Week 3: Afropessimism, Public Forum, and More Thumpers
Hello and welcome back to my senior project blog! This week was full of activity at both Heights and Holmes that I’m excited to share with you.
This week at Heights, we continued preparation for UDNC. The varsity team has decided on the affirmative they will run: communal authorship. This affirmative argues that status quo mechanisms to access intellectual property rights are inaccessible to indigenous communities. Specifically, the Copyright Act uses Western conceptualizations of ownership that don’t account for indigenous knowledge’s differing production. Because swaths of Traditional Cultural Expressions are ineligible under the Copyright Act, they are vulnerable to cultural appropriation. Understanding authorship as communal connects indigenous creativity to the Copyright Act. Specifically, their plan text reads: “The United States federal government should significantly strengthen its protection of domestic intellectual property rights in copyrights, by recognizing communal authorship in instances where a work has cultural significance indivisible from its holder.”
Their aff also contains “framing”, or an alternative lens through which the round should be evaluated. Traditionally, debate rounds are decided by determining whether the aff or the neg prevents the largest, fastest, and most permanent impacts; simply put, they are decided through a utilitarian lens. For example, if the affirmative convinces the judge that they prevent nuclear war, even if the negative proves that the aff certainly causes the extinction of one plant species, the aff would likely still win the debate. For this reason, affs that do not solve for the largest impacts require framing. Specifically, the Heights team must frame the debate in terms of cultural erasure through appropriation, proving that it matters more than the hypothetical doomsday scenario the neg inevitably will present. It indicts utilitarian analysis of rounds by pointing out that those logics perpetually kick the demands of oppressed people down the road under the guise of helping the majority. In short, they argue that “slow violence” or structural violence is more important than other issues, and should be evaluated first.
The Heights team wanted to do a practice round against another team to test out their aff. Specifically, they wanted to debate a Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy (BOMLA) team. This team is known for running a very threatening argument in the debate space: Afropessimism. Afropessimism, or “Afropess”, is an argument originally made by Frank B. Wilderson which argues that race, particularly blackness, is not a social construct but rather a type of “social death.” Anti-blackness is not an issue that can be fixed through legal progress or individual solidarity; white civil society functioning is too deeply predicated on the perpetual state of slavery of black people for this to be true. In debate, it is run as a K, arguing that the world, and thus the affirmative, relies on Black social death.
The wiki stalking from last week showed that Afropessimism will be quite common at UDNC, so they wanted to practice debating it. The practice debate was quite helpful in determining how they must answer Afropess, and I expect that next week we will spend some time preparing and improving our answers, specifically thinking about the intersections of Blackness and Indigeneity.
I also met with new students from Holmes. To maximize their chance of attending a national level tournament, they have decided to attend the qualifying tournament for nationals in an event other than policy debate: public forum debate, or PF. PF is a shorter, slower, and generally less technical form of debate created in 2002. It aims to be more accessible to the average person since some members of the debate community were unhappy with how policy debate has become fast-paced and difficult to succeed in in its 50+ year life. It operates similarly to policy debate, with two teams of two debaters affirming or negating a resolution, but rather than a yearly resolution, the topic of debates changes every 1-2 months. The April resolution is as follows: Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its investment in domestic nuclear energy.
PF affirmatives do not have to have a plan text, and the negative does not have to directly clash with the affirmative in their first speech. Rather, the aff and neg debate whether the resolution is conceptually good. The speech orders are also different: in PF, the aff doesn’t always go first, and there is no neg block. The speeches always alternate sides (aff and neg) regardless of which side started the debate, and teams flip a coin before the debate to determine if the aff or neg will speak first. Moreover, instead of a questioning period after every constructive, there is a questioning period where both speakers can ask each other questions. The speech orders are as follows:
- 1st constructive (aff or neg can speak first) (4 min)
- 2nd constructive( if the aff went first this speech is a neg speech and vice versa) (4 min)
- Cross-examination/ questioning (3 min)
- 1st rebuttal (if the aff went first this is another aff speech, and so on) (4 min)
- 2nd rebuttal (4 min)
- Cross-examination/ questioning (3 min)
- 1st summary (3 min)
- 2nd summary (3 min)
- Grand cross-examination (all 4 debaters can ask each other questions) (3 min)
- 1st final focus (2 min)
- 2nd final focus (2 min)
Functionally, PF constructives and rebuttals are like policy constructives, and PF summaries and final focuses are like policy rebuttals.
I briefly went over Holmes’ aff case (which argues the resolution is good for the economy) and neg case (which revolves around renewables & electricity costs). We discussed other negative strategies, and I cut a card that thumps most aff arguments. Even if the government invests in nuclear energy, a recent executive order makes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the pawn of the Office of Management and Budget by requiring they ensure the NRC complies with the President’s wishes and agenda. This ends the independent agencies’ insulation from political sway, decking their ability to stay politically isolated and increasing the risk of accidents that can shut down the whole industry. Independent regulatory commissions are meant to be able to determine what is best for their area of specialization without fear of political retaliation, but this order likely reverses this.
As my project progresses, I have begun to think about my final product. So far, I have noticed some differences in how HUDL debaters and TFA/UIL debaters view arguments. I think partially due to the HUDL only offering policy debate, the debaters I interact with seem to be more in tune with how arguments tend to play out in debate rounds after seeing them over and over. For example, after the practice round with Heights and BOMLA, the debaters had an extremely in-depth discussion about how Afropess debates tend to go and how other teams can strategize against them. The Holmes students tend to bounce around events a bit more, as UIL and TFA both offer many more types of debate events (like PF), so they think a bit more about how arguments can transcend different resolutions and be applicable in multiple ways. For example, thumpers revolving around the administration don’t stop being useful when they switch from policy to PF, they simply change verbiage.
I hope you enjoyed learning about new debate formats and new arguments, as well as my observations on how debate leagues compare. I’m looking forward to the following week of my senior project!
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