No Room for Debate

Elizabeth Catlett, Invisble Man

Don’t ask me how I became the head of the debate team.  It’s laughable that my name and the word “coach” would ever exist in the same sentence.  Competitions make me anxious because I feel too deeply for the losers.  But, I guess these are the breaks when you are a new employee.  You have to take the assignments that others have been wise enough to avoid.

Every Wednesday I meet with a group of around twenty 6th-8th graders for an hour.  During that time the students conduct research on both sides of a topic determined by the debate league that we belong to.  They have to be knowledgeable about both the proposition and opposition positions because they are not told what side of the issue they will be asked to argue until the day of the debate.  On Saturdays they compete against other private and charter school students. 

When I opened up my email earlier in the week, I read that one of the three topics was “Ban the public displays of Confederate symbols.”  Today, as I copied the statement onto the whiteboard in purple Expo marker, I shook my head at the insensitivity of the topic.  Dylan Roof killed nine Americans in a church in June, and here we are in October asking MIDDLE SCHOOL students research arguments justifying the display of Confederate symbols.  People can be so clueless at times.

I didn’t really get angry until I sat down with the one black girl on the team (also the only black person in the 8^th grade).  She was very clear about the fact that she didn’t like the topic, and she asked me to send a letter to the organizers in protest.  I don’t need to imagine how uncomfortable she felt having to research a topic that made her race especially salient.  Luckily, her teammates were pretty disgusted with the topic as well- either that or they were scared of her :)

As we sat there in front of our laptops, I thought about all of the crazy ways that this scenario could play out on the day of the debate.  Imagine one of the all black charter school teams (who are sometimes mocked and always underestimated) standing up defending the display of the Confederate flag, while the all white the private school team makes the opposite argument.  Who would I root for in that contest??

Or what if the debate organizers decided that the charter school team should argue against the display of the Confederate symbols and the black kids ended up losing the debate?  How self-esteem shattering would that be?  

Yes, it is important for children to learn about all sides of an issue and understand the perspectives of the parties involved.  However, asking a twelve year old black child to stand in front of a room of adults and her peers and justify the display of the Confederate flag four months after a racially motivated mass shooting is a slap in the face.

In America, we would never ask Jewish children to defend the use of Nazi symbols in a debate.  I would hope that we would know better than to ask Native American students to argue in favor of the Redskins team name and logo.  Why then, would we ask children who are the descendants of those who survived slavery to stand up in front of an audience and defend the use of symbols glorifying it?  What kind of hotmessmindfuckery is that?   Think about the dissonance that that would cause a black child.

And what of the white students?  Some were able to approach the activity as a purely intellectual exercise, but a few of the older students were savvy enough to understand that they were copying language coded with racism into their carefully organized GoogleDocs.  I wondered what assumptions would be made about them (fairly or unfairly) if they were a little too convincing in their arguments in the opposition on the day of the debate.  If they are chosen to defend the display of Confederate symbols, do they lose on purpose in order to avoid being perceived as a  racist? 

The most aggravating part of this is the fact that this topic was chosen by people who probably did not consider any of these issues.  (Did they assume that all of the debaters would be white kids with no emotional investment one way or the other?)  

Because of the ignorance of the organizers, I am put in the position of the black person who has to educate grown people about race and risk being called "oversensitive".  Or even worse, I am asked to turn moments of black discomfort into a "teachable moments" for white people.  YUCK.

In Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, the vet tells the narrator to “play the game, but don’t believe in it.”  That is my usual strategy when I'm on Central Park West.  Unfortunately, this is one game that I can not play.