White policy debate continues to be the overrepresentation form- marginalizing critical scholarship within the activity despite racialized and gendered rhetoric being at the forefront of political discourses- ignoring how different areas of scholarship are uniquely applicable to each topic

That white policy debate remains overrepresented as debate writ large does not point to its inherent center of any given resolution. Consider for example, Lisa Flores’ (2016) consideration of racial rhetorical criticism in the discipline of communication. She contends that despite the fact that minority scholars and scholarship concerning race remain marginalized in the canon, that rhetorical studies at its core is bound up with questions of race. This is because rhetoric is concerned with politics, publics, and cultural discourses, and race is central to all of those aspects. We suggest scholars ought to consider the ways in which race lies at the core of every resolutional question in different ways, as each year the resolution typically considers topics relevant to political publics and social change. One may object that by design, the resolutional question is meant to change the surrounding scholarship every year so that it is topic specific and thus allowing scholarship on race to be at the heart of every topic is problematic. However, this does not discard the fact that different areas of scholarship on race might be connected to each topic, just like each year policy debate continually draws from the disciplines of international relations, political theory, and legal theory, even though their particular cases vary with each resolution.

Proponents of a traditional policy interpretation of the topic often contend specifically that the mechanism, or the actor, in the resolution is necessary to make it predictable. However, as we have been arguing throughout this essay, traditional policy debate’s overrepresentation of debate is not neutral consensus, but a normalized process informed by racialized assumptions. Traditionally, the words in the resolution are assumed to describe fiat, or hypothetical imagination. Yet none of the words in any given resolution can be described definitively as meaning hypothetical imagination. A team could read a plan text and then describe the affirmative case as irony. They could also read a plan text as a metaphor. These would technically conform to the words in the resolution, and thus reveal it is not the words that limit out “unpredictable” mechanisms but a community norm. In this regard, fiat is, technically speaking, an arbitrary, extra-topical inclusion. It does not gain authority from the words in the resolution, instead it informs how debaters and coaches ought to interpret those words. Put differently, fiat is not inherently predictable based on the resolution, but only predictable based on a tradition. However, as Louisville and other Black and critical teams have pointed to, that tradition is steeped in the overrepresentation of white debaters, their interests, their desires, and their claims to what the activity ought to look like. When this aspect is taken into consideration with our aforementioned point that the topic selection and resolutional wording process is itself informed by racialized archival processes, new conceptualizations of clash beyond this restrictive framework become necessary.