1AC Killjoy .docx - 1AC Regular 1AC Debate is not a safe...

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Regular 1AC
Debate is not a safe space – minoritized debaters are constantly told they are too
loud or too angry or too emotional, constantly told to be happy, to stop complaining,
to just do “real debate”.
Exclusive forms of argumentation have made debate technocratic and elitist – it
desensitizes debaters to violence and racism, and teaches us to care more about
nuclear war than solving the structural violence within our own community. Thus,
the role of the judge is to vote for the debater who better performatively and
metholodgically provides a resistance strategy for the oppressed.
Fine 13
Todd; Founder of project Khalid and coaches the debate team at Washington Latin Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. and is Vice President of the High School D.C.
Urban Debate League and writes for the huff post; “Qatar Conference on Scholastic Debate Examines Activity's Role in Empowerment”; Huffington Post; 3/10/13 @ 5:12 am; Accessed 2/17/15
@ 12:43 pm;
Meanwhile, the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues (NAUDL), a nonprofit headquartered in Chicago, has supported the expansion of this policy format into urban school districts across the country, with large nonprofit leagues in Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, and other
cites. Because the sponsors are mostly college debaters, many of them now accomplished lawyers, who believe in the "
policy debate
" format
and its
transformative
power as an intense
, total
experience
, the association has largely focused on the establishment of leagues based exclusively on this policy format. These developments, combined, have created an inverse bell curve of wealth in the policy debate community, with a handful of elite schools and a
growing cohort of extremely poor schools being all that remains. Middle class suburban schools and rural schools, overwhelmed by the rising costs of travel to far-away tournaments as the total numbers in policy debate dwindle, are hard to find at all.This unusual socioeconomic makeup has
prompted more than just a culture shock, but a highly-contested and ongoing ideological war in the debate rounds themselves. Poorer schools, largely black and other
minority
, now often
argue that debate itself
reflects the racism and inequalities of
the broader
society . The year-long national topics
, which
serve the highly-
specific technical needs of the elite national circuit , are often "critiqued" as symptomatic of a
training system that forms cynical technocrats who will tolerate injustice as part of a never-ending,
brutal game where real consequences are always "debatable."
As the American economy continues to flounder and urban schools face heavy challenges and criticisms,
these violent communication collisions in
debate
rounds are causing some
young
participants to question the
possibility of ever addressing racism or structural inequality
in America. Yet, without some direct link between Urban Debate Leagues and activism itself,
even
these
potent and uncomfortable
challenges
float without resolution and
are reduced to a win/loss statement
written by a judge on a ballot. In exasperation, many of the urban league debaters, and
their coaches, now argue that
policy debate
can only
ha[s] ve value as a
fierce
training ground for blacks to gain survival skills to
engage a hopelessly irredeemable America.