It Ain’t Over ‘Til the Black Team Wins: Race, Corruption, and the Academic Debate Community
Collegiate debate has little to offer, in the way of perks, money, or prestige, but it is one of those fields that could make a crucial contribution to intellectual freedom in academia. Unfortunately, however, hidden behind academia's velvet curtain of tyranny, debate too has become an affirmative action ghetto of racism, political intimidation, and intellectual incompetence.
Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, to Rod Steiger, as his brother Charley, in the taxicab scene from On the Waterfront (1954):
....Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, "Kid, this ain't your night. We're going for the price on Wilson."
You remember that? "This ain't your night"! My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors in the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville!You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money....
You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. It was you, Charley.
In a prize fight, if you knock down your opponent, retreat to a neutral corner, and the referee counts to “ten,” without him rising to his feet, the fight is over by a knockout, and the ref raises your hand in victory. Not so, in the seamy world of academic debate, where a competitor may be declared the victor while lying unconscious on the canvas, so to speak, while his dominant rival is declared out on his feet. It’s not what you know, it’s who you are.
Consider the Cross Examination Debate Association’s (CEDA) annual tournament, held in March in Wichita, Kansas. The final round pitted Dayvon Love and Deven Cooper, of Towson State (MD) University, against Chris Stone and Nate Johnson of the University of Kansas.
In Deven Cooper’s eight-minute opening performance of his script, he jumps from pillar to post—“white supremacy” (seven times), “epistemology,” “global dysfunction,” “whites live in a racial fantasy land,” “Who believe that the shit that they write in books,” “credibility from our personal experience,” “epistemologically bankrupt, “selected by (unclear) to be raped,” “African women aboard those ships who felt compelled to murder their own babies,” “global systems,” “our social locations,” “black men,” “our revolutionary aesthetic,” “the black aesthetic,” “destruction of white ideas,” “feel excluded,” “white male judges favor only the white male,” “Bush administration,” “Justice Department,” “white supremacy the root of all evil,” “ecological predicament…"
Note that Cooper is denouncing not only American society, but the leftwing debate community, as well.
Cooper combines what scholar Lawrence M. Doss (PDF) once referred to, in a discussion of Leonard Jeffries, as the “paranoid style” in black rhetoric, with what I call the black school of rhetorical bombast and with multicultural rhetoric, which consists of slogans denouncing “racism, sexism, and homophobia” and class privilege.
According to Doss, the black paranoid style invokes white conspiracies. The black school of rhetorical bombast uses big words and pompous phrases to suggest erudition and to distract the audience from one’s lack of an argument (see also here). The purpose of multicultural rhetoric is simple intimidation.
While being careful to speak only of destroying “white ideas,” rather than white people, Cooper also evokes the genocidal black supremacy of Frances Cress Welsing, according to whom blacks are in a war of defensive racial annihilation against whites and the “global system of white supremacy.”
Following Towson’s Deven Cooper’s first speech, Cooper acknowledges during Kansas’ Nate Johnson’s cross-examination that a “revolutionary black aesthetic” is “an anti-white aesthetic.”Cooper and Love openly identify with the black nationalist black arts movement, which sought to destroy white culture, and through it, white society. The movement’s most famous writer, playwright Frederick August Kittel, better known as August Wilson, referred to the white man as “the Devil,” even though Wilson, the son of a white, German-born, baker and his black, American-born, cleaning lady wife, was himself every bit as much a white as he was a black man.
KU’s Chris Stone and Nate Johnson offer as an alternative to Towson’s Cooper and Love, a call for openness and an ethic of love.
During Johnson’s rebuttal to Love, beginning at 43:05 of the video, he exposes and decisively refutes the cheaters’ sophistries. He points out that Towson reduces the entire world to “white supremacy” and the black “challenge” to it; argues that there is “no connection between a revolutionary black aesthetic and what they seek to realize”; that they are provincial (“everything has to fit within your social location”); that Towson set up a double-bind: Whites who seek to bring blacks into the debate community are “racists,” while those who oppose reaching out to blacks are “bigots” (“We’re totally screwed, either way”); and ultimately, that Cooper and Love’s conception of black identity is parasitic (my word) and presupposes the truth of white supremacy: “Black identity only exists in opposition to white supremacy,” “Implicitly, blacks become inferior,” and it “reifies the type of construction of white supremacy that you are so ardently criticizing.”
The boxing term is, “knockout punch.”
Johnson does everything but point out that if white supremacy is the source of all the world’s problems, and is inseparable from the existence of whites, the only solution to it is to kill all whites.
In lieu of counterarguments, Cooper and Love assert that Johnson and Stone have “no methodology” and are arguing for “colorblindness.” (Although pc academics deny the reality of race, they identify “colorblindness” with neo-conservatism, and thus with racism, and rabidly support a society based largely on racial spoils, though according to them, there are no races to whom one could redistribute the spoils.)
So, Johnson and Stone won, right? Wrong. The all-white panel of judges gave Towson the victory, 7-4, with some of them giving explanations of their votes (at the end of the video) that were no more and no less than racial loyalty oaths to blacks. (Judge John Hines, of the University of North Texas, is the worst of a bad bunch.)
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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