Their conception of stasis and limits revolves around whiteness described as neutrality which breeds antiblack anxieties whenever minority debaters try to change the activity

Evolving scholarly debates over social movements, critical theory, race, and rhetoric have the potential to provide fruitful scholarly grounds upon which rev v. rev debates might draw on. As we contend in this section, these debates not only constitute rhetorics of agitation that challenge the hegemony of white-dominated establishment politics but present a model for considering clash between two strategies outside of government reform. Although traditional debate considers the hypothetical imagination of government reform to be the natural stasis of debate writ-large, this stasis is justified through social construction, not inherent limits on the scope of the topic. As Robert Krizek and Thomtas Nakayama (1995) highlight, whiteness functions as the unspoken, universal standard of communication, in which the ideas, identities, and experiences of white people are presumed as a “neutral” consensus. Sylvia Wynter (2003) speaks to the “overrepresentation of Man as human,” in describing how white people stand in as the metaphysical referent point for what it means to be human itself. Similarly, the white traditional policy debater stands in as the rhetorical, intellectual, and practical referent point of debate par excellence, framing critical challenges forwarded by Black and minority debaters as peripheral, threatening, and unpredictable.

This is not to say that only white debaters advance policy arguments and only Black and minority debaters advance critical arguments. Nevertheless, traditional debate continues to overrepresent white debaters while critical debate has largely been responsible for increasing Black and minority participation. More importantly, critical debate has been racialized through Blackness because much of the anxiety surrounding its inception associates critical debate with questions of identity, privilege, and personal experiences of racial domination. Much of this anxiety surrounded Louisville in particular and race-based performance and critical debate writlarge. In her examination of the Los Angeles Riots, Tamara Nopper (2006) argues that despite the participation of Latino/a/x people in the riots, the riots themselves are associated with Blackness as a signifier for criminality in the American cultural imagination, and therefore the Latino/a/x rioters were understood through this racializing frame. Similarly, one can understand how the supposed threats posed by critical debates are associated with the threat of Blackness, insofar as Blackness stands in for and gives coherency to threats to the civility, stasis and sovereignty of white policy debate as its constitutive outside (Kelsie, 2019). That Solt identified the shift from “culture war” to “clash of civilization” speaks to the way in which these forms of debate were considered particularly threatening to the activity – likely in no small part due to underlying antiBlackness