Reps aff

1ac

The American economy is built of the exploitation of black people in America, slavery,
Jim crow, and the new deal influences our current policy focus today--- Solomon et. Al
20
[ Danyelle Solomon,Connor Maxwell Abril Castro , Danyelle Solomon Former Vice President, Race and Ethnicity Policy Connor Maxwell
Senior Policy Analyst Abril Castro Research Assistant, Center for American Progress, "Systematic Inequality and Economic Opportunity -
Center for American Progress," 08/07/20, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/systematic-inequality-economic-opportunity/, Date
Accessed: 11/20/24] // DTA JB

The U.S. economy was built on the exploitation and occupational segregation of people of color . While
many government policies and institutional practices helped create this system, the legacies of slavery,
Jim Crow, and the New Deal—as well as the limited funding and scope of anti-discrimination agencies—
are some of the biggest contributors to inequality in America. Together, these policy decisions
concentrated workers of color in chronically undervalued occupations, institutionalized racial
disparities in wages and benefits, and perpetuated employment discrimination. As a result, stark and persistent
racial disparities exist in jobs, wages, benefits, and almost every other measure of economic well-being. This report examines how government-
sanctioned occupational segregation, exploitation, and neglect exacerbated racial inequality in the United States. Eliminating current disparities
among Americans will require intentional public policy efforts to dismantle systematic inequality, combat discrimination in the workplace, and
expand access to opportunity for all Americans. Slavery
and Jim Crow concentrated workers of color in chronically
undervalued occupations For centuries, Black people were enslaved and forced to work in brutal
conditions as agricultural, domestic, and service workers. By some estimates, slaveholders extracted
more than $14 trillion worth of labor, in today’s dollars, from their captives.1 Enslaved people plowed
and sowed fields; harvested and packaged crops; and raised, milked, and butchered livestock. 2 They cooked
and served food, cleaned houses, weaved and mended clothing, and provided child care services.3 They cut hair, carried luggage, and drove
wagons, carts, and carriages.4 When enslaved Black people attempted to flee, federal laws such as the 1793 and
1850 Fugitive Slave Acts helped ensure their recapture by fining officials who did not arrest alleged
runaways and imprisoning anyone who aided in their escape.5 If captured, enslaved people could be tortured, mutilated,
and even killed without legal repercussions.6 The United States abolished slavery in 1863, but. this action did not
coincide with the opening of all occupations to liberated Black workers On the contrary, federal officials within the
Freedmen’s Bureau—established by the federal government in part to help formerly enslaved people transition to freedom—encouraged Black
people to stay in the South and enter into contracts doing the same work for the families that previously enslaved them.7 After
Reconstruction, state and local governments doubled down on these efforts by enacting Jim Crow laws,
which codified the role of Black people in the Southern economy and society.8 States such as South Carolina
enacted strict “Black Codes” that fined Black people if they worked in any occupation other than farming or
domestic servitude.9 If they broke these laws or abandoned their jobs after signing a labor contract,
they could be arrested and, thanks to a loophole in the 13th Amendment, forced back into unpaid labor
on white plantations.10 Lawmakers also sought to prevent Black people from migrating in search of safety and economic opportunity.
They enacted emigrant-agent laws restricting interstate labor recruiters from encouraging or financing
the relocation of Black workers or from posting advertisements in predominantly Black communities for
distant job openings.11 During the mid-20th century, technological advancements reduced the demand
for farm labor and domestic work in the South.12 These changes, combined with discriminatory U.S.
Department of Agriculture policies, rampant lynchings, and Ku Klux Klan terror, led thousands of Black
households in the South to flee north.13 As a result, the United States experienced a rapid decline in the number of Black farm
operators and farm and domestic workers.14 However, Black workers remained overrepresented in low-wage service jobs.15 Meanwhile, the
continued devaluation of domestic and agricultural vocations and the accompanying search for lower-wage laborers of color soon led to a high
concentration of Asian American and Latinx workers in domestic and agricultural occupations; this remains the case today.16 Occupational
segregation and the persistent devaluation of workers of color are a direct result of intentional
government policy. To this day, people of color remain overrepresented in the lowest-paid agricultural,
domestic, and service vocations. (see Figure 1) While Black or African American, Asian, and Hispanic or Latino people comprise 36
percent of the overall U.S. workforce, they constitute 58 percent of miscellaneous agricultural workers; 70 percent of maids and housekeeping
cleaners; and 74 percent of baggage porters, bellhops, and concierges. Slavery
and Jim Crow devalued these types of
work, and the legacy of these institutions continues to inform the American economic system and its
outcomes. New Deal programs helped institutionalize racial disparities in wages and benefits During the Great Depression, the United
States enacted a series of policies under the New Deal to assist struggling families and expand access to economic mobility. These policies
included, but were not limited to, strengthened labor standards for wages and working conditions and increased protections for collective
bargaining. The
New Deal helped millions of families find work, increase their wages, and secure
employment benefits,17 but lawmakers reserved most of these benefits for white workers while
restricting and excluding people of color. These actions helped institutionalize and validate racial
disparities in economic well-being, and the effects are felt to this day. The New Deal’s Fair Labor Standards Act of
1938 (FLSA) introduced a 40-hour work week, banned child labor, and established a federal minimum wage and overtime requirements. 18 While
the FLSA boosted wages and improved working conditions for thousands of white workers, it largely excluded African American workers from
receiving these benefits by exempting many domestic, agricultural, and service occupations. 19 This policy decision trapped families in poverty
and tacitly endorsed the continued exploitation of workers of color. Lawmakers amended the FLSA to include some of these occupations in
subsequent decades, but agricultural and domestic workers—many of whom today are Latinx or Asian American—remain some of the least
protected employees in the United States.20 Many agricultural workers are still denied access to overtime and minimum wage protections. 21 For
example, children as young as 12 years old are legally allowed to work in the fields. 22 Live-in domestic service workers, babysitters, and
companions for the elderly—all occupations in which people of color are disproportionately represented—also remain excluded from many
FLSA protections.23

That leads to an increase in the racial wealth gap--- Stephens et al---1/9

Metro, Director – Center for Community Uplift Hannah Stephens Senior Research Assistant – Brookings Metro Manann Donoghoe Senior
Research Associate – Brookings Metro, Brookings, "Black wealth is increasing, but so is the racial wealth gap," 01/09/24,
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/black-wealth-is-increasing-but-so-is-the-racial-wealth-gap/#:~:text=Since%202010%2C%20the
%20wealth%20disparity,climbed%20since%2C%20peaking%20in%202022., Date Accessed: 12/07/24] // DTA JB

According to the latest data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the nation’s racial wealth gap increased
during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between 2019 and 2022, median wealth increased by $51,800, but the racial
wealth gap increased by $49,950—adding up to a total difference of $240,120 in wealth between the
median white household and the median Black household. The Survey of Consumer Finances is the most comprehensive
survey on household wealth in the United States. Updated every three years, this data provides a representative
outlook of our current and past economic landscapes, which is particularly helpful in capturing the
economic realities of households during the onset, peak, and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even
though wealth increased across the board, the data discussed here shows that not all people are reaping the
benefits. While housing equity increased for Black households, other components to wealth-building
such as corporate and business equity did not, exacerbating the racial wealth gap. Centuries of
discrimination in public policy, financial practices, and societal norms that limited Black wealth
accumulation have not been overcome, and will require broad structural changes to rectify the long-
lasting impact of inequality. Wealth increases during the pandemic did not narrow the persistent racial
wealth gap ...in 2022, for every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households held only
$15. Wealth measures the total value of assets a family owns (such as housing and business equity) minus their debts (such as student loans
and credit card bills). During the COVID-19 pandemic, wealth increased unevenly. Median wealth, which
provides an indication of a typical household’s financial security and capacity to invest in their future,
increased at varied rates depending on race. Figure 1, using data from the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts,
shows that between 2019 and 2022, total wealth increased for all racial and ethnic groups. However, according
to the Survey for
Consumer Finances, median Black wealth increased from $27,970 to $44,890, but continued to lag other
racial groups. In 2022, median wealth was approximately $62,000 for non-white Latino or Hispanic
households; $285,000 for white households; and $536,000 for Asian American households. (Asian
American household wealth data was only provided for 2022, and therefore time series graphs will only
show wealth data for the racial categories Black, Latino or Hispanic, white, and other, which includes
Asian American, Native American, and Pacific Islander wealth.) Since 2010, the wealth disparity between
Black and white families has persistently expanded. From the very first Survey of Consumer Finances
in 1983, the smallest difference between Black and white family wealth was $123,910 in 1992, and has
steadily climbed since, peaking in 2022. Figure 2 shows that from 1989 to 2022, the Black-white median wealth
gap has averaged $172,000, and rarely dropped below 10% of this. However, between 2019 and 2022,
the gap breeched 10% of the average—signaling an increase in disparity not seen since 2007, when the
gap reached $214,970. The growing disparity means that in 2022, for every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households
held only $15.

The wealth gap increases black deaths in America

[Kathryn E. W. Himmelstein, Kathryn E. W. Himmelstein, MD, MSEd1; Jourdyn A. Lawrence, PhD, MSPH2,3; Jaquelyn L. Jahn, PhD4; et a,
JAMA Network, "Association Between Racial Wealth Inequities and Racial Disparities in Longevity Among US Adults and Role of Reparations
Payments, 1992 to 2018 | Health Policy | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network," 11/01/22,
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2798135, Date Accessed: 12/07/24] // DTA JB

In the US, Black individuals have a higher mortality rate than White individuals ,1 a difference that reflects
the pervasive effects of structural racism. Indeed, some scholars view “group-differentiated
vulnerability to premature death” as a definition of racism2 and suggest that inequities in excess
deaths should serve as a metric of progress in eliminating racism .3 Racial health inequities in the US are
shaped by structurally driven differential access to economic resource s.4 Although the role of income in mediating
racial health inequities is well-documented, differences in income understate the extent of overall economic inequality. Although the
median income of White familes is 1.65-fold higher than that of Black families, the difference in wealth
(the value of all assets owned by a household) is 8-fold.5,6 Because wealth is transferred
intergenerationally, racial wealth gaps better reflect sustained economic disadvantages than do gaps in
income or other measures.7 However, because wealth data are less commonly collected in surveys, few
studies have examined the role of wealth in racial health inequality.8-11 Current racial wealth inequities
arose from centuries of government policies, including 250 years of slavery, rescission of the 1865 Field Order 15
(the promise of “40 acres and a mule” to formerly enslaved people), Black codes and Jim Crow laws, official tolerance of
and participation in vigilante violence, exclusion of most Black workers from New Deal programs such as
Social Security, discriminatory application of the homebuying provisions of the GI Bill, government-
sponsored redlining that excluded most Black families from federally guaranteed mortgages,
discriminatory criminal punishment, and lax enforcement of Civil Rights era laws designed to end
discrimination in employment, policing, housing, health care, and lending .12-14 The ideology of
“colorblindness” has helped to perpetuate the effects of these policies into the present .15 Reparations
payments to Black individuals have been proposed to redress these injustices and, consequently, narrow racial wealth and health gaps.3,16,17
Such payments would be in keeping with past instances of reparations, such as the US government’s reparations to Japanese Americans
interned during WWII and the German government’s payments to Holocaust survivors under the Luxembourg Agreement.18 To assess the role
of wealth in mediating racial longevity gaps—and whether narrowing wealth differences with reparations payments might mitigate racial
mortality differences—we
analyzed longitudinal data on middle-aged and older adults from the Health and
Retirement Study (HRS), which collects information on both mortality and wealth.19 We first examined
the extent to which racial differences in wealth explained observed racial inequities in survival. We then
modeled how reparations payments might affect racial mortality differences

Racism must be rejected in EVERY INSTANCE without surcease. It justifies atrocities,

creates another and is truly the CAPITAL SIN. Memmi 2k
Albert Memmi, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism,
Translated by Steve Martinot, p. 163-165//DTA
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved.
Yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One
cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a
mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is
to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear,
injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider
will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in
sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition .
The
anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is. and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to
the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge.
However, it remains true that one's moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and
always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the
One cannot found
condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy.
a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other
and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious
language, racism is "the truly capital sin."fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity's spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak,
for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is
not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real
utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death Of
course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no
one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed, All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its
own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. "Recall," says the Bible, "that you were once a
stranger in Egypt," which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming
once again someday.
It is an ethical and a practical appeal -- indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the
refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end. The
ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all . If this
contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is
accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.
Thus, the plan – Resolved: The United States ought to adopt a wealth tax to the rich,
conveying money back to African-Americans. (Excluding Wealthy Black People)
A wealth tax is key, it closes loopholes and stops the erdoding of black wealth in
America Collins and Asante-Muhammad--22
[Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and Chuck Collins, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is chief of membership, policy, and equity at the National
Community Reinvestment Coalition and an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Chuck Collins directs the IPS Program on
Inequality and co-edits Inequality.org., Newsweek, "Taxes on the Wealthy Could Fund Reparations—and Create a More Equal America for
Everyone | Opinion - Newsweek," 07/13/23, https://www.newsweek.com/taxes-wealthy-could-fund-reparations-create-more-equal-
america-everyone-opinion-1812047, Date Accessed: 12/07/24] // DTA JB

The growing concentration of wealth over the past four decades has been a further barrier to bridging
the racial wealth divide. The wealthiest 400 billionaires in the United States, we calculated, own as
much wealth as the entire African American population and a quarter of all Latinx households combined. Public
policy is responsible for creating the racial wealth divide—and public policy must be employed to
rectify it. That policy will be more effective if it includes some form of reparations, such as cash
payments to aid Black families in building wealth. But cash is only one piece of the puzzle. Communities across
the nation are exploring what reparations might entail. One notable example is a nonbinding Draft Reparations Plan released in San Francisco,
where the median Black income is a mere $31,000 compared to $116,000 for white people. The plan proposes allocating $5 million to each
eligible African American resident as reparations. That figure is obviously unaffordable, particularly for a local government. But it succeeds at
dramatizing the depth of the $10 trillion racial wealth divide for African Americans. More importantly, San Francisco's draft plan serves as a
model for a comprehensive national strategy to address the Black-white racial wealth divide. It recognizes the profound scope of the divide and
proposes practical steps to address various asset categories that contribute to wealth accumulation or its erosion. To
create wealth, the
plan recommends providing tax relief and incentives to help grow Black-owned businesses and
establishing a community land trust governed by Black residents to make housing more affordable. The
plan also includes steps to stop the erosion of Black wealth , including using land-use controls to reduce unhealthy
establishments in Black communities and closing the school-to-prison pipeline, where police officers in schools send kids into the criminal
justice system for routine disciplinary issues. It's encouraging that local communities are taking these initiatives. But
these local
measures would be more effective in the context of a national reparations initiative supported by the
federal government. Only the federal government has the financial capacity to undertake the broad
and bold endeavors necessary to address the deep-rooted issue of white socio-economic supremac y.
The federal government could also ensure that the burden of funding reparations falls on the ultra-
wealthy who benefit the most from inequality—not on ordinary working taxpayers. A graduated tax
on wealth and inherited assets, penalties for high-end tax evasion, and closing tax loopholes for the
ultra-rich could all help finance a national Reparations Trust Fund.

A Wealth Tax Solves!—Its Key to rectifying racial injustices such as slavery and the
unequal homeowner programs—Coates’ 23
Coates, T. (2023, October 2). The case for reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

A few years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a powerful essay, “The Case for Reparations” for The Atlantic. Reparations, he affirmed, would
help close the widening wealth gap between White households and Black households—the result of
structural racism rooted in the enslavement of millions of Black people. How much would it cost to close
that gap? As much as $10.7 trillion, according to Duke economist William Darity and his co-author Kirsten Mullen. They suggest
that amount could either be paid at once or stretched out over time to the descendants of enslaved
people. Just making good on the cash equivalent of Civil War General William Sherman’s unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule to the
families of people freed from bondage would cost up to $3 trillion in current dollars, Darity and Mullen estimate. And, although numerous
options exist to pay for $3 trillion in reparations, those payments would increase the share of total net wealth owned by Black households to
just 6.5 percent; by comparison, Black households comprise about 14 percent of all US households. Who would pay for reparations? Darity and
Mullen’s answer to the financing question: Borrow. After all, policymakers didn’t worry about budget pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) rules when it
came to COVID-19 relief totaling over $3 trillion through 2030. If reparations are about making amends, then individuals and the
institutions who benefited from enslaving people should make the payments. That was Sherman’s plan: the 40 acres promised to each family
would have come from 400,000 acres confiscated from former enslavers. Today, some supporters, including The Brookings Institution’s Andre
Perry, say that a government that once sanctioned treating people as property bears responsibility, not specific individuals. Of course,
taxpayers would ultimately bear that cost. One possibility: tax the wealthy to pay for reparations. If a
goal is to reduce the racial
wealth gap, that could be achieved by transferring assets from the very rich to those who face significant barriers to accumulating wealth.
Wealth can be taxed in various ways, including increasing capital gains or estate tax rates, taxing unrealized capital gains, or
imposing a wealth tax. Wealth taxes present many administrative and economic challenges, which would be very difficult to overcome.
And another constraint: The Supreme Court might overturn a wealth tax because the Constitution bans direct taxes that aren’t collected evenly
across states based on their populations. Ironically, that clause was added to the Constitution in exchange for allowing states to count people
held in bondage (but only at three-fifths of a free person) when determining representation in Congress. But for purposes of this discussion,
consider a
wealth tax a stand-in for the other ways that assets or capital income could be taxed to pay for
reparations. Taxing wealth to pay for reparations Reparations weren’t on Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign agenda, but revenues from
his proposed wealth tax would cover most of the costs of fulfilling Sherman’s promise. Sanders would tax all assets, with rates increasing from 1
percent on net wealth above $32 million to 8 percent above $10 billion (half those wealth thresholds for single taxpayers). The Tax Policy
Center estimates his proposal would raise $2.2 trillion over a decade—$3 trillion in wealth taxes that would be partially offset by a reduction in
individual income tax collections. (Income tax revenue would fall because some rich taxpayers, hiding assets to avoid the wealth tax, would also
underreport capital income.) Over 97 percent of the wealth tax would be borne by households in the top 0.1 percent of the wealth distribution,
or those with at least $36.2 million in net worth in 2021. (Those estimates don’t reflect the pandemic’s impact on the amount and distribution
of wealth.) Reparations could take many forms—including baby bonds, college tuition, and down payments for homes—but some supporters
say cash payments must be part of the total package. The $3 trillion of wealth tax receipts would pay for a one-time lump-sum payment of
about $66,000 to each Black American alive today, including people who identify both as Black and another race. Payments per
recipient would be larger if they were limited only to the descendants of enslaved people , as Darity and
Mullen propose. And, as compensation for past injustices, the payments would not be means-tested. Recipients wouldn’t pay taxes on
reparations, though they would be taxed on any income they earn from investing the payments. Just as reparations would not be means tested,
recipients could be exempted from the wealth tax. But without rigorous enforcement, rich taxpayers may fake claims of enslaved ancestors to
avoid sizable tax hits. Overall, a $66,000 one-time reparations payment would increase the net wealth of Black
Americans by 160 percent. The share of total net wealth held by Black households would rise from 4 percent to 6.5 percent in 2021.
The share would increase the most among Black households with less than $20,000 in assets before reparations, although they’d still hold less
than 1 percent of all total net assets owned by US households. Could reparations happen? Reparations remain a political long shot. Still a few
cities, such as Evanston, Illinois, Asheville, North Carolina, and St. Paul, Minnesota, are pursuing the idea. And during the campaign, President
Biden said he could support reparations if studies found direct payments to the descendants of enslaved people to be
viable. Identifying who would pay for reparations should be considered at the same time.

The ROB is to vote for the debater who best combats anti-Blackness.
The Standard is racial utilitarianism, meaning maximizing expected well-being with a specific
focus on mitigating anti-Blackness. To clarify, we don’t evaluate harms from a generic “view
from nowhere” – instead, we look to the SPECIFIC impacts policies have on Black people.---
cilli 17
Cilli 17 Cilli, Adam Lee. [Assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, Bradford] “The Pursuit of Happiness: Racial Utilitarianism and Black
Reform Efforts in John T. Clark’s Urban League.” Journal of Urban History, April 12, 2017. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0096144217702645
CH

More than a million southern blacks moved north during the interwar period, both to escape racial oppression and to find good paying industrial work.
During the Great Migration, black populations increased exponentially in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia as well as in smaller cities like Detroit,
Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.4 Northern whites responded to this development by strengthening de facto racial barriers that limited African Americans’
access to public accommodations, gainful employment, and decent housing—contributing to high disease and mortality rates in black communities.5 In
this difficult setting, urban blacks developed an array of tactics to promote their material prospects and safeguard their dignity, ranging from separatism
and radicalism to a conservative position of accommodation. Racial assimilationists fit somewhere in the middle. Emerging from a bourgeois-progressive
milieu that included prominent whites as well as black elites, assimilationists acquiesced to the prevailing economic and political order while insisting on
the right of African Americans to participate equally in it. John T. Clark pursued a variant of assimilation that might be termed racial utilitarianism.
Webster’s dictionary defines utilitarianism as the “doctrine that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should
be the end and aim of all social and political institutions.”6 Although happiness is a subjective term, it is objectively difficult to
achieve while suffering from hunger or sickness. Transposed to urban black communities in the interwar period, racial
utilitarianism entailed reducing or eliminating the greatest sources of physical hardship for the greatest number of
African Americans. As Clark explained, we are faced with the after effects of social problems arising out of living
congestion, bad housing, irregular employment, delinquency, lowered health standards and the lack of sufficient accommodation in social
institutions. Hence we now emphasize in our program, the kind of work which demands the greatest attention.7 This ethos
emerged in response to racial segregation and discrimination, which impinged on African Americans’ ability to enjoy
basic social welfare services. Hence, for Clark and others in the Urban League movement, pursuing utilitarian goals required
providing services to meet the pressing daily needs of African Americans. Although there was overlap, in general Urban
Leaguers’ training and methods set them apart from activists in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, many of whom were
academics and lawyers who challenged racial injustice through court litigation. Conversely, racial utilitarians typically earned degrees in social work
or sociology and addressed the
physical manifestations of racism through vocational, housing, recreational, and health programs.
Operating during the nadir of American race relations, they aspired to identify and mitigate
the most urgent practical problems in
urban black communities through the most efficacious channels available. More than simply a “bread and
butter” issue, Clark and other Urban Leaguers believed that having access to good jobs, decent housing, and adequate healthcare was a right
that belonged to all citizens. Yet while advancing a broad conception of citizenship and insisting that white America honor it, black reformers
addressed what they saw as behavioral sources of inequality stemming from the migrants themselves. Believing in the worth of Victorian moral ethics, and
hoping to undermine racist arguments that African Americans could not assimilate into the larger society, Urban Leaguers tried to inculcate migrants with
the values of thrift, sobriety, workplace reliability, and sexual monogamy.8 As they pursued this strategy, ULP activists also dealt with external origins of
inequality by pressuring unions to include nonwhites and by lobbying employers to open skilled positions to African Americans. As one racial utilitarian
understood it, behavioral and structural reform measures were part of a larger duty to “espouse the cause of the colored man of this country. The greatest
good for the greatest number ought to be the program.”9

Extinction Outweighs – BUT FOR WHOM??? Racial util is key for allowing law to best protect
targeted populations. The state has fumbled their duty to protect people of color, our
standard is a form of remedial progress. “Extinction also effects black people” is insufficient.
The Affirmative is necessarily key because racialized harms are existential and always come
first
.

We control uniqueness on institutional usage. Debate rhetoric and strategy is not

useless - it is interested and key to any revolutionary change. If we fail to engage
scholarship, then the neo-conservative thrust of the country will go unchecked and all
impacts are inevitable! Spanos ‘6
SPANOS Prof of English @ Binghamton University 2k6 William; Quoted in Joe Millers’
book Cross-ex (pg. 467) //DTA
Dear Joe Miller, Yes, the statement about the American debate circuit you refer to was made by me, though some years ago. I strongly believed

debate in
then –and still do, even though a certain uneasiness about “objectivity” has crept into the “philosophy of debate” — that

both the high schools and colleges in this country is assumed to take place nowhere,
even though the issues that are debated are profoundly historical, which means that positions
are always represented from the perspective of power, and a matter of
life and death. I find it grotesque that in the debate world, it doesn’t matter which position you take on an issue — say, the
United States’ unilateral wars of preemption — as long as you “score points”. The world we live in is a world

entirely dominated by an “exceptionalist” America which has perennially claimed

that it has been chosen by God or History to fulfill his/its “errand in the wilderness.” That claim is
powerful because American economic and military power lies behind it. And any alternative position in such a world
is virtually powerless. Given this inexorable historical reality, to assume, as the protocols of debate do, that all positions are equal is to efface
the imbalances of power that are the fundamental condition of history and to annul the Moral authority inhering in the position of the
oppressed. This is why I have said that the appropriation of my interested work on education and empire to this transcendental debate world

constitute a travesty of my intentions. My scholarship is not “disinterested.” It is militant and intended to

ameliorate as much as possible the pain and suffering of those who have been oppressed by the “democratic” institutions that have power
precisely by way of showing that their language if “truth,” far from being “disinterested” or “objective” as it is always claimed, is informed by

the will to power over all manner of “others.” This is also why I told my interlocutor that he and those in the
debate world who felt like him should call into question the traditional
“objective” debate protocols and the instrumentalist language they privilege in favor of a
concept of debate and of language in which life and death mattered. I am very much aware that the
arrogant neocons who now saturate the government of the Bush administration — judges,
pentagon planners, state department officials, etc. learned their “disinterested”
argumentative skills in the high school and college debate societies and that, accordingly,
they have become masters at disarming the just causes of the oppressed .
This kind leadership will reproduce itself (along with the invisible oppression it
perpetrates) as long as the training ground and the debate protocols from
which it emerges remains in tact. A revolution in the debate world must
occur. It must force that unworldly world down into the historical arena where positions make a
difference. To invoke the late Edward Said, only such a revolution will be capable of “deterring democracy” (in
Noam Chomsky’s ironic phrase), of instigating the secular critical consciousness that is, in my mind, the sine qua
non for avoiding the immanent global disaster towards which the blind arrogance of Bush Administration and
his neocon policy makers is leading.