Example 1NC

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I’ve got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

I rise to speak the truth about my people. I rise from the depth of the ocean to place myself and my people back into a conversation that we have historically left out. At a time when theory fills in the gaps for perspectives of those who have deathly forgotten. We must rise!

The 1ac is designed complicate our understanding to the Earth’s ocean, but who is our? Me and My ancestors relationship to the ocean need not be complicated, but rather need to be left alone. The relationship that we have to the ocean is something that was and is forced upon us. From the violent and torturous kidnapping of Africans from their homeland, blacks were forced to create a connection to the ocean. The ocean is grave of unknowable amount of my ancestors… as their bodies line the ocean floor, it is no wonder why the black queer seeks to retreat from the water. It is some stereotypical shit like “black people cant swim”, but the water has been the transporation route for those route of bodies. Embracing an analysis of the ocean would be the same to affirming the boat, the chains and whips, and the men enforcing the slavetide regulations.  We must rise for WE ARE THE SCREAM OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE!

The analysis of black queer subjects in the atlantic and to the ocean in the 1ac mirrors the oppression that the Middle passage brought upon the slave. As they were starved and beaten, they were reminded that everything that they knew before was no longer true or real – they were encouraged to accept complication as explanation for life, forced to be the object of thought of the settler, lashed by the tongue of the master, and marketed as the free world’s work horse.

PRESENCE is important not just for physical representation, but to challenge the construction of knowledge we have learned as an expression of freedom.  Those who are the afforded the ability explore are those who have the privilege and luxury to do so. They explore as an expression of intellectual emancipation, justice, and automony. Exploring the understanding of the oceans only produces an anti-ethical relationship to the struggles black queer bodies because the search for intersubjectivity happens outside the bounds of the black queer body historically. Gills explain in 2012 that….

Gill Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies @ UT-Austin 2012Lyndon K. “Situating Black, Situating Queer: Black Queer Diaspora Studies and the Art of Embodied Listening” Transforming Anthropology 20.1 EBSCO

If a Black queer diasporic consciousness encourages the kinds of perspectival shifts that permit different visions of queer possibility to emerge from the impermanent places Black queer people inhabit and the fertile impermanence that inhabits Black queerness, then it must not be satisfied with discursive treatments of Black queer subjects,Black queer subjectivity or even the juridical, moral and theoretical contexts in which Black queers find themselves.Black queer diaspora studies remains incomplete without the appearance of Black queers not simply as representational abstractions, but as situated, speaking subjects.4 This praxis of Black queer presence is intended to insistently foreground the material reality, quotidian experiences and cultural products of Black queer peoples. Anthropologist Gloria Wekker has offered her work as a call for rooted, contextconscious analyses of Black diasporic same-sex community (as well as sexual practices) that do not trample blossoming specificities in the haste to cultivate a haphazard global same-sex sexuality. And this call is at once part of a delicate symbiosis between a critique of transnational sexuality studies and a desire to elaborate a very specifically situated sexual subjectivity. As Wekker explains, attending to this subjecthood demands that one listen closely:

One possible fruitful way to open windows to local conceptions of personhood is to listen carefully to what people have to say about themselves and what terms they use to make these statements. Collecting and studying a contextualized lexicon of the self can provide an understanding of the ways subjectivity is locally conceptualized. [Wekker 1997:333]

The 1nc quares the reading of the 1ac. The affirmative of intersubjectivity nevitablility places the world ( and everything in it, including the black queer bodu in a position to be acted on by the position of the explorer. Our argument is that the openness that the 1ac exhibits to the world, is the same openness that fueled by the execution of the black queer body. Only the struggle of the black queer is placed in the political memory of the 1ac, but the bodies of the black queer is thrown overboard like the settlers did those imperfect niggas . We seek not to understand the complication that arises from a position of absolute direlection, but rather find the lost bodies of the Africa.  Attempts to affirm intersubjectivity within debate privilege those with the power to go on an investigation of idenity while furthering the oppression of black and queer bodie in debate.

Hundreds of people

Every weekend I see

And for barely any of them to ever look like me is just…

Implicit of the complicit and their intention to miss it

The mission omits the faces of the missionaries

So we get done the traditional way, let’s call it missionary

I see as we take off

In this face off,

They want me to take my race off

And ignore the factor of race that daily affects me,

And the ways being a Black man in this space perplex me,

And how when Im in their faces to speak on it

They respect me

But when they construct thought experiments,

They never seem to reflect me

So concerned with intersubjectivity

They short circuit the ability to shake the bullshit,

No palpitations

Just amalgamations

Of their agendas and the effects on the people

Hell bent on makin a miracle appear without a church and a steeple

Missing the mark

So if you tryna spark it ima be the flame

Being being shut up,

To being shame,

To finally screaming my name,

Cuz its forgotten in the monotony

Of what it means to create change

And see how my people’s perspectives can bring light

To the darkest of days

Flip the switch!

Cuz I tell you I’ll be the daughter of a snitch

Before the bastard son of political passivity

See Ima crack the world twice

Before it takes another dirty swing at me

And its gon be what its gon be

We have come to paint your ivory towers black again

Cuz my hope wont let me leave

And pride wont let my pride stop from my pride crashing in

Standstill

I will not,

I’ll stand from the hill top,

Don’t care care If you say stop,

Cuz Im looking for the black people.

This debate is about which team best performatively rises from the depths of the ocean. We need not to deepen the depths of the ocean or our understanding of it, but rather rise from the complicated, messy  conflicted naturethat the world has attempted to throw the slave in. The 1nc is a performative interruption to the complications and embracement of the black queer revolutionary call to rise from the ocean with life-ever lasting! DO JESUS!

JOHNSON 2K6 [Patrick E., “professor of African American studies and performance studies at Northwestern University, “Quare Studies or (almost) everything I know about Queer Studies I learned from my grandmother” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology

It also is a performance of self for the self in a moment of self-reflexivity that has the potential to transform one’s view of self in relation to the world. People have a need to exercise control over the production of their images so that they feel empowered. For the disenfranchised, the recognition, construction, and maintenance of self image and cultural identity functions to sustain, even when social systems and codes fail to do so. Granted, formations or performances of identity may simply reify oppressive systems, but they may also contest and subvert dominant meaning systems. When gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people “talk back,” whether using the “tools of the master” or the vernacular on the streets , their voices, singularly or collectively, do not exist in some vacuous wasteland of discursivity. As symbolic anthropologist Victor turner suggests, their performances are not simple reflectors or expressions of culture or even of changing culture but may themselves be active agencies of change, representing the eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting “ designs for living.”…Performative reflexivity is a condition in which a sociocultural group, or its most perceptive members acting representatively, turn, bend, or reflect back upon themselves, upon the relations, actions, symbols, meanings, codes, roles, statuses, social structures, ethical and legal rules, and other sociocultural components which make up their public selves.

The question is not how do WE respond, but why could you respond with me?