Contention One: Racism

Temporary Assistance to Needy Families has a long history of disproportionately

cutting off Black women and their families
Floyd et al 21 [IFE FLOYD, former staff; LADONNA PAVETTI, PhD, Senior Fellow; LAURA MEYER, former
staff; ALI SAFAWI, former staff; LIZ SCHOTT, former staff; EVELYN BELLEW, ABIGAIL MAGNUS, Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, "TANF Policies Reflect Racist Legacy of Cash Assistance," 8-4-2021,
cbpp.org/research/income-security/tanf-policies-reflect-racist-legacy-of-cash-assistance]

The “Black Women Best” (BWB) framework[2] developed by Janelle Jones, now Chief Economist at the Department of Labor, “argues if
Black women — who, since our nation’s founding, have been among the most excluded and exploited by
the rules that structure our society — can one day thrive in the economy, then it must finally be working
for everyone.”[3] Consistent with Jones’ framework, redesigning TANF so that it centers the needs of Black
women and families, adequately helps families struggling to afford the basics, and offers meaningful
opportunities to gain skills and secure quality jobs would better serve families of all races and
ethnicities, improving child outcomes and reducing hardship. Federal policymakers created TANF in 1996 with the purported promise of
helping families lift themselves out of poverty through work. But much of the debate around the 1996 law was centered (often implicitly, but

sometimes explicitly) on Black mothers,[4] who were portrayed as needing a “stick” to compel them to be more

responsible and leave the program. TANF’s harsh work requirements and arbitrary time limits
disproportionally cut off Black and other families of color. Also, Black children are more likely than white
children to live in states where benefits are the lowest and where the program reaches the fewest families
in poverty. In the decade after policymakers remade the cash assistance system, it became much less effective at protecting children from deep poverty — that is, at lifting their
incomes above half of the poverty line — and children’s deep poverty rose, particularly among Black and Latinx children.[5] Many of TANF’s rules mirror those

dating back to cash programs of the early 20th century, and many of its assumptions reflect anti-Black
racism dating back to enslavement. Throughout the history of cash assistance, many policymakers and
public figures have used these same racist justifications and stereotypes to question Black women’s
reproductive choices, coerce Black women to work in exploitative conditions, and control , deride, and
punish Black women who receive cash assistance. TANF’s design perpetuated these attitudes and, in some ways,
reinforced them, such as through stricter work requirements and expanded state control over program rules.

And, TANF's current framework relies on racist and sexist narratives and poverty
stereotypes
Haider et al 22 [Areeba Haider, Ayan Gordan, Cara Brumfield, & Laura Tatum, Center on Poverty and
Inequality, Georgetown Law, Economic Security and Opportunity Initiative, Re-Envisioning TANF Toward
an Anti-Racist Program That Meaningfully Serves Families, October 2022]

Creating a TANF program that advances racial equity requires an understanding of the many ways the
program currently generates and cements racial disparities. The program is grounded in racist and sexist
narratives, as well as the pernicious myth that poverty is a personal moral failure rather than a collective
one, directly contributing to exclusionary program design. Additionally, TANF’s insufficient funding structure,
state discretion, and other characteristics of the program limit the reach of cash assistance and
disproportionately exclude Black and Latinx families.
And, work requirements rely on racially driven motives and lead to increases in
poverty
Schott, Floyd, and Pavetti 21 [LIZ SCHOTT, Former Staff; IFE FLOYD, Former Staff; AND LADONNA
PAVETTI, PH.D., Senior Fellow; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Cash Assistance Should Promote
Equity Applying the “Black Women Best” Framework to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, 8-4-
2021, https://www.cbpp.org/research/income-security/cash-assistance-should-promote-equity]

Conditioning benefits on participation in mandatory work programs is one of TANF’s most racially
driven policies, arising from a long history of state control over Black labor starting with enslavement
and other coerced labor practices that continued long beyond emancipation. Studies have found that while
mandatory work requirements initially led to modest increases in employment, those faded over time. Work
requirements also led to increases in deep poverty (family income below half of the poverty line) among recipient families,
many of which had their benefits reduced or taken away. [13] One study that examined 11 pilot programs — local forerunners
of TANF’s work requirements — found that while most of them slightly improved short-term employment, deep poverty rates rose by
a statistically significant amount in six of the 11 and didn’t fall significantly in any. Other research found
that deep poverty rose among children in the decade after TANF’s creation, especially among Black and
Latinx children.[14] Moreover, the employment gains generally don’t translate into long-term improvement in employment and earnings
for families. All states impose work requirements in TANF and require parents receiving TANF to participate
in narrowly defined work activities. Those activities focus on immediate job placement. But as studies have found, this “work
first” approach pushes participants toward the same low-paying, unstable jobs that led them to seek
help from TANF in the first place.[15] If unable to meet the requirements, they face severe punishment in
the form of sanctions that take away the cash benefits they rely on to pay their rent and utilities and put
food on the table. In most states, the entire family can lose benefits, even the children. Some states go further by requiring applicants for
assistance to complete upfront work requirements before approving their application. The design of TANF’s work requirements (as
well as other behavioral requirements discussed below) grew out of the racist trope that Black women are inherently
lazy and need to be threatened with harsh punishment to work to support their families, even though Black
women actually have worked at higher rates than white women throughout our nation’s history.[16] In addition to being ineffective in raising
long-term employment earnings, the
emphasis on immediate job placement perpetuates occupational
segregation, pushing TANF recipients into low-paid jobs overwhelmingly held by Black women and other
women of color.[17] States’ application of work requirements has also exacerbated racial inequities.
Research consistently shows that Black women are significantly more likely to have their TANF benefits
taken away for not meeting work requirements than white women. [18]

Specifically, TANF's block grant funding structure and broad state flexibility
disproportionately harms families of color
Haider et al 22 [Areeba Haider, Ayan Gordan, Cara Brumfield, & Laura Tatum, Center on Poverty and
Inequality, Georgetown Law, Economic Security and Opportunity Initiative, Re-Envisioning TANF Toward
an Anti-Racist Program That Meaningfully Serves Families, October 2022]

TANF’s block grant funding structure and broad flexibility for states in how the program is administered
have resulted in disproportionate harm to families of color. This harm includes significant racial and
regional disparities in benefits levels, insufficient benefit levels for participants regardless of race, and insufficient access to cash
assistance.20 Broad discretion for states has meant that TANF funds are sometimes spent on programs to
benefit middle-income families rather than families experiencing poverty. TANF funding is also sometimes spent on
child welfare services which disproportionately harm families of color. Further, states can intercept child support payments owed to custodial
parents to compensate for TANF benefits the family received. Child support policies have also been shown to have racially disparate impacts.
To advance racial equity, TANF funds must prioritize cash assistance for people experiencing poverty —
which requires revisiting the program’s funding structure and statutory goals. THE TANF BLOCK GRANT’S STRUCTURE & ALLOCATION
FORMULAS LOCK IN INEQUITABLE & INSUFFICIENT FUNDING The federal TANF block grant was set at $16.5 billion in 1996
and has remained unchanged for 25 years. In that time, the real value of the TANF block grant has fallen more
than 40 percent.21 The TANF program’s insufficient funding has serious consequences on its ability to support
eligible families, especially Black families with children.22 The formula used to allocate funding to states
has not been adjusted since 1996, despite changes in demographics, population growth, and other
relevant factors.23 The allocation formula replicates the harm of historical spending differences across states on cash assistance, with
states with the highest populations of Black children continuing to receive the least funding per child experiencing poverty.24
Approximately 23 percent of Black children live in the six states with the lowest block grant amounts per
child experiencing poverty, compared to 14 percent of white children living in those states.25 States with larger Black
populations have also used the discretion granted to them under federal law to establish more
restrictive and less generous TANF programs than in other states.26, 27 In combination with the flawed allocation
formula, that means Black children are most likely to live in states with TANF programs characterized by the lowest levels of benefits, as well as
the states with programs that reach the fewest families experiencing poverty.28

This form of structural violence comes first – it creates all forms of macro-level
violence
Simon Springer 11, Otago geography professor, “Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal
rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies,” Political Geography (30) pp. 90-98) (Simon, “Violence
sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies,” Political
Geography (30) pp. 90-98)

**we disagree with the author's use of ableist language

The confounding effects of violence ensure that it is a phenomena shot through with a certain perceptual blindness. In his monumental essay ‘Critique of Violence’,
Walter Benjamin (1986) exposed our unremitting tendency to obscure violence in its institutionalized forms, and because of this opacity, our inclination to regard
violence exclusively as something we can see through its direct expression. Yet the
structural violence resulting from our political and
economic systems ( Farmer, 2004 and Galtung, 1969), and the symbolic violence born of our discourses ( Bourdieu, 2001 and
Jiwani, 2006), are something like the dark matter of physics, ‘[they] may be invisible, but [they have] to be taken

into account if one is to make sense of what might otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective
[or direct] violence’ ( Zizek, 2008: 2). These seemingly invisible geographies of violence – including the hidden fist of the market itself –

have both ‘nonillusory effects’ ( Springer, 2008) and pathogenic affects in afflicting human bodies that create
suffering ( Farmer, 2003), which can be seen if one cares to look critically enough. Yet, because of their sheer pervasiveness,
systematization, and banality we are all too frequently blinded from seeing that which is perhaps most
obvious. This itself marks an epistemological downward spiral, as ‘the economic’ in particular is evermore
abstracted and its ‘real world’ implications are increasingly erased from collective consciousness ( Hart,
2008). ‘The clearest available example of such epistemic violence’ , Gayatri Spivak (1988: 24–25) contends, ‘is the

remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other’ , and it
is here that the relationship between Orientalism and neoliberalism is revealed. Since Orientalism is a discourse that functions precisely due to its ability to conceal
an underlying symbolic violence (Tuastad, 2003), and because the structural violence of poverty and inequality that stems from the political economies of
neoliberalism is cast as illusory (Springer, 2008), my reflections on neoliberalism, Orientalism, and their resultant imaginative and material violent geographies are,
as presented here, purposefully theoretical. As Derek Gregory (1993: 275) passionately argues, ‘human geographers have to work with social theory…
Empiricism is not an option, if it ever was, because the “facts” do not (and never will) “speak for themselves”,
no matter how closely… we listen’. Although the ‘facts’ of violence can be assembled, tallied, and
categorized, the cultural scope and emotional weight of violence can never be entirely captured through
empirical analysis. After Auschwitz, and now after 9/11, casting a sideways glance at violence through the poetic abstractions of theory
must be considered as an enabling possibility. This is particularly the case with respect to understanding the geographies of violence, as
our understandings of space and place are also largely poetic (Bachelard, 1964; Kong, 2001).
Prefer our impacts - structural violence outweighs
Jinya Afroze’19---Jinya Afroze is a CLARISSA Country Coordinator at Terre des hommes foundation,
(Jinya Afroze, May, 2019), “Threads Of Everyday Violence: Childhood In An Urdu-Speaking Bihari Camp
In Bangladesh,” The Open University, https://oro.open.ac.uk/67505/1/Afroze%20J_FINAL.pdf---accessed
11-28-22///t.c.

***edited for ableist language

1.2 Conceptualising everyday violence Violence has often been understood as a visible physical force – either as
actual action or threat – with the intention to hurt others either purposefully or by accident which may
affect victims’ health and wellbeing (Krug et al., 2002; Pinhero, 2006; Maternowska, Potts and Fry, 2016; Lansford and Banati,
2018). The World Health Organization understands violence primarily in terms of its physicality, defining it as: The intentional
use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or
community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or
deprivation. (quoted in Krug et al., 2002, p. 5) This definition of violence however has been criticised as somewhat
limited and lacking in nuance because it downplays notions of power and inequality. In the introduction to the
seminal edited volume on Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2004a, p.1) state that: Violence can
never be understood solely in terms of its physicality – force, assault, or the infliction of pain – alone.
Violence also includes assaults on the personhood, dignity, sense of worth or value of the victim. The
social and cultural dimensions of violence are what gives violence its power and meaning. Violence
disdains easy conceptualisations; as Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2004a, p. 2) rightly note , violence can be ‘everything and
nothing; legitimate or illegitimate; visible or invisible; necessary or useless; senseless and gratuitous or
utterly rational and strategic’. To them, putting too much attention to the physicality of the violence can
turn a project into a ‘clinical, literary, or artistic exercise’, which, to their apprehension, can generate a
‘pornography of violence’ by offering a ‘voyeuristic’ illustration of sufferings and torture, camouflaging
the broader scenario that influences and affects violence (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004a, p. 2). As opposed
to physical violence, which is primarily directed from one individual to the other, Galtung (1969) in his classic essay ‘Violence, peace,
and peace research’ conceptualised violence in relation to structural inequalities, and unequal relationships of
power, engrained by the ‘social injustice’ that shapes violence within local realities . In contrast to personal
violence, Galtung (1969, p. 173) explains ‘structural violence as something that shows a certain stability, whereas personal
violence […] shows tremendous fluctuations over time’. He continues Structural violence is silent, it does not show –
it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters. In a static society, personal violence will be registered, whereas
structural violence may be seen as about as natural as the air around us. [Italic original] Galtung (1969)
acknowledges that even though personal violence always remains clearer and more noticeable because of its
prominence, structural violence within ‘tranquil waters’ can have a deeper impact on people. Galtung (1969, p.
168) rejects the ‘narrow concept of violence’ where violence is considered from an individualistic point of
view. Instead, he argues for the importance of understanding the relationships of power in order to understand violence within a broader and
structurally informed orientation: There may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. The violence is built
into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chance s (Galtung, 1969,
p. 171). Thus, the unequal distribution of resources affects hierarchies and relationships of power so that
someone with less economic resources, combined with a limited education and poor health, will, inevitably, find
themselves with the least amount of power and influence in a community. In his later work, Galtung added another
manifestation of violence – cultural violence – to his broader definition of violence: By ‘cultural violence’ we mean those aspects of
culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence – exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science […]
that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence. (Galtung, 1990, p. 291) He argues that, in the name
of cultural practices, cultural violence reproduces and validates the use of direct and structural violence in the
society, making reality so ‘opaque’ that people are unable to perceive, question, or challenge those acts
of violence as something wrong. Building on Galtung’s work, Farmer (2003, 2004) reiterates the importance of exploring
the social processes and arrangements, engrained in historical, economic, and political practices, which
produce and reproduce inequalities and harms such as poverty, exclusion, and injustice. Farmer (2003) coins
the term ‘pathologies of power’ to describe how structural factors result in oppression and inequalities
which paralyse [freeze] and pathologise the oppressed to such an extent that they tend to believe that
they are responsible for their own oppression. To elaborate further the views of understanding violence as structurally
contingent and deeply embedded, I find it useful to refer to Bourdieu (1991) who uses the term ‘ symbolic power’ to imply the ways
that unequal power relationships and domination are routinely exercised in everyday life. The
relationships between those who exercise power and those who accept it , according to Bourdieu, are triggered
by ‘symbolic power’ – whereby the ‘dominants’ do not recognise their exercise of power as violence,
while, the ‘dominated’ legitimise their own vulnerability by adhering to the values and beliefs of the
dominants, as well as internalising the belief that such domination is simply the way of the world
(Bourdieu, 1991). Symbolic violence, therefore, is as real as any other forms of violence, where power is
channelled in such an ‘invisible’ way that often it is ‘misrecognized’ as violence and thus ‘recognized’ as
legitimate (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 24). Echoing Bourdieu (1992), Bourgois explains that: For example, an insult per se is not symbolic violence.
Symbolic violence occurs through the process of misrecognition. The socially dominated come to believe that the insults directed against them,
as well as the hierarchies of status and legitimation that curtail their life chances, are accurate representations of who they are, what they
deserve, and how the world has to be (Bourgois, 2009, p. 19). Drawing on the reasons people ‘misrecognize’ violence, Bourdieu (1991) argues
that, as social agents, they operate with presupposed assumptions where they take the world for granted and accept the structures of the
world as they are. Bourdieu, however, recognises that his conceptualisation of symbolic violence as ‘the violence which is exercised upon a
social agent with his or her complicity’ can be problematic – because of the issue of power – whether power comes from below or whether
individuals desire the condition that is enforced upon them (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2004, p. 272). Bourdieu goes on to explain that an
individual’s complicity is ‘neither a passive submission to an external constraint nor a free adherence to values’: instead, symbolic violence
defies a binary opposition of constraint and freedom (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2004, p. 274). Social hierarchies and inequalities therefore,
according to Bourdieu, are not reinforced by external power rather they are legitimised by normalising domination in everyday routine
practices. 1.2.1 Everyday violence in everyday lives Individual,
structural, and/or symbolic violence are closely
intertwined, as the work of all the above theorists has suggested. How these theories play out in ‘real life’ however has been the focus of
scholarships by Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, whose work I will explore in this section (Scheper-Hughes, 1996, 1997, Bourgois, 2001, 2009;
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004b). Having done that, I will go on to explore some key empirical research on children’s experiences of
everyday violence, particularly in the intersection of relationships of power across gender, generation, and space – some key ideas which
resonate through my data chapters (Chapters Four to Six). Drawing on Bourdieu’s ideas of symbolic violence, Scheper-Hughes
refers
to the routinised normalisation of invisible violence as ‘everyday violence’ (Scheper-Hughes, 1992; Scheper-Hughes
and Bourgois, 2004a), which Bourgois later glossed as a ‘continuum of violence’ (Bourgois, 2001) and ‘normalized
violence’ (Bourgois, 2009). Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois wrote: By including the normative everyday forms of violence
hidden in the minutiae of 'normal' social practices – in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in
the exchange of gifts, and so forth – Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence,
especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state
repression (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004a, p. 20). In contrast to communal and political violence, everyday
violence is not something extraordinary or ‘painfully graphic and transparent’ (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois,
2004a, p. 2). Instead it is something that is ‘taken for granted’, ‘ routinized’ (ScheperHughes, 2004, p. 177) and
‘utterly banal’ (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004b, p. 19). Thus, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois have concerns that often this
violence can be ‘invisible or misrecognized’ yet may have significant impacts on people’s lives. Scheper-
Hughes (1996, p. 889) in her earlier work coined this as ‘small wars and invisible genocide’, as she finds everyday
violence as invisible – not so much because it is ‘secreted away or hidden from the view’, rather because
it is so taken for granted that it is often not counted as violence. Following this line of argument, ScheperHughes (1997,
p. 473) frames the mundane and routinised violence as ‘peace-time crimes’, allowing her to capture the
fluidity of violence from extraordinary to ordinary, from noteworthy to normal, and from startling to
something straightforward. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2004a) develop Bourdieu’s work further, arguing that while it is
important to recognise different forms of violence; placing violence into narrow boxes does not allow a
full understanding of how structural inequalities and relationships of power are embedded in our
everyday lives. They describe everyday violence as a ‘slippery concept’ and a ‘continuum’ as it moves from
more physical and direct violence to subtler forms of everyday violence that contribute to daily
sufferings in mundane lives. Furthermore, violence also gives birth to violence, so that victim and perpetrator cannot be seen
as binary opposites: often those who experienced violence can become violent to others in a different time and context. Violence thus
becomes omnipresent and generative in ‘normative social spaces’ (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004a, p. 19),
‘operating along a continuum from direct physical assault to symbolic violence and routinised everyday
violence, including the chronic, historically embedded structural violence whose visibility is obscured by
globalized hegemonies’ (Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes, 2004, p. 318). It is therefore not surprising that Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes
(2004, p. 318) call for more ethnographically based empirical studies to understand ‘the way everyday life is shaped by the historical processes
and contemporary politics of global political economy as well as by local discourse and culture’.

Plan: The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal
redistribution in the United States by expanding Social Security through the
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program by
 establishing a federal minimum benefit;
 eliminating the federal requirements that states impose sanctions and mandate
participation in work;
 barring behavioral requirements, time limits, and other eligibility exclusions;
 refocusing TANF agencies on helping families address immediate crises and
improving long-term well-being; and,
 requiring states to spend a greater share of Temporary Assistance to Needy
Families' resources on basic assistance, establishing an equitable formula
allocation, and increasing the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families block grant
and index it to inflation.
 Contention Two: Solvency
Reforming TANF according to the BWB is key to resolve its history of anti-Black racism
Floyd et al 21 [IFE FLOYD, former staff; LADONNA PAVETTI, PhD, Senior Fellow; LAURA
MEYER, former staff; ALI SAFAWI, former staff; LIZ SCHOTT, former staff; EVELYN
BELLEW, ABIGAIL MAGNUS, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "TANF Policies
Reflect Racist Legacy of Cash Assistance," 8-4-2021, cbpp.org/research/income-
security/tanf-policies-reflect-racist-legacy-of-cash-assistance]
cash assistance for when families experience a crisis needs to be a critical component of our
In short,

economic support system. However, TANF, with its history of anti-Black racism, must be fundamentally
reformed by adopting a Black Women’s Best framework. Black mothers need a cash program that
provides stability through life’s challenges, protects their children from hardship, and affirms and supports parents’
autonomy over their families and careers. When this is available to Black mothers, it will mean that we have crafted a TANF program that works well for all families facing significant
economic distress. This work cannot be left entirely to the states ; federal changes are essential to advance

racial equity nationally and ensure a stable economic foundation for all families. For a reimagined TANF
program, we envision: Establishing a federal minimum benefit so that no family of any race falls below a certain
income level. TANF benefits vary greatly by state and the lowest benefits tend to be in Southern states, which have larger Black populations and deeper-seated legacies of
enslavement and Jim Crow. A minimum federal benefit would establish a necessary floor to mitigate these disparities

and better protect Black, brown, and white families. Barring states’ mandatory work requirements.
Conditioning benefits on participation in mandatory work programs is one of TANF’s most racially driven
policies, one that started with enslavement and continued with coerced labor practices that continued long beyond emancipation. Federal policymakers should
eliminate federal requirements that states impose sanctions and mandate participation in work
activities. To ensure that states don’t maintain these policies even without a federal requirement, federal policymakers also should bar states from
imposing mandating work as a condition of eligibility for cash assistance and imposing sanctions for non-
participation. Barring behavioral requirements, time limits, other eligibility exclusions. Rooted in racism
and sexism, these provisions demean families by assuming that adults are irresponsible and do not want what is best for their families. Worse, they often
take away assistance from families that need it. Some also disproportionally hurt Black women and Black families. Eliminating them would remove the concept of “deservingness” from a

program that should be designed to support parents and protect children from destitution. Refocusing TANF agencies on helping families
address immediate crises and improving long-term well-being. TANF is better suited than other
economic security programs to provide the support that parents need to achieve the goals they set for themselves and their families. (For example,
tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Child Tax Credit cannot provide services to families.) Yet it must do a much better job of helping

families in crisis address their immediate needs and setting them up for long-term stability. The program should
move away from mandatory work programs that do very little to help mothers find work that lift them and their children out of poverty and toward voluntary support programs that align with
a family’s goals and needs. Resources that TANF agencies previously used to monitor compliance with mandatory work requirements could instead support families in new and meaningful

ways.Changing TANF’s funding structure to retarget TANF resources to basic assistance, address funding
inequities, and prevent erosion over time. States have used TANF resources to pay for other things
beside cash aid to families; notably, states with high Black populations tend to spend less on basic assistance
and to redirect these funds elsewhere. Federal policymakers based the original TANF block grant
allocation on states’ AFDC spending amounts; this approach locked in some of the lowest TANF
funding levels per poor child, for states where Black children disproportionately live.[180] Furthermore, the
original block grant formula has lost about 40 percent of its value since its creation due to inflation, which
makes it harder for states that want to adequately invest in families to do so. Federal policymakers should require states to spend a

greater share of TANF resources on basic assistance, establish an equitable formula allocation, and
increase the TANF block grant and index it to inflation to encourage states, especially those with lower benefits and higher Black populations, to
 Remaking cash assistance requires undoing the consequences — and power — of
increase benefits and serve more families.

racist ideas and policies that have marginalized mothers and their families, Black people especially. A cash aid
program that centers equity for Black women would, as the “Black Women Best” framework posits, promote the economic security

of all families with the least income.

And, Congress can redesign TANF according to BWB framework

CBPP 22 [Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "Policy Basics: Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families," 3-1-2022, https://www.cbpp.org/research/income-security/temporary-assistance-for-needy-
families]

TANF has been due for reauthorization since 2010 but has only been temporarily extended every year
since then. When Congress finally reauthorizes TANF, it should redesign the program using the “Black
Women Best” framework, which “argues that if Black women — who, since our nation’s founding, have been among the most
excluded and exploited by the rules that structure our society — can one day thrive in the economy, then it must finally be working for
everyone.” CenteringBlack women in TANF reauthorization would help to undo the racist policies in TANF
and benefit families of all races and ethnicities who need cash assistance. TANF funds should be targeted
to families with the lowest incomes and should be used primarily for cash assistance . Congress should
also set a federal minimum benefit level, end and bar exclusionary policies rooted in racism, and replace
the work participation rate with access measures to ensure that states serve families in need and with
performance measures based on employment and earnings outcomes.

Policymakers reorienting their thinking towards a Black women best framework is key
– centers Black women conversations and policy actions
Jones 20 [Janelle Jones, Managing Director of Policy & Research, Groundwork Collaborative, Black
Women Best,” Data for Progress, JULY 15, 2020,
https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2020/7/15/black-women-best]

But if
policymakers can reorient their thinking toward a “Black women best” framework, we can shift
the economic worldview to include and elevate Black women and other people of color in ways that will
benefit everyone. A “Black women best” ideology would lead to enacting deliberate strategies of
inclusion to create a stronger economy so that our most marginalized can thrive. It would center Black
women in conversations and policy actions. It would ensure that Black Women and their needs are
centered -- they are being paid fairly, attaining new levels of education, surviving in hospitals, building wealth, and more. And by doing so, it
would ensure that the floor gets lifted for everyone, and the economy as a whole benefits from strong and widespread
growth and prosperity.

And, an anti-racist TANF solves racialized narratives and stigma, while promoting
equity and participatory involvement
Haider et al 22 [Areeba Haider, Ayan Gordan, Cara Brumfield, & Laura Tatum, Center on Poverty and
Inequality, Georgetown Law, Economic Security and Opportunity Initiative, Re-Envisioning TANF Toward
an Anti-Racist Program That Meaningfully Serves Families, October 2022]
**This card also answers Racial Impact Statements CPs, consultation with those affected CPs,

4. PROMOTE RACIAL & GENDER EQUITY An

anti-racist TANF program would include intentional efforts to address
structural racism within the program and promote racial and gender equity. While the priorities above would do
much to advance equity, a holistic and intentional effort to advance equity is required and should be prioritized in the creation of new statutory
goals. Ways to go beyond the racial and gender equity outcomes that would flow from the priorities above
could include: ● Addressing the racialized narratives and harmful myths that stigmatize participants,
including by renaming and/or rebranding the program in consultation with participants; ● Employing racial equity impact
assessments and evaluations on an ongoing basis and making changes accordingly; ● Meaningfully engaging
participants in policy formation and compensating them appropriately; ● Achieving cultural competence and
accessibility for people with disabilities; and ● Incorporating an understanding of the disparities and
structural racism that participants of color face when building supplementary programming, such as
voluntary employment services. While new goals for the TANF program would advance racial and economic justice by centering the needs of
participants and their overall financial well-being and quality of life, it is vital that an improved TANF program wrestle explicitly with the role of
systemic racism and sexism in its previous iterations.84

And, the federal government should hold states accountable

Shrivastava and Thompson 22 [Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, ADITI SHRIVASTAVA, Deputy
Director for Income Security, AND GINA AZITO THOMPSON, Former Staff, "TANF Cash Assistance Should
Reach Millions More Families to Lessen Hardship," 2-18-2022, https://www.cbpp.org/research/income-
security/tanf-cash-assistance-should-reach-millions-more-families-to-lessen]

Additionally, federal policymakers should: Hold states accountable to serving families in need . States focus on
what they are incentivized to do. To expand TANF’s reach, Congress should remove incentives that encourage
states not to assist families and should create a state accountability measure that focuses on serving
families in need (such as the TPR). States that fail to meet a specified standard could be required to spend additional resources on cash
assistance or work activities. Require states to direct a specified share of federal and state resources to
families receiving cash assistance. TANF’s purposes are broad, which has given states the flexibility to spread program funds
throughout their budgets and allowed them to shift resources away from assistance to families. To better target resources, Congress
should require states to spend a specific share of their state and federal TANF funds on basic assistance.
Provide more resources for states to provide cash assistance . The TANF block grant is worth 40 percent
less than when it was created in 1996. Without additional funds, states are unlikely to adopt policies that
would reach more families as this would increase the costs of providing cash assistance to families . With a
fixed block grant, providing cash to more families means taking money away from other activities that use TANF funds. Any additional
funds should be restricted to TANF’s core purposes: cash assistance, employment assistance, and work
supports.

TANF reform addresses racist and sexist narratives and resolves racial disparities in
poverty
Haider et al 22 [Areeba Haider, Ayan Gordan, Cara Brumfield, & Laura Tatum, Center on Poverty and
Inequality, Georgetown Law, Economic Security and Opportunity Initiative, Re-Envisioning TANF Toward
an Anti-Racist Program That Meaningfully Serves Families, October 2022]

It is past time that we reform the TANF program to actively redress its foundational racist and sexist
narratives and rectify the racial disparities in poverty it has helped to entrench. TANF can and should
play a role in advancing racial equity, improving access to cash assistance, and promoting economic
security and opportunity. With new statutory goals and an improved funding structure, millions more
families could receive direct, flexible support that better meets their needs. Thoughtful policy and service delivery changes can
also help transform the program into one that provides access to cash assistance while preserving family autonomy, dignity, and privacy. For
families experiencing poverty and striving to overcome barriers to economic stability, transforming
TANF cannot wait.
And, policymakers have a network in place to eradicate poverty – TANF is key
Haider et al 22 [Areeba Haider, Ayan Gordan, Cara Brumfield, & Laura Tatum, Center on Poverty and
Inequality, Georgetown Law, Economic Security and Opportunity Initiative, Re-Envisioning TANF Toward
an Anti-Racist Program That Meaningfully Serves Families, October 2022]

An America where no one experiences poverty is possible. Already, the United States has a network of
programs with the potential to make this vision a reality, including programs that provide cash assistance, like Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Yet, high levels of racial disparities and poverty persist in the U.S. TANF contributes to, rather than
ameliorates, structural racism in its current form and does disappointingly little to reduce poverty. Policymakers who are interested
in eliminating poverty must address the shortcomings and opportunities associated with TANF—our
nation’s primary source of cash assistance to families with children. Indeed, some policymakers have proposed
eliminating it altogether in recent years. This report, based on extensive input from stakeholders, offers a new, anti-racist vision
for TANF, supported by tangible recommendations for realizing that vision. If achieved, this vision would ensure
that TANF plays a crucial role as part of a broader effort to end racial inequities and poverty alike.
 Contention Three: Impact Framing

Infinite risk does not justify ignoring probability and collapses decision-making.
Kessler ‘8 (Oliver; April 2008; Ph.D. in IR, Professor of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, Professor of History and Theory of IR at the
Faculty of Arts; Alternatives, Vol. 33, “From Insecurity to Uncertainty: Risk and the Paradox of Security Politics” p. 211-232; RP)

The problem of the second method is that it is very difficult to "calculate" politically unacceptable losses. If the risk of
terrorism is defined in traditional terms by probability and potential loss, then the focus on dramatic terror attacks leads
to the marginalization of probabilities. The reason is that even the highest degree of improbability becomes
irrelevant as the measure of loss goes to infinity. ^o The mathematical calculation of the risk of terrorism thus
tends to overestimate and to dramatize the danger. This has consequences beyond the actual risk assessment
for the formulation and execution of "risk policies": If one factor of the risk calculation approaches infinity (e.g., if a
case of nuclear terrorism is envisaged), then there is no balanced measure for antiterrorist efforts, and risk management
as a rational endeavor breaks down. Under the historical condition of bipolarity, the "ultimate" threat with nuclear weapons
could be balanced by a similar counterthreat, and new equilibria could be achieved, albeit on higher levels of nuclear overkill. Under the new
condition of uncertainty, no such rational balancing is possible since knowledge about actors, their motives and
capabilities, is largely absent. The second form of security policy that emerges when the deterrence model collapses mirrors the
"social probability" approach. It represents a logic of catastrophe. In contrast to risk management framed in line with
logical probability theory, the logic of catastrophe does not attempt to provide means of absorbing
uncertainty. Rather, it takes uncertainty as constitutive for the logic itself; uncertainty is a crucial precondition
for catastrophes. In particular, catastrophes happen at once, without a warning, but with major implications for the world polity. In
this category, we find the impact of meteorites. Mars attacks, the tsunami in South East Asia, and 9/11. To conceive of
terrorism as catastrophe has consequences for the formulation of an adequate security policy. Since
catastrophes hap-pen irrespectively of human activity or inactivity, no political action could possibly prevent
them. Of course, there are precautions that can be taken, but the framing of terrorist attack as a catastrophe points to
spatial and temporal characteristics that are beyond "rationality." Thus, political decision makers are
exempted from the responsibility to provide security—as long as they at least try to preempt an attack. Interestingly enough,
9/11 was framed as catastrophe in various commissions dealing with the question of who was responsible and whether it could have been
prevented. This makes clear that under the condition of uncertainty, there are no objective criteria that could serve as an anchor for measuring
dangers and assessing the quality of political responses. For ex- ample, as much as one might object to certain measures by the US
administration, it is almost impossible to "measure" the success of countermeasures. Of course, there might be a subjective assessment of
specific shortcomings or failures, but there is no "common" currency to evaluate them. As a consequence, the framework of the
security dilemma fails to capture the basic uncertainties. Pushing the door open for the security paradox, the main problem of
security analysis then becomes the question how to integrate dangers in risk assessments and security policies about which simply nothing is
known. In the mid 1990s, a Rand study entitled "New Challenges for Defense Planning" addressed this issue arguing that "most striking is the
fact that we do not even know who or what will constitute the most serious future threat, "^i In order to cope with this
challenge it would be essential, another Rand researcher wrote, to break free from the "tyranny" of plausible scenario planning. The decisive
step would be to create "discontinuous scenarios ... in which there is no plausible audit trail or storyline from
current events"52 These nonstandard scenarios were later called "wild cards" and became important in the current US strategic discourse. They
justified the transformation from a threat-based toward a capability- based defense planning strategy.53 The problem with this kind of risk
assessment is, however, that even the most absurd scenarios can gain plausibility. By constructing a chain of
potentialities, improbable events are linked and brought into the realm of the possible, if not even the
probable. "Although the likelihood of the scenario dwindles with each step, the residual impression is one of
plausibility. "54 This so-called Othello effect has been effective in the dawn of the recent war in Iraq. The connection between
Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda that the US government tried to prove was disputed from the very beginning. False
evidence was again and again presented and refuted, but this did not prevent the administration from presenting as
the main rationale for war the improbable yet possible connection between Iraq and the terrorist network and the improbable yet
possible proliferation of an improbable yet possible nuclear weapon into the hands of Bin Laden. As Donald Rumsfeld famously said:
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence ." This sentence indicates that under the condition of genuine uncertainty,
different evidence criteria prevail than in situations where security problems can be assessed with relative certainty.

Linear impact scenarios like the aff's come first – view their disad internal link chains
with skepticism – correct for the Othello Effect.
Piatelli-Palmarini, 94 – professor of Cognitive Science, Linguistics, & Psychology at the University of
Arizona (Massimo, Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds, p. 134-136)

As the narrative unfolds one event is linked with another, making for a script that seems plausible —always
admitting, of course, that each stage has really been preceded by another. In the end, don't we think that the probability of a U.S. invasion is
somewhat higher than one in a million? Here we leave statistics behind and enter the domain of pure fiction. Look a
bit closer, and one can see that we are not yet out of the realm of cognitive science, for these questionnaire-experiments, just like real
life, have countless times shown us that a plausible and well-told story can lead us to hold as "objectively"
probable events that, just minutes before, we would have considered totally improbable. The notorious
"Protocols of Zion," a pure fabrication of the czar's anti- Semitic propaganda taken up by the Nazi regime raised an anti-Semitic storm. It did
little good to show that it was a pure invention. What the propagandists sought to do, in order to seize power, was to make imaginatively
presentable the probability of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, and in so doing they succeeded admirably, at least in the minds of those
uncritically committed to hatred. I will not waste space on other instances, but limit myself to the purely cognitive aspects of the phenomenon.
Offering a "plausible" sequence of events that are causally linked one to another has the effect of
immediately raising our estimate of probability. It suffices that the links between these "events" should hold from one to the
next for our minds lo approach the final link in the chain. For, as we have seen, that which we can readily imagine is ipso facto more probable.
Even if the probability of the very first link in this chain is very low, the fact is soon forgotten. Say "Iet's
suppose that . . .” and them "plausible" enough. I put "plausible" in quotation marks because true plausibility, in effect, depends wholly on that
initial "Let's suppose . . ." Once the first link in the chain of our script is "supposed," then all the rest of the links "hold" one to another.
Rationally speaking, however, and having regard to the calculation of probabilities, we are in the domain of what is known as "compound
probabilities," or, more restrictively, "conditional probabilities." (What is the likelihood that B will be true, supposing that A has proven to be
true?) The probability of the last link in the chain being true is calculated on the basis of a series of
conditional probabilities being true, and that in turn is obtained by combining the probabilities of each
link in the chain, from the first to the last. Probabilities being, by their nature, less than one, the
probability of the entire chain (or the last link) being true is always and without exception less probable
than the probability of the least probable link in the chain. We fail to notice this progressive attenuation of probability.
The story takes over from reality. The last link seems ever truer to our mind, and our increased facility in
representing or imagining makes that last link seem ever more probable. The trick—which is one of the oldest in the book—is to find
the narrative path by which the last, and most implausible, link can be made imaginatively compelling.
My Othello effect depends on this perverse use of the imagination.

Current debate reverses the logical burden of proof by assuming 100% risk of an
argument once it is presented instead of requiring the DA to be built from a
presumption of zero risk.
Nate Cohn 13, covers elections, polling and demographics for The Upshot, a Times politics and policy
site. Previously, he was a staff writer for The New Republic. Before entering journalism, he was a
research assistant and Scoville Fellow at the Stimson Center “Improving the Norms and Practices of
Policy Debate,” Nov 24, http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/topic,5416.0.html
So let me offer another possibility: the problem isn’t the topic, but modern policy debate. The unrealistic scenarios, exclusive focus on policy
scholarship, inability to engage systemic impacts and philosophical questions. And so long as these problems characterize modern policy
debate, teams will feel compelled to avoid it.¶ It might be tempting to assign the blame to “USFG should.” But these are bugs, not features of
plan-focused, USFG-based, active voice topics. These bugs result from practices and norms that were initially and independently reasonable,
but ultimately and collectively problematic. I also believe that these norms can and should be contested. I believe it would be possible for me to
have a realistic, accessible, and inclusive discussion about the merits of a federal policy with, say, Amber Kelsie. Or put differently, I’m not sure I
agree with Jonah that changing the topic is the only way to avoid being “a bunch of white folks talking about nuke war.” ¶ The fact that policy
debate is wildly out of touch—the fact that we are “a bunch of white folks talking about nuclear war”—is a damning indictment of nearly every
coach in this activity. It’s a serious indictment of the successful policy debate coaches, who have been content to continue a pedagogically
unsound game, so long as they keep winning. It’s a serious indictment of policy debate’s discontents who chose to disengage. ¶ That’s not to
say there hasn’t been any effort to challenge modern policy debate on its own terms—just that they’ve mainly come from the middle of the
bracket and weren’t very successful, focusing on morality arguments and various “predictions bad” claims to outweigh. ¶ Judges were receptive
to the sentiment that disads were unrealistic, but negative claims to specificity always triumphed over generic epistemological questions or
arguments about why “predictions fail.” The affirmative rarely introduced substantive responses to the disadvantage, rarely read impact
defense. All considered, the negative generally won a significant risk that the plan resulted in nuclear war. Once that was true, it was basically
impossible to win that some moral obligation outweighed the (dare I say?) obligation to avoid a meaningful risk of extinction. ¶ There were
other problems. Many of the small affirmatives were unstrategic—teams rarely had solvency deficits to generic counterplans. It was already
basically impossible to win that some morality argument outweighed extinction; it was totally untenable to win that a moral obligation
outweighed a meaningful risk of extinction; it made even less sense if the counterplan solved most of the morality argument. The combined
effect was devastating: As these debates are currently argued and judged, I suspect that the negative would win my ballot more than 95
percent of the time in a debate between two teams of equal ability. ¶ But even if a “soft left” team did better—especially by making solvency
deficits and responding to the specifics of the disadvantage—I still think they would struggle. They could compete at the highest levels, but, in
most debates, judges would still assess a small, but meaningful risk of a large scale conflict, including nuclear war and extinction. The risk would
be small, but the “magnitude” of the impact would often be enough to outweigh a higher probability, smaller impact. Or put differently: policy
debate still wouldn’t be replicating a real world policy assessment, teams reading small affirmatives would still be at a real disadvantage with
respect to reality. . ¶ Why? Oddly, this is the unreasonable result of a reasonable part of debate: the burden of refutation or rejoinder, the
responsibility of debaters to “beat” arguments. If I introduce an argument, it starts out at 100 percent—you then have to disprove it. That
sounds like a pretty good idea in principle, right? Well, I think so too. But it’s really tough to refute something down to “zero” percent—a team
would need to completely and totally refute an argument. That’s obviously tough to do, especially since the other team is usually going to have
some decent arguments and pretty good cards defending each component of their disadvantage—even the ridiculous parts. So one of the most
fundamental assumptions about debate all but ensures a meaningful risk of nearly any argument—even extremely low-probability, high
magnitude impacts, sufficient to outweigh systemic impacts. ¶ There’s another even more subtle element of debate practice at
play. Traditionally, the 2AC might introduce 8 or 9 cards against a disadvantage, like “non-unique, no-link, no-impact,” and then go for one and
two. Yet in reality, disadvantages are underpinned by dozens or perhaps hundreds of discrete
assumptions, each of which could be contested. By the end of the 2AR, only a handful are under scrutiny;
the majority of the disadvantage is conceded, and it’s tough to bring the one or two
scrutinized components down to “zero.”¶ And then there’s a bad understanding of probability. If the
affirmative questions four or five elements of the disadvantage, but the negative was still “clearly ahead” on all five elements, most judges
would assess that the negative was “clearly ahead” on the disadvantage. In reality, the risk of the disadvantage has been reduced
considerably. If there was, say, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform would pass, an 80 percent chancethat political capital was key,
an 80 percent chance that the plan drained a sufficient amount of capital, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform was necessary to
prevent another recession, and an 80 percent chance that another recession would cause a nuclear war (lol), then there’s a 32 percent chance
that the disadvantage caused nuclear war. ¶ I think these issues can be overcome. First, I think teams can deal with the “burden of refutation”
by focusing on the “burden of proof,” which allows a team to mitigate an argument before directly contradicting its content. ¶ Here’s how I’d
look at it: modern policy debate has assumed that arguments start out at “100 percent” until directly refuted. But few, if any, arguments are
supported by evidence consistent with “100 percent.” Most cards don’t make definitive claims. Even when they do, they’re not supported by
definitive evidence—and any reasonable person should assume there’s at least some uncertainty on matters other than few true facts, like
2+2=4.¶ Take Georgetown’s immigration uniqueness evidence from Harvard. It says there “may be a window” for immigration. So, based on the
negative’s evidence, what are the odds that immigration reform will pass? Far less than 50 percent, if you ask me. That’s not always true for
every card in the 1NC, but sometimes it’s even worse—like the impact card, which is usually a long string of “coulds.” If you apply this very basic
level of analysis to each element of a disadvantage, and correctly explain math (.4*.4*.4*.4*.4=.01024), the risk of the disadvantage starts at a
very low level, even before the affirmative offers a direct response. ¶ Debaters should also argue that the negative hasn’t introduced any
evidence at all to defend a long list of unmentioned elements in the “internal link chain.” The
absence of evidence to defend the
argument that, say, “recession causes depression,” may not eliminate the disadvanta ge, but it does raise
uncertainty—and it doesn’t take too many additional sources of uncertainty to reduce the
probability of the disadvantage to effectively zero—sort of the static, background noise of
prediction.¶ Now, I do think it would be nice if a good debate team would actually do the work—talk about what the cards say, talk about the unmentioned steps—but I
think debaters can make these observations at a meta-level (your evidence isn’t certain, lots of
undefended elements) and successfully reduce the risk of a nuclear war or extinction to something
indistinguishable from zero. It would not be a factor in my decision.¶ Based on my conversations with
other policy judges, it may be possible to pull it off with even less work. They might be willing to
summarily disregard “absurd” arguments, like politics disadvantages, on the grounds that it’s patently
unrealistic, that we know the typical burden of rejoinder yields unrealistic scenarios, and that judges
should assess debates in ways that produce realistic assessments. I don’t think this is too different from elements of
Jonah Feldman’s old philosophy, where he basically said “when I assessed 40 percent last year, it’s 10 percent now.” ¶Honestly, I was surprised
that the few judges I talked to were so amenable to this argument. For me, just saying “it’s absurd, and you know it” wouldn’t be enough
against an argument in which the other team invested considerable time. The more developed argument about accurate risk assessment would
be more convincing, but I still think it would be vulnerable to a typical defense of the burden of rejoinder. ¶ To be blunt: I want debaters to
learn why a disadvantage is absurd, not just make assertions that conform to their preexisting notions of what’s realistic and what’s not. And
perhaps more importantly for this discussion, I could not coach a team to rely exclusively on this argument—I’m not convinced that enough
judges are willing to discount a disadvantage on “it’s absurd.” Nonetheless, I think this is a useful “frame” that should preface a following, more
robust explanation of why the risk of the disadvantage is basically zero—even before a substantive response is offered. ¶ There are other, broad
genres of argument that can contest the substance of the negative’s argument. There are serious methodological indictments of the various
forms of knowledge production, from journalistic reporting to think tanks to quantitative social science. Many of our most strongly worded
cards come from people giving opinions, for which they offer very little data or evidence. And even when “qualified” people are giving
predictions, there’s a great case to be extremely skeptical without real evidence backing it up. The world is a complicated place, predictions are
hard, and most people are wrong. And again, this is before contesting the substance of the negative’s argument(!)—if deemed necessary. ¶ So,
in my view, the low probability scenario is waiting to be eliminated from debate, basically as soon as a capable team tries to do it.¶ That would
open to the door to all of the arguments, previously excluded, de facto, by the prevalence of nuclear war impacts. It’s been tough to talk about
racism or gender violence, since modest measures to mitigate these impacts have a difficult time outweighing a nuclear war. It’s been tough to
discuss ethical policy making, since it’s hard to argue that any commitment to philosophical or ethical purity should apply in the face of an
existential risk. It’s been tough to introduce unconventional forms of evidence, since they can’t really address the probability of nuclear war.

Very low risk scenarios should be treated as zero risk.

Rescher 83(Nicholas, PhD in Philosophy from Princeton, Former president of the American Philosophocal Association, Risk p39-40)

Once the stage is reached where these small-possibility eventuations are seen as “effectively
impossible,” the mathematical expectation of return becomes finite, and the paradox is
resolved. But in decision theory there are two different, more pressing reasons for dismissing sufficiently improbable possibilities. One is
that there are just too many of them. To be asked to reckon with such remote possibilities is to
baffle out thought by sending it on a chase after endless alternatives. Another reason lies in out need and
desire to avoid stultifying action. It’s simply “human nature” to dismiss sufficiently remote eventualities in
one’s personal calculations. The “Vacationer’s Dilemma” of Figure 1 illustrates this. Only by dismissing certain
sufficiently remote catastrophic possibilities as outside the range of real possibilities – can we
avoid the stultification of action on anything like standard decision-making approach
represented by expected-value calculations. The vacationer takes the plausible line of viewing
the chance of disaster as effectively zero, thereby eliminating that unacceptable possible
outcome from playing a role by way of intimidation. People generally sufficiently unlikely disasters can be set at zero;
that unpleasant eventuations of “substantial improbability” can be dismissed and taken to lie outside the realm of “real” possibilities.

Specifically, their extinction impacts have a maximum probability of 0.2%

Simpson 16 – Fergus Simpson, Mathematician at the University of Barcelona. [Apocalypse Now?
Reviving the Doomsday Argument, https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.03072]//BPS
Whether the fate of our species can be forecast from its past has been the topic of considerable controversy. One
refutation of the so-called Doomsday Argument is based on the premise that we are more likely to exist in a
universe containing a greater number of observers. Here we present a Bayesian reformulation of the
Doomsday Argument which is immune to this effect. By marginalizing over the spatial configuration of observers, we
find that any preference for a larger total number of observers has no impact on the inferred local number. Our results remain
unchanged when we adopt either the Self-Indexing Assumption (SIA) or the Self-Sampling Assumption
(SSA). Furthermore the median value of our posterior distribution is found to be in agreement with the
frequentist forecast. Humanity's prognosis for the coming century is well approximated by a global
catastrophic risk of 0.2% per year.

The plan is a form of radical incrementalism that can break down hegemonic
structures.
Boyer, ’06 (Kate, Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Science and Technology Studies,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA, “Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space, Scale
and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform,” Antipode, Volume 38, Issue 1,
January. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0066-4812.2006.00563.x, p 22-40, bgm)
In addition to legislative advocacy, administrative advocacy, and community organizing, some advocates and activists have turned to the courts
as a means of challenging welfare reform.3 Litigation has an important role to play in the policy process, and though legal challenges
can be difficult to mount, when successful they can result in dramatic change. Even when unsuccessful, litigation can be a powerful
policy signal.4 Toward creating strategies to challenge neoliberal social policy, Sanford Schram advises looking for openings in the current socio-
political fabric, focusing attention on these points of opportunity, and paying attention to even small victories. He calls this approach “radical

incrementalism” (Schram 2002). I suggest that legal challenges to welfare reform can function as a kind of radical
incrementalism , leveraging sometimes small fissures as a way to begin to challenge a policy
hegemony. As welfare reform has changed the landscape of social service provision, it has also led to
significant changes both in what kinds of laws can be used to challenge welfare policy and what kinds
of groups can mount cases. Beginning with the Nixon administration, the federal government began providing funding for legal aid
to welfare clients through the Legal Services Corporation (LSC). This body had wide latitude to hold welfare providers accountable for
administering welfare services in accordance with the law, and could use federal dollars to bring forward cases on behalf of welfare recipients
as a class. During the Reagan administration in the 1980s and again in the 1990s through the Gingrich Congress, the federal government began
to restrict what the LSC could do. To prevent roadblocks in implementing the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, the LSC was restricted from
challenging welfare law directly, or from bringing forward cases on behalf of welfare recipients as a class. Though the legality of using federal
funds to challenge federal law has since been restored with the result of Legal Services Corporation v Velasquez in 2001, welfare advocates
remain unable to base claims in entitlement to benefits, or make claims on behalf of welfare recipients as a class.5 Legal
challenges to
welfare reform have included both individual cases and class-action cases, employing both local and
national level law in the form of Civil Rights legislation. Cases have targeted issues ranging from eligibility determinations,
benefit levels and residency requirements, to child support and workplace protections. I will briefly examine both cases which employ local
laws, and those which appeal to National Civil Rights. I focus on New York City for two reasons. First, this city constitutes a prime articulation of
punitive, anti-poverty social policy in action (MacLeod 2002; Smith 1996, 1998). Neil Smith bases his argument about the rise of ‘‘revanchist’’
urban policies—those which in effect take vengeance on the indigent— on an analysis of 1990s New York City. Smith defines the revanchist city
as one which punishes its poorest residents through vengeful public policies (anti-homeless laws, zero-tolerance policing and increased
incarceration, as well as high-end urban regeneration programmes) in the context of a widening cross-class income gap through the end of the
twentieth century (Smith 1996).

Prioritizing structural violence leads to better understandings of consequences – the

aff is a prereq to their framing.
Madva 23 [Alex Madva, Department of Philosophy, California State Polytechnic University; Daniel
Kelly, Department of Philosophy, Purdue University; Michael Brownstein, Department of Philosophy,
John Jay College and The Graduate Center, CUNY; “Change the People or Change the Policy? On the
Moral Education of Antiracists” Ethical Theory Moral Pract. 2023 Jan 24;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9871422/; Go Green!!]

We’ll start with an idea we share with structuralists: individuals too often have an insufficient
understanding of, and pay too little attention to, the social structures that perpetuate racial injustice.
The inference we draw from this is that antiracist moral education should be more in the business of
training people to better understand social structures and show them how to change systems, norms,
institutions, and their policies. Moral education so configured can help address a problem with the way
people of all racial groups think, feel, and act. In what follows we articulate a family of virtues, dispositions, and traits of
character that we think moral education concerned with racial justice ought to cultivate. We take no position on the relative standing of virtue
ethics with respect to other normative theories such as consequentialism or deontology. We do hold, however, that cultivating
these
kinds of virtues will lead to better consequences (e.g., Driver 2001), viz., moral progress. We also hold that
all individuals have an imperfect duty to cultivate virtues instrumental to the aim of ending racial
injustice, especially insofar as all forms of racial injustice fail to treat people with respect (e.g., Glasgow 2009).
That said, we express our view through the conceptual framework of virtue theory because it is naturally amenable to the idea that antiracist
moral education ought to cultivate multitrack, open-ended dispositions in individuals to think, feel, and act in a variety of ways. These will vary
greatly with context, evolve over time, and remain difficult to codify in a neat set of rules for action. The framework of virtue theory is well-
suited to handle these challenges.8

BWB is key to challenge white supremacy, ableism, sexism, queerphobia, and

xenophobia – the aff represents a vital policy opportunity to mitigate burdens placed
on the multitude of marginalized identities experienced
Clarke 22 [Yvette D. Clarke has been in Congress since 2007. She represents New York’s Ninth
Congressional District, which includes Central and South Brooklyn. Clarke is Chair of the Congressional
Black Caucus Taskforce on Immigration, a Senior Member of the House Energy and Commerce
Committee, and a Senior Member of the House Committee on Homeland Security. “CBWG RELEASES
BLACK WOMEN BEST POLICY FRAMEWORK FOR HOW TO CENTER BLACK WOMEN,” 3-28-2022,
https://clarke.house.gov/cbwg-releases-black-women-best-policy-framework-for-how-to-center-black-
women/]

“Black women have been intentionally left behind in our economy for generations. Today, we release the Black Women Best
agenda to outline the most important legislation we can pass to finally bring Black women to the forefront of our economy,” said
Congresswoman Robin Kelly (IL-02). “The
power of the Black Women Best agenda is that in prioritizing the
economic success of Black women, we improve the economy for everyone. Black Women Best
challenges white supremacy, ableism, sexism, queerphobia and xenophobia to demand better for
Black women and for everyone. Black women are historically the last to recover from economic downturn. For the past two years,
Black women have served on the front lines as childcare workers, home health workers, transportation workers, nurses and teachers. Black
women have also been forced to leave the workforce at historic levels. As we put our economy back on track after the damage of the COVID-19
pandemic, we must center our focus on Black women. We must actively uplift Black women to support the recovery of our economy and
protect against future economic crises. I am proud to join Congresswoman Watson Coleman and Clarke in releasing this agenda to empower
Black women across the country with the tools to achieve economic success and prosperity.” “In this country, Black women have never been as
considered, included, or rewarded as they should,” said Janelle Jones, architect of the Black Women Best framework. “The way to economic
growth that provides security and stability for all is possible. And the blueprint is here — in this BWB legislative agenda.” “There’s no
denying the structural inequities built into US policy, systems and institutions that directly harm Black women — too often by design,” said
Kendra Bozarth, co-chair of the Black Women Best Working Group and communications director at Liberation in a Generation. “Narrative
change is a key part of uprooting this harm, and the BWB framework is our North Star for rewriting the
stories that shape economic policy, politics, and ultimately our livelihoods and lives.” “Pursuing a Black
Women Best legislative agenda is about pulling Black women out of economic precarity and into economic prosperity, which is only possible
when all interlocking oppressive structures are dismantled,” said Azza Altiraifi, co-chair of the Black Women Best Working Group and senior
policy manager at Liberation in a Generation. “Black
women hold a multitude of marginalized identities and endure
compounded oppression; using intersectional policy interventions to mitigate those burdens will propel
us on the path toward building a liberation economy.”

Deciding not to do the aff because of the political consequences is the same logic that
allowed slavery to continue.
Cook, ’00 (Anthony, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. J.D., Yale Law School, “RACE
AND RELIGION: REVISING 'AMERICA'S MOST SEGREGATED HOUR': King and the Beloved Community: A
Communitarian Defense of Black Reparations,” George Washington Law Review, July / September, 2000,
68 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 959, lexis, bgm)
We have, more so than not, chosen the path of denial and silence, a path made inviting by the
rhetoric of inalienable rights, equality under the law, and freedom and justice for all. Even when
afforded the opportunity to end the charade, acknowledge the dreadful truth, and make restitution
for past mistakes, we have chosen three-fifths compromises, short-lived reconstructions, and anti-
affirmative action referenda. At defining moments in our nation's history, we have succumbed to the
lower angels of our collective nature and sacrificed black equality upon the altars of political
expediency - saving the Union, saving the Party, protecting states' rights, and constructing a trans-
ethnic solidarity based on whiteness. n53 America needs its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission, similar to the South
African model in which the stories of victims of oppression and the beneficiaries of oppression can be heard. n54 Abstract history must be
made personal in order for genuine healing and reconciliation to occur. This mechanism has the potential of personalizing a history that for
most Americans seems unrelated to their lives. At the social level, we must acknowledge the ways in which certain social fears like the fears of
disunion, competition, retaliation and humiliation have led to the historic atrocities committed against black people in America. First
and
foremost, there is the fear of disunion, the fear that absent the social subordination of blacks as slaves
and second-class citizens, there would be no social compact. That is, had the slaveholding colonies not
secured the [*985] constitutional protections for slavery that they did, the union of states we now call
America would not exist. n55 This Union was created and has been preserved by the continued
sacrifice of black humanity on the altars of political expediency . The Northwest Ordinance, both
Missouri Compromises, and the Fugitive Slave Acts were enacted to embellish and reaffirm the
original sin of 1787, a constitution that provided protection for the institution of slavery. Every branch
of government was bloodied by the sacrifice, as were many social institutions like the church.