Hacking Traditional College Debate's WhitePrivilege Problem

Minority participants aren't just debating resolutionsthey're challenging the

terms of the debate itself.

Members of the Wiley College debate team present arguments during a practice session.
Donna McWilliam/AP Photo

JESSICA CAREW KRAFT

APR 16, 2014

EDUCATION

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It used to be that if you went to a college-level debate tournament, the

students youd see would be bookish future lawyers from elite universities,
most of them white. In matching navy blazers, theyd recite academic
arguments for and against various government policies. It was tame,

predictable, and, frankly, boring.

No more.
These days, an increasingly diverse group of participants has transformed
debate competitions, mounting challenges to traditional form and content by
incorporating personal experience, performance, and radical politics. These
alternative-style debaters have achieved success, too, taking top honors at
national collegiate tournaments over the past few years.
But this transformation has also sparked a difficult, often painful controversy
for a community that prides itself on handling volatile topics.
On March 24, 2014 at the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA)
Championships at Indiana University, two Towson University students,
Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American
women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution
asked whether the U.S. presidents war powers should be restricted. Rather
than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other
teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue,
they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black
communities.
In the final round, Ruffin and Johnson squared off against Rashid Campbell
and George Lee from the University of Oklahoma, two highly accomplished
African-American debaters with distinctive dreadlocks and dashikis. Over
four hours, the two teams engaged in a heated discussion of concepts like
nigga authenticity and performed hip-hop and spoken-word poetry in the
traditional timed format. At one point during Lees rebuttal, the clock ran out
but he refused to yield the floor. Fuck the time! he yelled. His partner
Campbell, who won the top speaker award at the National Debate
Tournament two weeks later, had been unfairly targeted by the police at the

debate venue just days before, and cited this experience as evidence for his
case against the governments treatment of poor African-Americans.
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This year wasn't the first time this had happened. In the 2013 championship,
two men from Emporia State University, Ryan Walsh and Elijah Smith,
employed a similar style and became the first African-Americans to win two
national debate tournaments. Many of their arguments, based on personal
memoir and rap music, completely ignored the stated resolution, and instead
asserted that the framework of collegiate debate has historically privileged
straight, white, middle-class students.
Tournament participants from all backgrounds say they have found some of
these debate strategies offensive. Even so, the new style has received
mainstream acceptance, sympathy, and awards.
Joe Leeson Schatz, Director of Speech and Debate at Binghamton University,
is encouraged by the changes in debate style and community. Finally,
theres a recognition in the academic space that the way argument has taken
place in the past privileges certain types of people over others, he said.
Arguments dont necessarily have to be backed up by professors or written
papers. They can come from lived experience.
But other teams who have prepared for a traditional policy debate are
frustrated when they encounter a meta-debate, or an alternative stylistic
approach in competition. These teams say that the pedagogical goals of
policy debate are not being metand are even being undermined. Aaron
Hardy, who coaches debate at Northwestern University, is concerned about

where the field is headed. We end up with a large percentage of debates

being devoted to arguing about the rules, rather than anything substantive,
he wrote on a CEDA message board last fall.
Critics of the new approach allege that students dont necessarily have to
develop high-level research skills or marshal evidence from published
scholarship. They also might not need to have the intellectual acuity required
for arguing both sides of a resolution. These skillstogether with a nonconfrontational presentation styleare considered crucial for success in
fields like law and business.
Hardy and others are also disappointed with what they perceive as a lack of
civility and decorum at recent competitions, and believe that the alternativestyle debaters have contributed to this environment. Judges have been very
angry, coaches have screamed and yelled. People have given profanity-laced
tirades, thrown furniture, and both sides of the ideological divide have used
racial slurs, he said.
To counter this trend, Hardy and his allies want to create a policy only
space in which traditional standards for debate will be enforced. However,
this is nearly impossible to do within the two major debate associations,
CEDA and the National Debate Tournament (NDT), as they are governed by
participants and have few conduct enforcement mechanisms. For instance,
while CEDA and NDTs institutional anti-harassment policy would normally
prohibit the term nigga as it was used at the recent Indiana University
tournament finals, none of the judges penalized the competitors that used it.
In fact, those debaters took home prizes.
14 schools expressed interest in sending debaters to Hardys proposed
alternative tournament, scheduled to occur last month. But after word got
out that a group of mostly white teams from elite universities were trying to
form their own league, Hardy and his supporters were widely attacked on

Facebook and other online forums. Ultimately the competition didnt

happen, purportedly because of logistical issues with the hotel venue.
Nonetheless, Hardy wrote in an email that a toxic climate has precluded
even strong supporters of policy debate from publicly attach[ing] their
name to anything that might get them called racist or worse.

"The debate community is broken, but there is

nothing wrong with that."
Korey Johnson, the reigning CEDA champion from Towson University, was
one of the students who took offense the alternative tournament.
Segregating debate is a bad move, she said.* With the increase in
minority participation came a range of different types of argument and
perspectives, not just from the people who are in debate, but the kind of
scholarship we bring in. Her debate partner Ameena Ruffin agreed: For
them to tell us that we cant bring our personal experience, it would literally
be impossible. Not just for black peopleit is true of everyone. We are always
biased by who we are in any argument.
Liberal law professors have been making this point for decades. Various
proceduresregardless of whether we're talking about debate formats or law
have the ability to hide the subjective experiences that shape these
seemingly objective and rational rules, said UC Hastings Law School
professor Osagie Obasogie, who teaches critical race theory. This is the
power of racial subordination: making the viewpoint of the dominant group
seem like the only true reality.
Hardy disagrees. Having minimal rules is not something that reflects a
middle-class white bias, he said. I think it is wildly reductionist to say that
black people cant understand debate unless there is rap in itit sells short

their potential. He said he is committed to increasing economic and racial

diversity in debate and has set up a nonprofit organization to fundraise for
minority scholarships.
According to Joe Leeson Schatz, one of the unstated reasons for trying to set
up policy-only debates is that once-dominant debate teams from colleges like
Harvard and Northwestern are no longer winning the national competitions.
It is now much easier for smaller programs to be successful, he said. You
dont have to be from a high budget program; all you need to win is just a
couple of smart students. Schatz believes that the changes in college debate
are widening the playing field and attracting more students from all
backgrounds.
Paul Mabrey, a communications lecturer at James Madison University and
CEDA vice president, is organizing a conference for this coming June that
will address the college debate diversity problem. The debate community is
broken, he declared, but there is nothing wrong with that. We talk about a
post-racial America, but we shouldnt elide our real differences, we should
talk about how to work across and work with these differences.
One thing is clear: In a community accustomed to hashing out every possible
argument, this particular debate will continue. The uncontested benefit of
the debate format is that everyone receives equal time to speak, something
that drew many minority students to debate in the first place, said Korey
Johnson. No matter how people feel about my argument, they have to listen
to me for all of my speeches, everything I have to say, they cant make me
stop speaking, she said.

* An earlier version of this post misquoted Korey Johnson as saying "separating" rather than "segregating." We

regret the error.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JESSICA CAREW KRAFT is a journalist based in San Francisco.