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1AC

It is hard to call what is going on in the six countries of the resolution“a struggle for democracy”.  The only word that even closely resembles the undeniable outcry for freedom, change, and growth is revolution. People in Behrain, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria have risen and joined together as agents of liberation to claim a life that is worth living.They are refusing to stand by idly as their communities and homelands are ravished by oppression and exclusion. Today the affirmative team makes that same refusal.

The building that I went to school in was one that not all that fancy. Olympic size swimming pool yes, huge wrap around hallways? Yes. It had the basic stuff that a school should have like students. Teachers and administrators, but there was something lacking in the presentation of the school. The walls were beige canvases that only spoke when we used our creativity to make them speak to us – they were bare. It was like the walls themselves were gatherers of information, but never was willing to share. 

It was this one place that I found myself inspired because every year it had a different theme.  There was people always laughing and sharing thoughts with one another and there were times where nothing could be agreed upon. Room 131 the place where I recaptured my agency. It was the place where I found my refuge. Unlike the places reserved for those who are worthy or noble, this space was not lavish, but one that people could do with as they wished. Some wished to talk about the world of governmental politics, while others found it more empowering to talk about things like social relations. Like Gaga said, there’s something about this place…. I can’t put my hands on it, but there is something liberating about this space. Unlike any other space that I had the ability to be a part of, I was able to contextualize my existence in the space within my experience. It was in this space that I could just be, instead of always thriving to –  that place was debate.

As three of the only Debate KC alum to be actively debating on the college level, looking at democracy through the lens of education, and especially in terms of experience, is crucial in unpacking notions of democracy and the assistance that accompanies it. The effectiveness of democracy is predicated on the idea of representation. Once people are made visible, and their needs are made audible the possibility of change and progression can exist. 

Without a medium to deliver the message, the people do perish; much as they did in the Debate Kansas City Urban League when the entire program was phased out the academic itinerary of the Kansas City, Missouri School District. Students like me, who are reminded both explicitly and implicitly daily that their perspectives don’t matter and won’t change anything, use the debate space as a platform of empowerment that create an opportunity to cultivate the political education needed to navigate through the process of what we know as “democracy”. At a time when: 1 in 3 high schools has closed in the district in the past four years, accreditation is unattainable as the district meets only 3 of the 14 mandates required by the state of Missouri, and yet another superintendent has resigned with less than two years in action, somebody must stop and ask the question…Is it good for the children? Those who will inherit the spaces where we push for democratic assistance in an outward land while overlooking ways to incorporate perspectives in our own institution; will feel the aftershocks of discussions that omit their muted voices. This is why it is important to interrogate every educational aspect of this activity; from the people who coach, to the people who speak, to the people who judge, we must become critical of the rhetoric of democratic institutions.  

You should vote for the team who best performitively and methodologically democratic seeds of resistance in the
classroom.

In a hurry to get to catastrophic impacts, this topic has already dismissed the question of what democracy means.  Instead of criticizing it, we simply emulate the mechanics of foreign policy designed to export democracy as a cure-all for all the world’s problems.  Because we no longer talk about democracy as though it were something in our everyday lives but instead some institutional end, we forget to ask questions central to the topic.  We need to take as step back and ask what the broader rhetoric of democracy does to the way we understand politics in our day to day lives.  

“Democracy” is a loaded word that becomes arbitrary based on who uses it, the context in which it is deployed, and who it is meant to affect. Most simply it means a government in which is the power is vested in the people to take up political authority in a given place. This power controls and maintains a general quality of life that a people decide equally that they need to thrive and grow. Democracy is rooted in the equitable division of responsibility amongst citizens and officials to do what is in the best interest of the people. Democracy is no respecter of person, in the sense that from the least to the greatest, each person has the same resources, opportunities, and education to make educated decisions about what will effect a population at-large. 

Democracy is made synonymous with words like freedom, liberty, emancipation, sovereignty, equality, and justice. The word powerful to move entire countries toward a common goal even admist socio-political unrest and gridlock and has recently fueled an outcry from people in Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Behrain, and Egypt. Angered by autocratic tyranny and motivated by the lives lived by Americans, we find the U.S. in the position to offer democracy assistance. The question becomes, has the U.S. acquired the tools inside their own country to truly be considered democratic?

Those who interpret democracy to hold the characteristics of freedom, justice, and equality are usually those who have the privilege and luxury to do so. Their interpretation links democracy to resources, visibility, and status. This is implicit by a correlation between whose voices and ideas are given the most credibility and space in the status quo. This can be seen inside of this very activity in the ways topics and areas of discussion are determined and the ways in which those involved can talk about them. Democracy is a mathematical game. If a group has nothing to add to a system of inputs to produce an outcome is it is simply represented by a zero, or an empty input, and leaves the overall outcome unaffected.

For some democracy means the freedom to vote, but others it could mean freedom to eat or to work or to believe and worship they way they chose. This speaks to the fluid function of democracy and how it cannot be grappled with rigidly. People and their experiences speak to the way democracy functions and what it means. While most plans advocate installing ballot boxes or increasing voter education which could be good in some instances, that does little to grapple with the voices ostracized from the political arena by those who do not acknowledge and cede their power to those with marginalized needs and perspectives. Democracy is not democracy for everyone.  Structural violence defines the limits of democratic empowerment.

Before we confront our activism on a political level, it is our ethical obligation to confront our identities as students and teachers. While it might seem logical to cast our affirmative aside as something that could and should be done external to a debate round, Michael and James Beane confront the lapse in democracy that exist in classrooms and impacts what we come to value as education

→ Apple and Beane, Democratic Schools,
We have chosen to include…reason for existence.

Our method also recognizes that democracy and the assistance it mandates is not just a one-shot option with no lasting investment. It is the type of process that Apple and Beane isolate into spheres that ultimately lead into and are contingent upon one another. By creating “democratic classrooms” in debate, we revolutionize the spaces we use to theorize and interrogate issues that have a larger bearing on the quality of life people have outside of the debate space. We become positively impacted through the act of “democratic practice” that breaks down the divide established by debaters to separate themselves from who we are inside and outside of debate rounds. Confronting the conceptualization of democracy in practice, then allows for our future endeavors; whether it be as political pundits or ethical actors, to be rooted in a sense of true equity and liberation. This becomes our “democratic work” even as DKC debaters.

Currently democracy is deployed as a static and rigid state that is to be worked toward and subsequently obtained. Once enough money, resources, and assistance has been given to an NGO, once the USAID has sponsored the upstart of enough vaguely significant programs, then we will have achieved democracy. Our interpretation looks at democracy as a fluid dynamic that changes with every story and perspective linked to it. The ever-changing nature of what democracy means to a given people at a given time begs the question of how talk about it in circles like debate. We should subscribe to democracy through a process of both embodiment and process.  

Democracy assistance, or democracy promotion as a whole, isn’t some magic seed that will make a democracy spring-up wherever it is planted.  Democracy is rhetoric.  And more commonly than it liberates people, it empowers their oppressors.

This rhetoric takes on a life of its own, defining those who are with and without democracy with broad strokes.  Instead of finding solidarity with the people dying and bleeding in these struggles against oppression, we end-up speculating endlessly about their real motivations.  We assign the rhetoric of democracy to their struggles to dictate how they experience and express their liberation.  We know what they actually want and its western-style institutional democracy.  This is a ruse for imperial domination, not a campaign of liberation.

Iris Young writes in 2001
(Iris Marion, late Professor in Political Science at the University of Chicago “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy Author(s)”, Political Theory, Vol. 29, No. 5, Oct., p.682-5)

In analyzing how actual...rather than to weave an argument.

2AC evidence

Holloway Sparks, Queens, Teens, and Model Mothers: Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform 2003
ED: Schram, Soss, and Fording

Aff: Emporia WW

Round #3   Tournament: Shirley

vs:Liberty GW

Judge: Ermo

Plan Text

Same

1ac Advantages

Same

2ac Offense

T

We must relearn our conception of “democracy assistance”

Only we lead to a true democratic work

Topicality is exclusionary

K

-Accessibility turns the K, they don’t let her activate her agency

1ar Strategy

This debate is about who best plants the seeds of democracy in the classroom

Permutation

Fairness & Predictability Don’t Exist in Debate

Topicality means you don’t solve real problems in debate land

2ar Strategy

This debate is about combating methodological exclusion. Must plant democratic seeds in the class room

Permutation

Social location impact turns their K

Aff: Emporia State WW

Round #1   Tournament: Shirley

vs: Wyoming PF

Judge: Jim Shultz

Plan Text

None

Role of the ballot-The judge should vote for the team who best performatively and methodologically plants democratic seeds of resistance in the classroom.

1ac Advantages

Exclusion Bad

Movement in the debate community

2ac Offense

Identity Politics good

Accessibility good/privilege bad

Intersectionality link turn

1ar Strategy

Everything above

2ar Strategy

Everything above

Furthermore, most of their links will treat identity as though it’s a luxury – like its some mode of politics that we can choose to engage in or disconnect from.  Identity isn’t some switch you can turn-off, it’s a way of surviving.  The pleasure we derive from identity is okay, its not something we have to analyze in Lacanian terms to do-away with, its just a way of getting by.

Ross 2000 [Marlon B., Professor, Department of English and Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, “Commentary: Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging,” New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 4, pages 836-837]

More to the point, Professor...must produce its own curious delights.

Their alternative allows for the expansion of white-led social movements – the attempt to mute identity in debates is a ruse for allowing white men to be at the forefront of the resistance.

Ross 2000 [Marlon B., Professor, Department of English and Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, “Commentary: Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging,” New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 4, pages 840-841]

Although in his contribution Eric....with the folk and their culture.

And you should call into question the style of their presentation – their evidence is written for academics by academics – the alternative can’t work unless debate is accessible and people can understand what the hell you are saying. 

JONES 2009 [Lee ,lecturer in IR at Queen Mary, Univ. of London, 09’“International Relations Scholarship and the tyranny of Policy Relevance,” Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies Issue 1, p.126, Ryan]

Putting those questions aside for now...once urged (Nussbaum, 1997).

This is the danger of embracing the scholarship of the negatives advocacy because it would suggest that isolating capitalism as the source of the oppression would allow for us solve the oppression, but instead only reintrench those same structures because we understand how the multiplicity of identity dictates how one internalizes their reality.,

African American Policy Forum, March 16, 2K9

“A Primer on Intersectionality,” http://aapf.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/aapf_intersectionality_primer.pdf, ACC. 8-30-2010, JT  *This card also ans. critics of INTSX. like Hutchinson (Multi-D)…proves our INTSX not link!

Intersectionality is a concept that enables us...more inclusive coalitional advocacy.

Democracy must begin in classrooms much like this one, among educators and students like us—Democracy isn’t some goal to reach is a quality of education praxis—debate should take the topic as an opportunity to internalize the democratic values we talk about applying to others’ struggles—it starts by listening to each others’ stories and formulating based on lived experiences. Bottom-up etc.

Apple and Bean 2007 Democratic Schools: Lessons in Powerful Education. ED: Michael W. Apple and James A Beane, page 24-26

The term democracy assistance is completely ambiguouse—there is no clear definition of what it means and assuming that there can be only causes more confusion about policy decisions. All of their predictability impacts to the framework arguments are non-unique because the topic itself is ambiguous. If our aff creates some unpredictability, it’s okay because that’s inevitable.

Lappin 2010

This entire season we have been talking about democracy assistance in disconnected, out-of-touch ways.  The events that are going on in MENA are profound – the type of stuff we’ll tell kids about when we’re old.  “I was alive for that”. 

Yet our response to the topic has been less than profound.  Just like any other topic, the vast majority of debaters run to the biggest extinction scenario.  The fact that people are fighting and dying for freedom while we speak does not seem to change our approach.  The difference between a farm subsidy and a revolution is one-in-the-same to the traditional debate mind.

Still more have responded to the topic with calls to retreat to the theoretical – using what is intriguing and eye-opening about the MENA revolutions to turn completely inward.

One way or the other, we have tranquilized the awe-inspiring events this topic was intended to speak to the heart of.  Keeping it at a safe distance, we move rigidly within our argumentative comfort zones.  If left unchecked, our education on this topic could end-up being the opposite.  We may learn much of the data, but because our response to it will fall into debate mathematics, we would have been better off just staying at home and watching the news.

But this is precisely the danger.  Debate allows us to find comfort in distance from the problems that we address.  The hypothetical nature of debate makes it easy to forget that there is a very real world out there.  If we think of what is going on in MENA as a game, then we begin to filter our epistemologies through that game.  A horrible story about virginity tests at an Egyptian protest becomes inherency for the affirmative.  Hundreds of people dying in Syria last week was a good thing – it means the aff has more of an impact.

The way we play this game increases the propensity for disconnection, for traditional mental machines to begin epistemologically trivializing what should be stories that keep us up at night. 

Thus, instead of turning toward our traditional argumentative comfort zones to distance ourselves from that which is disturbing, shocking, inspiring, and beautiful about the topic; Ryan and I choose to make this affirmative – one of the last of the season and of my debate career – about giving-up on this fearful inclination to retreat to the theoretical.

Forget simulation of democracy assistance, lets DO IT.<ahem>

I got a “leave a name and number after the beep”

Kinda message

A wake you up outta yo sleep

Kinda message

Tryna chill, need to get on yo feet

Kinda message

Full of b/s, you are what you eat

Kinda message

By “you are what you eat”,

I mean you are what you buy into

You gotta guard ya heart

And keep a close eye on your mental

This world will leave you with no drive

Like a rental

People follow, but are no longer “lead”,

Broken pencil

Middle East, Northern Africa

Is where we see the problem

Bombs dropped on Homs

Assad is tryna solve em

But no shots are stopped

And no lives are saved

Until we fight power

With power

Give people the center stage

Im amazed

At all the ways

The US is in cahoots

Like when our money bought the guns

That sponsored Mubarak’s troops

Give people no right to live

They practice the right to die

Oppressed, hot like the 4^th

Cuz they already know July

No lie

Imspittin truth

Fight thru it,

Im living proof

Send HIP HOP to the region

To re-empower the youth

Cynthia Schneider and Kristina Nelson 2008

(Cynthia P. Schneider (PhD Harvard, former ambassador, working at Georgetown now) and Kristina Nelson (PhD Berkeley, living in Cairo since 1983 doing consulting for local artists and donors), “Mightier than the Sword: Arts and Culture in the U.S.-Muslim World Relationship”, June, Brookings Institute Saban Center)

Arts and culture, …for nonprofit arts and media organizations.

I got a “leave a name and number after the beep”

Kinda message

A wake you up outta yo sleep

Kinda message

Tryna chill, need to get on yo feet

Kinda message

Full of b/s, you are what you eat

Kinda message

Im fareal when I tell you
 This is no time to chill

Cuz if we’re not willing to do it

China or Russia will

You’re probably thinkin right now

“Are you serious? Why us?”

Debate cant send HIP HOP

This is gonna be too tough

But pushing limits, a must

Innovation is us

But we need people to say

<Ryan> “Ay, enough is enough”

Ayat al Cormezi

Arrested in Pearl Square

No beat behind it

But the spoken word was there

In rare form,

So therefore,

Im implored,

To do same.

What im seeing everyday

Is what I hear about in Bahrain

So we wont leave it alone

We’re meeting you in the middle

Hope I’m not making it hard

And I don’t fiddle with with riddles

Its simple.

Send HIP HOP

Send HIP HOP to the Master

Send HIP HOP to the Slave

Send it to the well-mannered

And the ones who wont behave

For some, its all they got

And they gon take it to the  grave

By CHOICE or by FORCE

You gon hear what we gotta say

Robin Wright 2011

Robin B. Wright is an American foreign affairs analyst, and an award-winning journalist and author. “The Hip-Hop Rhythm of Arab Revolt: Muslim rappers have become a surprising source of dissent and protest”

7/23 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903554904576457872435064258.html?mod=lifestyle_newsreel

In November 2010, a young Tunisian… while she is performing.

Now, what kind of message

Should not be considered equal?

Any message not designed

To wake up a sleeping people

Cuz they poppin everybody

Bustin caps at the babies,

Slitting throats of the men

Droppin bombs on the ladies

Updates to Twitter

Picture to Book of Faces

It’s one thing to have a dream

But it’s another thing to chase it

Complacent and so detached

Discussions are sterilized

The standards for these discussions

Leave politics paralyzed

Society in demise

And I feel you more than you think

Whole block get sprayed up

Kill a 5 year old in her sleep

Government aint listening

Issues bigger than Michigan

Soon as you think they fixed it

They go around and they switch again

So you need a “a name and number after the beep”

Kinda message

Keep fightin even when you feel weak

Kinda message

The more they silence you, the louder you speak

Kinda message

Because its time to take it back to the streets

Kinda message

Send HIP HOP

The 1AC is a form of democracy assistance via cultural engagement.  This topic is about revolutions that are occurring – at least in part – through media that we have access to.  You don’t have to theorize about what the future politician you will do or say if you work for USAID someday, you can just get involved in the revolution. 

Facebook and Twitter didn’t start these revolutions but they sure helped.  They are conduits for not just for logistical information but also soulful inspiration.  The river of ideas that flooded Pearl and Tahir Square has capillaries in this room on the computers in front of you.

So quit fighting the urge to get involved.  Voting affirmative is an endorsement of democracy assistance in in the form of cultural engagement through hip-hop music.

Our method is one that locates the communicative aspect of policy making centrally – it is not enough for debaters to learn how to do rational cost-benefit analysis exclusively

The way that we talk about the Arab revolutions matters – our method of cultural engagement acknowledges that the policy making training we receive from this topic must acknowledge that this isn’t just pieces on a game board.  In fact, the way that policy is communicated to folks on the ground is absolutely pivotal to the overall success of our involvement in MENA.

You should prefer our approach to alternatives that gloss-over the method of presentation.