Debatable

Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Yeah. So before we get started, I have to cover questions for you. Yeah, please fire away.

So I've talked to a lot of people who you've attempted to contact. There's a lot of hesitation. People just don't have faith in media right now and consider it our issues to be honest. Why control media?

So I've got a couple questions for you. Yeah. Go away. Why now?

Why do we want to do this story now? Yeah, well, it's an abby just found story. Yeah. So it was unknown to us until right now.

Well, this feels a little new. You have the moment to see stuff like that. Yeah. This is Robert.

So we have Robert. We have Robert. We have Chad. And you have Abigail.

JAD. JAD. Yes. I guess.

Do you have other questions? Sure. We can wait. We can table those.

No, no, no. So what is the in goal? What do you want the story to say? We never know that.

Okay. Hey, I'm Chad Abenron. I'm going to tell you the story of a guy. A guy named Ryan Wash.

He's part of a movement of people who have taken this established corner of the academic world and they've reshaped it, reframed it. It's something even weirder and we're different. Weirder. No, not weird bad.

Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. Let's replay the word.

I'm just saying in debate lingo, that's a link. That's a link. Usually when you run a criticism, the link is the thing that they've done bad. Oh, okay.

Okay. The description of performance debate is a problematic. Can I put a list? Can I?

Let's touch mentally. Okay. So the world that we're talking about, which is the center of this whole story, is obviously debate. Yes.

High school debate and college debate. Now I have an edited debate, but from the outside it always seemed like this hyper competitive like brain storm. These guys were these accordion briefcase where they have all these files in there with all the research. Yeah.

And they go to these tournaments and they argue about some topic back and forth and back and forth. Yeah. Now the interesting thing about debate, I didn't know this beforehand, is that the people who do this often go on to become hugely powerful people, you know, Supreme Court judges, presidents, leading thinkers, scholars, titans of industry. It's the farm team of the big folks for tomorrow.

So Lee Ia Koka from Chrysler, he was a debater. Margaret Thatcher, Ted Cruz, Carl Rowe, Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Nixon, Malcolm X, they all were debaters. And today, this is Ryan's story. Ryan washes story of debate.

Actually, it's Ryan's story debating debate. Yeah, yes. And the story comes from reporter Abigail Keel and before we get going, just want to let you know there is some strong language in the story, some profane words. Skip it if you need to.

Otherwise, here we go. Is it a cool if we jump in Ryan? Yeah. I would love to know Ryan, like, what was your life like before you were ever on a debate team?

Well, Kevin City, Missouri, inner city, public school, you know, 99% black students. I was actually tricked into debating. Really? When was this?

When was this? We were talking about, oh, well, let me see, 2000. I'm sorry, I'm old. 2005?

When were you born if you sang your old? 1990. Oh, some odd. Oh, but yeah, I ended up getting tricked into debate.

I was definitely more of an observant person, which is why I like to play the game of chess, because, you know, how people move their pieces the time it takes them to move their pieces all gives away, you know, something their tails. And so I was tricked into debate by playing chess and I ended up winning the school chess tournament that we had in this little short German redhead lady named Jane Reinhart came to chess practice. I ended up being president chess club. She came to chess practice one day and pulled me in the hallway and was like, I understand you were a chess champion and that's a really good thing.

And we had this debate program and I think you'd be really good at it. Like, you know, anybody who critically think a chess could critically think a debate. Yeah, I don't even know what debate was. So we told her, no, not for me, but I persist.

So over the next year, she kept on telling me, she was like, I thought I told you to join debate and I was like, I thought I told you no. I can spot a debate or at 20 paces. And she was just like, okay, you think I'm playing? So one Monday I came to school.

She handed me a piece of paper. It was a revised schedule. She had my schedule change to where I had to bait first hour. I just after some meetings.

So here I am. Here you are. That's what happens with a lot of my debaters. They just come in kind of days like my schedule got changed.

I'm like, yeah, okay, that's fine. Take a seat. So those first few classes, Ryan's learning the basics of debate. And in this kind of debate that he's doing is called policy debate.

There's two teams and two people on each team. Usually the debate is about some kind of national policy topic. Like the United States government should increase its economic engagement in China. One team at the beginning of the debate is randomly assigned to be affirmative.

And that means they're supporting that proposition. They're saying, yes, the United States federal government should do that. Here's why. And the other team is the negative team.

And they're arguing against the affirmative. Both of those sides make their case. And at the end, the judge decides who made the better arguments. I mean, I get them up debating almost day one.

We ended up having mock debates in class like Pepsi versus Coke, you know, family goversus, the Simpsons and stuff like that. So it wasn't very fun. It made us learn how to do impact analysis. Impact analysis.

So for instance, let's say you're debating apples versus oranges. If I say the rhymes of apples are necessary for the fertilizer to produce oranges, so you must vote for apples. That would be the impact of choosing apples over oranges. You have to be able to compare the two and make argumentation.

So the traditional standard for argumentation is. And as Ryan started learning all this, impact analysis, schoolman's model of argumentation, he started to eat those pathos logo. Do you really well? Yeah, he did.

He joined the team, started going to tournaments. You know, debate is one of those activities that affords you to the possibility of traveling places where I grew up and went to school. I mean, students didn't leave like a 40 block radius for their entire life, you know? I mean, you're in control in that debate round.

And everybody's listening to you. And I think it's important to feel that way, even if it's only in a 60, 90 minute debate round. Ryan needed those wins. He needed that affirmation.

That affirmation. That was a great time. The thing that helped me out was that my first tournament was a debate Kansas City tournament. The Bay Kansas City is an urban debate league.

And so we were debating other kids from the same neighborhood that just went to different schools. And so that environment of debate was to me very different. Like yeah, we wanted to win. But there was a lot more camaraderie in the debate, I thought.

And so to me, by the time I went to my first national competition, I was very much committed to debate. But once I went to that national tournament for the first time, I was like, oh, hey, I don't know about this, you know. National tournaments, you're up against what I call name brand schools, you know, predominantly private schools. And so we were real excited about that.

Put our little dress clothes on, got cute. Got on the bus. Nerves started kicking a little bit just by going to the bay tournament, got off the bus, went inside. And then we went to the cafeteria.

And when we opened the door to walk into the cafeteria and began to walk in, the room went silent. I mean, when I tell you that talking stopped literally 300 other plus students stopped and stared at us because a bus of black kids had just arrived. And they like watched us the whole time that we were in the cafeteria and they was like, what are they doing here? Well, at least that's how I failed, you know.

But we walked over to our table and our coach was like, do not worry about them, pull out your things, get warmed up, get ready for competition. And so got our stuff pulled out and started to practice. And then they started to whisper. You know, whether they were whispering about the bay stuff or about us, I don't know, I wasn't in their hands.

But I can definitely explain to you what they felt like. It was real awkward and it was real uncomfortable. And making things even more awkward and more uncomfortable is that when the debates actually got going and this is particularly true at the natural level, this is what debate sounds like. This is what debate sounds like.

This is what debate sounds like. This is what debate sounds like. The plan for the US federal government to run out of Congress will potentially inform the administration infrastructure by replying that all federal government projects in the US to 15 to 20 percent ground on the ground are not really the conflicts. What is this?

Is this like, is this like, sped up or something? No. This is what debate sounds like today. Like, they sort of speed read.

Well, the goal of speed reading or spreading if you will is to get more arguments out. The US highly written infrastructure has an issue of requirement for fairness. And apparently, and this is like a quick digression. This kind of thing actually started in like the 1960s and the students were actually the ones who were driving it.

One of the things that makes debate such an interesting and intellectual game is that it's much more of a bottom up driven activity than a top down activity. That's Scott Harris, director of debate at the University of Kansas. In the case of speed reading. We evolved a situation where one team decided, well, I'm going to present eight arguments and the other team talked slower and only answered six of them and the judge says, well, you didn't answer two of these arguments.

So you lost the debate because you didn't answer those arguments. Well, we need to answer all eight of those arguments and they started to talk faster and the other team said, well, we'll present 10 arguments and then they answered 12 and they said, so it escalated to a point that in some instances gone way too far. And getting back to Ryan, it's not as if he didn't know how to do that style of debate. That's the way I debated.

I did try to speak fast. But he says somewhere around the first national tournament, like all that stuff just kind of stopped making sense to him, like the fast talking and the fact that he had to debate these super, you know, highfalutin topics. I felt as if I could never take any of the stuff that I learned in debate and take it back to 33.04, ask you where I live. And this isn't just unique to Ryan.

I mean, what you see at this stage in debate is that a lot of kids, like especially inner city kids from public schools, black students, you know, they just start to drop out of debate at a certain point. But Ryan, Ryan didn't do that. Now something big is going to happen. I have a feeling like somebody's going to say, no, no, no.

What happened was is that a student from University Academy, she was a senior. Her name was Marcia and she went to a different school than Ryan. She came over and asked around her. She needed a partner.

There was about to be this tournament called KCCTLC tournament. It was a big high school debate tournament and Marcia and she was older than Ryan, but she needed a partner. So she ended up in Ryan Hart and Jane said, well, here, Ryan, he's your guy. So met with Marcia and it was the Thursday before the tournament happened.

And I pulled her into this room and I had over, I had three boxes of evidence, you know, and I was ready to go with my traditional stuff. The topic was whether the US should increase participation in national service programs, so like Peace Corps, armed services, stuff like that. And I'm like, oh, this is the stuff that I've been working on. I showed her the learnings of America stuff.

I had this like Peace Corps affirmative that I hadn't wrote yet. She showed her note cards with statistics on them, quotes from various experts. You know, and she was like, uh, yeah, that's cute. Yeah.

And so she handed me this expand on was just like, okay, take this folder, go home, study it. So I got home and I opened this expand on and it was all of this. It was full of things and I stayed up literally all night studying this file. I mean, it was not a lot of evidence.

There was not a lot of pre written out answers to arguments. There wasn't a lot of that. There was some things that were there was Ralph Ellison's. I am an invisible man.

There was a clip from Ralph Ellison's, you know, invisible man in there. There was, uh, you may write me down in history with your disa-clisted line. My angel who poem in there. You may charge me in the very dirt, but still like dust.

I there was some original stuff that she wrote. And I'm like, I, I didn't get it, but she was the senior. So I'm like, right, hard kind of told me, you know, like her, you know, drive the ship. You just ride along and I was like, okay.

So next day we get to the first debate. I still was very unclear when we arrived at the tournament. Just what was going on? He and Marchana get to the classroom and standing on the other side of the room.

Are there two opponents? Are they white kids? Most of the, yeah, they were white guys and suits were Republican ties on. If you want to know, if you want to, if you want to be with just.

We're just going to be honest. The other team, they're affirmative. So big of first and they're like, I love this. This is about the.

They lay out this whole argument about how the national service programs are good because they increase us power abroad. And then it was Marchana's turn. So she gets up to give this speech and I starts with this like four minute long piece of spoken words like this performative speech kind of about her personal experience and debate. And she had this way of speaking that was very passionately forceful.

It made people stop. They stopped writing. They stopped talking. And in the middle of this riff, Marchana laid out this argument that the style of debate that they engaged in that fast paced form of debate was exclusionary because it demotivated minority students from participating.

And not only that, like it also creates this resource imbalance because if you're going to start debating with a ton of arguments, then you have to research that many arguments and you need help researching those arguments. So you pay people and you pay coaches help you make those arguments and not clearly favors rich and affluent schools. And beyond that, Marchana argued like even the language itself sets up a norm of what counts as intelligent authoritative argumentation. For instance, like men's voice to be held up over women, black people to always seem angry and rude when they're just being passionate as if they don't have feelings.

You know, it was a criticism of the auctioneer style of debate. It was a criticism of the insular lingo of debate. It was a criticism of the way in which debates were decided socially and politically as opposed to argumentatively. So I was like, I was like, okay, I can you shock?

Were you shocked? Were you shocked? I was shocked. I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, damn, that was a great.

That's like, snaps like we was at the poetry slam, but I was sitting to myself thinking, like, okay, how am I going to extend this? Like when it got to be his turn, what's left for him to say? I don't know what more what other words I could use. And so it wasn't until the second person from this team got up and he started to speak and he was like, you know, debating about to say this great, this is disrespectful to the state of debate and he turned to her.

It was this moment. He turned to her and he said it like from his soul, you should go down the hall because that's where poetry process held this academic debate. And I was like, what? And he basically his argument was that what we were doing was not debating.

What we were having was a talent show is how he described it. And I was just like, I get it. And maybe it was a study and I had done all night, but everything kicked in in that moment. Passion came into the room.

I was like, what was it? You get it? Like, I get everything that she was trying to say what she was saying about the structure of debate because I had felt those things before. I just didn't know how to articulate them.

Was it like, I get that I can, was it like permission? I get what she's saying. Like, debate is fucked up. I get it.

I'm sorry. And let's just like, we definitely went on to win that debate. You won this match? Yeah, we won the debate because...

Okay, so let me just explain like what happened in this debate. Judges in this kind of situation have a choice, right? Like they can hear the arguments that Ryan and Marciaan are making and they can think, okay, this isn't really about the Peace Corps or about armed services. So you lose.

Or they can do what the judge in this debate did. And they can say, all right, the topic has kind of shifted, but let's look at what we have in front of us. Let's look at the arguments that were made. You have Ryan and Marciaan as saying that the structure of debate is racist.

And then you've got the other team not really responding in any kind of like counter-argumentative way. And Ryan in this debate, what he does is he points at that. He points at when this other team says leave the room and he says, hey, like what they just did proves our point that we are excluded from debate. And the judge agreed.

Oh, so you use his sort of, you use his, you don't belong here as a kind of, as an argument against him. That's what I was saying is about our evidence and it came for a lot from what happened in the debate itself. Fascinating. Let me just take that guy side.

So that you're changing the whole, you're really throwing huge bombs at them. And racism hegemony, what's he supposed to do? I'm a racist. What is he supposed to do?

Stop. What do you mean stop? First off, he should stop. Second off, I mean, you don't have to say you're racist.

Ain't nobody going to want to admit that they're racist. But you can definitely admit that you've engaged in racist practices or you can have a debate about whether or not that was a racist practice. There's a healthy debate to be had about that. But instead, what he said was that you all do not belong here.

Leave the room. Like if you walk in and you say what you just said and you say it forcibly and eloquently. And the other says, hey, you're changing the rules here. You're breaking things down.

Leave the room. And then in the leave the room, they leave themselves open to this counter-attack. And it still surprises me that you win. And so this is a thing.

There's very few rules to debate, but there's tons of norms. And depending on the community of debate or the space of debate that you're in, those norms may differ. But I only know of a few rules. Like there must be a winner and a loser.

Time limits. And obviously that'd be debatable at times. There must be affirmative and a negative. Other than that, how one approaches debate, how one approaches the topic, how one approaches themselves and their opposition.

All of that stuff is debatable and arguably should be debatable. With this, there's no like, there's no bible of debate. There's no like book. Okay, so they put out things like the NDT rule book, which is like affirmative teams must be topical, but in the world of debate, what does it mean to be topical?

What does it mean to be on topic? That has to be debatable in order for debate to happen. This is getting very interesting. I'm just curious.

If you're really good at this, like can you give me, parse me what you would have said if you were the guy coming after you or before you? Well, one of the things that they needed to do in particular was to say that the debate itself shouldn't be about debate. But what they said was, y'all should leave. See, that's interesting.

Because that's one of the places where I have sympathy for the other side is where they're like, I thought we were talking about the B-score. Like, they walked into the wrong room or something. But that was one of our arguments was that how do you do debate? How do you participate in an activity for hours and hours and hours and weeks upon weeks upon weeks and arguably years and years and not ever think about why you debate the way that you do?

That was what we were present. So what was the other team's reaction? They were really upset. Yeah, they called us an in-word.

No. No. Really? Yeah.

This is Nuss-Smith calling from her eighth grade history classroom. RadioLab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.slown.org.

Hey, I'm Janip O'Rone. I'm Robert Kroll, which is RadioLab. And it's back to our story, again from Producer Abigail Kiel, which is sorry about a guy named Ryan Wash and about debate. How we debate.

Yeah. Okay, so just to kind of pull back from that moment with Marcheanna in the poetry and all that, this kind of thing wasn't just happening in a vacuum. It actually came from all kinds of different places all at once. And one particular interesting person who was influencing it was George Soros.

With a billionaire? Yeah. Soros was fascinated by debate. That's Dr.

Shenera Rebrinkley, she's a scholar and a big figure in the so-called black debate world. Soros thought that debate was one of those kinds of activities that was incredibly important to the production of democracy. So he started funding debate programs overseas. It's like Eastern Europe.

And here in the US, he poured tons of money. Like millions and millions and millions of dollars to start urban debate programs first started with New York City. 1987? Right, so they literally went out to all of these New York high schools, talked to a bunch of administrators, Soros just pumped money into New York City to start an urban debate league.

Then it went to Baltimore, then to Chicago, Detroit, went to Kansas City, out to LA, New York. It just kept moving, so we're almost up to maybe 23 or 24 city. So, you know, if you take a step back and look at it all suddenly, really within just a few years, you have all of these new black debaters. And many of those students, she says, would go through the exact same thing that Ryan went through.

At the regional level, you can imagine you get a bunch of African-American students, a bunch of teachers who are supporting them in a very positive environment. They build relationships and friendships. And so debate feels like home in that space. But as soon as they go to that first national tournament, culture shop.

Because there is a sea of white people. And according to Dr. Reed Brinkley, this influx of black debaters into a primarily white space started to create some tension and pressure. And that all built up and eventually resulted in something called the Louisville Project.

The Louisville Project started its goal was to increase meaningful participation. It was just like Louisville. It was like what happened in Louisville. Let's go back.

I know that there's a baseball bat associated with Christ. Okay, so early 2000s. Yeah, and at the University of Louisville, there was a debate team. Predominantly African-American team.

And so they were having a hard time finding traction. He says they would go to these national tournaments. And no matter what they did, if they tried to accommodate them or traditional style, there was always something that they did wrong. Apparently those students would try to make arguments about race inside the topics.

But usually it didn't work. And so at a certain point, they decided that they were done with that. They were like, no, we are unwilling to play your game in the way that you have defined it should be played. And so these debaters, what they would basically do is they would show up and they would force a conversation about race.

Basically saying like we're not going to talk about China or global trade until we deal with this. This is Louisville's famous phrase. They said, we can't change the state, but we can change the state of debate. So they kind of end up developing this whole new methodology, which is actually a throwback to Aristotle.

And in his idea, yeah, you need three things to persuade someone. Ethos, pathos, and logos. Logos is like logic. So, you know, getting research and scholars and evidence and things like that.

Pathos, that's where emotion comes in. So maybe a personal story or sharing something that will connect with the audience. And then ethos, which is kind of hard to pin down. You can think of it as credibility or sort of like speaking in tune with the spirit of your culture.

That's where you get the introduction of the use of hip hop. Sometimes the black and the berries. The sweet and the juice I say, the dark and the flesh and the deep and the deep. Use the spoken words.

They say the niggas always already queer. That's exactly the point of use that. And it's the case starts to be affirmative because we are saying the use of what we call street scholars. Hey, what?

You know? What was the reaction when this first started? They would say things to Louisville like, you know, this isn't research. This is me search as if black scholars, noted black scholars in their fields are not real experts, right?

They would say things like hip hop does not belong here. Your argument style doesn't belong here. And then I'm saying these things in really nice ways. You know what I mean?

But there could be really angry screaming matches at tournaments. Would you have an objection to a prohibition as a coach? If you said, like, look, for next year, let's never talk about you and leave your agenda, your sex, your background, your family, your religion behind and stay entirely in the brain. I doubt that you would do that, but I'm wondering why you wouldn't.

Well, I think that's anti-black. I think it's anti-black too. Well, it would be anti-gay, anti-du, anti-gay. Right, exactly.

It would be anti-all of those things. But particularly for our purposes, right? It would be anti-black. And the reason why that's important for me is because these students don't get to leave their blackness at the door when they enter for competition, right?

They can pretend that they're not black, but that does not mean that everybody else is going to pretend that they are not black. How, even when they speak what arguments they make when they open their mouths to make an argument, people are paying attention to the fact that it is coming out of a black body. They don't get to speak without race being a factor. Nobody gets to speak without race being a factor in a nation where race is a factor.

Now back to Ryan. So he's 16 years old and he sees Marshall do this spoken word poetry thing. He starts to read more about Louisville and he's just like, I'm in. That I dedicate him my debate career to discussing debate.

Every debate. Every single one. Every single one. Fast forward.

He graduates high school. Isn't sure he's going to go to college. I was a first generation college student, so I really didn't know much about the process. But then, early August 2008, he gets a message from a debate coach at a small school in Kansas called Emporia State University.

And August 14th, I was driving up to Emporia for college. So Ryan gets there, gets paired up with a sophomore, LaToya Williams Green. Who's now the director of the debate at Cal State Fullerton, go best for you. Two of them start debating together and over the course of a couple of years, Ryan starts to get recognized.

He's winning Speaker Awards. He's making it into the out rounds at tournaments. But it was an uphill battle. She says that Ryan kept bumping into judges who weren't really into the whole three tier approach to debate.

Yes, I lost a lot of debates before I won any of them. And at this point, Toya's graduated and he's debating with a freshman on the team. He's halfway into his senior year when I had their freshman partner flunked out of school. At this point, I was either finding somebody to debate with or my career was over.

And so what happens is Ryan is also close to one of my best friends who's one of my contemporaries, Rashad Evans, who was then a coach at Western Connecticut University. And basically Rashad had this bombshell idea. One day they called Ryan up and they were like, what if you partnered up with this guy from Rutgers, Elijah Smith? And the reason in particular Rashad thought this was a good idea first, Elijah was in a sound and really good debater.

He just had excellent skills and traditional skills. But the other reason was that both Ryan and Elijah were queer black men. The thinking was that you've got two guys kind of standing at the intersection of two marginalized groups. And if they're going to try to make an argument about feeling excluded and invisible in the debate world, well, they can own that argument better than almost anyone.

So I called him one night. It was 9.30. And he's like, hey, do you want to come debate with me? And he was like, dude, this is a lot.

I can't really answer this right now. And I was like, I understand I'm asking you to come move to Kansas for a semester or what have you in Newark, New York, New York, New Jersey. He called me back the next morning. It was like 8 a.m.

my time. He was like, I've already applied and everything. And so the next couple weeks he was down in Emporia. Elijah and I debated four tournaments together.

First tournament, they won two matches, lost four. I was very upset. I was heartbroken because I was a senior and I was like, I don't really do two four. But it's fine.

It's okay. Dr. Reed Brinkley was actually at that tournament. And she said that watching Ryan in Elijah debate was a hot mess.

They just didn't have any chemistry. There was nothing persuasive about it. Nothing popped about it. It didn't really speak to the judges.

She remembers the time when Ryan came over to her apartment to talk to her and Rashad. And he was just like, I don't know what we're doing wrong. He just didn't know why things weren't clicking, what's not working, I don't know what's happening. So three of them were all talking and Rashad, Ryan really looks up to Rashad because Rashad is also a queer black guy, but he's also a really, really great debater.

And it was Rashad who said, you're not being a queer black man, right? You're being a debater. And so Rashad would say things like, you need to butch it out. You know what I mean?

You need to fimp it up sometimes. You need to duck walk on him. Sometimes you're going to have to vote. So he's saying be black.

You always be black and queer in these spaces. So rather than attempting to hide parts of yourself, instead you should be fully you. Ryan with this in his head went back to Elijah. And within a few weeks, things started to click.

We were just like, here's what our roles are. This is what you do. This is what I do. I would start the debate.

This is our argument about how it's a thank you to Prof. Gay because strategy doesn't allow for us to make a mistake who's supposed to make. Ryan would preach. This activity is affected by the same structure when he called these little lather hoods to be segregated.

And then Elijah. You asked for better. Oh, you're not trapped. You're all based on your art.

He did the middle speeches. He dealt with logic, counter-arguments, things like that. And this question of black holes, the question of those things allows you to go out. He was better at the game of debate.

Ryan said he went from practicing ethos to pathos logos to being it. We embodied that methodology. So you tell me how bad that I was, literally, you can't stop, stop, the second white and the second white and the second white and the second white and the second white and the second white. And then I'll end it.

That's the same thing that our urner talks about. That's the real talk to be hard. In their second tournament, they made it to the finals and they lost in a close decision. But their third tournament was actually a national tournament called CEDA, the cross-examination debate association.

It's kind of called the People's Tournament. And they won that tournament. I was able to give it a pretty good 2 AR and we ended up squeaking the debate out. And then their fourth tournament, their final tournament together.

That's actually the whole reason we're telling this story. It's the NDT. The National Debate Tournament. That was the tournament.

Why decision? I'm going to go for a break. So the NDT is this marathon of a debate tournament. That's like, you know, March Madness or something?

If, however, year, it lasts for four whole days and there's 13 rounds of debates, 70-80s. And the NDT is where Harvard is. North-West, you know. George, you're the first tournament to prepare for.

That's the tournament that they prepare for. That's the tournament those sorts of teams usually win. So we're definitely the underdogs. Definitely the underdogs.

And all black team had never gotten past quarterfinals of this tournament. Things kick off Friday morning at 8am. Emporia versus Idaho State. And they beat Idaho State at 11.45am.

They take care of Puget Sound, 4.15. They go against Oklahoma. Oklahoma actually beats them, but it's Brelam, so it's not like they're out or anything. And then the crazy thing is that after the loss to Oklahoma, Ryan and Elijah go on a roll.

They take out USC, they roll over Emery, they beat not one, but two different teams from Harvard. They beat Michigan State. And then on the last day, they beat another team from the University of Michigan. Then they go on to beat Wake Forest.

That puts them in the semis, which has never been done before by a black team. And then they're against Oklahoma, who they beat, and that puts them into the finals. It was, I can't, everything's very surreal to me. We're in the finals of the NDT, never happened before.

We're also potentially about to unite the crowns, and what that means. It's winced in the NDT, no team in history had ever done that. And who were they all against? Well, they were going against a team that Ryan had already faced twice that year.

And lost every time. The 14-time national debate champions, Northwestern University. So when this round gets set up between Northwestern and Emporia, one of the things that we've described it as is a clash of civilizations. She says that about Northwestern because they have one of the biggest debate programs in the country.

They've got an entire hive mind, you know, with a hotel war room for them to strategize in. And then it was us, these two queer black guys from Emporia, Kansas. From a really small school with not a lot of resources, so it is like a David and Goliath story. Okay, so let me explain the room to you all.

This is the biggest room that I had ever debated in. This hotel room that they have the debate happening in is a huge ballroom. Welcome to the ballroom of the 2013 National Baker Men. And this ballroom was packed.

But the audience itself is segregated on the right side of the room, and inside it was packed full of their people. And then on our side, was it like racially segregated too? It was. It was.

So just to round this out. The judges were the same as David. Up near the front of the room at a table were the judges, which included our guys Scott Harris. Yeah, and how many judges were judging this debate?

Five. Four men, one woman. All of them are what? And...

You've heard of Team in Texas, the Maple Bay, and the other side of the stage are the two Northwestern students. One was this guy? I'm Arden Veliathan. My partner, Payton, I was a sophomore.

Where's my partner? And Ryan were on the other side were seniors. That was the thing that was really getting me. It was going to be my last debate.

It was Payton of the last debate. It was my last debate. We were seniors. This was it.

College debate is the pros. It's the NFL. It's it. Since it's their last debate, everybody kind of gets up before their speeches to say like thanks and bye.

Oh my God, why would I have to leave the... Is this Ryan? Yeah. And this is going to be my bye.

So it might take me a little bit. This is Payton. He's been my family and my friends. It's been my hardest work and my most rewarding play.

And it's taught me more than I could ever dream. For that, I'm indebted to all of you, every part of this community. And a particular number of special people in my life. Wow.

It was a lot. So the topic for the year was whether or not the United States federal government should increase incentives for certain forms of alternative energies. It was nuclear power, solar power, wind or reduced restrictions on other forms of alternative energies, coal, natural gas and oil. Okay, so Ryan and Elijah were affirmative.

So they were supposed to argue like something positive about how the US government should support solar energy production or should restrict coal usage and energy or whatever. But they're not going to debate that. We had figured out that we wanted to talk about the ideal of home. In other words, energy isn't the most important conversation that we need to have.

The conversation we need to have is whether this community can include people like Ryan, like Elijah. Can we find home and debate? Because that's how the community feels about itself. That this is a home place for a lot of people.

Right, there are people who grew up in debate, people who started debating when they were 12 and 13 went all the way through college. So the people that you often develop the tightest friendships with people that, you know, have some of your coolest memories because you all spent the summer together going to debate camp. Those people make up your family. There are people who make friends and debate when they're 13 that they keep until they die.

So Ryan's up first and to make his argument about home. You are the record of the great formula of the camp. But you still know black home when you look at the talk. He starts talking about a movie.

Have you lost any of the list? I have. I have not. Okay.

So. Alright, real quick synopsis, it's a 1978 film. What it is is like an all-black cast version of The Wizard of Oz. So like Michael Jackson is playing the Scarecrow, Richard Pryor is the Whiz, and Diana Ross is Dorothy.

It was that movie was just like to me. You know, it was the fear that Dorothy felt where I'm at. By the beginning of arriving to Oz. The indivitable at Oz.

Oz. I want to go home. I mean the point Ryan's making is that's how he felt too. When he came into debate, when he was walking into that cafeteria.

Yeah. And there's a line where you say, it's funny fun. When the Dorothy's of this world think of energy, they don't think of thorium reactors, but the energy required to get out of bed and navigate the struggle. Yeah.

So that's like kind of how is that how you were like tying it? Yeah. Energy for us meant what it meant to get out of bed in the morning. What it meant to thrive in the world in which you were never meant to survive.

And for Dorothy. She was able to reach a place of Oz. Please. Is there a way for me to get home?

Where you realize that all you ever needed in the first place was yourself. Home. Inside me. And that you had the power all along.

And that's part of what our argument was. And that was part of what I was trying to say was that I had been in debate for eight years at that point. And I was so sick and tired of people telling me that what I had to say about the debate and what I thought about the debate wasn't legit. When debate was a student driven activity.

That I have just as much to say about this topic as you do and your claims are not any more valid than mine and vice versa. And Ryan ended his like eight and a half minute speech on sort of this like hopeful appeal. You know to never give up. You know we have to ease on down the road together.

Dorothy just can't go by herself. You know. You know. You know.

You know. You know. You know. You know.

You know. You know. You know. You know.

You know. You started to make a document. The one that they had beat us with every time. Called topicality which basically says the topic has posited a question.

You know. Should the US government alter its approach to energy policy. And we think that the affirmative should have to answer that. Or is it a real debate?

Well. Basically that role that means the first of all I don't think the resolution is a question. Second of all like nowhere in the rules is it say that you have to be topical. But.

This is a mean of how to make a big debate. Our position was debate should be theoretically fair. Both sides should be able to win. And if you're going to come out here and argue that racism is bad.

The debate is not a home. Like we can't argue against that. I'm not going to say debate is a home for me. I love it.

Well. Who is debate fair for now who is debate inclusive for now. Is it actually fair if in order to win a debate you need to have like a whole research team and debate camps that cost thousands of dollars to participate in. But.

There's a topic that's democratically voted upon by all the schools at the beginning of the year. Something about the topic should be mentioned. Just to give the negative. Basically respect.

Respect for the thousands of hours that my partner and I and the Northwestern debate team and other people in debate have spent researching energy and being prepared to talk about the intricacies of energy policy in the United States. This went on for over an hour. I mean it was a lot happening. And eventually Arjun and Peyton really start to like focus their argument on their version of debate.

The traditional version. This is how you actually change the world. Not by focusing on yourself but doing research. It's being able to argue the affirmative side of something and the negative side of it because people who learn those kinds of skills.

They can actually go and do things outside of debate. Like deal in convoluted globalized trade negotiations or solve global warming. Right. So after two hours of this it's almost midnight Ryan feels like exhausted.

Um. Yeah. But I felt it in the room that people were like we're not out of the debate. We can still win.

At this point there's only one speech left and it's Ryan's. I was nervous. I knew it was my last speech. I knew everybody in the audience was waiting on me.

Like I just felt pressured and I had maybe five sentences written on a piece of you know just copy paper. And I looked over at Elijah and kind of was just like well this is it. This is all I got. The audio quality of the speech is kind of terrible but we're just going to let it play.

Roll up the down in the debate for Unibot, the best performance we've ever seen in the past. I don't think they have really answered this. They started meeting this argument that for not. And Ryan says like early on that piece of paper he was holding.

I like threw it. And I started speaking for myself. What I would call the Shanday. The Shanday is the place that encapsulates your soul in your loins.

Well alright. There was portions of the speech that I don't remember giving. Apparently there was a part where I almost took my shirt off. I don't remember that.

And I had a pause because I was trying to just get out of that zone. And come back. It's kind of like provide a voice of reason. But as I kind of slow down to do that the crowd starts off.

I still have to answer this last thing. I still have to extend this piece of evidence. Oh shit I didn't say anything about warming. What do I do?

What do I do? I mean what do I do? I don't know. This is a reason enough to vote affirmative.

Forget it. I'm going to start with Miss Bates. I walk over and shook their hands. I gave Elijah a hug and then I walked out the room and went and smoked a cigarette.

At that point as a judge I took a deep breath, packed up my notes. I put headphones, noise cancelling headphones on my head. I found a room where there was no one else around and I could have total quiet and think about what had been said. Scott says that he felt like the debate was close.