The "Death Good" Problem: Debate and Sensitive Topics

I’m relatively new to debate, as a sophomore who’s only in my second year of Lincoln-Douglas, but I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. Across tournaments, circuits and types of debate, it’s both consistently present and consistently disturbing. And it’s this: debate has a sensitive topics issue. 

To put it simply, debaters have issues with handling sensitive topics, and debate incentivizes mishandling them. We are taught to think of horrifying real world-events as good uniqueness cards, appropriate discriminatory rhetoric for good links, and turn a blind eye to journalistic ethics for the strongest worded evidence in favor of our points. This problem should reflect more on the issues other debaters raise about our arguments and change them; it’s not worth being a worse person for the ballot, and if we can’t win a debate without saying something offensive, maybe we shouldn’t win that debate. 

It’s worth not only modifying individual actions, but the way we debate period. We need to reorient our positions on debate away from winning and towards education, speaking out and creating a safe space. Coaches, camps and fellow debaters need to do a better job of impressing upon new debaters that the ballot is not worth harm to ourselves, others, or marginalized groups. Yes, debaters do become policymakers, and we would do well to become the ones who advocate for what we believe in, not for what lobbyists tell us to do. Debate is a good place to approach these topics. So let’s do it well. True modification manifests itself in a few ways, but here are some of the main ones. 

First is the topics we debate on. While debate should be a place for advocacy and critical thinking skills, it often feels as if some topics are chosen purely because they are controversial, potentially posing safety issues for marginalized debaters. Take the public forum topic for September / October: Resolved: the United States federal government should substantially expand its surveillance infrastructure along its southern border. When the topic selection was announced, there was an online spat between two well-known debate camps, Victory Briefs and Public Forum Boot Camp. Victory Briefs published an article arguing that the surveillance topic incentivized racist and xenophobic argumentation, and that debate camps shouldn’t have chosen it for their topics. 

They argued that during an election season when anti-immigrant rhetoric was rife, the first topic for many novice competitors should not be one in which the strongest impact cards would come from hard-right demonization of Latin-American immigrants. The response from Public Forum Boot Camp argued that VBI was attempting to swing the topic or intimidate debaters out of voting for it, but I would argue that VBI was right. 

In my debate circles, the surveillance topic led to a lot of damage. On the Equality in Forensics server itself, someone asked for a card saying “the government gives too much money to illegal immigrants, ruining the US [economy].” The way this was phrased as them looking for a card suggests that they didn’t believe it, but thought it would be a strategic argument. On my way home from school, I overheard PFers talking about judging a novice round that had left one of them, a second generation immigrant, near tears because the novices were framing undocumented immigrants as threats to America. 

In Alabama, a Congress tournament proposed a bill on banning abortion. In Lincoln-Douglas, two months after the beginning of the current Israel-Palestine conflict, the January-February topic was military presence in the Middle East (or West Asia/ North Africa.) It became the TOC topic, and throughout its stay as the topic, I heard from many debaters scared of being forced into an in-round debate about something they hadn’t even begun to process outside of debate. And on the flip side, I heard many debaters excited to read arguments on it, because they believed other people would find it hard to respond to. And because in debate, we argue for both sides of a topic, people become accustomed to saying one thing one round, and another thing the next, approaching topics where our rhetoric has real impact from the point of strategy. 

This gets to the second manifestation, debate norms around sensitive topics, or the lack thereof. Trigger warning theory, or trigger warnings themselves, have become common in debate. The theory shell is read against people who read arguments around sensitive topics and don’t preface it with trigger warnings, usually with justifications about in round safety and norms. But the level at which these debates are ended with the debater who the shell is read against having prepped it out, reading at lightning pace their counter standards and winning off the RVI without ever substantively engaging with the safety issues posed should leave a bad taste in our mouths. When there are trigger warnings, debaters often leave them for courtesy, and don’t have other arguments to read if the person they are against or the judge says the topic is triggering to them. 

Trigger warnings have become a way to avoid the shell, or they are left out because the person reading the triggering arguments is good at theory debate and is prepared to kick the case for the RVI on trigger warnings. I was left in tears after a round when my opponent read graphic descriptions of violence without a warning, and I felt like it was my fault for not being tougher, or more thick-skinned. This is fundamentally at odds with what the debate space should be. And one thing I’ve always loved about debate, specifically Lincoln-Douglas debate, is how it’s a self-critiquing space. 

From the Louisville Project to IVIs to identity Ks, marginalized debaters have found ways to use debate itself to improve debate. But these forms of argumentation become appropriated by debaters who are not in these marginalized groups for strategic reasons. In Zion Dixon, Joshua Porter and Quinn Hughes’ seminal article “On Non-Black Afropessimism”, they talk about the ways in which afropessimism, a literature base about antiblackness and the complicity of non-black people in and out of debate in racist structures, has been appropriated by white debaters reading it for the ballot without having to live with the substance of what the literature is saying. They say “stop using Black suffering and the reality of anti-Blackness to win high school debate rounds. There I said it. If only it were that simple. If only I could be assured you would listen.” If only I could be assured you would listen. 

In the case of the IVI, or independent voter issue, it exists in this weird space between a theory argument and a K. It calls out a safety issue in the round and why it’s justification for dropping the debater. I’m a fan of the IVI, and I think it truly does help. People often do stop reading the arguments that the IVI was read against, because they recognize the safety issue. But like identity Ks, and performance, the IVI is often used cynically and blippily, not as a way to call out issues in the round but as a one sentence stretch used in the same way as a spike. This leads to people taking IVIs less seriously, and just seeing them as another argument. 

In trying to find the quickest ways to answer arguments, debaters tend towards the most sweeping and dramatic arguments possible, including things like death good. No, death good arguments are not inherently bad, but when we treat them as just strategic turns we end up with debaters reading death good against affirmatives about real life genocides or wars, and judges voting off it if it’s conceded. Debaters reading death good will often answer yes to questions about whether it would be good for them, their judges or their opponent to die in round simply for the sake of not contradicting themselves in cross, without fully considering the implications or taking the time to consider that that’s probably not something their authors would justify.

 “Tech over truth” judging often incentivizes this, and often makes judges have a much higher threshold for what constitutes an offensive argument for the sake of the flow, or feel bad about voting off an argument that they believed was unsafe or violent. Even the way debaters are taught to weigh incentivizes comparing one atrocity to another, and arguing that one is worse or more important, is fundamentally flawed.

The third manifestation is in debate itself, which I’ve been alluding to throughout this entire article. As many theory debaters have said, debate is a game with winners and losers. We are incentivized to place our self esteem in winning, and do anything to win. To read the identity argument we don’t understand, and do not relate to, because it’s scary to respond to. To have the blippy IVI debates not because of safety, but because we have the IVI in our backfiles for when we don’t know how else to respond. To vote for the topic we know some people will find emotionally taxing to compete on, because it gives us a bigger chance of winning. 

So, what to do? I have a few ideas, though many of them may seem intuitive. The first few are about the NSDA and the powers that be. First, there should be more careful analysis before topics are selected for voting. It should consider current events, politics, the kinds of arguments people will run, and whether the educational benefits outweigh the risk of offensive argumentation. Yes, people can read bad arguments on any topic, also yes, they are more likely to on a topic about the southern border. 

The second is about dealing with when these topics are mishandled: tournaments should do a better job telling people where to get in contact with tab, and work to make it less taboo to report hurtful things that happen in round to tab. 

And thirdly, judges should be willing to intervene for what’s right. If judges agree that an argument being read is racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise discriminatory, they shouldn’t ignore their gut feeling for the sake of impartiality. And on judging: judges shouldn’t dismiss all forms of identity and safety arguments (ie all IVIs, all Ks) because they find them uninteresting to evaluate or differing from the “original spirit” of debate; they’re important to making the debate community a better space. 

Then, on what we can do as debaters. Let’s not read arguments we feel uncomfortable reading, or feel we shouldn’t be reading, for the sake of strategy. And we can talk to our teammates if they’re reading arguments we feel are offensive or violent, the true worst case scenario is that nothing changes. And the best case scenario? We make debate a better place for everyone involved in the activity.