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the civil rights skeptics

hello. i feel that this conflict has become exceedingly personal and 
inflammatory.  i would like to take a step back and discuss why it is 
that many of us believe that civil rights is a long overdue topic and why 
it is important, for social reasons, for us to debate.
	perhaps where our problem begins is with the skeptics' concept of 
social change.   i keep getting the impression that people opposing civil 
rights think that unless there's a mass societal revolution as soon as 
the topic's selected all of us CR advocates are at worst liars and at 
best naive.  social change rarely takes the form of violent revolution or 
mass uprising.  social change is accomplished one person at a time.  it 
is accomplished when after a debate round i have to sit down and think 
about some of the assumptions i've been functioning under my whole life.  
it happens when i am forced to think intelligently about racism, about 
how to argue it effectively, about how to refute it and keep my 
integrity.  it happens when the Daniel Webster Foundation, an outreach 
mentoring program which teaches inner-city kids debate skills, can double 
up on research and include five more kids in its program.  it happens 
when these posts are uncomfortable to read and so we have to ask 
ourselves why.  it happens when we realize that minorities are GROSSLY 
underrepresented in this activity and that womyn, although growing in 
numbers, still suffer from amazingly asymmetrical representation and are 
forced to deal with archaic attitudes that persist.  it happens when 
everyone must acknowledge, in the form of topic acceptance, that race and 
gender discrimination are "real", every bit as real as our foreign policy 
and every bit as relevant.  it happens one person at a time, it happens 
one conversation at a time.  it happens when instead of speaking from the 
margins with "those feminist arguments" i can speak from the center.
	i agree, all topics are educational and some can change our 
lives.  after learning about the environment last year my awareness was 
raised and in some cases i changed my behavior.  i admire the womn you 
described who went to mexico after the mexico topic.  but not all topics 
have the same transformative potential because not all of them hit close 
to home.  learning about interesting and fun thing is part of this 
activity, a part that we all love.  but it is not the totality.  what we 
talk about in debate forms our awareness and beliefs.  but it would be 
wrong to say that my opinion about israel's government was even remotely 
as relevant as my perspective when i look at someone who has skin of a 
color different than mine and make an assumption about her before she's 
even spoken.  before we can ask questions about how our foreign policy is 
formed, we should ask the difficult questions about our own community, 
the questions no-one is eager to ask, questions about the nature of race 
and sex discrimination.  please don't let your skepticism overlook the 
possibilities in this topic.

thank you.

laura
References:
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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