This year’s topic is that the United States Federal Government should substantially increase its democracy assistance for one or more of the following: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen
The problem with the debate community’s response is the dominant episteme, or what James Baldwin called in 1965, the “Western system of reality” from which deliberation and enunciation occurs. The only solution to this problem is the interjection of the sub-altern epistemic perspective.

The first question we must ask is why is the U.S. always the starting point for, and focus of discussion? To answer this point, we must look to the work of Dr. Ramón Grosfoguel, a professor of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Grosfugel writes in 2011
Grosfoguel 11
(Ramón, University of California, Berkeley, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality”, Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(1)
The first point to discuss is… from which the subject speaks.

The placement of the USFG at the center of discussion is based on the assumption that the U.S. is neutral and ethical from within the “Western system of reality” and the privilege it comes with. The focus on USFG actually causes a tradeoff with in-depth inquiry & discussion about the nature of these revolutions.
As Esam Al – Amin writes in 2011:
(Esam Al-Amin, Centre for Research on Globalization, “It's Not About the West, Mr. Friedman - Distorting the Essence of the Great Arab Revolutions of 2011”, http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/03/04/distorting-the-essence-of-the-great-arab-revolutions-of-2011/)
One of the problems ….could be disposed of.

Debate is part of the elites he speaks of. The drive to make all things about the U.S. is precisely the issue. As William Robinson, professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara puts it in 2005, unless there is an interjection of the subaltern epistemic position, debate and the knowledge it produces will remain a breeding ground for “intellectual mercenaries.” This approach to interlocution is precisely what James Herod in 2004 calls the “we should” mentality of Americans who think nationalistically
Robinson ‘5 [William, Sociology prof – UC Santa Barbara, “The Battle for Global Civil Society,” an interview with Jonah Gindin of Venezuelanalysis.com, June 13, http://www.iefd.org/articles/global_civil_society.php]
Do you think that the academics and policymakers behind the "democracy promotion" strategy believe that they are promoting genuine democracy? Or are they cynically aware of their imperialist role?
Herod 2001 (James, “A Stake, Not a Mistake: On Not Seeing the Enemy”, October, http://www.jamesherod.info/index.php?sec=paper&id=9&print=y&PHPSESSID=4387a9147ad42723ea101944dd538914)

 The second question we must ask is why everyone should be forced to utilize the USFG as an actor in debates about the topic. It is what Proffessor Istvan Meszaros, in 1989, called a “methodological” bracketing out based on “‘procedural rules’, ‘models’ and ‘paradigms’” steeped in the “established order.” 

This point is contextualized by Professor Ziauddin Sardar and anthropologist Merryl Wyn Davies in 2004, who speak from an immigrant Muslim epistemic location.
Sardar & Wyn Davies ‘4
[Ziauddin, Visiting Professor, the School of Arts, The City University, London, Chair – Muslim Institute; Merryl, Welsh Muslim anthropologist; American Terminator: Myths, Movies, and Global Power p26]

Grosfugel illustrates the importance of this point in 2011, stating that:
This epistemic strategy ….of Europeans/non-Europeans.

This starting point necessitates a disavowal of American hypocrisy and violence, at home and abroad. However, from my epistemic location, I am privy to what the USFG did in Nigeria; which was to help create a sham democracy after the death of Abacha in 1998, primarily to preserve its access to oil and natural resources. Nigerian scholar Ikechi Mgbeoji is particularly poignant when he states in 2000 that: “American foreign policy is largely a process of cold-hearted professionalism fueled by articulated and enlightened national self-interest.”

The interjection of our sub-altern perspective in this round is able to challenge the supposedly neutral Eurocentric paradigm that undergirds this year’s topic and how knowledge production typically operates in debate. We implore you to join us in the disruption of the common paradigmatic approach to the topic by affirming our interjection of sub-altern epistemic knowledges that are able to counter the current hegemonic cog-producing intellectualism. 

This year’s resolution is not about Syria, Yemen, Lybia, Egypt, Bahrain or Tunisia in any meaningful sense except as these constructs can serve their purpose in the narrative of the USFG. Otherwise, statements like this from the topic research committee would have actually given us pause in our rush to craft a slate of nearly identical resolutions –

(http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?topic=2444.0)

“We were primarily looking at...solvency cards appropriate to such a mechanism.”

We shouldn’t begin from the startpoint of the USFG-

Esam Al – Amin 2011

(Esam Al-Amin, Centre for Research on Globalization, “It's Not About the West, Mr. Friedman - Distorting the Essence of the Great Arab Revolutions of 2011”, http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/03/04/distorting-the-essence-of-the-great-arab-revolutions-of-2011/)

One of the problems... stereotypes could be disposed of.             

We criticize the kind of debate that takes the rational blank state as our mode of engagement with policy for granted because this form of knowledge production functions within a Eurocentric paradigm that obscures that when we speak we already have a subject position that is engaging with colonial structures in a certain way- Grosfoguel 11

 (Ramón, University of California, Berkeley, Associate professor, Ethnic Studies Department, Chicano/Latino Studies, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality”, Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1)

The hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western… international division of labor of core/periphery that overlaps with the global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-Europeans.

The demand for democracy abroad from the agency of the federal government isn’t just an inconsistency- it’s the same demand for me to fit within framings that make it easier for you to disenfranchise me carried out through US policy- Sussman 6

 [Gerald, Prof of Urban Studies & Communication – Portland State; “The Myths of Democracy Assistance: US Political Intervention in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe,” Monthly Review, v58, #7, http://monthlyreview.org/2006/12/01/the-myths-of-democracy-assistance-u-s-political-intervention-in-post-soviet-eastern-europe]

One of the notable shifts in post-Soviet world politics is... overall good intentions of the state

The problem with both resolutional and academic approaches to policymaking is that they don’t consider the epistemic foundations of their intellectual labor. When democracy assistance is approached with a contrived viewpoint that doesn’t consider how structures of democracy promotion and US interventionism are relevant to the discussion we create intellectual mercenaries that can only serve to legitimize a flawed system- Robinson 5

 [William, Sociology prof – UC Santa Barbara, “The Battle for Global Civil Society,” an interview with Jonah Gindin of Venezuelanalysis.com, June 13, http://www.iefd.org/articles/global_civil_society.php]

Perhaps Gramsci was giving the benefit of the doubt to these intellectuals. There are many respectable and well-intentioned.... , the crisis of civilizational proportions we face in 2005.

And, it’s not just that our discussion is useful in the abstract- the community would be remiss without allowing in forms of education that don’t adhere to traditional norms of engaging ideas.  Methodological bracketing out of our discussion is structurally biased in favor of those that benefit from the current order.  Such frameworks smuggle in value commitments and ideological assumptions which are anything but fair and neutral.

Meszaros ’89 (Istvan, Chair of philosophy @ U. of Sussex, The Power of Ideology, p. 232-234 GAL)6.1.2

Naturally, to speak of a ‘common’ methodologic… methodology are doubly mystifying.

Aff: WGO GR

Round 7   Tournament:

vs: Kansas PW

Judge: Antonnuci

Plan Text

nomo

1ac Advantages

Anti-blackness

2ac Offense

Policing = bad

Marxism bad

1ar Strategy

Policing bad / Marxism bad

2ar Strategy

Policing, Marxism bad

Aff:West Georgia GR

Round #  2 Tournament: Shirley

vs:Michigan State LR

Judge:Matthew Moore

Plan Text

n/a

1ac Advantages

Ant:-blackness

2ac Offense

Structural adjustment

1ar Strategy

K of T

2ar Strategy

K of politics 

What does it mean, ontologically, to BE capital-B Black in the World? Blackness is fashioned in the furnaces of modernity’s quotidian terror and the churning vertigo of the slave ship in contradistinction to the Human. The African qua Black is a priori metaphysically and socially dead – without transgression or contingency.  The black is totally powerless, alienated from kinship structures and generally dishonored. This is what it means to be Black

Woods 7 (Tryon, Professor, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Sonoma State University, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, V, Special Double-Issue, summer 2007, 319-330, OG)

In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes clear the distinction between domination and colonialism. The difference is that…. absurdity. As Fanon puts it in Black Skin, White Masks, when the black enters the space, all reason immediately evacuates.

Democracy is anti-Black because it is foundationalized by the political and libidinal economy of Slavery. The Dutch case proves that Black Death provides the material base for freedom, and the psychic void that Humanity flees. Furthermore, the academic specialization of our discussions disavows the truth of Black Death that facilitates the rise and spread of democratic ideals.

Buck-Morss 2000 (Susan, professor of political philosophy and social theory in the department of government, Cornell University, and Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Public Intellectuals Program, Florida Atlantic University, “Hegel and Haiti”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4. (summer, 2000), pp. 821-865, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0093-1896%28200022%2926%3A4%3C821%3AHAH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F, Accessed: 11/6/11, OG)

By the eighteenth century, slavery… nothing to say about African slaves in this ~ontext.~

Discussions of democracy in the debate community this year are anti-Black because their assumptive logic is a distancing from the void of subjectivity that is Blackness. Notions of freedom, rights, and participation gain their coherence in contradistinction to the abject mutesness of the Black object. As Humanity aspires to freedom, screaming “give me liberty or give me death”, “we are the 99 percent”, “we won’t be slaves to Mubarrak or Ben Ali”, “down with Saleh”, it renders illegible the Slave’s grammar of suffering. Freedom for the Slave lies not in the “Arab Spring”, the blazing autumn skies of the Enlightenment, or the warm breeze of July 4^th. It is gratuitous freedom from the world, Humanity, and the multicultural love-fests that inaugurated the slave trade and sustains contemporary rainbow coalitions.

Wilderson 10 [Frank B. III, Ph.D., Associate Professor at UC Irvine, former ANC member, “on some guerilla shit”, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 19-22, OG]

In their own ways, Spillers, a Black woman and cultural historian, and Eltis, a White historian of the transatlantic slave trade, make the similar n a trajectory of Humanist thought, which is why the infinite trajectories of freedom that emanate from Humanism's hub are anything but infinite—for they have no line of flight leading to the Slave. 

We refuse to engage in academic dribble about democracy assistance. Our utilization of the Slave narrative to disrupt knowledge production destroys the unethical debate fantasy-space that reproduces an anti-Black world. Claims of fairness, predictability, balance, standards, and norms are reductive abstractions to maintain passivity and subtend a churning vertigo of Black and Red flesh. We are a revolutionary struggle against democracy and wholeheartedly believe that Whites are guilty until proven innocent of trying to maintain their fantasy-space. We know this hurts, but only truth begets gratuitous freedom.

Wilderson III 8 (Frank B., Ph.D., Associate Professor at UC Irvine, former African National Congress member, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, pages 407-11) og – contextualized

In defense of his actions, and as a way…. Here are some questions and guidelines to speed the search committee on its way and make everyone feel entitled.  

Gratuitous freedom doesn’t mean fighting for democratic inclusion and the ideals they entail, but fighting against democracy itself. The Black ethico-political project is unabashed revolution. It is not a struggle against America’s policies, but America itself. Against democracy!

Boggs 63 [James, Political activist and author of The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, “Letter of correspondence to Brandt Russell”, archived at the Walter P. Reuther library at Wayne State]

Dear Lord Russell:  It has been a long time since you wrote and lots of…. are struggling against.  Here’s hoping that 1964 will see us communicating better than in 1963, which presupposes, of course, that both of us will still be around to weather the storms and emerge into the sunshine of a different society, call it what you may.  

The Black call for contingent freedom and democratic participation perfects Slavery. The only option for the Slave is to BURN DOWN EVERYTHING in this unethical world. Cleansing violence, just like that of the Haitian revolution, is the only path to gratuitous freedom.

Farley 4 (Anthony Paul, Associate Professor at Boston College Law School, “Perfecting Slavery”, http://www.luc.edu/law/activities/publications/lljdocs/vol36_no1/farley.pdf, Accessed: 11/9/11, OG)

What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of necessity, burned everything: They burned San Domingo…. finds its way back from the undiscovered country only by burning down every plantation. When the slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes the free choice to not be.

The Slave forced is always to structurally adjust and “play alive” to participate in democracy and academia. Academic circles like the debate community police Black thought to maintain proper limits, equal ground, and stability. This process disavows Black incapacity and sutures civil society. Only an interjection of pure Black thought can destroy civil society and dis-form knowledge and Reason in the academe.

Wilderson 10 [Frank B. III, Ph.D., Associate Professor at UC Irvine, former ANC member, “on some guerilla shit”, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 38-44, OG]

How is it that the Black appears to partner… regardless of the fact that the mobility of symbolic material, that is, the idea of "criminal rehabilitation" and the agreement on who constitutes a criminal, and the mobility of imaginary captation, that is, the image of the warden, are both without limit in their capacity for transgression.