Blake Invitational 1 Kamiak nb aff

24 Evanston ES Aff

https://hsld.debatecoaches.org/Evanston/Sperti+Aff

Aff Non-T Abolition in the Debate Community

I. The Entanglement

“This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. For women..poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” From Poetry Is Not a Luxury, by Audre Lorde,. Lorde is a Writer, Womanist, Librarian, Activist, and author of Sister Outsider.

My existence is a tangle of freedom and entrapment and feeling in between, and I’m going to guess yours is too.

I am free. I am free in the sense that I am not locked up. I can go where I please. I can see my family when I want to. I can go to school everyday and see my friends. I have my own room. I have my own things, my own clothes, my own bed, my own journals and posters and even my colorful origami paper. I can run. I can sleep. I am autonomous. I am here. I am here because I am free. In a community where fighting injustice is said to be a top priority, I often think of my freedom and my entrapment, how they both follow me quietly and loudly at their own whims. How does freedom look in the flesh? In the body? In a feeling? In a meaning? Ontologically? Philosophically? Chemically or mentally?

I am trapped. I am trapped in the sense that I am held back, stopped, questioned, guilty. Maybe even frowned upon. Maybe even disgusting. I am a confusion to many, including myself sometimes. Love not making sense is pretty normal until it comes to queer folks, it seems. Forced coming out. Trapped. Lying to my parents - still. Trapped. Anxiety of being. Trapped. A spectacle, a nuisance, a queer. Automatically drilling a hole of discomfort into the room. And I get it. It’s not always out of distaste. But it is there.

I am feeling, here it is, here it stays and decays.

This is the mess of words and feeling that fell from me when I wondered about freedom. When I imagined it. When I imagined it here, when I imagined it in schools, in houses, in streets and corners and inside and outside of us.

II. A Theory of Violence

Here, I confront the function of the plea bargain in the criminal justice system. I confront the plea, the bargain, the prosecutor and the criminalized. Brady Heiner1 describes the plea bargain system as “massively and predominantly, though not accidentally or exclusively, a technology of racial domination.” He explains the way it acts as a system of procedural entrapment, an apparatus in which some are criminalized before the crime, pushed into it, left with no choice but to take it only to end up in handcuffs, prison, another in the quarter of the world’s imprisoned population. Plea bargaining requires a forfeiture of rights in order to keep the CJS functioning, as it could never be vast enough to give a trial to each criminalized person. This creates a situation in which prosecutors are held unaccountable.

But entrapment goes beyond procedure. It is social. It is cognitive. It is personal. It’s here.

Hortense Spillers2 theorizes the prison regime as symbolic captivity.

Here, I confront the function of plea bargaining in debate. I understand plea bargaining in debate as the way debate “criminalizes” genuine and personal engagement in materiality, but will tolerate social justice if it is debated in a normative way; it forces debaters to cop a plea to a lesser way of debating, a compromised approach to truth. I contend that this social justice eventually reaches a point of emptiness, of infinite regress into abstraction and post-fiat imaginary worlds. Theory is used as a tool to debate about debate, but historically it is repeatedly used to limit, silence, and even destroy the narratives of debaters attempting to bring attention to the violence against them. I get it, responsibility is hard. It can even suck. But my argument is that it’s time to get over that! I ask us to reflect on the way debaters assume the role of the prosecutor. We use debate-specific, exclusive terms tell each other that we can’t do something. This isn’t about all theory being bad, but it’s about the way we debate theory. Theory shouldn’t be something that only debaters understand. Accessible debate is more truthful, genuine, and productive. We spread to unintelligibility, we use the work of others without context or committed understanding, and we don’t establish a personal or emotional connection to the topic.

With this in mind, I propose that the role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best embodies abolishment.

III. The Advocacy

Thus I affirm that plea bargaining ought to be abolished in the US CJS as a starting point for abolishing plea bargaining in our community. I affirm this resolution through my own ecological abolitionist praxis.

My interpretation is that the resolution should serve as a starting point for discussions about activism in our own lives. This means that debates must not abstract from the political reality that surrounds us. This interp is critical for two reasons:

1. We have an obligation to challenge the racial gendered violence that structures the debate space because otherwise we are implicit in the structures we critique.

2. To provide a transformative political education to students, to create material change in their lives, and resist genocide management. Abolitionist praxes must be primarily pedagogical. Pragmatism, liberalism, and reformism have made liberationist dreams unspeakable. We need room to articulate abolition in spaces like these. Rodriguez 10:

Dylan Rodriguez, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Aboliton as a Pedagogical Position, The Radical Teacher, 2010, 16-17

I have had little trouble “convincing” most students—across distinctions of race, class, gender, age, sexuality, and geography—of the gravity and emergency of our historical moment. It is the analytical, political, and practical move toward an abolitionist positionality that is (perhaps predictably) far more challenging. is is in part due to the fraudulent and stubborn default position of centrist-to-progressive liberalism/reformism (including assertions of “civil” and “human” rights) as the only feasible or legible response to reactionary, violent, racist forms of state power. Perhaps more troublesome, however, is that this resistance to engaging with abolitionist praxis seems to also derive from a deep and broad epistemological and cultural disciplining of the political imagination that makes liberationist dreams unspeakable. This disciplining is most overtly produced through hegemonic state and cultural apparatuses and their representatives (including elected officials, popular political pundits and public intellectuals, schools, family units, religious institutions, etc.), but is also compounded through the pragmatic imperatives of many liberal and progressive nonprofit organizations and social movements that reproduce the political limitations of the nonprofit industrial complex.22 In this context, the liberationist historical identifications hailed by an abolitionist social imagination also require that such repression of political-intellectual imagination be fought, demystified, and displaced. Perhaps, then, there is no viable or defensible pedagogical position other than an abolitionist one. To live and work, learn and teach, and survive and thrive in a time defined by the capacity and political willingness to eliminate and neutralize populations through a culturally valorized, state sanctioned nexus of institutional violence, is to better understand why abolitionist praxis in this historical moment is primarily pedagogical, within and against the “system” in which it occurs. While it is conceivable that in future moments, abolitionist praxis can focus more centrally on matters of (creating and not simply opposing) public policy, infrastructure building, and economic reorganization, the present moment clearly demands a convening of radical pedagogical energies that can build the collective human power, epistemic and knowledge apparatuses, and material sites of learning that are the precondition of authentic and liberatory social transformations. The prison regime is the institutionalization and systemic expansion of massive human misery. It is the production of bodily and psychic disarticulation on multiple scales, across different physiological capacities. The prison industrial complex is, in its logic of organization and its production of common sense, at least proto-genocidal. Finally, the prison regime is inseparable from—that is, present in—the schooling regime in which teachers are entangled. Prison is not simply a place to which one is displaced and where one’s physiological being is disarticulated, at the rule and whim of the state and its designated representatives (police, parole officers, school teachers). The prison regime is the assumptive premise of classroom teaching generally. While many of us must live in labored denial of this fact in order to teach as we must about “American democracy,” “freedom,” and “(civil) rights,” there are opportune moments in which it is useful to come clean: the vast majority of what occurs in U.S. classrooms—from preschool to graduate school—cannot accommodate the bare truth of the proto-genocidal prison regime as a violent ordering of the world, a primary component of civil society/school, and a material presence in our everyday teaching acts. As teachers, we are institutionally hailed to the service of genocide management, in which our pedagogical labor is variously engaged in mitigating, valorizing, critiquing, redeeming, justifying, lamenting, and otherwise reproducing or tolerating the profound and systemic violence of the global-historical U.S. nation building project. As “radical” teachers, we are politically hailed to betray genocide management in order to embrace the urgent challenge of genocide abolition. The short-term survival of those populations rendered most immediately vulnerable to the mundane and spectacular violence of this system, and the long-term survival of most of the planet’s human population (particularly those descended from survivors of enslavement, colonization, conquest, and economic exploitation), is significantly dependent on our willingness to embrace this form of pedagogical audacity.

IV. My Abolishment Praxis

I endorse abolishing plea bargaining through ecological praxis. To be ecological is to start from where we are, and to realize relation and connection across time and space.

To debate ecologically is to see the interconnectedness of the round and the criminal justice system. Debating ecologically is to understand how the historical racial gendered violence that manifests in the world influences and manifests within this round and the debate community as a whole.

So given this understanding of praxis, I engage in abolition by my knowledge production in this round. Almost the entire case is original. I generated my own arguments from research and my own experiences. The narrative I present allows debaters to bring their own personal story as well as history directly into the round. The evidence I cite isn’t just a highlighted card in static form, it’s analyzed, thought through, and presented in an ecological way that connects it to other arguments and ideas. It’s not just the form of evidence, but the authors I cite are people of color who are on the forefront of critical thought on these issues. This emphasizes an ecological form of debate that challenges abstraction by connecting rounds to our personal reality.

I’m not just affirming abolition, I’m doing it.

Aff Trans Pessimism / Abolition

The role of the ballot is to vote for the debaters with the best strategy for abolition. By abolition, I mean movement towards the end of the world. (3 reasons)

Abolitionist praxes must be primarily pedagogical. Pragmatism, liberalism, and reformism have made liberationist dreams unspeakable. We need room to articulate abolition in spaces like these. This means the role of the judge betray genocide management and embrace a fundamental epistemic disorientation. Rodriguez 10:

Dylan Rodriguez, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Aboliton as a Pedagogical Position, The Radical Teacher, 2010, 16-17

I have had little trouble … of pedagogical audacity.

2. Abolition is an existential necessity. It is the only way to address the violence that underpins ontology. Value systems and philosophical categories gain their coherence through the negation of trans being. Hayward 17

Eva S. Hayward, Professor of Gender and Women Studies at Arizona University, Don’t Exist, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2017,

“Don’t exist” is an imperative… for addressing anti trans violence?

3. Abolition grounds justice, morals, and value in historical and material violence. We cannot abstract our theorizing from oppression and captivity of the world. Mcleod 2015

Allegra McLeod, A professor of law at Georgetown University, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, www.uclalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf , 2015, 1233-1234

An abolitionist … inequality persists in the world.

PART ONE IS PLEA BARGAINING AND ENTRAPMENT

Plea bargaining is a form of procedural entrapment. It is a technology of racial domination and a necessary condition of mass incarceration. Plea Bargaining produces confinement prior to conviction, sentencing or imprisonment.

Brady Heiner 1, Affiliated Faculty at California State University Fullerton, The Procedural Entrapment of Mass Incarceration, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2016, 606-607

To clarify, I do not … confine people of color.82

2. Procedural entrapment is a tool of racial/gendered violence that maintains trans entrapment. Trans entrapment is an assemblage of gendered policing and racialized punishment. This continuum of violence and exclusion animates the criminal justice system and prison regime. Oparah 12:

Julie C. Oparah, Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College, Feminism and the (Transgender entrapment of gender non-conforming prisoners, UCLA Women’s Law Journal, 2012, 256-260

At the Transforming Justice conference described above, formerly incarcerated trans women screened video journals of their lives featuring a collage of photographs, documents and memories from early childhood through their adult experiences with the criminal justice system.87 The women's narratives illustrated a continuum of racialized gender violence and policing, beginning in the family and continuing in encounters with the police, courts and prisons. Policing the gender-binary begins at home where children are pressured to engage in culturally appropriate gendered behavior and play and to wear gender appropriate clothing.88 For many gender nonconforming young people, the teenage years are when conflicts with parental and school authorities and peers over gender identification become most fraught, as behaviors that were seen as a …, forms of gender policing.

3. Entrapment reflects a necropolitics that marks trans people of color for death. This violence is constitutive and paradigmatic. “Trans death opens up political and social life worlds across…times and places” Snorton and Haritaworn 13

Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, …transnormative political projects.

PART 2 IS CRASHING THE SYSTEM

Thus, I affirm that plea bargaining ought to be abolished in the United States Criminal Justice System.

The abolition of plea bargaining would crash the system.

Michelle Alexander 12, Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary Author of the New Jim Crowe, Got to Trial: Crash the System, New York Times, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html

On the phone, Susan said she … of us will have to risk our lives.”

2. Abolishing plea bargaining could unravel many of the material arrangements of entrapment.

Brady Heiner 2, Affiliated Faculty at California State University Fullerton, The Procedural Entrapment of Mass Incarceration, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2016, 616-620 (This is a big chunk, maybe cut selectively and even several cards here)

The answer is yes… and departmental organizations.

Executive desistence in the face of the systemic crisis generated by the mass asser- tion of due process rights would likely prove unsustainable, however, as it would pre- sumably raise widespread doubts about the rationality, legitimacy and procedural justice of maintaining an arsenal of criminal statutes that routinely go unenforced.

3. Abolition is also an affirmation of queer and trans impossibility that can unmake and remake the world as we know it. Bassichis et al 2011

Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade, Building A queer and Trans Abolitionist Movement with all we’ve got, Captive Genders, 2011, 36-37

This stuff is heavy, … words to wish for.