Ideas From High School Debate So Bad I Couldn't Make Them Up

Is it bad to prevent people from being convicted based on junk science because black people are LITERALLY slaves?

I’ve elsewhere talked about the insanity in high school and college debate, where judges refuse to vote for any position to the right of Lenin. I’m not the only one who noticed this: the Free Press has an article about it, and so does Slow Boring. The kinds of arguments that proliferate in debate are truly crazy, what happens when ideology runs amuck, wholly untethered from sanity. Debate is mostly no longer about politics, but instead is just about saying the right words in the right combination, doing the right sort of vulgar intellectual dance, rather than saying anything profound or true.

Truly a wonder of the world, akin to the Taj Mahal.

Debate has two sides: the affirmative and the negative. The affirmative argues for the proposition. The negative—surprise surprise—argues against the proposition. Of course, sometimes the affirmative wholly eschews arguing for the proposition on the grounds that, for example, “The plan exemplifies the method of signifyin(g) upon the resolution, a vernacular counter-strategy of repetition and revision within language games like debate that unsettles the transparent correspondence between signifier and signified toward an aporetic trope-a-dope that draws on the absent presence of blackness to trouble the proliferation of information in CJR curricula.” Or something.

In debate, there’s a kind of argument called a kritik, which involves, rather than criticizing the other team’s proposal, arguing, in some way, that they have some bankrupt assumptions about some things. Here’s what the kritik would look like in the context of ordinary life:

John: Hey, should we get a sandwich?

James: Your assumption that there is a neutral self which can consider getting a sandwich reproduces settlerist assumptions of futurity wherein the settler is omnipotent and able to do what they want to settled populations. Instead, we should unsettle colonial modes of discourse, which outweighs because settler colonialism is responsible for all bad things ever.

One common kritik is called settler colonialism—or set col, as all cool kids call it. It argues that the United States is a settler colonial state, one that’s currently—as it has been through all of its history—hellbent on exterminating the native populations, and that the other team is in some way settler colonial. For example, one of the most common ways that they argue this is they claim that the other team, if they argue that their proposal would lower the probability of the end of the world, is being a colonist! Apparently, worrying about the end of the world is very settlery and colonialy because, well, debaters don’t really explain this bit, but instead cite a colonial studies (a very serious field) professor from clown college just saying that it’s true. Therefore, they argue that the other team should lose because, they’re being settlerist, and thus are actively an enemy of desirable decolonial movements.

What I’ve just said is much clearer than what is usually said—debate is notoriously obscure. Debate has its own weird vernacular where kritiks aren’t stated clearly, but instead people say things like “Science’s positivist imperatives and murderous inheritances render the world a living laboratory through settler colonial and slave-making violence that writes its racializing effects as the result of biologically signified traits that determine the positions of the others of Europe from within affectability and outer-determination while instituting European Man within the transparency and interiority of the rational mind.” I didn’t make this up—I found this after randomly looking online for a kritik someone made in a debate round.

You might think that judges would not take these deeply vague and crazy arguments seriously. They do, of course, take them seriously—in 2018, for example, the affirmative team won the most competitive national tournament by arguing that there is literally a race war going on (how did I not read about this in the paper?) and so instead of debating, we should go out and…fight the race war or something?

But it’s worse than that.