Tournament: Lakeland | Round: 1 | Opponent: BCC BY | Judge: Pavi Chari
I don’t belong here
On my first day of school, when I told my World History teacher that white western imperialism was responsible for the erasure of too many cultures to count and he gave me sarcastic glance and walked away, while the white boy behind me told me to “stop hating America”
But then someone told me about debate, an intellectual space where I could supposedly be myself and do what I wanted. He lied to me, just like they lies to Assata when they told her this was the land of the free.
Ever since my first tournament I learned that novices didn’t belong, then critical debaters didn’t belong, and that there was no space for the Black female body
I have been disenfranchised by the white policy debate community and by the left debate community
I am Assata
I have been antagonized and marked as a terrorist of the debate community, with my only motivation to destroy it.
Assata is not a terrorist, nor am I.
I call myself Assata.
Assata’s story highlights just one particular instance of the government’s injustice towards the black female. From Assata in her own words in 2003:
Shakur, Former Black Panther and U.S. Political Prisoner in exile, 2003 (Assata, Crisis Magazine, p. 23)
A politica1 activist most of my life, I am an ex-political prisoner
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would never receive any justice, my committed comrades liberated me from prison.
Forty years later the US government has assigned Assata an exchange value of 2 million
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return her to her owners, the New Jersey State Police and the USFG
Cleaver, Law Professor at Emory University and former Black Panther Party member, 2005 (Kathleen, Essence Magazine, Vol. 36 (4))
Apparently the million-dollar bounty has already been covertly offered by police to a
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law. We cannot allow them to engage in lynch-mob diplomacy.
We demand that the U.S. government totally rescind both its $2
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defamation of Assata's name, family, friends, comrades and supporters.
Assata is a fugitive from slavery - Fugitivity is a politic of stealing back the
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masters – but this is an impossible demand to make on the state alone
Best and Hartman 2005 Stephen and Saidiya, “Fugutive Justice,” Representations p. 1-2
Cugoano isn’t at all confused here. A ‘‘just commutation’’ is not opposed to
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, of giving back what was taken, of repairing what was broken?
We don’t belong here.
Just as I have been exiled from both the debate community and society for my dark skin and female body, there is no place for the mixed body. We are both too “other” to be white, to overlook the atrocities committed by our government and pretend that all we need is increased economic engagement with Mesoamerican countries to solve the friction between us.
We don’t belong here.
Debate functions through exile. We are polarized into those who either debate on the
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mean debate is just a game, it means there’s something at stake.
The debate space is one of confinement, of reduction. While other teams respond
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coaches, because the only way to gain respect is to win it.
Like Assata, I am the fugitive slave stealing back my body through performance on the plantation that is debate. Assata’s stealing away as a runaway slave is a metaphor for our relationship to the resolution and the debate community—this stealing away disrupts hegemony and produces the kind of transgression necessary to collapse the norms of civil society.
Hartman 97 Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia, Scenes of Subjection, p. 65-7
When the enslaved slipped away to have secret meetings, they would call it "
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the articulation of insurgent claims that make need the medium of politics.74
And we must interrogate slavery through black feminist performance. As a property constituted in torture and rape, the ungendered Black woman’s body made flesh is the Slave par excellence. Our performance and advocacy is a symbolic and material returning of the body to the slave.
Spillers 1987 Hortense, owns you—paradox!, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”p. 66-69
Even though Daughters have their own agenda with reference to this order of Fathers (
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person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside.
AT: Feminism/Gender K
The flesh is the concentration of “ethnicity” that contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge
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for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations.
… She continues…
This profitable “atomizing” of the captive body provides another angle on the divide
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, every writing as revision makes the “discovery” all over again.
Imprisoned intellectuals produce a vital form of scholarship that allows us to dissect the injustices of American society.
Joy James 2003 (Presidential Professor of the Humanities and a professor in political science) “Imprisoned intellectuals” Pg. 1and2 ROWMAN and LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham----Boulder, New Ymk, Oxford
The ‘public intellectual’ encompasses the oft-forgotten ‘prison intellectual’.
Like his or her visible counterparts, the imprisoned intellectual
reflects upon social meaning, ethics and justice; only s/he does so in
detention centres and prisons which function as intellectual and political
sites unauthorised by the state. Consider a special grouping of
imprisoned intellectuals, political prisoners. Incarcerated for their political
beliefs and acts or politicised after being jailed for social crimes
against people or property, progressive political rebels, surviving or
succumbing to incarceration, wrote as outlaw intellectuals. Facing
repression because of their political stances, they provided unique
and controversial insights into social justice and humanity.