Anti-Racism/Anti-Oppression Neg Framework

Here are some of the best justifications for an anti-racism/anti-oppression neg framework.

Because the assumptions of the resolution are exclusionary, I negate.

Therefore, the Role of the judge is to not only to be an ethical decision maker invested in the wellbeing of disadvantaged students, but to recognize and question whether civil society is ethical and should exist. Accessibility is a multiplier for all impacts and should be your primary concern because any educational or discursive benefits are expanded by an accessible space for dialogue. The role of the ballot is remaining consistent with the best liberation strategy for the oppressed.

For years the black body has been excluded and oppressed when it came to discourse centered around ethics. Rooted in western ideology, academia as confined itself in a realm in which morality is determined by the white, straight, male. Even within the debate space, the wording of our topics express and fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be moral and where morality comes from.

[Crenshaw] The affirmative rhetorical silence on whiteness is an active stance that allows white privilege to thrive by masking its existence and treating is as an assumed norm.

DR. CRENSHAW Prof of Speech Comm @ Univ. Ala.  1997

Carrie-PhD. USC; former director of debate @ Univ. of Ala.; WESTERN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION

This analysis of Helms’ opening argument illustrates how the ideology of white privilege operates through rhetorical silence. Helms’ statement was an argument over the meaning of the UDC—its members, its actions, and its insignia. It was an ideological struggle to maintain silence about the members’ whiteness and its implications through a strategic use of gender. Two key issues arise here. First, rhetorical silence about whiteness sustains an ideology of white privilege. Second, intersecting gendered discourses work to preserve this silence.Helms’ silence about whiteness naturalized the taken-for-granted assumptions contained in his framework for understanding who is harmed by this decision. The “colossal unseen dimensions [of] the silences and denials surrounding” whiteness are key political tools for protecting white privilege and maintaining the myth of meritocracy (McIntosh 35). This silence is rhetorical and has important ideological implications. Scott observes that silence and speaking have symbolic impact and as such are both rhetorical. When considering the dialectic of speaking and silence, he thinks of silence as the absence of speech. Silence is active, not passive; it may be interpreted. Furthermore, silence and speech may be both simultaneous and sequential. The absence of speech about whiteness signifies that it exists in our discursive silences. It may often be intentional; it can be interpreted, and it can occur simultaneously with the spoken word. Whiteness’ silence is ideological because it signifies that to be white is the natural condition, the assumed norm. Scott notes that silences symbolize the nature of things—their substance or natural condition. Silences symbolize “hierarchical structures as surely as does speech” (15). Indeed, the very structure of privilege generates silences, and “ironically, the most powerful rhetoric for maintaining an existing scheme of privilege will be silent” (10). Thus, silent rhetorical constructions of whiteness like Helms’ protect material white privilege because they mask its existence.

No matter how my opponent is trying to justify his/her framework, without taking the oppressed into account he/she will never fully maximize the benefits of their standard.

[Curry] The colorblind approach to ethics the aff takes leads to abstractions that distance us from the empirical reality. The biggest problem with the resolution is one that occurs in numerous debate topics in the LD community that spans back for years. Tommy Curry explains:

Curry, Tommy J. [doctor in Associate Professor of Philosophy, Affiliated Professor of Africana Studies, Texas A & M University] In the Fiat of Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical. 2013. SPHS//SS

Ought implies a projected (futural) act [and]. The word commands a deliberate action to reasonably expect the world to be able to sustain or support. For the Black thinker, the Black citizen-subject-slave-(in)human, ought is not rational but repressive. For the oppressed racialized thinker, the ethical provocation is an immediate confrontation with the impossibility of actually acting towards values like freedom, liberty, humanity, and life, since none of these values can be achieved concretely for the Black in a world controlled by and framed by the white. The options for ethical actions are not ethical in and of themselves, but merely the options the immorality of the racist world will allow, thus the oppressed is forced to idealize their ethical positions, eliminating the truth of their reality, and the peeling away the tyranny of white bodies, so that as the oppressed, the can ideally imagine an “if condition,” whereby they are allowed to ethical engage racism from the perspective of: “if whites were moral and respected the humanity of Blacks, then we can ethically engage in these behaviors. Unfortunately, this ought constraint only forces Blacks to consciously recognize the futility of ethical engagement, since it is in this ought deliberation that they recognize that their cognition of all values are dependent not on their moral aspirations for the world, but the determined by the will of white supremacy to maintain virtue throughout all ethical calculations. In short, Black ethical deliberation is censored so that it can only engage moral questions by asserting that whites are virtuous and hence capable of being ethically persuaded towards right action, hence all ethical question about racism, white supremacy and anti-Blackness is not about how Blacks think about the world, but what possibility the world allows Blacks to contemplate under the idea of ethics.

The resolution cannot be proven true, or be called a moral statement, because ought and morality have become deeply rooted in whiteness. When debaters are forced to simply consider what societies “ought” to do without discussing these same systems relations to blackness, it forces the Black thinker into a naïve space in which they are tricked to imagine whiteness reorienting itself in order to function morally. This thought process is futile because the current structures and morality can never go hand in hand. Its foundation is bankrupt.

[This framework originally and generously contributed by Newark Science SS.]