Debatable
01:00:49 Share

Radiolab is supported by Progressive Insurance. What if comparing car insurance rates was as easy as putting on your favorite podcast? With Progressive, it is.

Just visit the Progressive website to quote with all the coverages you want. You'll see Progressive's direct rate. Then their tool will provide options from other companies so you can compare. All you need to do is choose the rate and coverage you like. Quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.

Prime one-day delivery is fast. How fast we talking? We're talking swim goggles and flip-flops delivered fast. Beach towels and sunscreen delivered fast. Not just fast. Before you leave Hawaii tomorrow fast. I didn't know you were leaving tomorrow fast. Just not as fast as Prime one-day delivery. But it was. Fast one-day delivery on 20 million items. It's on Prime. Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Wait, you're listening. Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab.

Radio Lab. From WNYC. Hey, it's Latif. This is Radio Lab. Today, we're rerunning one of the most polarizing episodes of the last few years. We didn't expect it to be, but it really was. So, yeah, take a listen. Whether you've heard it before or not, curious to hear what you think. So tweet at us. But other than that, here you go. Debatable from Radio Lab. Yeah.

So before we get started, I had a couple of 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 considering our issues, to be honest, white controlled media. So I got a couple questions for you. Yeah. Quest away. Why?

Why now? Why do we want to do this story now? Yeah, it's been a couple of years. Yeah, well, you know, it's... Abby just found the story. Yeah. So we were... It was unknown to us until right now. Well, this feels a little newsy of the moment. It does, kind of, yeah. In its upside-down way. This is Robert, by the way. Hi. So we have Robert, we have... We have Robert, we have Jad. And we have Abigail. Jad. J-A-D. J-A-D. Yes. Yes. I guess...

Did you have other questions? Sure, we can wait. We can table those. No, no, no. Ask them. Let's hear them. So what is the end goal? What do you want the story to say? We never know that at the beginning. Okay. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab. And today? Today we're going to tell you the story of a guy. This is a guy named Ryan Walsh. 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. Into something even weirder and more different. Weirder. No, not weird bad. Weird just interesting. Interesting. Let's replace the word weird with interesting. I don't know. I'll confess. 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 have done bad. Oh.

Oh. Okay. Okay. The description of performance debate is weird, is problematic. Well, can I put a less... Less judgmentally? Okay, so the world that we're talking about, which is at the center of this whole story, is obviously debate. Yes. High school debate and college debate. Now, I never did debate, but from the outside, it always seemed like this hyper-competitive, like,

like brain sport. These guys with these accordion briefcases where they have all these files in there with all the research. Yeah, and they go to these tournaments and

and they argue about some topic back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. 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 Iacocca from Chrysler, he was a debater. Margaret Thatcher, Ted Cruz, Karl Rove, Hillary Clinton. Oprah Winfrey. Richard Nixon. Malcolm X. They all were debaters.

And today, this is Ryan's story, Ryan Walsh's story of debate. Actually, it's Ryan's story debating debate. Yes. And the story comes from reporter Abigail Keel. And before we get going, I just want to let you know there is some strong language in this story, some profane words. Skip it if you need to. Otherwise, here we go. Is it cool if we jump in, Ryan? Yeah. I would love to know, Ryan, like, what was your life like before you...

We're ever on a debate team. Well, Kansas City, Missouri, inner city, public school, you know, 99% black students. I was actually tricked into debating. Really? When was this that we were talking about? Oh, well, let me see. 2000. I'm sorry, I'm old. 2000 and...

2005. When were you born if you sang your old? 1990. Oh, come on. 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, and this little short German redhead lady named Jane Ronhart came to chess practice. I ended up being president of the chess club. She came to chess practice one day and pulled me in the hallway and was like, I understand you were chess champion, and that's a really good thing, and we have this debate program, and I think you'd be really good at it. Like, you know, anybody who could critically think of chess could critically think of debate.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't even know what debate was. So he told her... No. 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. I thought I told you to join debate. And I was like, I thought I told you no. I can spot a debater 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 changed to where I had debate first hour. Okay.

I just, after the meeting. So here I am. Here you are. That's what happens with a lot of my debaters. They just come in kind of dazed, like, uh, 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, it's 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

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 then 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 Guy versus The Simpsons and stuff like that. So it was very fun. It made us learn how to do impact analysis. Impact analysis? What is that? So, for instance... Let's say you're debating apples versus oranges.

If I say the rinds 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. Pullman's model of argumentation. He started to... Ethos Pathos logos. Do really well. Yeah. Yeah, he did. He joined the team. Started going to tournaments. You know, debate is one of those activities that affords you 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 on that debate route. Yeah.

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. I was enjoying that. That affirmation. I was having a great time.

The thing that helped me out was that my first tournament was a Debate Kansas City tournament. Debate Kansas City is an urban debate league. And so we were debating other kids from the same neighborhood, 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, okay, I don't know about this, you know. At national tournaments, you're up against what I call name brand schools, you know, like 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 about going to a debate tournament. Got off the bus, went inside. And then we went into 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 the 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 felt, 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 debate stuff or about us. I don't know. I wasn't in their heads, but I can definitely explain to you what that felt like. It was real awkward. 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 national level, this happened.

is what debate sounds like. This event also turns back wealth as deserts hit on my medicine to get to causes global nuclear war and escalation if there's a backlash, sorry. The plan, the U.S. federal government through an act of Congress will substantially reform domestic transportation infrastructure by requiring that all federally funded road paving projects in the U.S. use 15 to 22 percent ground rubber and asphalt and concrete mixes. Funding for

What? 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 U.S. highway and road infrastructure has an urgent requirement for a pair of...

And apparently, and this is like a quick digression, that 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 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...

And so it escalated to a point that...

In some instances, he's 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 3304 ASCU, which is where I lived. 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. What happened was is that a student from University Academy, she was a senior. Her name was Marshana, and she went to a different school than Ryan. She came over and asked Reinhardt. She needed a partner. There was about to be this tournament called the KCKC TLC tournament. It was a big high school debate tournament, and Marshana, she was a senior, so she was older than Ryan, but she needed a partner. So she came to Jane Reinhardt, and Jane said, well...

Here, Ryan, he's your guy. So met with Marshawn. It was the Thursday before the tournament happened. And I pulled her into this room and I had open, I had three boxes of evidence, you know, and I was ready to go with my traditional stuff. The topic was whether the U.S. 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 Learn and Serve America stuff. I had this, like, Peace Corps affirmative that I hadn't wrote yet. He showed her note cards with statistics on them, quotes from various experts. You know, and she was like, mm-hmm, uh-huh, yeah, that's cute, yeah. And so she handed me this expando and was just like, okay. Take this folder, go home, study it. So I got home and I opened this expando 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. 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... You may write me down in history with your bitter twisted lies. Maya Angelou poem in there. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still like dust. There was some original stuff that she wrote.

And I'm like, I didn't get it. But she was the senior, so Ron Hart kind of told me, you know, let 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 Marshawn get to the classroom, and standing on the other side of the room are their two opponents. Are they white kids mostly? Yeah, they were white guys in suits with Republican ties on.

If you want to know, if you want to vivid this, I'll be honest with you. The other team, they're affirmative, so they go first. And they're like... They lay out this whole argument about how the national service programs are good because they increase U.S. power abroad. And then it was Marshawn's turn. And so she gets up to give this speech and it starts with this like,

four-minute-long piece of spoken word. It's 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, Marshana 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 to help you make those arguments. And that clearly favors rich and affluent schools. And beyond that, Marshawn argued, even

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. Were you shocked? Did this shock you? No, I wasn't shocked. I was like, I was like on one hand, I was like, damn, that was a great, that was tight. 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 the state is great. This is a this 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 prose is held. This is academic debate. I was like, what?

And basically his argument was that what we were doing was not debate. 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 the studying I had done all night, but everything kicked in in that moment. My passion came into the room. 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, I'm sorry. And let's just say we definitely went on to win that debate. You won this match?

Yeah, we won the debate because...

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 Marshawn saying that the structure of debate is racist. And then you've got the other team not really responding in any kind of like way.

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 used his sort of, you used his you don't belong here as a kind of

as an argument against him. And that's what I was saying is about our evidence. And it came for a lot from what happened in the debate itself. That is fascinating. It's so interesting. Wait a second. Wait a second. Like, let me just take that guy's side. Like, so that you're changing the whole, you're throwing huge bombs at them. Racism, hegemony. Like, what's he supposed to do? He's like, I'm a racist. I'm going to be, what is he supposed to do? Stop. Stop. What do you mean stop? First off, he should stop. Right.

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 praxis or you can have a debate about whether or not that was a racist praxis. 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, no, leave the room. And then in the leave the room, they leave themselves open to this counterattack that you give. It still surprises me that you'd win. Okay, see, and so this is the thing. There's...

Very few rules to debate, but there's tons of norms. And depending on, you know, the community of debate, 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 I've seen that be debatable at times. Yeah.

There must be an affirmative and a negative. Other than that, how one approaches debate, you know, how one approaches the topic, how one approaches themselves and their opposition, all of that stuff is debatable and arguably should be debatable. But is it there's no like Bible of debate? There's no like book? No, there's like, okay, so they put out things like the NDT rulebook, which is like affirmative teams must be topical. But in the world of debate, what does it mean to be topical?

You know, what does it mean to be on topic? That has to be debatable in order for a 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. They were trying to say that, but what they said was y'all should leave.

See, that's interesting. Because that's one of the place where I have sympathy for the other side is where they're like, I thought we were talking about the Peace Corps. Like they walked into the wrong room or something. But that was part of our argument was that how do you do debate? How do you participate in an activity for hours and hours and hours, weeks upon weeks upon weeks, arguably years on years on years and not ever think about.

Why you debate the way that you do. That was what we were pressing. So what was the other team's reaction? They were really upset. Yeah, they called us an N-word and shit. No. Really? Yes. Like, what do you mean no? Yes. That's, wow. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

Hey, everybody. This is Matt Kielty. I was one of the producers for this episode. And I wanted to take a moment to thank you. Radiolab belongs to public radio, which means that more than anything, we rely on listener support to exist. And I'm so grateful to you all for that.

And this episode, like all of our other episodes, involved many people doing many things. Like, obviously, there's Abigail, who's incredible. And a whole team of editors, our trusty team of sound designers, a fact checker. And we talked to a lot of different people for this story. We read a lot of different things. Watched many, many, many YouTube videos of college debate. And it took months for us to put this together. And, you know, this is what happens when...

Here at Radiolab, we get to go deep on every story, spending lots of time thinking about how to best tell it. And we do this with your help. This is why our membership program, The Lab, exists. And when you sign up as a member of The Lab, your support lasts. And with it, we can take our reporting and our storytelling to even greater heights.

Plus, when you subscribe to the lab, you get perks. For example, everything like cuts that don't make it in the episode, sweet little audio extras, to exclusive merch, sweatbands, really cool, but also events. For example, I did one of our first Ask Me Anything sessions with associate producer Maria Paz and one of our reporters, Andrew Leland. It was very cool. It was very fun. But most importantly, your support makes it possible for us to work hard to bring you great stories.

So for those of you who are already members, thank you always for making all of this possible. For those of you who aren't yet, you can join the lab at radiolab.org slash join. Can't wait to see you there.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. And it's back to our story, again from producer Abigail Keel. Which is a story about a guy named Ryan Wash and about debate, how we debate. Yeah. Okay, so just to kind of like pull back from that moment with Marshana and the poetry and all that, this kind of thing wasn't just happening in a vacuum. Like, 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. Shannara Reid-Brinkley. 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. In, say, places like Eastern Europe. And here in the U.S., he poured...

Tons of money. Like millions and millions and millions of dollars to start urban debate programs. First started with New York City.

Right, so they literally, you know, went out to all of these New York high schools, talked to a bunch of administrators, and 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 L.A., Newark. And it just kept moving, so we're almost up to maybe 23 or 24 cities.

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 shock.

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. What's Louisville and what happened in Louisville? Let's go back. Let's go back.

I know that there's a baseball bat associated with you. Jesus Christ.

Okay, so early 2000s. Down at the University of Louisville, there was a debate team. A predominantly African-American team. And so they were having a hard time finding traction. He says they would go to these national tournaments. And, you know, no matter what they did, if they tried to accommodate the more 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... But they decided that they were done with that. And 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

It's kind of hard to pin down. You can think of it like as credibility or sort of like speaking in tune with like the spirit of your culture. That's where you get the introduction of the use of hip hop. Some say the black is the berry, the sweet is the juice. I say the dark is the flesh and the deep is the fruit. The use of spoken word. They say the niggas always already queer. That's exactly the point. It means that it is a case turned to the affirmative because we're saying that... The use of what we call street scholars. Hey!

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 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 gender, 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 to- It's anti-everything. It would be anti-gay, anti-Jew, anti-everything. 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 Marshawn do this spoken word poetry thing. Starts to read more about Louisville and he's just like, I'm in. I dedicated my debate career to discussing debate. Every 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 debate at Cal State Fullerton. Go best friend. The two of them start debating together and over the course of a couple years, Ryan starts to get recognized. He's winning speaker awards. He's, you know, 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 his new debate partner flunked out of school. At this point, it was either find somebody to debate with or my debate 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 particularly Rashad thought this was a good idea. First, Elijah was an astoundingly 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 like 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 930. 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 and live. From Newark. From Newark, New Jersey. Weird.

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 within the next couple of 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. Oh.

But it's fine. You know, it's OK. Dr. Reed Brinkley was actually at that tournament, and she said that watching Ryan and Elijah debate was a hot mess. They just didn't have any chemistry. There was nothing persuasive about it, nothing popped about it. You know, it didn't really speak to the judges. She remembers a time when Ryan came over to her apartment to talk to her and Rashad.

And he was just like, you know, I don't know what we're doing wrong. You know, he just didn't know why things weren't clicking, what's not working. I don't know what's happening. So the three of them were all talking and Rashad, well, like Ryan really looks up to Rashad because Rashad is also a queer black guy, but he's

He's also like 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, you know, you need to fem it up sometimes. Sometimes you need to duck walk on him. You know what I mean? Sometimes you're going to have to vogue, you know? So he's saying-

be Black. You will 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. This debate is about debating the performative and methodological exclusion perpetuated by the negative. I would start the debate. This is our argument about how it is that they get to propagate the strategy that allows for us to not even be those niggas that you say we're supposed to be. Ryan would preach. I could reign in the choir, if you will. That this activity is affected by the same structural inequalities that allow the hood to be segregated. And then Elijah. You as a competitor. Oh, you're not describing that to your offense or your argument.

He did the middle speeches. He dealt with logic, counter-arguments, things like that. If it's a question of black goals, a question of new epistemologies... He was better at the game of debate. Ryan said they went from practicing ethos, pathos, logos, to being it. We embodied that methodology. So you tell me how their methodology literally deconstructs those exact fights inside the... And then... I would end the debates. That's the shit that our firm talks about. Now that's real talk, sweetheart. Right?

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 CETA, the Cross-Examination Debate Association. It's kind of called the People's Tournament. And they won that tournament. I was able to give a pretty good 2AR and we ended up squeaking the debate out. And then their fourth tournament, their final tournament together. That's actually, it's the whole reason we're telling this story. It's the NDT. The National Debate Tournament.

That was the tournament. So, the NDT is this marathon of a debate tournament. It's like, you know, March Madness or something. It's held every year. It lasts for four whole days, and there's 13 rounds of debates, 78 teams. And the NDT is where Harvard is.

Northwestern, you know. Georgetown. That's the tournament that they prepare for. That's the tournament those sorts of teams usually win. So we're definitely the underdog. Definitely the underdogs. An all-black team had never gotten past quarterfinals of this tournament.

Things kick off Friday morning at 8 a.m. Emporia versus Idaho State. And they beat Idaho State at 11.45 a.m. They take care of Puget Sound, 4.15. They go against Oklahoma. Oklahoma actually beats them, but it's prelim, 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 down USC. They roll over Emory. 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 finals.

never happened before. We're also potentially about to unite the crowns. And what that means is when Sita and NDT, no team in history had ever done that. And who were they up against? Well, they were going against a team that Ryan had already faced like 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. ♪

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. And I'm Robert Kralwich. This is Radiolab. And now back to our story about the state of debate. And when we left off, Ryan and his teammate Elijah were about to go head-to-head with 14-time National Debate Tournament winner, Northwestern. 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 final round of the 2013 National Debate Tournament. And this ballroom was packed.

But the audience itself is segregated on the right side of the room, northwestern side. It was packed full of their people. And then on our side... Was it like racially segregated too? It was. It was. It was. So just to round this out... The judges for this evening's debate are...

Up near the front of the room at a table were the judges, which included our guy Scott Harris. Yeah. And how many judges were judging this debate? Five. Four men, one woman. All of them were white. And... The affirmative team in tonight's debate will be Emporia State University. Ryan and Elijah from Emporia, they were on one side of the stage, and on the other side of the stage are the two Northwestern students. Wearing our Northwestern jerseys. One was this guy. M. Arjun Valliopan. I debated at Northwestern for four years. And the other was his partner, a young woman named... Peyton Lee. Peyton Lee. Woo!

I don't know if she knew this, but she was like my college debate nemesis. My partner, Peyton, I was a sophomore, whereas my partner and Ryan were on the other side were seniors. And that was the thing that was really getting me. It was going to be my last debate. It was Peyton's last debate. It was my last debate. We were seniors. This was it. Oh, wow. 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... I want to thank Northwestern for providing me the opportunity to make the debate at home again for myself. This is Ryan. In my last debate. Yep. And... This is going to be my goodbye, so it might take me a little bit. This is Peyton. Debate has been my family and my friends. My hardest work and my most rewarding play. Um...

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 in particular, a 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 reduce 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 U.S. government should support solar energy production or should restrict coal usage in energy or whatever. But they're not going to debate that. We had figured out that we wanted to talk about the idea 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 in 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. He starts talking about a movie.

Have you all seen The Wiz? I have. I have not. Okay. So... All right, real quick synopsis. It's a 1978 film. And 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 Wiz, and Diana Ross is Dorothy. It was that movie was just like, to me, you know, it was the fear that Dorothy felt. Where am I?

At the beginning of arriving to Oz. The indivisible land of Oz! Oz? I want to go home! I mean, the point Ryan's making is that, like, 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... Let me find it. Uh...

When the Dorothys 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. 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 a 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?

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 debate and what I thought about 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, never give up. You know, we have to ease on down the road together. Dorothy just can't go by herself, you know? Judy Garland may not have much on the fabulous Diana Ross, over 100. She did have one thing right, and that there is no place, not even in no place, like home. Whoo! Whoo!

And then... After a few minutes, Arjun, the sophomore from Northwestern... I got up and I gave the first negative speech. He's from the state of New England. He's a top-level defense player. He's a policy-offensive base. He's a transformative individual. He's a potential result. He's a blessing.

He started to make his argument. 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 U.S. government alter its approach to energy policy? And we think that the affirmative should have to answer that. Or this isn't a real debate. Well, first of all, I don't think the resolution is a question. Second of all, like, nowhere in the rules does it say that you have to be topical. But... This is a debate about the main thing.

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, debate's not a home. Like, we can't argue against that. I'm not going to say debate isn't a home for me. I love it. It's not fair to have to argue against that. 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, like,

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

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 it. That's all I got. The audio quality of this speech is kind of terrible, but we're just going to let it play.

The role of the ballot in this debate is for you to vote for the team that best performatively and methodologically brings debate back home. I don't think they have really answered this stark uniqueness argument that core bodies are not allowed in their debate space. All of their evidence assumes the role of a good citizen or an engaged student in a democratic society. All of these assume an equal for people vote without a discussion of the access or even the right to have a home in the first place. This leads to black bars out. Our Johnson evidence

that our bodies situate themselves in a moment of self to be self-reflective that enables them to speak out as a way to engage and change our relationship to the world and also to ourselves, which says that regardless of how we're using the tools of the master or

And Ryan says, like, early on, that piece of paper he was holding. I, like, threw it. And I started speaking for my soul. What I would call the shonday. The shonday. The shonday is the place that encapsulates your soul in your loins. Well, alright. It's always about a broader fucking struggle, but the question then becomes how broad do we get? When does their research model ever access our portion of the library? When do we

about those individuals, their method of debate then becomes foreclosed to those individuals who have already had access to homes now. The one they are are conceited that black bar bodies do not belong right now and we need to join these struggles together. We need to hold hands and beat Diana Ross and Michael Jackson and ease on down the road together which is exactly who is and allows us as bar bodies to raise the questions of why is it that in debates it's a question of I instead of and, and, and. Their notions of fairness

that is always prefigured because debate isn't fair for who now debate is equal for who now it still leads us out why do I have to make a forced choice why even do I have to relegate another team to the exclusion especially when they don't have another place to go when debate has been the place where I've come to share my views perspectives and opinions about a given subject I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do when this debate is over I don't know how the hell I'm going to situate myself but I know one thing that I'm going to do I'm going to make room for

Nobody

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 almost took my shirt off. I don't remember that. And I had to pause because I was trying to just get out of that zone and come back to kind of provide a voice of reason. But as I kind of slowed down to do that, the crowd started clapping.

And I had 50 seconds left. 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? What do I do? And I was just like, I don't know. This is reason enough to vote affirmative. Forget it. And then I walked 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.

I packed up my notes. I put headphones, noise-canceling 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.

Now, Scott says that he felt like the debate was close, like it was going to be a tight vote. So I sit down and look at my notes. I re-listened to the last couple of speeches that I had recorded several times. On one hand, Northwestern presented a lot of good research and a lot of it he agreed with. On the other hand, like Peyton and Arjun are saying, if you have these skills, then you're going to be better prepared to go talk in front of like Congress or something.

But Scott says, if you just listen to, like, Ryan and Elijah, like, they sound more persuasive. Like, you can't convince me that somebody who sounds like that isn't actually also prepared to do those things. And so, like, Ryan and Elijah's whole presentation is actually proof that Peyton and Arjun's argument is invalid. At the same time, he thought...

There have to be things that we all just agree on as our starting point. And if the alternative is a world in which the affirmative can come into a debate and talk about anything they want to talk about, then the ability to make that a fair competitive environment seems a little problematic. I think Scott was kind of torn. It took me about 45 minutes to an hour to decide...

who I thought won the debate. Ryan says that when he was sitting there waiting for the decision to be announced... I was very convinced that we lost. And eventually... They announced the decision. The 3-2 decision. Three judges voted for Emporia and two for Northwestern. He was like, it's the 3-2 for the affirmative from Emporia. Woo! My partner Elijah jumped up. He was like, yeah! People were crying. Woo!

I mean, if you could have seen this room erupt into joy, I was in tears watching this historic moment happen because I'd been around for so long and I'd watched so many black debaters fail to make it to that top point. I stood there and I was like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. All I could say, I said it like a million times. Like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

What Swaite's got in the end? Well, he actually published this like 11 page essay all about, you know, his decision explaining why he voted the way he did. There's a lot in there. But what I kind of take away from it is that, you know, while while maybe he didn't like that, there was a sort of disregard for the topic. He would have liked it a whole lot less if Ryan and Elijah hadn't been in the room. I mean,

Debate itself is incredibly important to me. Debate has been the greatest influence in shaping who I am as a person. And so in many ways, I view debate as my home. And given that it was a debate that challenged and criticized the activity that I have made a home for the last 40 years that pointed out weaknesses, weaknesses,

It caused me to reflect. Wow, so their argument really worked. I find this kind of like, it's either a segregating or an integrating event. My sense is that it's kind of integrated. Like in a racially chilly world, this is a strangely warm spot. Are you saying no? Yeah. You know, when we asked Ryan about how he felt about winning this tournament, I expected him to be really like celebratory and positive.

you know, tell me that it changed his life. He was the first black student to win this tournament and, you know, it seemed important to me. But he didn't really go there. No? You don't seem, like, as proud as I want you to seem, you know? Like, why? Why don't you? You know, I... You know, it was a good thing for history. It was a good thing to motivate people. I just...

I just want to stay focused. It was an important win. It was significant. It was powerful. It was beautiful. But it was very clear to us very early on that not much had changed by the time we got into the next year. Shanara Reid Brinkley says that since Ryan's win, there's been like a backlash. Basically, I mean, the next year, another Black team broke through. It was two Black women this time. And that caused this big controversy. And people were saying that the state of debate was ruined.

And in that same year, you even had a group of schools like talking about breaking off to form their own tournament where performance styles wouldn't really be invited. I think all of this just makes Ryan like not really know how to feel about his win. Like maybe sometimes it can just for him feel like an anomaly. Yeah. Yeah.

It sort of sees, there's a series of accidents here. You're in a school where accidentally you have a teacher who pushes you, pretty much forces you into something which suddenly takes you over. You turn out to be peculiarly good at it almost again by accident. Then you're thrown into this sequence of events where you get to meet Elijah and then almost by accident you become a champion and then suddenly it's over. The whole thing feels...

strangely lonely to me. Lonely but beautiful. I wonder how it feels to you. Ironically the same. That is the first time you have agreed with Robert this entire interview. Oh, stop. I've just got to give him a hard time. Vice versa. He's on down, he's on down the road. He's on to carry nothing. He's on down, down the road. He's on down,

Huge thanks to Abigail Keel for reporting that piece. Abigail works for an amazing podcast called The Longest Shortest Time. You should definitely check them out. Thank you, Hilary Frank, for letting us borrow Abigail. This piece was produced by Mr. Matthew Kielty. Thank you.

We also had original music from Matt and from Dylan Keefe. And special thanks to Will Baker. Myra Milam. John Delamore. Sam Maurer. Tiffany Dillard-Knox and Mary Mudd. Darren Chief Elliott. And Jody Hobbs. And Rashad Evans. Okay, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krowich. Thanks for listening.

Radiolab was created by Chad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, and

With help from Carolyn McCusker and Sarah Sonbach. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Shibbo.

Hi, I'm Luis Vera and I'm calling from Mexico City. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's On the Media. Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here and maybe how to head them off at the pass? That's On the Media's specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts.