Blake Invitational 1 Kamiak nb aff

Affirming the right to trial in deportation cases is a key method of resistance against the CJS

Perez et al 17: Jose Decordoba and Santiago Perez, February 11th, 2017. “Mexicans Vow to Fight Trump by Jamming US Courts”. Market Watch. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/mexicans-vow-to-fight-trump-by-jamming-us-courts-2017-02-11. RW

Mexico City—Influential Mexicans are pushing an aggressive and perhaps risky strategy to fight a likely increase in deportations of their undocumented compatriots in the U.S.: jam U.S. immigration courts in hopes of causing the already overburdened system to break down. The proposal calls for advertising campaigns advising migrants in the U.S. to take their cases to court and fight deportation if detained. “The backlog in the immigration system is tremendous,” said former Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda. The idea is to double or triple the backlog, “until Trump desists in this stupid idea,” he added. Castañeda is part of a group of Mexican officials, legislators, governors and public figures planning to meet with Mexican migrant groups Saturday in Phoenix to lay out plans to confront the Trump administration’s deportation policy. Mexico’s government hasn’t endorsed the strategy or the group’s Phoenix mission. But it recently allocated some $50 million to pay legal fees of undocumented migrants facing deportation, and President Enrique Peña Nieto has instructed the country’s 50 consulates in the U.S. to defend migrants. Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said late Thursday it has intensified efforts to protect Mexican migrants, “foreseeing the hardening of measures by immigration authorities in the U.S., as well as possible constitutional violations during raids or in due process.”

Increasing trials through the plan would force a public conversation about CJS reform and eventually lead to decriminalization

Alexander 12: Michelle Alexander, March 10th, 2012. The New York Times. “Go to Trial: Crash The System”. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html. RW

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. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Opinion Today Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, The Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. 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. 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. 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.

The aff is negative state action which links turns critiques of the state

Dempsey 9: Michelle, Professor of Law, Villanova University School of Law, http://www.academia.edu/352923/Sex_Trafficking_and_Criminalization_In_Defense_of_Feminist_Abolitionism

The unintended consequences of criminalizing the purchase of sex include the harms that may be suffered disproportionately by men who are already socially disempowered. Given the negative uses of criminal law throughout history and still today, such as racist law-enforcement policies, there is reason to resist using the criminal law as a tool for positive social change. See generally MICHAEL TONRY, MALIGN NEGLECT— RACE, CRIME, AND PUNISHMENT IN AMERICA (1995) (discussing the disparate impact crime-control policies can have on disadvantaged communities); Angela J. Davis, Be- nign Neglect of Racism in the Criminal Justice System, 94 MICH. L. REV. 1660, 1663 (1996) (reviewing TONRY, supra) (discussing racial discrimination within the criminal justice system). Since racism is fundamentally inconsistent with feminist commitments to ab- olish all wrongful structural inequalities, feminists should resist any reforms that will tend to exacerbate racism. See DEMPSEY, supra note 9, at 129-35. This risk of unintended consequences poses a serious objection to feminist abolitionism. Yet, it is important to bear in mind that feminist-abolitionist reforms like the Swedish model, if adopted in the United States, would not expand the criminal law’s power; it would reduce it. At present, in most jurisdictions throughout the United States, both sellers and buyers are criminalized. Feminist abolitionist reforms would therefore restrict the power of the criminal law by decriminalizing people who sell sex. Thus, to the extent that current criminal laws are being used in racist and other problematic ways (e.g., by targeting disempowered women of color who sell sex, while allowing relatively power- ful middle-class white men to go free), the proposed reforms would improve the criminal justice system by limiting its scope.

Framework

Adopting the perspective of the oppressed is the only way to account for dominant ideologies that skew our thought processes.

Mills 5: Charles W. Mills (John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy) ““Ideal Theory” as Ideology” Hypatia vol. 20, no. 3 (Summer 2005) RW

Now what distinguishes ideal theory is not merely the use of ideals, since obviously nonideal theory can and will use ideals also (certainly it will appeal to the moral ideals, if it may be more dubious about the value of invoking idealized human capacities). What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual. As O’Neill emphasizes, this is not a necessary corollary of the operation of abstraction itself, since one can have abstractions of the ideal-as-descriptive-model type that abstract without idealizing. But ideal theory either tacitly represents the actual as a simple deviation from the ideal, not worth theorizing in its own right, or claims that starting from the ideal is at least the best way of realizing it. Ideal theory as an approach will then utilize as its basic apparatus some or all of the following concepts and assumptions (there is necessarily a certain overlap in the list, since they all intersect with one another): • An idealized social ontology. Moral theory deals with the normative, but it cannot avoid some characterization of the human beings who make up the society, and whose interactions with one another are its subject. So some overt or tacit social ontology has to be presupposed. An idealized social ontology of the modern type (as against, say, a Platonic or Aristotelian type) will typically assume the abstract and undifferentiated equal atomic individuals of classical liberalism. Thus it will abstract away from relations of structural domination, exploitation, coercion, and oppression, which in reality, of course, will profoundly shape the ontology of those same individuals, locating them in superior and inferior positions in social hierarchies of various kinds. Idealized capacities. The human agents as visualized in the theory will also often have completely unrealistic capacities attributed to them—unrealistic even for the privileged minority, let alone those subordinated in different ways, who would not have had an equal opportunity for their natural capacities to develop, and who would in fact typically be disabled in crucial respects. • Silence on oppression. Almost by de nition, it follows from the focus of ideal theory that little or nothing will be said on actual historic oppression and its legacy in the present, or current ongoing oppression, though these may be gestured at in a vague or promissory way (as something to be dealt with later). Correspondingly, the ways in which systematic oppression is likely to shape the Charles W. Mills 169 basic social institutions (as well as the humans in those institutions) will not be part of the theory’s concern, and this will manifest itself in the absence of ideal-as-descriptive-model concepts that would provide the necessary macro- and micro-mapping of that oppression, and that are requisite for understanding its reproductive dynamic. • Ideal social institutions. Fundamental social institutions such as the family, the economic structure, the legal system, will therefore be conceptualized in ideal-as-idealized-model terms, with little or no sense of how their actual workings may systematically disadvantage women, the poor, and racial minorities. • An idealized cognitive sphere. Separate from, and in addition to, the idealization of human capacities, what could be termed an idealized cognitive sphere will also be presupposed. In other words, as a corollary of the general ignoring of oppression, the consequences of oppression for the social cognition of these agents, both the advantaged and the disadvantaged, will typically not be recognized, let alone theorized. A general social transparency will be presumed, with cognitive obstacles minimized as limited to biases of self-interest or the intrinsic difficulties of understanding the world, and little or no attention paid to the distinctive role of hegemonic ideologies and group-speci c experience in distorting our perceptions and conceptions of the social order.

ROB

The Role of the Ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences of the aff policy. Prefer:

The state is inevitable- debating policies is the only way to create social change in debate

Coverstone 5: Alan Coverstone (masters in communication from Wake Forest, longtime debate coach) “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact” Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference November 17th 2005 11/18/15. RW

An important concern emerges when Mitchell describes reflexive fiat as a contest strategy capable of “eschewing the power to directly control external actors” (1998b, p. 20). Describing debates about what our government should do as attempts to control outside actors is debilitating and disempowering. Control of the US government is exactly what an active, participatory citizenry is supposed to be all about. After all, if democracy means anything, it means that citizens not only have the right, they also bear the obligation to discuss and debate what the government should be doing. Absent that discussion and debate, much of the motivation for personal political activism is also lost. Those who have co-opted Mitchell’s argument for individual advocacy often quickly respond that nothing we do in a debate round can actually change government policy, and unfortunately, an entire generation of debaters has now swallowed this assertion as an article of faith. The best most will muster is, “Of course not, but you don’t either!” The assertion that nothing we do in debate has any impact on government policy is one that carries the potential to undermine Mitchell’s entire project. If there is nothing we can do in a debate round to change government policy, then we are left with precious little in the way of pro-social options for addressing problems we face. At best, we can pursue some Pilot-like hand washing that can purify us as individuals through quixotic activism but offer little to society as a whole. It is very important to note that Mitchell (1998b) tries carefully to limit and bound his notion of reflexive fiat by maintaining that because it “views fiat as a concrete course of action, it is bounded by the limits of pragmatism” (p. 20). Pursued properly, the debates that Mitchell would like to see are those in which the relative efficacy of concrete political strategies for pro-social change is debated. In a few noteworthy examples, this approach has been employed successfully, and I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed judging and coaching those debates. The students in my program have learned to stretch their understanding of their role in the political process because of the experience. Therefore, those who say I am opposed to Mitchell’s goals here should take care at such a blanket assertion. However, contest debate teaches students to combine personal experience with the language of political power. Powerful personal narratives unconnected to political power are regularly co-opted by those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-called role-playing that public policy contest debates encourage promotes active learning of the vocabulary and levers of power in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation. Simulation of success in the public realm is far more empowering to students than completely abandoning all notions of personal power in the face of governmental hegemony by teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imagining myself starting a socialist revolution in America is no less of a fantasy than imagining myself making a difference on Capitol Hill. Furthermore, both fantasies influenced my personal and political development virtually ensuring a life of active, pro-social, political participation. Neither fantasy reduced the likelihood that I would spend my life trying to make the difference I imagined. One fantasy actually does make a greater difference: the one that speaks the language of political power. The other fantasy disables action by making one a laughingstock to those who wield the language of power. Fantasy motivates and role-playing trains through visualization. Until we can imagine it, we cannot really do it. Role-playing without question teaches students to be comfortable with the language of power, and that language paves the way for genuine and effective political activism. Debates over the relative efficacy of political strategies for pro-social change must confront governmental power at some point. There is a fallacy in arguing that movements represent a better political strategy than voting and person-to-person advocacy. Sure, a full-scale movement would be better than the limited voice I have as a participating citizen going from door to door in a campaign, but so would full-scale government action. Unfortunately, the gap between my individual decision to pursue movement politics and the emergence of a full-scale movement is at least as great as the gap between my vote and democratic change. They both represent utopian fiat. Invocation of Mitchell to support utopian movement fiat is simply not supported by his work, and too often, such invocation discourages the concrete actions he argues for in favor of the personal rejectionism that under girds the political cynicism that is a fundamental cause of voter and participatory abstention in America today.

2. Legal debates are key to short-term survival of oppressed populations. Whether the law is good or bad, legal education is crucial to empowerment.

Arkles et al 10: (Gabriel Arkles, Pooja Gehi and Elana Redfield, The Role of Lawyers in Trans Liberation: Building a Transformative Movement for Social Change, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 8 Seattle J. Soc. Just. 579, Spring / Summer, 2010, LN)

While agenda-setting by lawyers can lead to the replication of patterns of elitism and the reinforcement of systems of oppression, we do believe that legal work is a necessary

and critical way to support movements for social justice. We must recognize the limitations of the legal system and learn to use that to the advantage of the oppressed. If lawyers are going to support work that dismantles oppressive structures, we must radically rethink the roles we can play in building and supporting these movements and acknowledge that our own individual interests or even livelihood may conflict with doing radical and transformative work. n162 A. Community Organizing for Social Justice When we use the term community organizing or organizing, we refer to the activities of organizations engaging in base-building and leadership development of communities directly impacted by one or more social *612 problems and conducting direct action issue campaigns intended to make positive change related to the problem(s). In this article, we discuss community organizing in the context of progressive social change, but community-organizing strategies can also be used for conservative ends. Community organizing is a powerful means to make social change. A basic premise of organizing is that inappropriate imbalances of power in society are a central component of social injustice. In order to have social justice, power relationships must shift. In Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Manual for Activists (hereinafter, "the Manual"), n163 the authors list three principles of community organizing: n164 (1) winning real, immediate, concrete improvements in people's lives; (2) giving people a sense of their own power; and (3) altering the relations of power. n165 Before any of these principles can be achieved it is necessary to have leadership by the people impacted by social problems. n166 As Rinku Sen points out: Even allies working in solidarity with affected groups cannot rival the clarity and power of the people who have the most to gain and the least to lose . . . organizations composed of people whose lives will change when a new policy is instituted tend to set goals that are harder to reach, to compromise less, and to stick out a fight longer. n167 She also notes that, "If we are to make policy proposals that are grounded in reality and would make a difference either in peoples' lives or in the debate, then we have to be in touch with the people who are at the center of such policies. n168 We believe community organizing has the potential to make fundamental social change that law reform strategies or "movements" led by lawyers cannot achieve on their own. However, community organizing is not always just and effective. Community-organizing groups are not immune to any number of problems that can impact other organizations, including internal oppressive dynamics. In fact, some strains of white, male-dominated *613 community organizing have been widely criticized as perpetuating racism and sexism. n169 Nonetheless, models of community organizing, particularly as revised by women of color and other leaders from marginalized groups, have much greater potential to address fundamental imbalances of power than law reform strategies. They also have a remarkable record of successes. Tools from community organizers can help show where other strategies can fit into a framework for social change. The authors of the Manual, for example, describe various strategies for addressing social issues and illustrate how each of them may, at least to some extent, be effective. n170 They then plot out various forms of making social change on a continuum in terms of their positioning with regard to existing social power relationships. n171 They place direct services at the end of the spectrum that is most accepting of existing power relationships and community organizing at the end of the spectrum that most challenges existing power relationships. n172 Advocacy organizations are listed in the middle, closer to community organizing than direct services. n173 The Four Pillars of Social Justice Infrastructure model, a tool of the Miami Workers Center, is somewhat more nuanced than the Manual. n174 According to this model, four "pillars" are the key to transformative social justice. n175 They are (1) the pillar of service, which addresses community needs and stabilizes community members' lives; (2) the pillar of policy, which changes policies and institutions and achieves concrete gains with benchmarks for progress; (3) the pillar of consciousness, which alters public opinion and shifts political parameters through media advocacy and popular education; and (4) the pillar of power, which achieves autonomous community power through base-building and leadership development. n176 According to the Miami Workers Center, all of these pillars are essential in making social change, but the pillar of power is most crucial in the struggle to win true liberation for all oppressed communities. n177 *614 In their estimation, our movements suffer when the pillar of power is forgotten and/or not supported by the other pillars, or when the pillars are seen as separate and independent, rather than as interconnected, indispensable aspects of the whole infrastructure that is necessary to build a just society. n178 Organizations with whom we work are generally dedicated solely to providing services, changing policies, or providing public education. Unfortunately, each of these endeavors exists separate from one another and perhaps most notably, separate from community organizing. In SRLP's vision of change, this separation is part of maintaining structural capitalism that seeks to maintain imbalances of power in our society. Without incorporating the pillar of power, service provision, policy change, and public education can never move towards real social justice. n179 B. Lawyering for Empowerment In the past few decades, a number of alternative theories have emerged that help lawyers find a place in social movements that do not replicate oppression. n180 Some of the most well-known iterations of this theme are "empowerment lawyering," "rebellious lawyering," and "community lawyering." n181 These perspectives share skepticism of the efficacy of impact litigation and traditional direct services for improving the conditions faced by poor clients and communities of color, because they do not and cannot effectively address the roots of these forms of oppression. n182 Rather, these alternative visions of lawyering center on the empowerment of community members and organizations, the elimination of the potential for dependency on lawyers and the legal system, and the collaboration between lawyers and directly impacted communities in priority setting. n183 Of the many models of alternative lawyering with the goal of social justice, we will focus on the idea of "lawyering for empowerment," generally. The goal of empowerment lawyering is to enable a group of people to gain control of the forces that affect their lives. n184 Therefore, the goal of empowerment lawyering for low-income transgender people of *615 color is to support these communities in confronting the economic and social policies that limit their life chances. Rather than merely representing poor people in court and increasing access to services, the role of the community or empowerment lawyer involves: organizing, community education, media outreach, petition drives, public demonstrations, lobbying, and shaming campaigns . . . Individuals and members of community-based organizations actively work alongside organizers and lawyers in the day-to-day strategic planning of their case or campaign. Proposed solutions--litigation or non-litigation based--are informed by the clients' knowledge and experience of the issue. n185 A classic example of the complex role of empowerment within the legal agenda setting is the question of whether to take cases that have low chances of success. The traditional approach would suggest not taking the case, or settling for limited outcomes that may not meet the client's expectations. However, when our goals shift to empowerment, our strategies change as well. If we understand that the legal system is incapable of providing a truly favorable outcome for low-income transgender clients and transgender clients of color, then winning and losing cases takes on different meanings. For example, a transgender client may choose to bring a lawsuit against prison staff who sexually assaulted her, despite limited chance of success because of the "blue wall of silence," her perceived limited credibility as a prisoner, barriers to recovery from the Prison Litigation Reform Act, and restrictions on supervisory liability in § 1983 cases. Even realizing the litigation outcome will probably be unfavorable to her, she may still develop leadership skills by rallying a broader community of people impacted by similar issues. Additionally, she may use the knowledge and energy gained through the lawsuit to change policy. If our goal is to familiarize our client with the law, to provide an opportunity for the client *616 and/or community organizers to educate the public about the issues, to help our client assess the limitations of the legal system on their own, or to play a role in a larger organizing strategy, then taking cases with little chance of achieving a legal remedy can be a useful strategy. Lawyering for empowerment means not relying solely on legal expertise for decisionmaking. It means recognizing the limitations of the legal system, and using our knowledge and expertise to help disenfranchised communities take leadership. If community organizing is the path to social justice and "organizing is about people taking a role in determining their own future and improving the quality of life not only for themselves but for everyone," then "the primary goal of empowerment lawyering is building up the community." n186 C. Sharing Information and Building Leadership A key to meaningful participation in social justice movements is access to information. Lawyers are in an especially good position to help transfer knowledge, skills, and information to disenfranchised communities--the legal system is maintained by and predicated on arcane knowledge that lacks relevance in most contexts but takes on supreme significance in courts, politics, and regulatory agencies. It is a system intentionally obscure to the uninitiated; therefore the lawyer has the opportunity to expose the workings of the system to those who seek to destroy it, dismantle it, reconfigure it, and re-envision it. As Quigley points out, the ignorance of the client enriches the lawyer's power position, and thus the transfer of the power from the lawyer to the client necessitates a sharing of information. n187 Rather than simply performing the tasks that laws require, a lawyer has the option to teach and to collaborate with clients so that they can bring power and voice back to their communities and perhaps fight against the system, become politicized, and take leadership. "This demands that the lawyer undo the secret wrappings of the legal system and share the essence of legal advocacy--doing so lessens the mystical power of the lawyer, and, in practice, enriches the advocate in the sharing and developing of rightful power." n188 Lawyers have many opportunities to share knowledge and skills as a form of leadership development. This sharing can be accomplished, for example, through highly collaborative legal representation, through community clinics, through skill-shares, or through policy or campaign meetings where the lawyer explains what they know about the existing structures and fills in gaps and questions raised by activists about the workings of legal systems. D. Helping to Meet Survival Needs SRLP sees our work as building legal services and policy change that directly supports the pillar of power. n189 Maintaining an awareness of the limitations and pitfalls of traditional legal services, we strive to provide services in a larger context and with an approach that can help support libratory work. n190 For this reason we provide direct legal services but also work toward leadership development in our communities and a deep level of support for our community-organizing allies. Our approach in this regard is to make sure our community members access and obtain all of the benefits to which they are entitled under the law, and to protect our community members as much as possible from the criminalization, discrimination, and harassment they face when attempting to live their lives. While we do not believe that the root causes keeping our clients in poverty and poor health can be addressed in this way, we also believe that our clients experience the most severe impact from state policies and practices and need and that they deserve support to survive them. n191 Until our communities are truly empowered and our systems are fundamentally changed to increase life chances and health for transgender people who are low-income and people of color, our communities are going to continue to have to navigate government agencies and organizations to survive.

3. Oppression is created by social systems so only a focus on material conditions can solve

Johnson 1: Allan Johnson, 2001. (PhD in sociology, he joined the sociology department at Wesleyan University) http://www.cabrillo.edu/~lroberts/AlanJohnsonWhatCanWeDO001.pdf. RW

Privilege is a feature of social systems, not individuals. People have or don't have privilege depending on the system they're in and the social categories other people put them in. To say, then, that I have race privilege says less about me personally than it does about how the society we all live in and how it is organized to assign privilege on the basis of a socially defined set of racial categories that change historically and often overlap. The challenge facing me as an individual has more to do with how I participate in society as a recipient of race privilege and how those choices oppose or support the system itself. In dealing with the problem of privilege, we have to get used to being surrounded by paradox. Very often those who have privilege don't know it, for example, which is a key aspect of privilege. Also paradoxical is the fact that privilege doesn't necessarily lead to a "good life," which can prompt people in privileged groups to deny resentfully that they even have it. But privilege doesn't equate with being happy. It involves having what others don't have and the struggle to hang on to it at their expense, neither of which is a recipe for joy,personal fulfillment, or spiritual contentment.... To be an effective part of the solution, we have to realize that privilege and oppression are not a thing of the past. It's happening right now. It isn't just a collection of wounds inflicted long ago that now need to be healed. The wounding goes on as I write these words and as you read them, and unless people work to change the system that promotes it, personal healing by itself cannot be the answer. Healing wounds is no more a solution to the oppression that causes the wounding than military hospitals are a solution to war. Healing is a necessary process, but it isn't enough.... Since privilege is rooted primarily in systems—such as families, schools, and workplaces—change isn't simply a matter of changing people. People, of course, will have to change in order for systems to change, but the most important point is that changing people isn't enough. The solution also has to include entire systems, such as capitalism, whose paths of least resistance that shape how we feel, think, and behave as individuals, how we see ourselves and one another.

4. Fairness. Anything else moots 6 minutes of 1ac offense – forces a 1ar restart. They get a 13-7 minute advantage which means we have worse discussion, even if the subject of discussion is slightly better. Unfairness denies effective dialogue on kritikal issues which turns your impacts

Galloway 7 Ryan Galloway, Samford Comm prof, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28, 2007

Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114).

That justifies severance out of things like reps, epistemology, or discourse- only the plan itself should matter

Prestes 97: Brian Prestes, Wake Forest University. 1997. “Answering Critiques: Strategies and Tactics”. http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/GartensteinPrestes1997RenewableEnergy.htm. RW

He points out that "any permutation would be ... a severance perm. Why should we allow the affirmative to sever out of the advocacy of the 1AC? Anyone got an argument as to why ADVOCACY is irrelevant in this activity?" Our argument is that the permutation we outlined would not jettison any of the IAC assumptions. It simply specifies an alternative path of reaching the IAC's conclusion without taking the route that the negative says you do. It could be viewed as an "alternative framework" permutation. The negative says that you necessarily view the debate through X framework, which is bad. The affirmative argues that they actually view the debate through Y framework, which escapes the bad impacts that the negative talks about while solving the problem that the IAC outlines. A legitimate permutation to a counterplan consists of the entire plan plus part or all of the counterplan. By the standards that kritikers attempt to impose, it would be illegitimate to permute a states counterplan to solve for its federalism net benefit because the initial assumption of the plan is that the federal government should act, which is antithetical to state action. There are some assumptions that the affirmative should be able to jettison. Affirmative teams are able to kick out of advantages, and negatives can abandon disadvantages without anybody crying "Advocacy shift!" Part of your methodology may be based on flawed scientific models. You can recognize that, admit that you were wrong and win the I AC advantage based on a non-scientific justification. Some kritiks are offensive arguments. If so, you can't simply kick out of your old advantages, because they've been turned. If, however, the implication of the kritik only problematizes your assumptions, then you may abandon the flawed claims and win on other benefits of your plan that the kritik does not indict. Furthermore, the negative appeal to an advocacy paradigm is problematic. Often the kritik will be presented along with other arguments which are inconsistent with the kritik's value. For instance, the negative may urge rejection of statist action while arguing that Clinton needs to maintain popularity to get his agenda passed. The contradictions in their INC positions seems to legitimize conditionality of assumptions. Negative teams usually respond to the contradiction argument in one of two ways. They may say that their only obligation is to negate, in which case their appeal to advocacy seems misplaced since they are not advocating anything. Or they could argue the debate through a theoretical window, that they primarily endorse a rejection of the affirmative framework, but if that framework is correct then the affirmative plan is still bad within its own hypothetical world. If this is the case, it creates a huge inequity - the negative is allowed to argue in two conflicting worlds simultaneously while the affirmative is forced to defend every word they uttered throughout the whole round.’