AT: Race/Gender KAttempts to combine activism with policy deliberation kills the potential to create any change, the activism will always be co-opted and incorporated into current strategies of dominance employed within the public.Young, 1 (Iris Marion, Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy, Political Theory, Vol. 29, No. 5 (Oct., 2001), pp. 670-690)Let us suppose that by some combination of activist agitation and deliberative persuasion, some deliberative settings emerge that approximately rep- resent all those affected by the outcome of certain policy decisions. Given the world of structural inequality as we know it, the activist believes such a circumstance will be rare at best but is willing to entertain the possibility for the sake of this argument. The activist remains suspicious of the deliberative democrat's exhortation to engage in reasoned and critical discussion with people he disagrees with, even on the supposition that the public where he engages in such discussion really includes the diversity of interests and per- spectives potentially affected by policies. That is because he perceives that existing social and economic structures have set unacceptable constraints on the terms of deliberation and its agenda. Problems and disagreements in the real world of democratic politics appear and are addressed against the background of a given history and sedi- mentation of unjust structural inequality, says the activist, which helps set agenda priorities and constrains the alternatives that political actors may con-sider in their deliberations. When this is so, both the deliberative agenda and the institutional constraints it mirrors should themselves be subject to criticism, protest, and resistance.7 Going to the table to meet with representatives of those interests typically served by existing institutional relations, to discuss how to deal most justly with issues that presuppose those institutional rela- tions, gives both those institutions and deliberative process too much legitimacy. It co-opts the energy of citizens committed to justice, leaving little time for mobilizing people to bash the institutional constraints and decision- making process from the outside. Thus, the responsible citizen ought to with- draw from implicit acceptance of structural and institutional constraints by refusing to deliberate about policies within them. Let me give some examples. A local anti-poverty advocacy group engaged in many forms of agitation and protest in the years leading up to passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act by the U.S. Congress in the spring of 1996. This legislation fundamentally changed the terms of welfare policy in the United States. It abolished entitlements to public assistance for the first time in sixty years, allowing states to deny benefits when funds have run out. It requires recipients of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families to work at jobs after a certain period and allows states to vary significantly in their pro- grams. Since passage of the legislation, the anti-poverty advocacy group has organized recipients and others who care about welfare justice to protest and lobby the state house to increase welfare funding and to count serving as a welfare rights advocate in local welfare offices as a "work activity."

The law is insufficient to address oppressionNancy Levit 06 (CARDOZO LAW REVIEW, 2006, CARDOZO LAW REVIEW Vol. 28:1 CONFRONTING CONVENTIONAL THINKING, http://cardozolawreview.com/Joomla1.5/content/28-1/LEVIT.WEBSITE.pdf)Feminist legal theorists also relied on social cognition theory to address Title VII antidiscrimination doctrine and the intractability of prejudices. Professor Linda Krieger, for example, explained that stereotypes are one form of heuristic: a shorthand mechanism of processing information about people.92 Humans often, and usually unthinkingly, categorize based on race, gender, and ethnicity characteristics which are visible, as well as historically and culturally important categories.93 People internalize prevailing social stereotypes and tend to interpret facts consistently with the stereotypes. Meanwhile, they discard facts that are stereotype-inconsistent, so that the stereotypes themselves influence recollections of events, perceptions and evaluations of others, and interpretations of situations. An important feature of stereotyping is that the biases it introduces are cognitive rather than motivational; in other words, they occur independently of decision makers group interests or their conscious desire to favor or harm others.94 As Krieger and others have shown, if much discrimination is unconscious, many subtle discriminatory practices remain outside the reach of antidiscrimination laws.95 Cognition theory understands mental functions as information processing models. Stereotypical assumptions about people are just one type of automatic cognitive categorizing structure. The errors of stereotyping are tied to errors of salience and representativeness.96

Without an analysis of intersectionality, they ignore scores of people that are marginalized for more than one reasonCollins says in 2013 that (Patricia Hill, Prof of Sociology @ University of Maryland at College Park, On Intellectual Activism) The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that Piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us. -AUDRE LORDE, from Sister Outsider (123) AUDRE LORDE'S STATEMENT raises a troublesome issue for scholars and activists working for social change. While many of us have little difficulty assessing our own victimization within some major system of oppression, whether it be by race, social class, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, or gender, we typically fail to see how our thoughts and actions uphold someone else's subordination. Thus, White feminists routinely point with confidence to their oppression as women but resist seeing how much their white skin privileges them. African Americans who possess eloquent analyses of racism often persist in viewing poor White women as symbols of white power. The radical Left fares little better. "If only people of color and women could see their true class interests," they argue, "class solidarity would eliminate racism and sexism." In essence, each group identifies the type of oppression with which it feels most comfortable as being fundamental and classifies all other types as being of lesser importance. Oppression is full of such contradictions. Errors in political judgment that we make concerning how we teach our courses, what we tell our children, and which organizations are worthy of our time, talents, and financial support flow smoothly from errors in theoretical analysis about the nature of oppression and activism. Once we realize that there are few pure victims or oppressors, and that each one of us derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression that frame our lives, then we will be in a position to see the need for new ways of thought and action. To get at that "piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us," we need at least two things. First, we need new visions of what oppression is, new categories of analysis that are inclusive of race, class, and gender as distinctive yet interlocking structures of oppression. Adhering to a stance of comparing and ranking oppressions-the proverbial "I'm more oppressed than you"-locks us all into a dangerous dance of competing for attention, resources, and theoretical supremacy. Instead, I suggest that we examine our different experiences within the more fundamental relationship of domination and subordination. To focus on the particular arrangements that race or class or gender take in our time and place without seeing these structures as sometimes parallel and sometimes interlocking dimensions of the more fundamental relationship of domination and subordination may temporarily ease our consciences. But while such thinking may lead to short-term social reforms, it is simply inadequate for the task of bringing about long-term social transformation. While race, class, and gender as categories of analysis are essential in helping us understand the structural bases of domination and subordination, new ways of thinking that are not accompanied by new ways of acting offer incomplete prospects for change. To get at that "piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us," we also need to change our daily behavior. Currently, we are all enmeshed in a complex web of problematic relationships that grant our mirror images full human subjectivity while stereotyping and objectifying those most different from ourselves. We often assume that the people we work with, teach, send our children to school with, and sit next to in conferences such as this will act and feel in prescribed ways because they belong to given race, social class, or gender categories. These judgments by category must be replaced with fully human relationships that transcend the legitimate differences created by race, class, and gender as categories of analysis. We require new categories of connection, new visions of what our relationships with one another can be. Our task is immense. We must first recognize race, class, and gender as interlocking categories of analysis that together cultivate profound differences in our personal biographies. But then we must transcend those very differences by reconceptualizing race, class, and gender to create new categories of connection. My presentation today addresses this need for new patterns of thought and action. I focus on two basic questions. First, how can we reconceptualize race, class, and gender as categories of analysis? Second, how can we transcend the barriers created by our experiences with race, class, and gender oppression to build the types of coalitions essential for social change? To address these questions, I contend that we must acquire new theories of how race, class, and gender have shaped the experiences not just of women of color but also of all groups. Moreover, we must see the connections between these categories of analysis and the personal issues in our everyday lives, particularly our scholarship, our teaching, and our relationships with our colleagues and students. As Audre Lorde points out, change starts with self, and relationships that we have with those around us must always be the primary site for social change. How Can We Reconceptualize Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis? To me, we must shift our discourse away from additive analyses of oppression. Such approaches are typically based on two key premises. First, they depend on either/or, dichotomous thinking. Persons, things, and ideas are conceptualized in terms of their opposites. For example, Black/White, man/woman, thought/ feeling, and fact/opinion are defined in oppositional terms. Thought and feeling are not seen as two different and interconnected ways of approaching truth that can coexist in scholarship and teaching. Instead, feeling is defined as antithetical to reason, as its opposite. Despite the fact that we all have "both/and" identities (I am both a college professor and a mother-I don't stop being a mother when I drop my child off at school, or forget everything I learned while scrubbing the toilet), we persist in trying to classify each other in either/or categories. I live each day as an African American woman, a race/gender-specific experience. And I am not alone. Everyone in this room has a race/gender/class-specific identity. Either/or, dichotomous thinking is especially troublesome when applied to theories of oppression because every individual must be classified as being either oppressed or not oppressed. The both/and position of simultaneously being oppressed and oppressor becomes conceptually impossible. A second premise of additive analyses of oppression is that these dichotomous differences must be ranked. One side of the dichotomy is typically labeled "dominant" and the other "subordinate." Thus, Whites rule Blacks, men are deemed superior to women, and reason is seen as being preferable to emotion. Applying this premise to discussions of oppression leads to the assumption that oppression can be quantified, and that some groups are oppressed more than others. I am frequently asked, "Which has been most oppressive to you, your status as a Black person or your status as a woman?" What I am really being asked to do is divide myself into little boxes and rank my various statuses. If I experience oppression as a both/and phenomenon, why should I analyze it any differently? Additive analyses of oppression rest squarely on the twin pillars of either/or thinking and the necessity to quantify and rank all relationships to know where one stands. Such approaches typically see African American women as being more oppressed than everyone else because the majority of Black women experience the negative effects of race, class, and gender oppression simultaneously. In essence, if you add together separate oppressions, you are left with a grand oppression greater than the sum of its parts. I am not denying that specific groups experience oppression more harshly than others-lynching is certainly objectively worse than being held up as a sex object. But we must be careful not to confuse this issue of the saliency of one type of oppression in people's lives with a theoretical stance positing the interlocking nature of oppression. Race, class, and gender may all structure a situation but may not be equally visible and/or important in people's self-definitions. In certain contexts, such as the antebellum American South and contemporary South Africa, racial oppression is more visibly salient, while in other contexts, such as Haiti, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, social class oppression may be more apparent. For middle-class White women, gender may assume experiential primacy unavailable to poor Hispanic women struggling with the ongoing issues of low-paid jobs and the frustrations of the welfare bureaucracy. This recognition that one category may have salience over another in a given time and place does not minimize the theoretical importance of assuming that race, class, and gender as categories of analysis structure all relationships. To move toward new visions of what oppression is, I think that we need to ask new questions. How are relationships of domination and subordination structured and maintained in the American political economy? How do race, class, and gender function as parallel and interlocking systems that shape this basic relationship of domination and subordination? Questions such as these promise to move us away from futile theoretical struggles concerned with ranking oppressions and toward analyses that assume race, class, and gender are all present in any given setting, even if one appears more visible and salient than the others. Our task becomes redefined as one of reconceptualizing oppression by uncovering the connections among race, class, and gender as categories of analysis.AT: FrameworkWe are in the right forum- if debate is the only place that we have to speak out, then they shouldnt be able to exclude our conversationRebecca Bjork, former college debater, coach, and professor in 93 (former college debater and former associate professor at the University of Utah, where she taught graduate and undergraduate courses in Communication and Women in Debate, Reflections on the Ongoing Struggle, Debater's Research Guide 1992-1993: Wake Forest University.Symposium, web.archive.org/web/20011012220529/members.aol.com/womynindebate/article3.htm)

While reflecting on my experiences as a woman in academic debate in preparation for this essay, I realized that I have been involved in debate for more than half of my life. I debated for four years in high school, for four years in college, and I have been coaching intercollegiate debate for nine years. Not surprisingly, much of my identity as an individual has been shaped by these experiences in debate. I am a person who strongly believes that debate empowers people to be committed and involved individuals in the communities in which they live. I am a person who thrives on the intellectual stimulation involved in teaching and traveling with the brightest students on my campus. I am a person who looks forward to the opportunities for active engagement of ideas with debaters and coaches from around the country. I am also, however, a college professor, a "feminist," and a peace activist who is increasingly frustrated and disturbed by some of the practices I see being perpetuated and rewarded in academic debate. I find that I can no longer separate my involvement in debate from the rest of who I am as an individual. Northwestern I remember listening to a lecture a few years ago given by Tom Goodnight at the University summer debate camp. Goodnight lamented what he saw as the debate community's participation in, and unthinking perpetuation of what he termed the "death culture." He argued that the embracing of "big impact" arguments--nuclear war, environmental destruction, genocide, famine, and the like-by debaters and coaches signals a morbid and detached fascination with such events, one that views these real human tragedies as part of a "game" in which so-called "objective and neutral" advocates actively seek to find in their research the "impact to outweigh all other impacts"--the round-winning argument that will carry them to their goal of winning tournament X, Y, or Z. He concluded that our "use" of such events in this way is tantamount to a celebration of them; our detached, rational discussions reinforce a detached, rational viewpoint, when emotional and moral outrage may be a more appropriate response. In the last few years, my academic research has led me to be persuaded by Goodnight's unspoken assumption; language is not merely some transparent tool used to transmit information, but rather is an incredibly powerful medium, the use of which inevitably has real political and material consequences. Given this assumption, I believe that it is important for us to examine the "discourse of debate practice:" that is, the language, discourses, and meanings that we, as a community of debaters and coaches, unthinkingly employ in academic debate. If it is the case that the language we use has real implications for how we view the world, how we view others, and how we act in the world, then it is imperative that we critically examine our own discourse practices with an eye to how our language does violence to others. I am shocked and surprised when I hear myself saying things like, "we killed them," or "take no prisoners," or "let's blow them out of the water." I am tired of the "ideal" debater being defined as one who has mastered the art of verbal assault to the point where accusing opponents of lying, cheating, or being deliberately misleading is a sign of strength. But what I am most tired of is how women debaters are marginalized and rendered voiceless in such a discourse community. Women who verbally assault their opponents are labeled "bitches" because it is not socially acceptable for women to be verbally aggressive. Women who get angry and storm out of a room when a disappointing decision is rendered are labeled "hysterical" because, as we all know, women are more emotional then men. I am tired of hearing comments like, "those 'girls' from school X aren't really interested in debate; they just want to meet men." We can all point to examples (although only a few) of women who have succeeded at the top levels of debate. But I find myself wondering how many more women gave up because they were tired of negotiating the mine field of discrimination, sexual harassment, and isolation they found in the debate community. As members of this community, however, we have great freedom to define it in whatever ways we see fit. After all, what is debate except a collection of shared understandings and explicit or implicit rules for interaction? What I am calling for is a critical examination of how we, as individual members of this community, characterize our activity, ourselves, and our interactions with others through language. We must become aware of the ways in which our mostly hidden and unspoken assumptions about what "good" debate is function to exclude not only women, but ethnic minorities from the amazing intellectual opportunities that training in debate provides. Our nation and indeed, our planet, faces incredibly difficult challenges in the years ahead. I believe that it is not acceptable anymore for us to go along as we always have, assuming that things will straighten themselves out. If the rioting in Los Angeles taught us anything, it is that complacency breeds resentment and frustration. We may not be able to change the world, but we can change our own community, and if we fail to do so, we give up the only real power that we have.

Multifaceted identity politics is key- they cant solve without acknowledging other forms of oppressionChun et. al 13 (Jennifer Jihye - Department of Sociology @ the U of Toronto Scarborough, George Lipsitz - Department of Sociology and Department of Black Studies @ UC Santa Barbara, Young Shin - Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, "Intersectionality as a Social Movement StrategyL Asian Immigrant Women Advocates," Signs, Vol. 38 No. 4, Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory, (Summer 2013), pp. 917-940)In both academics and activism, the concept of intersectionality can be used to clear up the confusions about sameness and difference that dominant ways of knowing both permit and promote. It can be a tool for refining understanding of the relationships that link individuals to social groups. No individual lives every aspect of his or her existence within a single identity category. Every person is a crowd, characterized by multiple identities, identifications, and allegiances. Yet the process of racial formation set in motion by dominant racial projects brings individuals together in particular groups with shared and linked fates Omi and Winant 1994 . Collective political struggle requires the creation of strategic group positions adaptable to forging coalitions within and across identity groups. These positions are always partial, perspectival, and performative. They never encompass all dimensions of peoples identities. Yet as an analytic tool intersectionality can be used strategically to take inventory of differences, to identify potential contradictions and conflicts, and to recognize split and conflicting identities not as obstacles to solidarity but as valuable evidence about problems unsolved and as new coalitions that need to be formed. Group identities are vital for collective mobilizations for rights, resources, and recognition, yet every collective identity expressed through solidarities of sameness runs the risk of occluding differences within the group. In its most sophisticated articulations, intersectionality acknowledges both the plurality and diversity of identities that comprise any group and the common concerns that create aggregate identities. In Crenshaws deft formulation, the utility of intersectionality flows from its ability to mediate the tension between assertions of multiple identity and the ongoing necessity of group politics 1991, 1296 . Without intersectionality, group unity threatens to degenerate into a compulsory uniformity that benefits some members of the group at the expense of others. For example, employment opportunities and promotions for Black workers do not necessarily provide justice for Black women. Anti- racist organizing can be uncritical about misogyny. Homophobia can seep into feminist and antiracist mobilizations alike, while race and class privilege can be unexamined within queer politics. Still, Crenshaw does not advocate the abandonment of identity categories and the embrace of a disembodied universalism. Instead, she recognizes that identities can contain situated knowledges with valuable vantage points on power. In the tradition of Aime Cesaire, she rejects both parochial particularism and disembodied universalism. Instead, she argues for a universal that is contingent, provisional, and rich with particulars, that entails the dialogue of all, the autonomy of each, and the dictatorship of none Cesaire 2000, 25 26 . Crenshaws intersectionality promotes struggles that are race-based but not race-bound, feminist but not essentialist, always pro-Black and pro-woman but never only pro-Black and pro-woman. Seeking unity without uniformity, mobilizing identities without demanding that people be identical, intersectionality matters from Crenshaws perspective because it is an indispensible tool for creating new democratic institutions, identities, and practices.

Framework uses masculine claims of rationality to determine what knowledge is legitimate for public debate pushing unproductive knowledge to the private sphere There is only a risk that interruptions like the affirmative are able to reclaim the public sphere Peterson in 2000V. Spike Peterson. Rereading Public and Private: The Dichotomy that is Not One1 SAIS Review. Vol 20, Num 2. Pp 11-29. Summer-Fall 2000. In Homer and Thucydides, the meanings of public and private are delineated in relation to the demands of war and the moral dilemmas they pose. In this sense, their accounts link the states external affairs to impossible internal dilemmas. In contrast, the most familiar account of public and private, provided by Aristotle, avoids the question of war and external affairs. Instead of a tragic choice between competing but parallel claims to loyalty, Aristotle resolves the dilemma by privileging the public sphere over the private. Here, the public realm of politics constitutes the highest association, a realm of freedom and equality, where citizens pursue the good life. This higher realm depends upon but encompasses the private sphere, which is characterized not by freedom but necessity, and involves not equal but naturally hierarchical relationships. In this account, the public sphere of free, equal, reasoning citizens is masculinized by the exclusion of women and feminized characteristics, while the private sphere of contingency, inequality, and emotional attachments is feminized by the relegation of women and characteristics of femininity to it. This is the model of public and private most frequently assumed in the Western tradition of social and political theory. Arguably its greatest significance is in defining the boundary and elevating the status of politics: the dichotomy distinguishes what is deemed political and therefore what is politicized. That which is associated with the private sphere is denied the status of being political, hence, denied the important sense of being contingent (not given), contestable (not fixed), and of collective interest (not simply personal). Not only do we inherit a bounded domain of citizenship and political power, but we also inherit a subordinated sphere of naturalized inequality. Or so we assume. What Aristotle intended is the subject of ongoing debate, but he is clear about the interdependence of public and private, which is often lost in modern accounts.14 This interdependence was both emotional and economic. The public sphere depended as much on the cultivation of virtue, love, and emotional attachments15 as it did on the economic productivity of the oikos (household). Hence, on the one hand, Aristotles account is more complex and less binary than conventionally assumed. On the other, however, his characterization does establish the hierarchy of public over private (and masculine over feminine), and his avoidance of war and external affairs and omission of (non-oikos) market exchanges introduce differently problematic simplifications.