Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
1AC starts with a narrative from Ryan about his mother.

Our surrounding dictate some part of who we are.  And my momma had lost something, an energy that kept her going.  The alcohol just solidified something that was already going on around her, an environment of despair.  But let’s take a step back…

Energy production necessitates a zone of sacrifice – while we enjoy the benefits of constant electricity, clean water, and technical gadgetry beyond belief, the hidden story of violence remains invisible – at every phase of the process of energy production, oppressed people are sacrificed for privilege.  It is not just coal that burns but the inner cities themselves.  

Robert Bullard explains in 2008 that (Robert D. Bullard, Ph.D, Environmental Justice Resource Center,_Clark Atlanta University, 7/2/08, “POVERTY, POLLUTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM: STRATEGIES FOR BUILDING HEALTHY AND SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES” http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/PovpolEj.html

The United States is...poverty, and overloaded health care systems.

This is not just a technical policy problem – if there was simply some zoning law that could fix everything, the organized political movements that already exist to fight these injustices would have accomplished victory already.  Unfortunately, what they’re fighting is something greater than a policy flaw – it is a systemic form of environmental and social destruction that is informed by a violent dismissal of identity, a proactive form of creating invisibility that keeps some of the most acute forms of structural violence from public view.
--

Thus, our investigation of this topic must begin with the way we socially construct zone of sacrifice.  If what the resolution asks us to do is increase production of energy that disproportionately leaves its waste in my old neighborhood, then our answer is no thanks!  

Instead, we want to save the topic from the resolution.  If energy policy necessitates zones of sacrifice that kill and hurt people because their identities, than we must question the historical, epistemological, and social factors that create that necessity.  This is a deeper, better investigation into the topic that won’t otherwise exist.

Moreover, this debate round is about debate – if the zones of sacrifice are socially constructed, than debate has its own zones of sacrifice that must be investigated.  Zones of sacrifice are manifested in debate in two connected ways:

1.  Literally – people from dilapidated and underprivileged communities have a far narrower chance of getting into debate to begin with.  Environmental racism is not just something that makes the air dirty, it crushes the life chances of people who live in the zones of sacrifice.  We need to be aware of the parts of world that have been written-off as disaster zones and think about who cannot be here as a result.

2.  Culturally – the way we think and talk change the way we act – there is no denying this in this history of environmental racism – thus, the seeds of physical destruction of bodies is in assumptions, epistemologies, and ethical calculations.  If debate produces political energy, then we must ask ‘what are debate’s zones of sacrifice?’  What price to we pay for the ‘greater good’ and who is it that is excluded as a result?

Debate itself produces energy.

So often the energy we create is unable to effectively empower us to be agents of change in the world – we are always told to be patient policy makers that produce something worthwhile someday…but some of us don’t have time to wait around. For some of us, we need change now. For some of us, tomorrow is not promised. Not only does the current model of debate, whereby we simulate game playing so we can be effective later, discourage us from creating change now, it also discourages meaningful participation from people who experience violence on a daily basis who don’t have time to wait around for some change in their life, whose “someday” is not assured. 

It’s time we assure them debate can be a space for true empowerment and synergy, it’s time we re-enegergize debate.  Not only does this model of debate have to be rethought, the way in which we have these conversations need to find a way to bring us back to the forefront of our discussions. Too often, debaters throw around lives as a tool to play the game of policy debate, dropping nuclear scenarios like its nothing. 

This process has desensitized some debaters to the largest atrocities, and leaves us unmotivated to satisfy the so called point of policy debate, to participate in politics in the future, likely because we they are convinced that, with all of the disasters associated with the political realm, there is no reason to, because everything is headed to hell anyways. We must engage in efforts to relate ourselves to the discussions we have in these spaces so when we leave the activity, whether it be for the weekend, or for good, we feel empowered and motivated to actually do things, because we view it as imperative or directly affecting out lives.

Therefore, you should vote for the team that best performatively and methodologically energizes the debate space. 

In an effort to reap the benefits of competition inside the activity, we have made our agency and bodies the collateral for our politics.  We become the zones of sacrifice for debate.  We have to recognize that this activity is affected by those same structural inequailities that the topic strategically avoids. 

So it much more than saying there are zones of sacrifice inside of debate, rather there are pre-figured zones of sacrifice in debate. 

The method of the 1ac is to use to revolutionary power of debate to delegitimize those sacrifices in the realm of public deliberation

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 public...thought, rather than to weave an argument.

I thought that after my mother died that Zones of sacrifice were empty, but they are not.  They are filled with the voices and struggles of cultures that have been excluded and are still fighting to empower themselves.  Our affirmative is an effort to allow those who are sacrificed to speak for themselves instead of carrying-over the assumption that they are dead and gone.

*NEW 1AC CARD KY RR

Replaced Bullard evidence

Sheila R. Foster (Professor of Law and Co-Director, Stein Center for Law and Ethics, Fordham University School of Law) 2005
"SYMPOSIUM: CRITICAL RACE LAWYERING: FOREWORD" 73 Fordham L. Rev. 2027, lexis, loghry

The crux of my students' questions about the reach of legal...array of fields and across different social contexts.

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
2AC Cards -- 

must examine own speaking position

Fiona Cambell, 1997, members.tripod.com/FionaCampbell/speech_acts_on_problematising_empowerment.htm, 12-04-07
So who am I - to speak, to be listened....allied with resistance to oppression (Alcoff:1991:15)

Switchside is bad  - makes positions meaningless
Greene and Hicks 2005 ("lost convictions" Cultural studies. Volume 19. Informa World) (www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a738568563andfulltext=713240928)
When the opposition to debating both sides....same ethical obligation?

Objectivity is determined by those in power
Delgado 92 (Shadowboxing: An Essay On Power"
We have cleverly built power's....judge our own acts.

identity isn't bad, its a survival strategy

Marlon B. Ross, "commentary: pleasuring identity, or the delicious politics of belonging"  New literary history, Vol. 31, No. 4, pages 836-837

More to the point, Professor Michaels...of purpose, is in fact impossible.

must combine frameworks -- deliberative democracy benefits from advocacy

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)

picks-up where 1AC card leaves off for the rest of the article

Our framework creates unifying force in debate
Pat J. Gerkhe 98, “critique Arguments as Policy analysis: policy debate beyond the rationalist perspective,” http://www.cedadebate.org/CAD/1998_gerkhe.pdf

Accepting critiques as a part of… erasing the fictionality of debate rounds

We should be citizens not fake government officials. Policy of rationalism alone creates hegemony of knowledge and masks underlying conflicts
Pat J. Gerkhe 98, “critique Arguments as Policy analysis: policy debate beyond the rationalist perspective,” http://www.cedadebate.org/CAD/1998_gerkhe.pdf

Once debaters and critics recognize… the guise of the rationalist mindset

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: