Part V. Activism vs. Persuasion
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Activist Rejection Forecloses the Persuasion Overcoming Prejudice Requires
- The enemy of progress is the use of critic-manipulated outrage—for example, leading racial minorities to see Europeans as subconsciously prejudiced, so that minorities reject participating in learning from culture. The critic is used just to talk about authors that the team and the judge can relate to, giving up the opportunity of race leadership in detailed research over affirmative action or criminal reform. People suppress sharing negative reactions to groups out of fear of being accused as racist and sexist. Cancel culture is more toxic than cancer, as people look to vilify their enemies by publicly spreading hate over some phrase they said without fair explanation just so they are unjustly marginalized and dehumanized and retaliate worse due to polarization and preclusion of dialogue. Some people excuse in their own mind negative reactions as “those people may just be racist” and foreclose the engagement that actually changes minds. The goal is to keep the conversation open, not to assign motive. Some may speculate that someone not liking them could be racist, but one needs to pursue common interests to connect deeper. The popularity of interests and statistical difference in groups is tied to essentializing interests as cultural self-expression so as to develop authentic identity fetishism and then to isolate into niche cultures. People look at labels that social groups construct for them instead of inspiration by a full range of paths. We should not essentialize diversity by appearance as it trades-off with focusing on background and perspective to affect diversity relevant to decisions. Dialogue does more to shift unexamined bias than dismissal does.. Authors would not reject a debate speech as it is equivalent to their articles or journal papers. Racism encompasses both the belief in inherent racial superiority and the practices of unequal treatment to overlook some racial groups. Rejection makes one feel ethically superior, masks one's own inevitable prejudices, and ends dialogue needed to teach against overlooking. It is a fallacy to tell a person to reject overlooking other groups, since the nature of overlooking is precisely that one does not know or see it as prejudiced. Critics have to help people to see it from other lifestyles. The norm that everyone should know to reject racism just means correcting errors after seeing one's bias. Debate can sharpen activist claims by forcing them through evidence. A team arguing that standardized admissions criteria entrench disparity has to confront the mismatch literature, and others confront the pipeline data.
Figure 19: Activism forecloses persuasion by elevating ideological purity over dialogue.
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Debate is already shifting to both an annual topic and to major current issues. Teams should demand activists debate their rounds on, “Resolved: The U.S. federal and state governments should propose a plan for activist action on inequality of achievement between racial and/or demographic groups.” Affirmatives can also defend the core mindsets necessary for the speech. Negatives are limited to intrinsic opportunity costs to the plan and/or to the speech mindset. There is no way to argue out of this slayer as it contains any activist plan to address racism. “The task now, instead of convincing someone that there is a social problem that needs addressing, is to arouse desire for alternatives, belief in their possibility [...] That’s what consciousness raising and organizing are about. And the disagreement, if it became substantive and was taken seriously, could only be healthy. [...] Majority cultures and men have to be taught by people in minority cultures and women what is best for those domains and have to transcend the narrow messages of their prior experiences” (Albert, 1998). Activists are asking the judge to agree that obviously one should avoid errors of bias, while confusing to think of voting as like “fiating” change while giving up opportunity for a true challenge. Connolly (1999) compares it to when one critical scholar “calls the other names that give ammunition to the cultural Right.” The backlash against high-level wins by activists spurred backlash within the media's awareness from activism making a mockery of policy debate (The Oklahoma Daily, 2014). The far right wins and looks reasonable when activists make leftist political reformers look for excuses to label each other “racist genocider” for discussing sensible policies, similar to how the anti-woke backlash lead to Trump's rise: “the very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump's type of patriotic populism” (Žižek, 2024). Critics appeal to “one would not look good being called racist,” but confuse that with “institutions and society develop subconscious racism, so dealing with the racist system must be rejected, because racism must be rejected.”
- While claiming racism to be the biggest problem minorities should focus on, activists fail to see harm when readers of average intelligence take in power-tagged soundbites to project blame onto other groups with essentialism toxifying the needed relationships. What holds back minorities is not that doctors & engineers of European or Asian heritage have it in for them. Nor do most presume minorities are less capable. While past eras had a more limited understanding of evolution, most today see individuals of any group as inherently capable in any field and take time to talk before judging, but often still fail to bond due to diverse values. People should not make too much of the need to be liked by others to infer racism as an excuse why others do not like a group. “An awareness of difference (as can be seen in Bosnia and Rwanda) can all too often lead not to celebration but destruction” (Krause & Williams, 1997). Likability needs common cultural ties, not splitting over authenticity fetishism. Our institutions would hope to see many more join, as globalization and universities accelerate mobility. Racism is sometimes confused with achievement disparity, which is rooted in history, cultural family values, and role models who popularize interests in a culture. If activists cajole minorities to project onto Europeans responsibility for historical association, some people feel pressured to agree, feeling they will look good in the eyes of friends & family apologizing for collective guilt on their behalf. This reinforces the assumption of collectivism in a culture's responsibility; so, when viewers watch news on immigrants and crime, they blame that culture for failing responsibility in the present. Rejection reifies reductionism of races with diverse populations described as antipodes via crime vs. education statistics or as subconsciously supremacist vs. antiracist activists. Rewarding winning on undebatable truisms causes the most toxic exclusion that Albert (1998) finds repugnant to activist change, like coming to “block them from coming toward us or sticking with us.” If everyone gets called racist, then the label loses its significance, causing some to be more racist, as these activists seem unreasonable to deal with and come to tournaments with only one goal: to take offense. Rejecting the other teams so long as subconscious racism exists only enrages unjust hypocrisy. Some judges may want to feel good voting to reject all racism, but the ballot has no effect other than injustice.
