Some quick background for those who don’t know this already: I was a nationally competitive debater in high school and college. In a lot of ways, I credit debate for making me the person I am now: confident, smart, socially conscious, well-read, and ethical. Debate helped me in school and helped me get into a good college. While in college, I started volunteering with, and then working for, Chicago’s Urban Debate League, a non-profit organization that starts debate programs in public high schools in Chicago.
After graduating from college, I turned down an offer of a full-time job with benefits (not a wise thing for a kid with a degree in philosophy to do) in the urban debate field so that I could be with my girlfriend in Boston. I missed the debate league, though, and so along with a friend of mine, I started a similar one in Boston. Two years later, six schools and about sixty students participate in our debate competitions.
Anyway, last Saturday we put on a series of public debates at Faneuil Hall, an historic building in Boston where Samuel Adams argued for revolution, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass argued for abolition, and Susan B. Anthony argued for women’s suffrage. I was obviously very excited to have my students become a part of the tradition of great debate at Faneuil Hall, but there was a lot of preparation to be done getting them ready to debate in front of an audience (generally, a single judge is the only witness to their debating).
Ten students from four different schools debated five different topics in a series of one-on-one debates. Although I provided them with background reading and some advice about how to prepare more than a month ago, I’ve worked with high schoolers long enough to know better than to expect that they will have done much of anything until I sit down with them and make them do it. So in the weeks before the event, I visited all of their schools to talk to the participants in person and explain what they would be doing and how they should prepare.
Two weeks before show time, I visited South Boston high school to meet with three of the public debaters. Although I recognize the faces of most of my debaters, I’m more of an administrator than a teacher or coach these days, so I don’t know them personally as well as I would like. It’s something I miss a lot. So although I knew who Carla (not her real name) was, it was almost like I was meeting her for the first time on this particular Wednesday.
Carla is in her first year of debate, and with only two competitions under her belt, is one of the least experienced students participating in the public debate. However, her coach, a wiry, balding, middle-aged history teacher who is also a boxer, ice hockey player, and lawyer, described her to me, in this thick Boston accent, as a “wookhaas” [workhorse] and assured me she’d be ready.
As I expected, she knew virtually nothing about her assigned topic, which was to argue that the Supreme Court should not prevent school districts from taking a student’s race into consideration when assigning her to a school. (For those who don’t know, two separate cases, one originating in Louisville and one in Seattle, are before the Supreme Court this term. In both cases, the school districts were seeking actively to integrate their schools by prohibiting, for instance, more black students from attending public schools that were already disproportionately black.)
When the Supreme Court first ruled in Brown v Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, it provoked massive conflict in the American South, where the only thing keeping black and white students separate were the laws prohibiting them from attending the same schools. In the North, however, neighborhoods were sufficiently segregated that the ruling had little effect, and with or without laws enforcing segregation, white students went to white schools and black students to black schools.
In the 1970’s, the Court started pursuing integration more actively, ordering the busing of students across major cities from white neighborhoods to black schools and vice versa. There were protests and riots akin to those seen two decades ago in the South, and in few places was the rioting worse than in South Boston, a working class white neighborhood.
Carla and I discussed this history a bit but talked mostly about the continued segregation of public schools in the US. Boston abandoned its controversial busing in favor of an “open enrollment” scheme where any Boston public high school student could end up at any high school in the city as a result of a complex preferencing system, similar in many ways to those in Louisville in Seattle, but with the important distinction that race is not a factor in the final assignment. Though the neighborhood of South Boston remains largely white, whites are now a minority at South Boston High. At least once year to this day, a teacher at the school tells me, students arrive at their school one morning to find graffiti reading, “Niggers go home. Keep Southie white.”
Carla is a pretty Hispanic girl, clearly very intelligent. She was flattered to be chosen as a participant in the event and blushed when I told her all the reasons she was selected (this to make her less nervous about speaking in front of an audience.) I don’t know how long her family has been in the US, but I’m guessing she is not first generation, given how well she speaks English.
I ask if anyone has any more questions, and Carla asks if I will be back next week. I wasn’t planning on it, but when she promises to have a draft of her speech typed up for me to review, I can’t say no. “I want to have everything finished by Monday, so I won’t have to worry about it,” she tells me. Add responsibility to her list of character traits.
On Friday, I realize that Monday is Martin Luther King day, and schools are closed. I call Carla’s coach and arrange to visit the school on Wednesday instead. On Tuesday night, I get a call from a reporter interested in doing a story on the public debate. I invite her to come with me to South Boston the next day, and she agrees.
When I arrive on Wednesday, two of the three students in Saturday’s debate, including Carla, are absent. Her coach tells me Carla hasn’t been in school all week. “What are the odds that she won’t show up on Saturday?”
“She’ll be thah,” he assures me.
I promised the reporter, who is from a local NPR affiliate, a chance to hear run-throughs of Saturday’s speeches. The only public debater present is Nina (not her real name), who is going to be advocating for guest worker legislation. I ask if she is ready to practice her first, four minute speech.
“Um, not quite.”
“Just give it your best.”
She stares at the reporter’s gigantic boom mic. “I have a question first.”
I walk over to stand next to Nina and look over her shoulder at her notes. “What’s up?”
“What’s guest worker legislation?”
Thankfully, as a radio reporter, our guest has no video camera to record the look of horror that flashes across my face. Not wanting to panic Nina, I do my best to explain the issue to her calmly and emphasize the importance of reading up on it in the next two days.
Although she didn’t get to hear as much public debate preparation as I’d promised, the reporter seemed really impressed with what she saw anyway. While I worked with some other students on the team, she interviewed Nina and the coach, and then when the students left, she interviewed me.
My philosophy is that the students make the best salespeople for the Boston Debate League. It’s virtually impossible to speak to them without being impressed by how smart, articulate, and outgoing they are. Consequently, I do what I can to encourage media coverage to focus on them rather than on me.
The story of a kid who plays poker to support a debate league for inner city youth seems like it might be a bit too enticing, so when she asks if running the League is a full-time job for me, I just tell her, “It feels that way sometimes.” Thankfully she laughs and moves on.
To be continued