience should represent the end-point of a literacy
programme. Education, Freire would be quick to say, ought to encourage people to go beyond
their current understanding of the world (whether this is through reading and writing or any other
form of social practice), by challenging them, by demanding something some of them in their
thinking than they have been accustomed to, by extending their existing critical capacities and
so on. Freire's point is that each person has unique access to at least one domain of
knowledge-the reality of their lived experience. No one knows my world-my perceptions,
feelings, longings, sufferings, activities, etc.-quite the way I do. A literacy programme
(indeed any educational programme) cannot succeed if learners are unable to relate in some
way to what educators or coordinators are saying. The stronger the connection with existing
knowledge and experience, the better (other things being equal) learners will be able to
proceed with further learning by building on this base. “
And, people of privilege are in the BEST position to change things. It is MORE important
that people of privilege identify their position, critically examine how their social location
gives them advantages they didn’t ask for and other people don’t have, and figure out
their role in eliminating rather than reproducing white male privilege.
55
A/T: MUST FOCUS ON CAPITALISM
CAN’T REDUCE TRANSFORMATION AND EMPOWERMENT TO A SIMPLE QUESTION OF

CAPITALISM
Freire]
56
Analysis of capitalism and economic systems alone fail to explain many aspects of class
inequality and exclusion.
McDermott 1994 (Monica, “Race/Class Interactions in the Formation of Political
Ideology,” The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2, (May,), pp. 347-366 Published
by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Midwest Sociological Society Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4121551 Accessed: 02/08/2008 09:02)
Attempts to analyze the class system and political ideology in the United States have produce
d a variety of results, but can be broadly characterized as falling into two camps: those
following in the Weberian tradition utilizing measures such as status and income to
determine class position, and those following in the Marxist tradition that develop class
structures rooted in relationship to the means of production. While both of these
approaches to the analysis of class are useful for studying certain aspects of the
stratification system, they fail to account for the full impact of racial discrimination
on the internal structure of classes (Boston 1988) and its concomitant effects on the
ideological outlook so different members of the same class. While race was not a theoretically
central issue for either Marx or Weber in terms of defining class boundaries, race effects prevent
political ideology from being a simple function of an individual's class position (Gilliam and Whitby
1989). The status-based models building upon Weber's class theory generally take race
into account when analyzing status groups, but treat race as another "rank dimension", like
occupation or education (Curtis and Jackson 1977, p. 5; Jackman and Jackman 1983). Studies
employing the concepts of prestige or occupational status typically divide the American class
system into broad categories of upper, middle and lower classes, with numerous fluid divisions
within these loosely defined classes (Coleman and Rainwater 1978). Income, education and
occupation are the usual measures employed to formulate class concepts based on status (Huber
and Form 1973; Kluegel and Smith 1986). Such studies have a tendency to focus upon
personal interactions and social-psychological processes rather than to take into
account the economic bases for racism and the construction of race as a part of
historical development. The Marxist models of class are able to examine the economic
bases of racism, and some are closely connected to the historical processes involved (Bloom 1987;
Gesch-wender 1978). However, they fail to sufficiently explain race/class interactions for a different
set of reasons. A class system strictly framed by objective positions within the relations of
production cannot readily explain the effects of non-asset based forms of exploitation on
the formation of ideology. While structural class location may be the most important variable in
determining ideology, rigidly conscripted class schemas hide an intervening variable,
race, whose influence is of crucial importance.
57
Racial identity creates capitalism.
Smedley 1998 (Audrey, “Race" and the Construction of Human Identity Source:
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 100, No. 3, (Sep., 1998), pp. 690-702
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological
Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/682047 Accessed: 02/08/2008
07:31)
"Race" emerged as a social classification that reflected this greatly expanded sense of
human separateness and differences. Theodore Allen (1997) argues that the "invention" of
the white race took place after an early, but unsuccessful, colonial revolt of servants and
poor freedmen known as Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. Colonial leaders subsequently
decided it would be useful to establish a division among the masses of poor to prevent
their further collaboration against the governmental authorities. As African servants
were vulnerable to policies that kept them in servitude indefinitely, and European servants
had the protection of English law, colonial leaders developed a policy backed by new laws
that separated African servants and freedmen from those of European background.
Over the next half century, they passed numerous laws that provided resources and
benefits to poor, white freedmen and other laws that restricted the rights of
"Africans," "mulattoes,” and "Indians." Calling upon the model of the Chain of Being,
and using natural differences in physical features, they created a new form of social
identity. "Race" developed in the minds of some Europeans as a way to rationalize the
conquest and brutal treatment of Native American populations, and especially the
retention and perpetuation of slavery for imported Africans. As an ideology structuring
social, economic, and political inequality, "race" contradicted developing trends in England
and in Western European societies that promoted freedom, democracy, equality, and human
rights. Europeans justified this attitude toward human differences by focusing on the
physical features of the New World populations, magnifying and exaggerating their
differences, and concluding that the Africans and Indians and their descendants were
lesser forms of human beings, and that their inferiority was natural and/or God-given.
The creation of "race" and racial ideology imposed on the conquered and enslaved
peoples an identity as the lowest status groups in society. Myths about their inferior
moral, intellectual, and behavioral features had begun to develop and these facilitated
proscription of any competition with Europeans. By the mid-eighteenth century,
Negroes had been segregated from poor whites in the laws of most colonies and
transformed in to property as slaves in a state of permanent bondage.
Edmund Morgan (1975) also interpreted the actions of the early colonists in the process of
establishing "racial" identities as stemming from the propertied colonists' fear of poor
whites and possibly slaves engaging in rebellions together. Colonial leaders consciously
formulated policies that would separate poor whites from Indians, blacks, and mulattoes
and proceeded to provide the white poor, whom they had hitherto treated with contempt
and hatred, with some privileges and special advantages. In time, class divisions
diminished in the minds of poor whites and they saw themselves as having something
in common with the propertied class, symbolized by their light skins and common
origins in Europe. With laws progressively continuing to reduce the rights of blacks
and Indians, it was not long before the various European groups coalesced into a
58
white "racial" category whose high-status identity gave them access to wealth, power,
opportunity, and privilege.
Race reinforces capitalism which reinforces race which reinforces capitalism.
Sole focus on capitalism does not solve. Failures of integration during the
labor movement demonstrate.
Cable 2003 (Sherry, and L., Tamara, “Economic Imperatives and Race Relations: The Rise and Fall of
the American Apartheid System,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, (Nov., 2003), pp. 183-203
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3180903 Accessed:
02/08/2008 09:02)
Black industrial workers did not benefit from corporate concessions to strikers because they
were systematically excluded from the emerging labor movement. White ethnics were
gradually assimilated into the dominant culture and institutions, but Blacks were not.
Instead, they became a more focused target for White workers' competition-intensified
racial animosities. White workers' marked racism was exacerbated by the corporate strategy to
divide workers by using Blacks as strikebreakers. Early labor movement leaders recognized
the greater pressure that could be applied on corporate interests by a racially united workforce, but
their efforts failed to overcome workers' racism and integrate labor. Foner (1974) and Zinn
(1995) document the failure of attempts in the late 1880s and early 1900s to promote the
transcendence of worker unity above racial antipathies and the consequent occupational
segregation of Black workers in the North. Interracial labor efforts failed for two primary reasons.
First, union efforts were inconsistent in pursuing worker unity because of the
entrenched racism of rank-and-file members. White workers contended that job
competition with Blacks was best eliminated by excluding Blacks from unions and
driving them from the labor market. Many local affiliates, then, voted to adopt union charters
that barred Blacks from membership. Although national union leaders publicly expressed
values of racial unity, they refused to sanction their segregated local affiliates. Second,
many Black leaders opposed interracial unions. Some were opposed to all unions and
urged Blacks to work as strikebreakers, because they were otherwise routinely denied
access to skilled jobs. Others charged that the unions' token resistance to racial exclusion
actually encouraged the proliferation of segregated affiliates. Yet, other Black leaders predicted
that union membership would eventually cost Black workers their jobs because they
would be prohibited by union rules from accepting lower wages than Whites-
employers, whose only reason to prefer Black workers was the lower wages, would
replace them with White workers.
59
We must embrace the existence of issues of race if there is any desire to
progress forward.
Winant 2000 (Howard, “Race and Race Theory,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 26,
(2000), pp. 169-185 Published by: Annual Reviews Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/223441 Accessed: 02/08/2008 09:05)
If we are to understand the changing significance of race at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, we must develop a more effective theory of race. The racial
formation perspective at least suggests some directions in which such a theory should be pursued.
As in the past, racial theory today is shaped by the large-scale sociopolitical processes it is called
upon to explain. Employing a racial formation perspective, it is possible to glimpse a pattern in
present global racial dynamics. That pattern looks something like the following: In the period during
and after World War II an enormous challenge was posed to established systems of rule by racially
defined social movements around the world. Although these movement challenges achieved some
great gains and precipitated important reforms in state racial policy, neither the movements nor the
reforms could be consolidated. At the end of the century the world as a whole, and various national
societies as well, are far from overcoming the tenacious legacies of colonial rule, apartheid, and
segregation. All still experience continuing confusion, anxiety, and contention about race. Yet the
legacies of epochal struggles for freedom, democracy, and human rights persist as well. Despite
the enormous vicissitudes that demarcate and distinguish national conditions,
historical developments, roles in the international market, political tendencies, and
cultural norms, racial differences often operate as they did in centuries past: as a way
of restricting the political influence, not just of racially subordinated groups, but of
all those at the bottom end of the system of social stratification. In the contemporary era,
racial beliefs and practices have become far more contradictory and complex. The old world
racial order has not disappeared, but it has been seriously disrupted and changed. The legacy
of democratic, racially oriented movements22 and anticolonialist initiatives throughout the world's
South, remains a force to be reckoned with. But the incorporative (or if one prefers this term,
hegemonic) effects of decades of reform-oriented state racial policies have had a
profound effect as well: They have removed much of the motivation for sustained,
anti-racist mobilization. In this unresolved situation, it is unlikely that attempts to
address worldwide dilemmas of race and racism by ignoring or transcending these
themes, for example by adopting so-called colorblind or differentialist policies, will
have much effect. In the past the centrality of race deeply determined the economic, political,
and cultural configuration of the modern world. Although recent decades have seen a
tremendous efflorescence of movements for racial equality and justice, the legacies of
centuries of racial oppression have not been overcome. Nor is a vision of racial justice
fully worked out. Certainly the idea that such justice has already been largely achieved-as seen in the
"colorblind" paradigm in the United States, the "non-racialist" rhetoric of the South African Freedom Charter,
the Brazilian rhetoric of "racial democracy," or the emerging "racial differentialism" of the European Union-
remains problematic. Will race ever be transcended? Will the world ever get beyond race?
Probably not. But the entire world still has a chance of overcoming the stratification,
the hierarchy, the taken-for-granted injustice and inhumanity that so often
accompanies the race concept. Like religion or language, race can be accepted as part
of the spectrum of the human condition, while it is simultaneously and categorically
resisted as a means of stratifying national or global societies. Nothing is more
essential in the effort to reinforce democratic commitments, not to mention global
survival and prosperity, as we enter a new millennium.
60
A/T: WE JUST ALL AGREE
CAN STILL DEBATE AND DISAGREE IN A DIALOGIC WAY
61
KNOLWEDGE PRODUCTION SOLVES
OUR LANGUAGE IS A FORM OF ACTION THAT IS KEY TO DISCURSIVE FORMS

OF POWER RELATIONS AND TRANSVERSAL POLITICS
Bleiker, 2000. (Roland, Professor of International Relations Harvard and

Cambridge, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge
University Press, 2000. p. 216)
Language is one of the most fundamental aspects of human life. It is omnipresent. It

penetrates every aspect of transversal politics, from the local to the global. We speak,
Heidegger stresses, when we are awake and when we are asleep, even when we do not utter a
single word. We speak when we listen, read or silently pursue an occupation. We are always
speaking because we cannot think without language, because 'language is the house of Being', the
home within which we dwell. 2 But languages are never neutral. They embody particular
values and ideas. They are an integral part of transversal power relations and of global
politics in general. Languages impose sets of assumptions on us, frame our thoughts so
subtly that we are mostly unaware of the systems of exclusion that are being entrenched
through this process. And yet, a language is not just a form of domination that engulfs the
speaker in a web of discursive constraints, it is also a terrain of dissent, one that is not
bound by the political logic of national boundaries. Language is itself a form of action — the
place where possibilities for social change emerge, where values are slowly transformed,
where individuals carve out thinking space and engage in everyday forms of resistance. In
short, language epitomises the potential and limits of discursive forms of transversal
dissent.
62
LANGUAGE IS THE MOST IMORTANT FOCUS OF DEBATE; HOW WE
CONSTRUCT THE ISSUES WE DEBATE IS FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN
OFFERING OPINIONS ABOUT WHAT THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD DO,
BECAUSE OUR DISCOURSE SHAPES EVERY PERCEPTION OF WHAT WE HAVE
OF THE WORLD AROUND US AND FORMULATES OUR RESPONSES TO THAT
WORLD.
Bleiker, 2K. (Roland, Professor of International Relations Harvard and Cambridge,

Popular Dissent,Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge University Press,
2000. p. 219)
Nietzsche played an important role in the debate about language, for he opened up, Foucault
stresses, the possibility of connecting philosophical tasks with radical reflections on language. 4
Language, Nietzsche argues, can never provide us with pure, unmediated knowledge of the world.
Thinking can at best grasp imperfect perceptions of things because a word is nothing but an image
of a nerve stimulus expressed in sounds. It functions, to simplify his argument, as follows: a
person's intuitive perception creates an image, then a word, then patterns of words, and
finally entire linguistic and cultural systems. Each step in this chain of metaphors entails
interpretations and distortions of various kinds. When we look at things around us, Nietzsche
illustrates, we think we know something objective about them, something of 'the thing in itself'. But
all we have are metaphors, which can never capture an essence because they express the
relationship between people and things. 5 For Nietzsche, language systems are sets of prejudices
that are expressed via metaphors, selectively filtered images of objects and phenomena that
surround us. We cannot but live in conceptual 'prisons' that permit us to take only very narrow and
sporadic glimpses at the outside world, glimpses that must entail, eby definition, fundamental errors
of judgement. 6 But there is more to the problem of language than its imperfections as a medium of
expression. Languages embody the relationship between people and their environment.
They are part of a larger discursive struggle over meaning and interpretation, an integral
element of politics. We are often not aware of this function of language. The process of forgetting
that we have been conditioned by linguistically entrenched values largely camouflages the systems
of exclusion that are operative in all speech forms. We become accustomed to our distorting
metaphors until we 'lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all'. 7 As a result, factuality, observation,
judgement and linguistic representation blur to the point that the boundaries between them become
all but effaced: This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are
called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance,
the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for — originally almost always wrong and
arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin
— all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it
gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance
becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such. 8 As soon as one
problematises the existence of objectified values one must recognise that there cannot be
authentic knowledge of the world, knowledge that is not in one way or another linked to the
values of the perceiver and the language through which s/he gives meaning to social
practices.
63
A2: GOTTA FOCUS ON CAPITALISM/UNIVERSAL ISSUE
UNIVERSAL CALLS TO ACTION WITHOUT DEEP HISTORICAL CONSIDERATION FALL
SHORT
Robin D. G. Kelley, Identity Poltics & Class Struggle. Robert D. G. Kelley is Professor
of History and Africana Studies at NYU [from New Politics, vol. 6, no. 2 (new series),
whole no. 22, Winter 1997]
While Gitlin tends to be slightly more sympathetic to feminism and gay and lesbian
movements than Tomasky, they both view them as prime examples of dead-end
identity politics. On the other hand, when they proclaim a movement or issue
"universal," they don't stop to analyze how race and gender shape various
responses to issues. For example, Tomasky believes he hit on a common
value/agenda when he writes: "Working people in this country need a movement
that will put their interests and livelihoods first." Fair enough. But without an
analysis that takes racism, sexism, and homophobia seriously, or considers deep
historical differences, we won't know what "interests" mean. Let's take crime and
the issue of neighborhood safety, an issue on which many people across race,
gender, and even class lines can find common ground. Yet, racism -- not narrow
identity politics -- persuaded many African Americans to oppose Clinton's $22 billion
Crime Bill, and the majority of white voters to support it. For many black people, the
issue of neighborhood safety is not just about more police but the kind of police --
where they live, how they relate to the community. Indeed, no matter what we
might think of the Nation of Islam (NOI), many non-Muslims see its fight against
drug dealers in black communities as more effective than the police.
64
UNIVERSAL STRUGGLE IGNORES THE MINORITY DISCOURSE AND MINORITY
STRUGGLE. THE RACIALISM OF THE WEST, SLAVERY, IMPERIALISM AND THE
DESTRUCTION OF INDIGENOUS CULTURES ARE NOT EVEN RECOGNIZED. TO
SUPPORT UNIVERSALISM IS TO IGNORE THE FACTS OF HISTORY.
Much of the blame is assigned to women, gays and lesbians, and colored people for
fracturing the American Left, abandoning honest class struggle, and alienating white
men who could be allies but aren't because of the terrible treatment meted out to
them by the Loud Minority. Universal categories such as class have fallen before the
narrow, particularistic mantras of radical chic: race, gender, sexuality, and disability.
Indeed, in their view class is not just another identity, it transcends identity. If the
"Left" wants to save itself, we must abandon our ever shrinking identity niches for
the realm of majoritarian thinking. After all, we're told, the majority of Americans
are white and heterosexual and have little interest in radical feminism, minority
discourse, and struggles centered on sexual identity. In some ways, I can
sympathize with these people about the limitations of "identity politics." While the
growing interest in the politics of identity has extended our analytical scope to
overlooked or trivialized cultural spheres and expanded our understanding of
intellectual history, in some circles it has also tended to limit discussions of power
to cultural politics. And while so-called "identity politics" has always profoundly
shaped labor movements and -- even more than vague, abstract notions of class
unity -- has been the glue for class solidarity, by the same token it has also become
a noose around the necks of oppressed people, as in the case of white racism or
certain variants of black nationalism. ON THE OTHER HAND, WHATEVER CUL-DE-
SACS WE MIGHT HAVE ENTERED, the "Enlightenment train" will not lead us out.
These people assume that the universal humanism they find so endearing and
radical can be easily separated from the historical context of its making; indeed,
that it is precisely what can undo the racism and modern imperialism it helped to
justify. The racialism of the West, slavery, imperialism, the destruction of indigenous
cultures in the name of "progress," are treated as aberrations, coincidences, or not
treated as all. They insist that these historical developments do not render the
Enlightenment's radical universalism any less "radical," and those who take up this
critique are simply rejecting Enlightenment philosophers because they're "dead
white males." Their uncritical defense of the Enlightenment (which includes a
strange tendency to collapse Marx, Locke and Jefferson into the same category),
betrays an unwillingness to take ideas, let alone history, seriously The
Enlightenment is not to be discarded because Voltaire was anti-Semitic or Hume,
Kant, Hegel, and Jefferson racist, but rather further enlightened -- for it equips us
with the tools with which to refute the anti-Semitism of a Voltaire and the racism of
65
the others. . . . In none of these cases was bigotry at the core of the man's
intellectual system; it reflected the routine white prejudice of the time. The
Enlightenment is self-correcting. The corrective to darkness is more light." (p.
215).Good liberalism, to be sure, but its analytical insight leaves much to be
desired. To pose the question as pro or con, keep the Enlightenment or discard it,
sidesteps fundamental questions such as the legacy of 18th century social thought
for modern conceptions of race or the philosophical underpinnings of racial slavery
in an age when free labor and free market ideology triumphed. For example, while
racialist ideas can be traced to ancient thought and forms of domination internal to
Europe, the Enlightenment also ushered in a transformation in Western thinking
about race. How could it not? After all, as many commentators since the French
Revolution have observed, the expansion of slavery and genocidal wars against
non-European peoples took place alongside, and by some accounts made possible
bourgeois democratic revolutions that gave birth (in the West) to the concept that
liberty and freedom are inalienable rights. This contradiction is fundamental to
Enlightenment philosophy, notions of progress, and developments in scientific
thinking.
66
UNIVERSAL STRUGGLE RE-ENTRECHES RACISM.
As the work of George Mosse, David Theo Goldberg, Cedric Robinson, and many
others has demonstrated, modern racism is one of the "gifts" of the Enlightenment.
It is not an accident that during the 18th century modern science moves toward
classification as one of its primary endeavors, turning to aesthetic criteria derived
from ancient Greece as the source of measurement. These Enlightenment scientists
-- in some respects, the founders of modern anthropology -- begin to associate
outward, physical signs of "beauty" with inner rationality, piety, intelligence and
harmony. Thus a century before social Darwinism we see scientific justifications for
racial hierarchy and domination. Christian Meiners' influential book, Outline of the
History of Mankind (1785) put it bluntly: "One of the chief characteristics of tribes
and peoples is the beauty or ugliness of the whole body or of the face." At the same
time, the idealization of the so-called "primitive" (the "noble savage idea")
espoused by several 17th century travel writers, as well as in flashes of Rousseau,
began to give way to notions of European superiority vis-a-vis Africans and Native
Americans. Non-Europeans were unambiguously classified as representing a lower
stage of human development. The primitive mind was constructed as the very
opposite of Reason: atavistic, regressive, barbaric. Again, science provided a
rationale for racial hierarchies. Climatic theories explaining the origins of racial
difference were called into question by Enlightenment thinkers who proposed the
radical idea that Africans, Asians, and "Indians" originated from different species.
Voltaire certainly made this claim, as did Scottish Jurist Lord Kames in his Sketches
of the History of Man (1774), and Charles White in his celebrated An Account of the
Regular Gradation in Man (1799). Enlightenment thought not only opened the door
for future arguments about the inherent inferiority of different "races," but it sharply
limited the definition of "humanity." Thus, at the very moment when a discourse of
universal humanism is finding voice in the bourgeois democratic revolutions of the
era, colored people and Europeans rendered marginal to civilization (Jews, Irish,
etc.) are being written out of the family of "Man." (Is this why the Haitian Revolution
is still not considered one of the most important revolutions of the bourgeois
democratic era?)
67
UNIVESALISM IS NOT A GENDER OR RACE NEUTRAL PROJECT. THE ONLY PEOPLE
THAT SPEAK UNIVERALIISM ARE WHIT MEN. WHO REFUSE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT
CLASS IS LIVED THROUGH RACE AND GENDER, AND DENY THE CRITICAL INSIGHT
THAT THESE MOVEMENTS HAVE.
Besides assuming that the "universal" is truly "self-evident," the neo-Enlightenment

Left cannot conceive of movements led by African Americans, women, Latinos, gays
and lesbians, speaking for the whole or even embracing radical humanism. The
implications are frightening: the only people who can speak the language of
universalism are white men (since they have no investment in identity politics
beyond renewed ethnic movements arising here and there) and women and colored
people who have transcended or rejected the politics of identity. Moreover, they
either don't understand or refuse to acknowledge that class is lived through race
and gender. There is no universal class identity, just as there is no universal racial or
gender or sexual identity. The idea that race, gender, and sexuality are particular
whereas class is universal not only presumes that class struggle is some sort of race
and gender-neutral terrain but takes for granted that movements focused on race,
gender, or sexuality necessarily undermine class unity and, by definition, cannot be
emancipatory for the whole.
68
DESCRIPTION OF COLORBLINDNESS
The apparent abuse of minorities when it comes to “color-blindness” in criminal
justice or education, or turning “sharecropper” into “independent contractors” are
atrocious, we are left with a bitter take on what it means to be “White” in America
when it comes to enjoying certain privileges. We take it for granted as “white
instructors, law-makers or citizen” when we say that “I don’t see race because ‘I’m
not a racist’ or ‘I treat everyone as equals’ because everyone is the same.” As an
individual who interacts with others, I can’t but notice color, gender or sexual
orientation all the while I’m talking to them. I have to take into account their
personal history, culture and heritage as I still manage to be myself as the and not
fall into that trap of playing up to having to apologize for past wrongs of my
ancestors and peers. To be fair to a particular race or culture means that I have to
recognize that each one is different from the other. Debate is a reflection of what
the real world is and this is why I debate. I learn from the evidence, form my own
opinion, talk and question to verify my newly formed belief and then repeat. Debate
should always be dynamic so that what you believe now may become different later
and that is how we grow as debaters. We debate about migrant farmers or how
subsidies may affect the economy and we look at how race and cultures are to be
used to formulate what we argue about and see how this is reflected in “our”
community. Color-blindness may be a racist form of control and we need to be able
to look at it for what it is, subtle means to keep the minority in a sub-par lifestyle
while we have it better.
69
A2: DISADS AND COUNTERPLANS
Subsidies Bad Overview:
The past years have seen a revitalization of how destructive agricultural subsidies
can be not only to migrant labor and poor farm workers but also to other countries
under a global economy. Landowners, not farm workers, get the greatest
agricultural support. Subsidies ultimately have acted as a method to keep the land,
in the hands of the upper ten percent of landowners. Nearly seventy five percent of
the farm lands have gone to the top ten percent of the largest farms. Farm workers
renting land end up paying more money and the workers picking cotton get nothing.
Funding of the largest farms results in consolidating land into larger and larger
plots, lowering rural populations and maintaining power in the hands of the
landowners, and weakening the counties economies. These subsidies have created
dependency rather than economic growth.
Workers outside of the United States see a related plight. The large farms in the
United States produce enough food for export undercutting prices in other countries
and, especially in Mexico, forcing out-of-work farmers to immigrate to the US. The
influx of immigrant labor lowers standard wages for laborers. Unionizing is almost
impossible because there have always been more workers to take their place.
Migrant workers undergo terrible cycles of exploitation and poverty. Similarly other
importers of American subsidized food have also experienced farms turning
negative profits and decreased living standards because of price drops. The erosion
of family farms has been described as cultural genocide within rural communities in
West Africa.
70
AT: CP and DA’s / Experts Bad
The evidence base for these arguments reproduces its own elitism; we’ll argue it
produces a dangerous knowledge and should be rejected. The way our opponents
have deployed this evidence privileges expert knowledge and the content of the
evidence is colored by privilege.
Their evidence comes from a series of so-called experts, journalists, and

commentators.
Its fine that your experts collect facts about what they observe. We believe it is fine
that they use this knowledge toward policy making. What we cannot accept is a
debate where the agenda is defined by that base of expert knowledge. We should
borrow the facts from them when it suits our purposes of debate, we should not let
their pre-formed answers dictate what we should debate.
This is a form of social elitism that limits what is counted as knowledge and what
can be counted in argument. This expert knowledge in debate has come to the point
where the lived realities of the people who experience the oppression, systemic
violence in the topic are excluded from the forum. It is true that some truth can be
found with experts, however the knowledge they have is not comprehensive and
cannot speak for all people. Subjectivity must be imbued into debate rounds
through personal experience, because expertise often overlooks the beauty and
simplicity of common sense and subtlety of social location. Lay people have
experience and knowledge experts miss and ignore.
We are the final arbiters of whether the information the experts produce is worth
using; they should not the questions we should debate.
Expert knowledge has been historically tied with the state. The Incomplete story is a
creation of a hierarchy of knowledge. This has proved particularly problematic
because this exclusive knowledge is closely linked to politicians in almost any field
of expertise. These hierarchies in policies have resulted in extending cycles of war
in Vietnam, the War on Terror, Poverty, and marginalization of scapegoat groups.
Your counterplans and disads tell an incomplete story. They take a purely policy
perspective on what debate is and can be. Look to their evidence. Not one of their
sources have attempted to describe the lived realities of what it is like to be a farm
worker working in the fields or what it is like to be faced with constant cycles of
poverty barely making enough money to provide for yourself let alone family.
Ignoring this knowledge is expertise can based on certainty which marginalizes,
disarms, and disenfranchises the stories and experiences of those who draw
different conclusions. Power struggle results between expert knowledge and lay
knowledge. This struggle is imbued with epistemological concerns over how public
policy is formed, based on purely expert knowledge. These concerns open the space
71
necessary to rethink how and why public policies are made, and how they can take
an inclusive approach. Public policy discourse must be open to all people
Discursive changes that take place between politicians and experts overlook the
importance of encouraging personal participation of the disenfranchised in society.
Not in the sense that every individual MUST participate, but in the essence of
becoming more inclusive in a forum, so that everyone can feel they can know the
rules, change the rules, or devise a new forum altogether. It is important that it
never becomes too stagnant but rather remains open to continuous negotiations,
never sustaining a set of predetermined rules.
You have to win that debate should have an exclusive focus on experts, if there is
any risk of good in including lived realities then you vote aff.
Current Policy Making Structures Are Structured by the White Male Power Base and
Ignore and Disadvantage Minority Voices
Kathleen M. Shaw 04 Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Ohio State
Using Feminist Critical Policy Analysis in the Realm of Higher Education: The Case of
Welfare Reform as Gendered Educational Policy Source: The Journal of Higher
Education, Vol. 75, No. 1, Special Issue: Questions of Research and Methodology,
(Jan. - Feb., 2004), pp. 56-79
Feminist Critical Policy Analysis: Through a Different Lens Feminist critical policy
analysis has been most clearly articulated in the work of Catherine Marshall, whose
two edited volumes both lay out the theoretical and methodological underpinnings
of this approach to policy research and also provide examples of the ways in which
it can be used to examine both secondary and postsecondary education (Marshall,
1997a, 1997b). Feminist critical policy analysis melds critical theory and feminism in
a way that is designed to challenge the traditional, mainstream approaches to
policy analysis that have dominated policy research for the last fifty years (Marshall,
1997a). The methods and theoretical frameworks that dominate current policy
analysis have been developed and implemented by those in power who, particularly
in the world of policy formation and analysis, are overwhelmingly white, male, and
well educated. Thus, traditional policy research has, according to Marshall, reflected
the assumptions, worldview, and values of this group. As is the case with much
mainstream research in the social sciences, traditional policy analysis can be
characterized by the following elements. Among the most important are a belief in a
single concept of truth (truth with a capital "T"); the assumption that objectivity on
the part of the researcher is both achievable and desirable; the assumption that all
research subjects share the same relationship to their social environment, thereby
rendering such particularities as gender, race, social class, and sexuality
unimportant; and the practice of evaluating women on the basis of male norms
72
(Bensimon & Marshall, 1997, p. 7-8). Since this positivist paradigm is so widely
accepted in the policy world, it allows policy analysts to assume a dispassionate,
objective stance and at the same time encourages the broader policy community to
perceive the research enterprise in this way. Thus, traditional policy analysis willfully
ignores the inherently political nature of all research, and policy research in
particular. As Marshall states, "Traditional policy analysis is grounded in a narrow,
falsely objective, overly instrumental view of rationality that masks its latent biases
and allows policy elites and technocrats to present analyses and plans as neutral
and objective when they are actually tied to prevailing relations of power" (1997a,
p. 3). In contrast, these power relations are exactly the target of feminist critical
policy analysis. This approach to policy research is a variant of critical policy
analysis, which focuses on the policies and structures that restrict access to power
(Anderson, 1989, pp. 251).
SCIENCE IS ESSENTIALLY SIMILAR TO MYTH. ONE JUST

OVERPOWERED THE OTHER BY FORCE.
FEYERABEND ’00 (Paul. Philosopher of Science. Against Method. Excerpted at

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/feyerabe.htm)
The change of perspective brought about by these discoveries leads once more to
the long-forgotten problem of the excellence of science. It leads to it for the first
time in modern history, for modern science overpowered its opponents, it did not
convince them. Science took over by force, not by argument (this is especially true
of the former colonies where science and the religion of brotherly love were
introduced as a matter of course, and without consulting, or arguing with, the
inhabitants). Today we realise that rationalism, being bound to science, cannot give
us any assistance in the issue between science and myth and we also know, from
inquiries of an entirely different kind, that myths are vastly better than rationalists
have dared to admit.' Thus we are now forced to raise the question of the
excellence of science. An examination then reveals that science and myth overlap
in many ways, that the differences we think we perceive are often local phenomena
which may turn into similarities elsewhere and that fundamental discrepancies are
results of different aims rather than of different methods trying to reach one and the
same 'rational' end (such as, for example, 'progress', or increase of content, or
'growth').
73
LIKE CHRISTIANITY AND ITS MISSIONARIES BEFORE IT, SCIENTIFIC
CHAUVINISM SUPRESSES NON-WESTERN CULTURES.

There is another reason why such a re-examination is urgently required. The rise of
modern science coincides with the suppression of non-Western tribes by Western
invaders. The tribes are not only physically suppressed, they also lose their
intellectual independence and are forced to adopt the bloodthirsty religion of
brotherly love - Christianity. The most intelligent members get an extra bonus: they
are introduced into the mysteries of Western Rationalism and its peak - Western
Science. Occasionally this leads to an almost unbearable tension with tradition
(Haiti). In most cases the tradition disappears without the trace of an argument, one
sim ply becomes a slave both in body and in mind. Today this development is
gradually reversed - with great reluctance, to be sure, but it is reversed. Freedom is
regained, old traditions are rediscovered, both among the minorities in Western
countries and among large populations in non-Western continents. But science still
reigns supreme. It reigns supreme because its practitioners are unable to
understand, and unwilling to condone, different ideologies, because they have the
power to enforce their wishes, and because they use this power ' just as their
ancestors used their power to force Christianity on the peoples they encountered
during their conquests. Thus, while an American can now choose the religion he
likes, he is still not permitted to demand that his children learn magic rather than
science at school. There is a separation between state and church, there is no
separation between state and science.
74
SCIENCE IS NECESSARILY ALWAYS DOGMATIC AND INTOLERANT OF
DISSENT TO A FAULT.

Such a study reveals that, while some scientists may proceed as described, the
great majority follow a different path. Scepticism is at a minimum; it is directed
against the view of the opposition and against minor ramifications of one's own
basic ideas, never against the basic ideas themselves. Attacking the basic ideas
evokes taboo reactions which are no weaker than are the taboo reactions in so-
called "primitive societies." Basic beliefs are protected by this reaction as well as by
secondary elaborations, as we have seen, and whatever fails to fit into the
established category system or is said to be incompatible with this system is either
viewed as something quite horrifying or, more frequently, it is simply declared to be
non-existent. Nor is science prepared to make 'a theoretical pluralism the
foundation of research. Newton reigned for more than 150 years, Einstein briefly
introduced a more liberal point of view only to be succeeded by the Copenhagen
Interpretation. The similarities between science and myth are indeed astonishing.
But the fields are even more closely related. The massive dogmatism I have
described is not just a fact, it has also a most important function. Science would be
impossible without it." 'Primitive' thinkers showed greater insight into the nature of
knowledge than their 'enlightened' philosophical rivals. It is, therefore, necessary to
re-examine our attitude towards myth, religion, magic, witchcraft and towards all
those ideas which rationalists would like to see forever removed from the surface of
the earth (without having so much as looked at them - a typical taboo reaction).
DISPENSING WITH THE IDEOLOGICAL CONTROL OF EXPERTS

WONT MAKE OUR LIVES ANY WORSE MATERIALLY.

We need not fear that such a separation will lead to a breakdown of technology.
There will always be people who prefer being scientists to being the masters of their
fate and who gladly submit to the meanest kind of (intellectual and institutional)
slavery provided they are paid well and provided also there are some people around
75
who examine their work and sing their praise. Greece developed and progressed
because it could rely on the services of unwilling slaves. We shall develop and
progress with the help of the numerous willing slaves in universities and
laboratories who provide us with pills, gas, electricity, atom bombs, frozen dinners
and, occasionally, with a few interesting fairy-tales. We shall treat these slaves well,
we shall even listen to them, for they have occasionally some interesting stories to
tell, but we shall not permit them to impose their ideology on our children in the
guise of 'progressive' theories of education. We shall not permit them to teach the
fancies of science as if they were the only factual statements in existence. This
separation of science and state may be our only chance to overcome the hectic
barbarism of our scientific-technical age and to achieve a humanity we are capable
of, but have never fully realised. Let us, therefore, in conclusion review the
arguments that can be adduced for such a procedure.
SCIENTIFIC EXPERTISE IS PROFOUNDLY ANTI-DEMOCRATIC AND

IDEOLOGICAL.

Finally, the manner in which we accept or reject scientific ideas is radically different
from democratic decision procedures. We accept scientific laws and scientific facts,
we teach them in our schools, we make them the basis of important political
decisions, but without ever having subjected them to a vote. Scientists do not
subject them to a vote - or at least this is what they say - and laymen certainly do
not subject them to a vote. Concrete proposals are occasionally discussed, and a
vote is suggested. But the procedure is not extended to general theories and
scientific facts. Modern society is 'Copernican' not because Copernicanism has been
put on a ballot, subjected to a democratic debate and then voted in with a simple
majority; it is 'Copernican' because the scientists are Copernicans and because one
accepts their cosmology as uncritically as one once accepted the cosmology of
bishops and cardinals.
Even bold and revolutionary thinkers bow to the judgement of science. Kropotkin
wants to break up all existing institutions - but he does not touch science. Ibsen
goes very far in unmasking the conditions of contemporary humanity - but he still
retains science as a measure of the truth. Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss and others
have recognised that 'Western Thought', far from being a lonely peak of human
development, is troubled by problems not found in other ideologies - but they
exclude science from their relativisation of all forms of thought. Even for them
science is a neutral structure containing positive knowledge that is independent of
culture, ideology, prejudice.
76
The reason for this special treatment of science is, of course, our little fairy-tale: if
science has found a method that turns ideologically contaminated ideas into true
and useful theories, then it is indeed not mere ideology, but an objective measure of
all ideologies. It is then not subjected to the demand for a separation between state
and ideology.
But the fairy-tale is false, as we have seen. There is no special method that
guarantees success or makes it probable. Scientists do not solve problems because
they possess a magic wand - methodology, or a theory of rationality - but because
they have studied a problem for a long time, because they know the situation fairly
well, because they are not too dumb (though that is rather doubtful nowadays when
almost anyone can become a scientist), and because the excesses of one scientific
school are almost always balanced by the excesses of some other school. (Besides,
scientists only rarely solve their problems, they make lots of mistakes, and many of
their solutions are quite useless.) Basically there. is hardly any difference between
the process that leads to the announcement of a new scientific law and the process
preceding passage of a new law in society: one informs either all citizens or those
immediately concerned, one collects 'facts' and prejudices, one discusses the
matter, and one finally votes. But while a democracy makes some effort to explain
the process so that everyone can understand it, scientists either conceal it, or bend
it, to make it fit their sectarian interests.
77
EVEN SCIENCES SUCCESSES HAVE BEEN HIGHLY RELIANT ON
FOLK WISDOM AND OTHER “UNSCIENTIFIC” SOURCES.

Modern astronomy started with the attempt of Copernicus to adapt the old ideas of
Philolaos to the needs of astronomical predictions. Philolaos was not a precise
scientist, he was a muddle-headed Pythagorean, as we have seen, and the
consequences of his doctrine were called 'incredibly ridiculous' by a professional
astronomer such as Ptolemy. Even Galileo, who had the much improved Copernican
version of Philolaos before him, says: 'There is no limit to my astonishment when I
reflect that Aristarchus and Copernicus were able to make reason to conquer sense
that, in defiance of the latter, the former became mistress of their belief' (Dialogue,
328). 'Sense' here refers to the experiences which Aristotle and others had used to
show that the earth must be at rest. The 'reason' which Copernicus opposes to their
arguments is the very mystical reason of Philolaos combined with an equally
mystical faith ('mystical' from the point of view of today's rationalists) in the
fundamental character of circular motion. I have shown that modern astronomy and
modern dynamics could not have advanced without this unscientific use of
antediluvian ideas.
While astronomy profited from Pythagoreanism and from the Platonic love for
circles, medicine profited from herbalism, from the psychology, the metaphysics,
the physiology of witches, midwives, cunning men, wandering druggists. It is well
known that 16th- and 17th-century medicine while theoretically hypertrophic was
quite helpless in the face of disease (and stayed that way for a long time after the
'scientific revolution'). Innovators such as Paracelsus fell back on the earlier ideas
and improved medicine. Everywhere science is enriched by unscientific methods
and unscientific results, while procedures which have often been regarded as
essential parts of science are quietly suspended or circumvented.
The process is not restricted to the early history of modern science. It is not merely
a consequence of the primitive state of the sciences of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Even today science can and does profit from an admixture of unscientific
ingredients. An example which was discussed above, in Chapter 4, is the revival of
traditional medicine in Communist China. When the Communists in the fifties forced
hospitals and medical schools to teach the ideas and the methods contained in the
Yellow Emperor's Textbook of Internal Medicine and to use them in the treatment of
patients, many Western experts (among them Eccles, one of the 'Popperian
Knights') were aghast and predicted the downfall of Chinese medicine. What
78
happened was the exact opposite. Acupuncture, moxibustion, pulse diagnosis have
led to new insights, new methods of treatment, new problems both for the Western
and for the Chinese physician.
SO CALLED SCIENTIFIC DEFINITIONS ARE IMPORTANT. FOR

INSTANCE, THEY CAN BE USED TO FRAME THE DEBATE ABOUT
IMPORTANT SOCIAL ISSUES, SUCH AS RAPE, AND CLOCK IT IN
SCIENTIFIC AUTHORITY.
C L Muehlenhard ; I G Powch ; J L Phelps ;AND L M Giusti. 1992. Journal of

Social Issues Volume:48 Issue:1 Dated:(1992) Pages:23-44
Definitions of sexual assault, rape, and related terms vary along several dimensions: the sexual behaviors
specified, the criteria for establishing nonconsent, the individuals specified, and the perspective specified,
namely, who decides whether sexual assault has occurred. Conventional definitions of rape tend to be
narrow with regard to these dimensions. Traditional definitions label an incident as "rape" only if it involves
penile-vaginal intercourse perpetuated by a stranger with a weapon and only if the victim, police,
prosecutor, and jury all agree that the incident was rape. Such definitions give the advantage to men over
women: they heighten the distinction between coercive sex that is considered unacceptable and coercive
sex that is considered acceptable; and they promote images of "real rape" by strange men as a means to
frighten women and to act as a form of social control, keeping women off the streets and out of male
territory and thus limiting their freedom. Researchers' definitions of rape and sexual assault must be
examined critically because they convey the power of "scientific authority."
79
A2: IDENTITY POLITICS
I get that we used the word “identity” a lot in the 1AC, but this position is really missing our
point. All this evidence shows that it’s bad to center a political strategy around identity. But,
first, we aren’t a political strategy, we are a productive means of knowledge creation. That is
proven in the only solvency card we read in the 1AC. Also, we don’t have anyone rally around
their identity, we critically interrogate identity to see how it plays out in the world of agriculture
to create nasty material conditions for farm workers. We are a criticism of a monolithic and
privileged white identity, not a championing of minority identity, and none of their evidence
speaks to that.
And remember: The status quo is already identity politics, it’s just the politics of a
privileged white identity.
80
Identity Politics allows the oppressed to gain agency. It is the only method of resistance while
understanding the process of hegemony. By doing this the subject can act and be how they see fit
in the current hegomonic realm---Therefore breaking down essentialist identities.
FARRED in 00
Grant Farred. Professor of Litterature at Duke, Author. “Endgame Identity?Mapping the New Left Roots of
Identity Politics” New Literary History 31.4 (2000) 627-648. Project Muse. CT
Identity politics thus represents not only the marginal subject speaking back, but a more engaging
philosophical project: the oppressed not only resisting but also negotiating the limitations of its
agency. Identification, the ways in which minority constituencies are positioned by the dominant public, is
seldom voluntary. (By the same token, however, neither is it totally enforced from without. Identity is, as it
were, "mutually" constituted, a complex, frequently unequal negotiation between the inside and the outside,
between oppressed constituency and the dominant power bloc; identity formation is, as it were, the product of
syncretic overlappings and disjunctures.) To deploy Hannah Arendt's maxim "negatively," "One can only
resist in terms of the identity that is under attack." In order to resist how oppressed
constituencies are treated by the dominant grouping ("who" they are to the ruling bloc), they
simultaneously have to understand how they are perceived as a collectivity and how they
have to inhabit that hegemonically imposed identity. Arguing in an Arendtian fashion, Bickford
claims that the "coherence of the group identity itself . . . rests on marginalization. In other words,
politicized identity has an ontological investment in its own subjection" (AA 114).
"Subjection" here should not be equated with oppression but with the marginalized
performing the public transcript [End Page 638] of who they are so that they can challenge
the dominant perception of them. They have to be "ontologically" aware of (or "invested in") their
public subjectivities in order to respond to them. Before these minority groups can publicly be who
they think they are or as they see themselves outside of the hegemonic public sphere, they
have to be conscious of how the ruling bloc has publicly constructed them. In "front of the
veil," as W.E.B. DuBois might have it, 14 minorities have to fulfill the dominant's group perception of them
even as they challenge, denounce, or ridicule it "behind" that self-same veil. Blacks or gays have to recognize
that stereotypes have not only cachet but also enduring public resonance; dominant representations of
minority communities sustain themselves in spite--and sometimes because--of the public challenges to their
sociopolitical validity and currency.
Oppressed groups consistently confront the resilience and the power of their
marginalization, unable to alter dominant representations of themselves.
These communities have to negotiate ways in which negative public
perception reinforces their compromised capacity to effect the world, to
change how they are understood and received; their "disenfranchised" status
derives, it would appear, completely from their ontological existence as
racialized, sexualized, and gendered subjects. As a response to this diminution of
agency, identity politics transformed essential(ist) profiles into radically
politicized ones; the movement empowered oppressed constituencies to
resist their public representations rather than simply experience them as, to
phrase it awkwardly, pejorative dominant appellations. Minority
constituencies, as this explication makes clear, experience their "group identity"
as a complicated phenomenon because it is "implicated in power in multiple
ways--ways that both perpetuate inequality and provide the means to resist--
81
and group identity is therefore relevant to who we are as citizens" (AA 124). The hegemonic
imposition of "group identity" is so unrelenting that it might, precisely because of its
intensity, implicitly mark the limitations of this mode of political struggle. In other words,
because of the difficulty of public self-definition, identity politics is always likely to be
focused on the struggle to articulate the minority experience in the dominant public sphere;
identity politics will be primarily, if not exclusively, about the right to self-definition. As a
political strategy and a mode of oppositionality, identity politics has a stable,
if not fixed, "identity."
82
Forms of oppression are historically constructed. The only way to reveal these power
struggles in the system is to embrace identity. This allows groups to find tools of
empowerment and agency
FARRED in 00
This act of "assuming" the derogatory position is made not with the intention of reifying the identity, but
rather, as Brown points out, of utilizing it as a transformative signifier. By "accepting" terms such as
"natives" and "faggots," minority communities reconstruct them as (potentially)
empowering designations. Marginalized groups are [End Page 641] discriminated against
because they are "dykes" or "colored girls." Embracing the pejorative reveals the
transparently racist, misogynistic, and homophobic functionings of power. Oppression is,
through the strategy of taking on the publicly demeaning identity, politically and historically specified,
placed in (a) context, and epistemologically accounted for. Power cannot disguise its
machinations; identity politics does nothing so well as reveal a society's conscious--and
unconscious--prejudices and discriminatory tendencies. Identity politics, and the very need to
conduct the struggles surrounding minority constituencies, shows clearly what a society is; or, more
to the point, what it is not.
83
Power is never questioned—it becomes invisible and insulated into the system. Having the
ability to define your own identity is the only weapon to fight power.
FARRED in 00
Power is, of course, nothing so much as a political luxury here. It can select its moment or
form or style of response; it can insulate itself from the debate about identity; this is a
constituency that can be culturally ironized, aesthetically mocked or parodied without
concern for its political location or security; the dominant do not suffer from what Ian
Balfour, in another context, has named "social insecurity." 17 The "lack" of an identity (which is not
really a lack but an abundance), which is the most desirable form of self-representation, is the most confident
articulation of the public self: to not have to identity yourself is to know that [End Page 642] you
are in power. ("Unconsciousness" about identity is commensurate with the relative excess of power.)
Every minority identity has to define itself against this unspoken but normativized
expression of social, economic, and political authority. This is the identity that every other
constituency is fighting against, trying to wrest some power from, the very identity that has
to be radically amended--which is to say, its power must be diminished, its social control
lessened, its political authority decreased--if the gay or green or black struggle is to register
any significant achievement. It is a simple equation: white, heterosexual male power has to
be subtracted from if any other groups are to acquire any; power has to be reallocated and
racially, ethnically, and sexually redistributed.
84
Generic Identity Politics Bad arguments do no apply--- Latinidad has become
a well established form of identity which has historically and successfully
questioned, challenged and resisted American Exceptionalism. Latino and
Latina identity has historically, politically and socially contoured the
successes of overcoming oppressive powers. PEREZ-TORRES in 00
Rafael Perez-Torres. (Assoc. Prof. of English at UCLA) “Ethnicity, Ethics, and Latino
Aesthetics” American Literary History 12.3 (2000) 534-553. Project Muse. CT
In order to consider the oppositional quality of Chicano identification, it is important to
consider the discourses developing around notions of Latinidad--Latino
identity--both within and without academic discussions. There is, I would argue,
an increasing tendency to enclose discussions of Latinidad within well-
established patterns of national identity. Bonnie Honig, for one, has noted the
contradictory results of a xenophilic embrace of foreigners in response to a
renewed US anti-immigrant sentiment. She offers the observation that this
embrace has led to a renewed faith in the myth of an immigrant America.
This, she argues, "draws on and shores up the popular exceptionalist belief that
America is a distinctively consent-based regime, founded on choice rather
than inheritance, on civic rather than ethnicities. The exceptionalists'
America is anchored by rational, voluntarist faith in a creed, not by ascriptive
bloodlines; by individualism, not organicism; by mobility, not landedness.
The people who live here are people who once chose to come here, and, in
this, America is supposedly unique. In short, [End Page 537] the exceptionalist
account normatively privileges one particular trajectory to citizenship: from
immigrant to ethnic to citizen" (2). The condition of Chicano identification within a
larger discourse of immigration is, of course, complicated by ingrained patterns of migration
and immigration too numerous to consider here. Significant to our concerns, however, are
ingrained patterns of response--the discursive habits that help shape the contours of
Chicano identification--prevalent in the US.
The contested and complicated histories of the Americas have elicited the formation of a
signifier to identify the misplaced (or displaced) children of Latin America in the US: Latino.
This term--under which the more specific sign "Chicano" is often situated--is meant to signal
a sense of self and place within a history of US expansion and intervention. "Latino" (and
more problematically "Hispanic") can be a signifier full of neither sound nor fury and
certainly signifying nothing. Unless one takes into account particular economic concerns,
social or political contexts, the specificity of region and locale, the multiple historical
conditions that have brought us to this place, this time, Latino may signify nothing more
than a well-rehearsed but hollow gesture of inclusion.
The word "Latino" is sometimes invoked to help name a subjectivity formed via
an uneven history of displacement and dispossession. From this perspective,
Chicano identification finds an affinity with Latinidad. Ethnic identification
plays into the ways Latinos engage with regimes of power, an engagement
overwritten with racialized and/or nationalist identities. The historical forces
of slavery and colonization in which Latino ancestors played both protagonist
and victim form a far horizon in various engagements with power. More
immediately, the numerous positions within the heterogeneous contours of
current US political and social life form a nearer horizon for most Latinos.
85
These horizons of power, both near and far, political and historical, impinge on
ways Latinos--as individuals or as a group, as subjectivities or
constituencies--can assert an ethnic identity.
86
Even though some minority groups have sought rewards from whiteness
those groups have historically banned together more to fight against the
whiteness in the system.
LIPSITZ in 06
George Lipsitz( Author, Prof of Black Studies at UCSB) The Possessive Investment in
Whiteness: How White People Profit from Idenitity Politics. Published: Temple University
Press. 2006. ISNB: 1592134947
87
Identity Politics Good: A2 Totalizing Claims
Group interest does not equal group identity—this is the flaw within the
system now and the misconception of your evidence. Whiteness is what
constructs this ideology. LIPSITZ in 06
Press. 2006. ISNB: 1592134947
88
Under our framework of Identity subjects are not locked into one identity of
the self. Defining one's identity incorporates using multiplicity and a system
of hybridity which resolves the question of totalizing identities. LIPSITZ in
06
Press. 2006. ISNB: 1592134947
89

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2AC OVERVIEW – ALWAYS READ THIS PAGE...............................................................2

THIS IS OUR FRAMEWORK: Seemingly normal and race-neutral governmental

Ninety-seven schools responded to a survey that explored why

Policy debate is in a state of 9-1-1.

Womyn and minorities are underrepresented in debate.

Novices quit cuz of debate’s speed and racism.

Ninety-seven schools responded to a survey that explored why

Equality in debate is possible --- just look at this tournament’s novice

A serious problem that has plagued the debate community is

To demand that a critical project reduce itself to a 2-sentence statement of

Cesar Chavez, Founder of the United Farm Workers, November, 1984

Cesar Chavez, Founder of the United Farm Workers, November, 1984

A2: SPEAKING FOR OTHERS

Is their argument describing traditional politics or is it presenting an ideal? If it’s supposed to be

ALL KNOWLEDGE IS FRAGMENTED AND SUBJECTIVE, INCLUDING THEIRS AND THE

The power to raise subjective interpretations to a level of objectivity is rooted in a variety of

Disciplinary power means that it is what we do in every day discourse that

Kulynych. Jessica J. 1997 Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas, and

Participation as resistance compels us to expand the category of political

Kulynych. Jessica J. 1997 Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas, and

A performative concept of participation as resistance explodes the

Question of role playing is irrelevant in our framework where we believe personal

Our discussion is more inclusive. According to Kulynych, Participation is not

ANTONIO IN 1995 [Robert Antonio; Professor of Sociology at the University of

This is knee-jerk argumentation at its worst. OF COURSE not all farm

(see also the ID politics answers)

Ronald J. Grele. 2006 (Handbook of Oral History, pg. 55-56)

THEORIES OF ELITES CAN’T PRODUCE AN ADEQUATE THEORY FOR EMANCIPATION; YOU

Domination operates by seducing, pressuring, or forcing African-American women and members of

Denzin— professor of Sociology, Cinema Studies, and Interpretive Theory at the

Peter Robert [Educational Review 50(2), 105-114, Jun 1998 ]

WE ALL HAVE PERSONAL EXPERIENCES TO WE CAN SHARE

Peter Robert [Educational Review 50(2), 105-114, Jun 1998, ]

CAN’T REDUCE TRANSFORMATION AND EMPOWERMENT TO A SIMPLE QUESTION OF

CAN STILL DEBATE AND DISAGREE IN A DIALOGIC WAY

OUR LANGUAGE IS A FORM OF ACTION THAT IS KEY TO DISCURSIVE FORMS

Bleiker, 2000. (Roland, Professor of International Relations Harvard and

Language is one of the most fundamental aspects of human life. It is omnipresent. It

Bleiker, 2K. (Roland, Professor of International Relations Harvard and Cambridge,

Besides assuming that the "universal" is truly "self-evident," the neo-Enlightenment

Subsidies Bad Overview:

Their evidence comes from a series of so-called experts, journalists, and

Kathleen M. Shaw 04 Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Ohio State

SCIENCE IS ESSENTIALLY SIMILAR TO MYTH. ONE JUST

FEYERABEND ’00 (Paul. Philosopher of Science. Against Method. Excerpted at

FEYERABEND ’00 (Paul. Philosopher of Science. Against Method. Excerpted at

FEYERABEND ’00 (Paul. Philosopher of Science. Against Method. Excerpted at

DISPENSING WITH THE IDEOLOGICAL CONTROL OF EXPERTS

FEYERABEND ’00 (Paul. Philosopher of Science. Against Method. Excerpted at

SCIENTIFIC EXPERTISE IS PROFOUNDLY ANTI-DEMOCRATIC AND

FEYERABEND ’00 (Paul. Philosopher of Science. Against Method. Excerpted at

FEYERABEND ’00 (Paul. Philosopher of Science. Against Method. Excerpted at

SO CALLED SCIENTIFIC DEFINITIONS ARE IMPORTANT. FOR

C L Muehlenhard ; I G Powch ; J L Phelps ;AND L M Giusti. 1992. Journal of

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