Blake Invitational 1 Kamiak nb aff

8 Valley CR Neg

https://hsld.debatecoaches.org/Valley/Rieger+Neg

NC Freedom/Coercion

The ability to bring conditions upon oneself is a prerequisite to moral judgement.

Wallace, R. Jay (Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley). Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. (1994).

"To hold someone ... to be explained."

That implies the right to choose the course of one’s own life even if it is against one’s own self-interest.

Dworkin, Ronald (Professor of Law and Philosophy, New York University). Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom. New York: Knopf, 1993.

"But we must ... realize that aim."

The foundation of the criminal justice system assumes the autonomy of defendants, so rejecting it makes criminal law incoherent.

Hashimoto, Erica (Professor of Law, Georgetown University). “Resurrecting Autonomy: The Criminal Defendant’s Right to Control the Case.” Boston University Law Review (2010).

"Part of the ... and during trial."

Enforcing compliance with a conception of the good on others is the foundation of oppression.

Rawls, John (Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

"A continuing shared ... to remain so."

In the status quo, defendants have the right to a jury trial should they wish one; the prevalence of plea bargaining is effectively a waiver of rights.

Howe, Scott (Williams Professor of Criminal Law, Chapman University). “The Value of Plea Bargaining.” Oklahoma Law Review 58 (2005).

"Trading concessions for ... the public interest."

CP (?) Withhold Racial Demographics

Prosecutors use racial profiling to determine plea bargains.

Borchetta, Jenn and Alice Fontier. “When race tips the scales in plea bargaining.” Slate, October 23, 2017.

"A new study ... plea to offer."

However, knowing the defendants race is not necessary fact for plea bargaining, so cases ought to be blinded in plea bargains.

Shima Baughman, Christopher Robertson, and Sunita Sah. “3 Professors Have a Radical Idea for How to Remove Bias from the Criminal Justice System.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 22 Oct. 2016

"Blinding cases – removing ... can be blinded."

This uniquely solves the harms of plea bargaining in the squo

Goode, Erica. “Stronger Hand for Judges in the ‘Bazaar’ of Plea Deals.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 22 Mar. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/us/stronger-hand-for-judges-after-rulings-on-plea-deals.html.

"97 percent of ... in plea bargains"

DA Court Clog

Taking away plea bargaining means that there will be a complete overload in the court system with cases, and clogged civil courts are self-defeating- they are unsustainable and no trials receive proper attention.

(Ashely; InsideCounsel as managing editor ,"Frivolous lawsuits clogging U.S. courts, stalling economic growth", www.insidecounsel.com/2011/07/22/frivolous-lawsuits-clogging-us-courts-stalling-eco?page=1-5, July 22, 2011)ADS

"Americans’ litigiousness and ... of economic investment."

9 Strake DT Aff

https://hsld.debatecoaches.org/Strake+Jesuit/Thorburn+Aff

Aff Race

Part 1: Prisons

Control society has allowed the prison industrial complex to manifest itself through the law in a way that discourages exercise of rights.

Alexander 12 Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, March 10, 2012, Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html

But in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation’s prison population has quintupled in a few decades partly as a result of the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty.

“The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,” said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. In other words: the system is rigged.

In the race to incarcerate, politicians champion stiff sentences for nearly all crimes, including harsh mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws; the result is a dramatic power shift, from judges to prosecutors.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

No wonder, then, that most people waive their rights. Take the case of Erma Faye Stewart, a single African-American mother of two who was arrested at age 30 in a drug sweep in Hearne, Tex., in 2000. In jail, with no one to care for her two young children, she began to panic. Though she maintained her innocence, her court-appointed lawyer told her to plead guilty, since the prosecutor offered probation. Ms. Stewart spent a month in jail, and then relented to a plea. She was sentenced to 10 years’ probation and ordered to pay a $1,000 fine. Then her real punishment began: upon her release, Ms. Stewart was saddled with a felony record; she was destitute, barred from food stamps and evicted from public housing. Once they were homeless, Ms. Stewart’s children were taken away and placed in foster care. In the end, she lost everything even though she took the deal.

This sacrifice of rights gives up minorities to the capitalist system for the benefits of the elite.

Weil 12 “Widespread Use of Plea Bargains Plays Major Role in Mass Incarceration” Wednesday, November 07, 2012 By Danny Weil http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/12556-overwhelming-use-of-plea-bargains-plays-major-role-in-mass-incarceration

The American judicial system has become one in which constitutional rights and protections are sacrificed through mendacity and deception to appeal to a cult of judicial efficiency and economy. The public has been lied to; plea bargaining does not make society safe or tackle the problem of crime itself. This is simply another necessary illusion that is funneled into the minds of the populace to rationalize the commodification of people for profit. The problem with all of this, as the late thinker Hannah Arendt noted in her New York Review of Books article "Lying in Politics," is that: "the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods." In reality, the current criminal justice system has little to do with public safety, truth-telling or avoiding falsehoods. Many of those currently incarcerated and languishing in for-profit or government prisons include nonviolent drug offenders and those accused of parole-violation technicalities, such as not having a job or missing a parole officer appointment. In reality, Americans are locked up for crimes, such as writing bad checks or using drugs, that would rarely, if ever, produce prison sentences in other countries. The United States incarcerates 2.3 million criminals. The number of people on lockdown in America is more than that in any other nation. The modern criminal justice system primarily serves the interests of the increasingly privatized and financialized prison-industrial complex, which includes, among others, "tough on crime" politicians, seedy bail bondsmen, Wall Street-traded for-profit prison corporations, the drug-testing industry, police and corrections officers, and parole and prison officers' unions. It is well known, or should be, that California's "three strikes and you're out" provision was promoted by corrections officers because caging humans is not only good for business, it is the fiduciary responsibility of the for-profit prison-industrial complex corporations. It is no surprise, either, that the primary defenders of the criminalization of marijuana are police and corrections officers' unions because this is the bread and butter of their professions.

Plea bargaining is just part and parcel within the larger prison-industrial complex apparatus – the limited strength of evidence needed to throw convictions at defendents encourages a culture of prosecution and violence.

Gazal 2005 Oren, “Partial Ban on Plea Bargains”, University of Michigan Law School, Law and Economics Working Papers, Paper #05-008, Year 2005

The innocence problem cannot be attributed to the bargaining process itself. Usually the offer to settle can only alleviate the awfulness of the innocent’s condition. His real problem is that he was prosecuted in the first place. In many cases, he was charged because of the availability of plea bargaining. The problem with the system is the effects of plea bargaining on the prosecutors’ choice of cases. Because of the availability of plea bargaining, the strength of evidence of any given case becomes less important to the prosecution. Defendants in weak cases are more likely to be charged – and therefore more likely to be convicted. With the strength of evidence playing a relatively small role in the result of the case, more innocent defendants are likely to be among those convicted.

This is an impact magnifier – it allows prosecutors to incorporate more and more individuals into the for-profit prison system, with the burden falling primarily on minorities.

Weil 12 “Widespread Use of Plea Bargains Plays Major Role in Mass Incarceration” Wednesday, November 07, 2012 By Danny Weil http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/12556-overwhelming-use-of-plea-bargains-plays-major-role-in-mass-incarceration

Popular culture, disseminated by Hollywood movies and television series, depict plea bargains as a way of allowing those accused of a crime to escape justice and "get off easy." In reality, usually the opposite is true. Plea bargains allow prosecutors to bring charges against far more people than the legal system could process through a system of judicial trials. Thus, they create the material conditions for their own replication. Because less than 10 percent of criminal cases, federal and state, go to trial, plea bargains in effect allow the state to prosecute ten times more cases than they could handled at trial. Plea bargains are also essential for stocking for-profit prisons with a steady supply of "customers" for their corporate shareholders. Plea bargaining both enlists and perpetuates the principles of mass production, deception and mendacity, which in turn are applied quite readily in the whole of our system of criminal "justice." Plea bargaining has also become an essential element of both mushrooming prison growth and the racially disparate state of American prison populations, with the gravity of the burden falling on the backs of blacks and Latinos. Without plea bargaining, the explosion in prison populations of color, especially those of for-profit prisons, could never be possible.

The prison industrial complex is modern day slavery. Slavery is legally codified in the status quo to include prisoners and American corporations continue to reap profits from their labor. The system is set up to structurally disenfranchised prisoners, which makes prison reform impossible.

Starr 15 23 Cents an Hour? The Perfectly Legal Slavery Happening in Modern-Day America by Terrell Jermaine Starr July 1, 2015 UD-DD

“If you thought slavery was outlawed in America, you would be wrong. The 13th amendment to the Constitution states that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” In plain language, that means slavery in America can still exist for those who are in prison, where you basically lose all of your rights. (You don’t gain a lot of your rights back when you get out of prison, either, but that is a different story.) So, given the country’s penchant for rapacious capitalism, it may not come as a surprise that there is much of the American prison system that exploits American prisoners much like slaves. In fact there is large-scale exploitation in American prisons benefiting American corporations and the military-industrial complex. UNICOR, better known as Federal Prison Industries, or FPI, is a government-owned corporation that employs inmates for as little as 23 cents per hour, to provide a wide range of products and services under the guise of a “jobs training program.” In theory, this is supposed to give inmates skills that will prepare them for the workforce upon release. Critics of FPI have long claimed it exploits prisoners who don’t have the right to organize for representation to protect their rights and it unfairly competes with small businesses that can’t provide goods and services for the average pay of 92 cents an hour FPI workers make. The program employs around 13,000 prisoners per year. In 2013, it reported gross revenue of $609.7 million. According to FPI’s website, inmates employed in the program carry out a wide range of services that include making house and office furniture, mattresses, flags, traffic signs and military items. These items are usually made for other federal agencies, but private companies can contract workers through FPI as well. It is no surprise that the inmate/slave labor force has grown along with mass incarceration in America. The Prison Policy Initiative counts 2.3 million people in prison, according to the 2010 census, by far the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world. Many more are ensnared in the criminal justice system’s other branches. At the end of 2013, nearly 5 million adults were either on probation or parole, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics. All of these populations and even those not even convicted of a crime are vulnerable to exploitative fees and byzantine rules seemingly designed to catch people and get them back into the grips of the prison system. Basically, there is a trifecta of exploitation in the American criminal justice system. As reported on AlterNet, the bail system in America keeps many people in jail in a massive form of pretrial detention one has to buy one’s way out of. And police departments are increasingly funding themselves by charging poor people exorbitant fees for minor infractions. In terms of prison labor, one of its controversial services is the production of solar panels. Reuters reports that Suniva Inc, a Georgia-based solar cell and panel maker, uses prison labor for 10 percent of its manufacturing needs to keep its costs low so it can, in part, keep up with producers from China. The company is also backed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Over the last 18 months, Suniva moved all of its solar panel assembly to the United States from Asia. Suniva’s deal with FPI helps it to avoid U.S. government tariffs on Chinese-made panels and capture lucrative government contracts. Roughly 200 inmates make solar panels in factories at prisons in Sheridan, Oregon and Otisville, New York, according to Reuters. Solar panels made in America are more efficient in generating electricity from the sun, allowing companies like Suniva to sell them at premium rates. As for the inmates, Suniva’s vice president of global sales and manufacturing Mike Card says he doesn’t know how much they are paid. Manufacturing solar panels is actually a good skill to have, but according to Alex Friedman, managing editor of Prison Legal News, FPI has no job placement program for inmates once they are released. “You can have lots of skills, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get a good job when you get out,” Friedman told AlterNet. “You can be really skilled at whatever it is, diesel engines even, but you also have a felony record. You’re getting out from prison after five or two years or whatever it is and starting from scratch.” Another field where FPI inmates are providing labor is through military contracts. In 2013, federal inmates stitched more than $100 million worth of military uniforms for the Department of Defense, according to the New York Times. The federal inmates who make these garments earn no more than $2 per hour, something that puts competing small businesses that have to pay at least minimum wage at a major disadvantage. Cathy Griffiths, operations manager for clothing maker American Power Source of Fayette, Ala., complained in 2012 that she had to let 50 of her 300 employees go after FPI won a lucrative contract with the U.S. Army. During the same year, American Apparel, Inc., an Alabama company that makes military uniforms, said it had to close down a plant and lay off 175 workers because it was forced to compete with FPI for federal contracts. “We pay employees $9 on average,” Kurt Wilson, an executive with American Apparel, told Prison Legal News at the time. “They get full medical insurance, 401(k) plans and paid vacation. Yet we’re competing against a federal program that doesn’t pay any of that.” With prisoners lacking even a modicum of labor protection, it is very hard for any company to compete with companies that use this source of dirt-cheap prison labor. “Prisoners currently don’t fall under any fair labor standard practices or umbrellas,” Christopher Petrella, a researcher at UC Berkeley who studies labor abuses in prisons, told AlterNet. “So, often times, prisoners will get paid but they aren’t afforded the same protections as a worker outside of prison. No one is complaining about prisoners having the right to work and learn skills that will help them once they are released from prison. But that is not the issue. In reality, FPI is paying far below minimum wage rates. Prison labor takes advantage of a vulnerable workforce that can’t advocate for itself, form a union, fight for its labor rights or seek legal protections for potential workplace abuses. Prison workers have no political support, either. “There is virtually no constituency that really cares,” Petrella said. “That’s a very sobering and tragic thing to say, but I think it’s actually true. Prisoners are often times disenfranchised. They can’t even vote. So, if they can’t even vote, then what kind of constituency exists that politicians can then lean on to make these sorts of decisions about how they want to move forward with reforming the system?” The number of inmates working under FPI make up just a small number of the 2.2 million prisoners behind bars in a wide range of state and federal work programs, so it’s just a small part of the larger issue of exploited labor. But it is important to note that the federal government finances and operates FPI, a corporation that outsources labor in exploitive ways. Friedman says FPI and other work programs in general must undergo major reforms that include giving inmate workers the right to protect themselves from exploitation, paying them as much as a worker who is not locked up would make, and training them for jobs that will actually lead to employment once they leave prison. Without such changes, Friedman says prison labor is nothing more than slave labor.”

Part 2: Break the Courts

Thus, I affirm the “break the courts” social movement as a self-abolishment of plea-bargaining – we demand the 6th amendment as a grassroots strategy to break the CJS to the ground.

Alexander 12 Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, March 10, 2012, Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html

AFTER years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: “What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?”

Our advocacy solves – exercising the right to trial would CRUSH the legal system – it relies on the ability to plea off people and keep the caseload down.

Alexander 12 Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, March 10, 2012, Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html

On the phone, Susan said she knew exactly what was involved in asking people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and press for trial. “Believe me, I know. I’m asking what we can do. Can we crash the system just by exercising our rights?”

The answer is yes. The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation. Not everyone would have to join for the revolt to have an impact; as the legal scholar Angela J. Davis noted, “if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos.”

Such chaos would force mass incarceration to the top of the agenda for politicians and policy makers, leaving them only two viable options: sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial “emergency” fiat). Either action would create a crisis and the system would crash — it could no longer function as it had before. Mass protest would force a public conversation that, to date, we have been content to avoid.

Plea bargaining is the key lynchpin allowing the courts to continue functioning – the 1AC literally breaks the courts.

Walsh 2017 (Dylan, “Why US Criminal Courts Are So dependent on Plea Bargaining”, the Atlantic, May 2nd)

Plea bargains were almost unheard of prior to the Civil War. Only in its aftermath, as waves of displaced Americans and immigrants rolled into cities and crime rates climbed, did appellate courts start documenting exchanges that resemble the modern practice. The plea became a release valve for mounting caseloads. Appellate courts “all condemned it as shocking and terrible” at the time, said Albert Alschuler, a retired law professor who has studied plea bargains for five decades. The courts raised a range of objections to these early encounters, from the secretiveness of the process to the likeliness of coercing innocent defendants. Pleas, wrote the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1877, are “hardly, if at all, distinguishable in principle from a direct sale of justice.” The practice nonetheless continued, and, by the turn of the century, a minor economy had settled in its orbit. “Fixers” could be hired to arrange for alternatives to a prison sentence. Police regularly toured jails to “negotiate” with the inmates. One New York City defense attorney and friend to local magistrates loitered in front of night court hawking 10 days in jail for $300, 20 days for $200, and 30 days for $150. By the 1920s, as violations of the federal liquor prohibition flooded court dockets, 88 percent of cases in New York City and 85 percent in Chicago were settled through pleas. When the Supreme Court in 1969 finally heard a case concerning the legality of the issue, it unanimously ruled that pleas are constitutionally acceptable. They are “inherent in the criminal law and its administration,” the Court declared… In theory, abolishing the use of plea bargains wouldn’t take much: Prosecutors would simply stop offering deals. That would be that, though the massive influx of trials would jam courts. (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, discussed defendants’ deliberately going to trial and “crashing the courts” as a form of resistance to mass incarceration.) But both sides of the debate agree the odds of this happening are infinitesimal. Even Alschuler, who throughout his career remained one of the staunchest critics of plea bargaining, admitted in 2013 that “the time for a crusade” had passed. Instead, he suggested people work to make the criminal-justice system “less awful.”

Incrementalism fails – liberation demands radical actions to break down whiteness within cognition.

King 63 (Martin Luther King Jr. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail King, Jr." April 1963 AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIAFT)

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. "I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured." "In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning of time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: stating "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity."

Our advocacy isn’t abstract – we understand some people will be unable to accept plea deals. However, liberation requires risk and bloodshed – vote aff to endorse a revolutionary methodology.

Alexander 12 Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, March 10, 2012, Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html

In telling Susan that she was right, I found myself uneasy. “As a mother myself, I don’t think there’s anything I wouldn’t plead guilty to if a prosecutor told me that accepting a plea was the only way to get home to my children,” I said. “I truly can’t imagine risking life imprisonment, so how can I urge others to take that risk — even if it would send shock waves through a fundamentally immoral and unjust system?”

Susan, silent for a while, replied: “I’m not saying we should do it. I’m saying we ought to know that it’s an option. People should understand that simply exercising their rights would shake the foundations of our justice system which works only so long as we accept its terms. As you know, another brutal system of racial and social control once prevailed in this country, and it never would have ended if some people weren’t willing to risk their lives. It would be nice if reasoned argument would do, but as we’ve seen that’s just not the case. So maybe, just maybe, if we truly want to end this system, some of us will have to risk our lives.”

Part 3: Framing

The question of debate isn’t about strategy or arguments, but rather one of liberatory potential – given we can use this sphere for an external gain, only a strategy that focuses on the concrete experiences and strategies we can actualize in this space is ethical.

Smith 13 Elijah. “A Conversation in Ruins: Race and Black Participation in Lincoln Douglas Debate” 2013

At every tournament you attend this year look around the cafeteria and take note of which students are not sitting amongst you and your peers. Despite being some of the best and the brightest in the nation, many students are alienated from and choose to not participate in an activity I like to think of as homeplace. In addition to the heavy financial burden associated with national competition, the exclusionary atmosphere of a debate tournament discourages black students from participating. Widespread awareness of the same lack of participation in policy debate has led to a growing movement towards alternative styles and methods of engaging the gatekeepers of the policy community, (Reid-Brinkley 08) while little work has been done to address or even acknowledge the same concern in Lincoln Douglas debate. Unfortunately students of color are not only forced to cope with a reality of structural violence outside of debate, but within an activity they may have joined to escape it in the first place. We are facing more than a simple trend towards marginalization occurring in Lincoln Douglas, but a culture of exclusion that locks minority participants out of the ranks of competition. It will be uncomfortable, it will be hard, and it will require continued effort but the necessary step in fixing this problem, like all problems, is the community as a whole admitting that such a problem with many “socially acceptable” choices exists in the first place. Like all systems of social control, the reality of racism in debate is constituted by the singular choices that institutions, coaches, and students make on a weekly basis. I have watched countless rounds where competitors attempt to win by rushing to abstractions to distance the conversation from the material reality that black debaters are forced to deal with every day. One of the students I coached, who has since graduated after leaving debate, had an adult judge write out a ballot that concluded by “hypothetically” defending my student being lynched at the tournament. Another debate concluded with a young man defending that we can kill animals humanely, “just like we did that guy Troy Davis”. Community norms would have competitors do intellectual gymnastics or make up rules to accuse black debaters of breaking to escape hard conversations but as someone who understands that experience, the only constructive strategy is to acknowledge the reality of the oppressed, engage the discussion from the perspective of authors who are black and brown, and then find strategies to deal with the issues at hand. It hurts to see competitive seasons come and go and have high school students and judges spew the same hateful things you expect to hear at a Klan rally. A student should not, when presenting an advocacy that aligns them with the oppressed, have to justify why oppression is bad. Debate is not just a game, but a learning environment with liberatory potential. Even if the form debate gives to a conversation is not the same you would use to discuss race in general conversation with Bayard Rustin or Fannie Lou Hamer, that is not a reason we have to strip that conversation of its connection to a reality that black students cannot escape. Current coaches and competitors alike dismiss concerns of racism and exclusion, won’t teach other students anything about identity in debate other than how to shut down competitors who engage in alternative styles and discourses, and refuse to engage in those discussions even outside of a tournament setting.

Political discourse in scholarship must promote a politics of imagination of envisioning the end of the prison. Public discourse in the academy serves a unique role.

Rodriguez Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies @ UC Riverside Dr. Dylan Rodríguez, “The Terms of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition,” Critical Sociology 36(1) pg. 151-173

What were the fundamental concerns of our progressive organizations and movements during this time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or even viable opposition to the white supremacist state’s terms of engagement (that is, warfare)? This radical accountability reflects a variation on anticolonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanon’s memorable statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses: Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current struggles. Now that we are in the heat of combat, we must shed the habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning incomprehension at their silence or passiveness. (Fanon 2004 1963: 146) Lest we fall victim to a certain political nostalgia that is often induced by such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, we ought to clarify the premises of the social ‘mission’ that our generation of USA-based progressive organizing has undertaken. In the vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the US state, much of the most urgent and immediate work of community-based organizing has revolved around service provision. Importantly, this pragmatic focus also builds a certain progressive ethic of voluntarism that constructs the model activist as a variation on older liberal notions of the ‘good citizen’. Following Fanon, the question is whether and how this mission ought to be fulfilled or betrayed. To respond to this political problem requires an analysis and conceptualization of ‘the state’ that is far more complex and laborious than we usually allow in our ordinary rush of obligations to build campaigns, organize communities, and write grant proposals. We require, in other words, a scholarly activist framework to understand that the state can and must be radically confronted on multiple fronts by an abolitionist social theory. Effectively contradicting, decentering, and transforming the popular consensus (for example, destabilizing assertive assumptions common to progressive movements and organizations such as ‘we have to control/get rid of gangs,’ ‘we need prisons,’ or ‘we want¶ better police’) is, in this context, dangerously difficult work. Although the truth of the matter is that the establishment US left, in ways both spoken and presumed, may actually agree with the political, moral, and ideological premises of domestic warfare. Leaders as well as rank-and-file members in avowedly progressive organizations can and must reflect on how they might actually be supporting and reproducing existing forms of racism, white supremacy, state violence, and domestic warfare in the process of throwing their resources behind what they perceive as ‘winnable victories’, in the lexicon of venerable community organizer Saul Alinsky. Arguably, it is precisely the creative and pragmatic work of political fantasy/political vision/political imagination that is the most underdeveloped dimension of the US establishment left’s organizational modus operandi and public discourse. While a full discussion is best left for sustained collective discussion, we might consider the post-1960s history of the reactionary, neoconservative, and Christian fundamentalist US right, which has fully and¶ eagerly engaged in these political labors of fantasy/vision/imagination, and has seen the desires of their wildest dreams met or exceeded in their struggles for political and cultural hegemony. It might be useful to begin by thinking of ourselves as existing in a relationship of deep historical obligation to the long and recent, faraway and nearby historical legacies of radical, revolutionary, and liberationist struggles that have made the abolition of oppressive violence their most immediate and fundamental political desire. Pg. 165-170

Simulation debates prevent future confrontation of political oppression and leave individuals disempowered – our focus on embodied revolution is a better educational heuristic.

Antonio 95 (Nietzsche’s antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History”; American Journal of Sociology; Volume 101, No. 1; July 1995, jstor,)

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 as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists saw differentiated roles and professions as a matrix of 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. 232- 33, 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" (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, 288-89, 303-

Forcing minority debaters to debaters to role-play their oppressors breeds psychological violence.

Reid-Brinkley 2008 Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, “The Harsh Realities of “Acting Black”: How African-American Policy Debaters Negotiate Representation Through Racial Performance and Style”, P. 15MHELLIE

Genre Violation Four: Policymaker as Impersonal and the Rhetoric of Personal Experience. Debate is a competitive game.112 It requires that its participants take on the positions of state actors (at least when they are affirming the resolution). Debate resolutions normally call for federal action in some area of domestic or foreign policy. Affirmative teams must support the resolution, while the negative negates it. The debate then becomes a “laboratory” within which debaters may test policies.113 Argumentation scholar Gordon Mitchell notes that “Although they 117 may research and track public argument as it unfolds outside the confines of the laboratory for research purposes, in this approach students witness argumentation beyond the walls of the academy as spectators, with little or no apparent recourse to directly participate or alter the course of events.”114 Although debaters spend a great deal of time discussing and researching government action and articulating arguments relevant to such action, what happens in debate rounds has limited or no real impact on contemporary governmental policy making. And participation does not result in the majority of the debate community engaging in activism around the issues they research. Mitchell observes that the stance of the policymaker in debate comes with a “sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture.”115 In other words, its participants are able to engage in debates where they are able to distance themselves from the events that are the subjects of debates. Debaters can throw around terms like torture, terrorism, genocide and nuclear war without blinking. Debate simulations can only serve to distance the debaters from real world participation in the political contexts they debate about. As William Shanahan remarks: …the topic established a relationship through interpellation that inhered irrespective of what the particular political affinities of the debaters were. The relationship was both political and ethical, and needed to be debated as such. When we blithely call for United States Federal Government policymaking, we are not immune to the colonialist legacy that establishes our place on this continent. We cannot wish away the horrific atrocities perpetrated everyday in our name simply by refusing to acknowledge these implications” (emphasis in original).116 118 The “objective” stance of the policymaker is an impersonal or imperialist persona. The policymaker relies upon “acceptable” forms of evidence, engaging in logical discussion, producing rational thoughts. As Shanahan, and the Louisville debaters’ note, such a stance is integrally linked to the normative, historical and contemporary practices of power that produce and maintain varying networks of oppression. In other words, the discursive practices of policyoriented debate are developed within, through and from systems of power and privilege. Thus, these practices are critically implicated in the maintenance of hegemony. So, rather than seeing themselves as government or state actors, Jones and Green choose to perform themselves in debate, violating the more “objective” stance of the “policymaker” and require their opponents to do the same.