Tournament: State | Round: 1 | Opponent:  | Judge: 

1AC – 8:47

Neil’s Narrative – 3/4

Shattering the Mirror

We have built a mirror
It shines in opaque malice
A glistening example
Of all that is wrong
I know you are there
Waiting on the other side
I feel your presence
I sense your pain
But you are invisible
I cannot see you
I cannot see what you are
What you could become
The mirror
It hides you
It demands that we cannot see you
I only see me
And on the other side
You only see you
You know I am there
But I am just an outline
A ghost
We are both each other’s outsider
For a long time
I was ignorant
But now I can see
What the mirror is made of
Lined by greed on my side
And pain on yours
The mirror is fragile
We break it together
The mirror is shattered into a million pieces
Finally in harmony
I see you
And you see me

1AC

Silence when addressing privilege continues its invisibility. In order to solve, privilege must be exposed using discourse that correctly explores its implications on a larger scale. Thus, revealing the structural violence caused by privilege. - :41

Rothenberg ’12 (Paula S. Rothenberg, White Privilege: essential readings on the other side of racism, Worth Publishers, 4th edition)

The continued invisibility of privilege creates a self-centered world, shifting attention to the privileged, ignoring the victims of structural violence. Economic engagement with the topic is impossible because it only continues the invisibility - we care more about the goods the womyn of Juarez produce rather than the blood they repeatedly shed. -2:37

Reinares 10 (Laura Baberan Reinares, "Globalized Philomels: State Patriarchy, Transnational Capital, and the Femicides on the US-Mexican Border in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666" South Atlantic Review: The Journal of the Modern Language Association 75.4 (Fall 2010): 51-72.) ~~=gendered modify

Susana Chavez was born and raised in Ciudad Juárez. She became an activist, speaking out against the violence. She was later brutally murdered, her left hand dismembered with a saw. She offers her own perspective through poetry

Our Blood

(Susana Chávez Castillo, a Mexican poet and human rights activist who was born and lived most of her life in her hometown of Ciudad Juárez, "Our Blood" AKA "Sangre Nuestra", http://www.englishpen.org/mexico-in-memory-of-susana-chavez-castillo-2/, acc. 3-26-2014) ~~=gender modified

Our method allows us to attend to the multiplicities of identity, opening an intersectional approach to challenging structural violence. – 1:15

Darnell L. Moore 2011 (Writer and activist whose work is informed by anti-racist, feminist, queer of color, and a0nti-colonial thought and advocacy, "On Location: The "I" in the Intersection", http://thefeministwire.com/2011/12/on-location-the-i-in-the-intersection  ~~=gender modified 

Structural violence is an ongoing travesty hidden under the insidious cloak of privilege -

Mumia Abu-Jamal ’98 ~"A QUIET AND DEADLY VIOLENCE,"  9/19/98, http://www.mumia.nl/TCCDMAJ/quietdv.htm~~

Thus, the role of the ballot is who best performatively and methodologically combats structural violence.

Our role of the ballot is a contestable, provisional frame we advance for evaluating this particular debate, not a singular vision for what the entire community should do.

The 1AC’s combination of personal experience with the perspective of the oppressed is the best starting point for understanding and dismantling structural violence

Brent R.Henze 2000 "Who Says Who Says?: The Epistemological Grounds for Agency in Liberatory Political Projects." Found in Reclaiming Identity: Realist theory and the predicament of postmodernism. Edited by Paula Moya and Michael Hames-Garcia

Traditional debate practices incentivize disinterested argumentation, training us to be excellent at justifying policies, but divorcing us from our personal convictions. We must revolutionize our debate practice by speaking from our own perspectives to avoid becoming neoconservative hacks only capable of recreating the status quo

Spanos 4 (William V. Spanos, available online cross-x.com urlhttp://www.cross-x.com/vb/showthread.php?t=94511026high)

Tournament: Lincoln Southeast | Round: 1 | Opponent: Millard West FM | Judge: Matt Cosas

¡Ya Basta21 — Enough is enough. In 1994, the ruling elites made NAFTA the law of the land, declaring war on the people of Mexico. The Zapatistas responded. They took up arms. They rebelled against their century-old oppressor, the Mexican State, using Subcomandante Marcos as their voice. But, Marcos is not their leader; the Zapatistas have no leader; they are their own nation, a nation where the power belongs to the people. Subcomandante Marcos used his voice of the people to say:

"We are the product of 500 years of struggle: first against slavery, then in the insurgent-led War of Independence against Spain; later in the fight to avoid being absorbed by North American expansion: next to proclaim our constitution and expel the French from our soil; and finally, after the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz refused to fairly apply the reform laws, in the rebellion where the people created their own leaders. In that rebellion Villa and Zapata emerged, poor men like us.

We are denied the most elementary education so they can use us as cannon fodder and plunder the wealth of our country, uncaring that we are dying of hunger and curable diseases. Nor do they care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, no decent roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health care, no food, no education. We do not have the right to freely and democratically elect our political representatives, nor are we independent from foreigners, nor do we have peace and justice for ourselves and our children.

But today, we say ENOUGH. We are the inheritors of the true builders
AND
A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency)

Today, we align ourselves with the Zapatistas movement by utilizing our subject position as debaters in this particular debate space – the counterhegemonic discourses within the speech act of the 1AC ruptures dominant historical narratives of economic engagement and democracy- We say enough to a resolution that asks us to affirm a colonial, neoliberal legacy of exploitation towards the Global South.  We say enough to a form of debate that would tell us to be quiet, to uncritically follow community norms that train us to be detached policymakers.  We instead choose to affirm our agency right here and right now – this is our participation in what the Zapatistas call the War against Oblivion

Conant ’10 (Jeff Conant, Independent Journalist with decades of grassroots experience that focuses on the intersections between social justice, development, communications and ecology, "A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency," 2010, pg. 26-28)

Every society and every state controls public discourse to one degree or another – whether
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to bear as their primary armament in this, the war against oblivion.  

Our critique of dominant conceptualizations of macropolitics is grounded from the perspective of radical democracy demonstrated by the Zapatistas – Democracy means power to the people, a far cry from what the US or Mexico have today – The ruling class is full of apathetic colonialist policy elites that are oblivious to the ways the structures they uphold disenfranchise millions – this ultimately impact turns any state action because the hierarchal structures of domination will remain in place unless we expose its corruption

Esteva ’99 (Gustavo Esteva, Contributor-Capital 26 Class, summer 1999, "The Zapatistas and people’s power," http://search.proquest.com.leo.lib.unomaha.edu/docview/209695788/fulltextPDF/1421AD089AA7588CB51/8?accountid=14692)

Democracy is now both a supreme universal ideal and a frayed flag. Only the
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The Zapatistas are involved in such a search, struggling for people’s power. 

Just like the Zapatistas exposing the corrupt nature of democracy we can lay bare the ways that traditional modes of debate exclude dissident forms of knowledge production – we must understand how debate is implicated within larger structures of domination instead of acting like our community exists in a societal vacuum before we can produce good policies - The Role of the Ballot is to performatively and methodologically use counterhegemonic discourses to rupture mythohistorical narratives that justify oppression.

Spanos ’11 (William Spanos, World War II Veteran, POW at Dresden, distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton, 2011. Interview with Spurlock.http://www.kdebate.com/spanos.html)

The reason I asked you that question is because I’ve always thought that the debate
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determined by those who are the heirs of this quantitative system of binaries.

Current forms of democracy have played into the hands of capital – untold corruption, inequality and oppression saturate the system - while society may claim to recognize that all humans are equal, some are way more equal than others in our current system.  Economic engagement in our current state will only continue to perpetuate the cycle of oppression – we must expose the mythologies that justify our system to solve

Esteva ’99 (Gustavo Esteva, Contributor-Capital 26 Class, summer 1999, "The Zapatistas and people’s power," http://search.proquest.com.leo.lib.unomaha.edu/docview/209695788/fulltextPDF/1421AD089AA7588CB51/8?accountid=14692)

The social pact on which modern democracies rest is supposedly celebrated by equal and homogeneous
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The Zapatistas claim for everyone such personalized treatment, as a style of social

While we may not have access to armed rebellion with the Zapatistas in the Chiapas region, we have our minds and our hearts – Discourse is all we have access to in this debate space.  Fortunately, our discourses can problematize popular conceptions of "democracy," "peace," and "education" and therefore expose epistemological violence committed by how our debate community has approached the resolution – our discursive reframing is a prerequisite to morally engaging with the topic

Conant ’10 (Jeff Conant, Independent Journalist with decades of grassroots experience that focuses on the intersections between social justice, development, communications and ecology, "A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency," 2010, pg. 11-12)

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said, "The world is not made of atoms,
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to read it.  And then to walk, and to keep walking.