Tournament: Sandburg Convocation of Eagles | Round: 2 | Opponent: FREEBUMP | Judge: FREEBUMP
Verse From Lauryn Hill- Forgive them Father
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTQL42onK08
Why every Indian wanna be the chief?
Feed a man 'til he full and he still want beef
Give me grief, try to tief off my piece
Why for you to increase, I must decrease?
If I treat you kindly does it mean that I'm weak?
You hear me speak and think I won't take it to the streets
I know enough cats that don't turn the other cheek
But I try to keep it civilized like Menelik
And other African czars observing stars with war scars
Get yours in this capitalistic system
So many caught or got bought you can't list them
How you gonna idolize the missing?
To survive is to stay alive in the face of opposition
Even when they comin' gunnin'
I stand position
L on the mission since conception
Let's free the people from deception
If you looking for the answers
Then you gotta ask the questions
And when I let go, my voice echoes through the ghetto
Sick of men trying to pull strings like Geppetto
Why black people always be the ones to settle
March through these streets like Soweto

The debate community violently excludes difference. As a white, heterosexual, able, economically advantaged, male, I have countless privileges that give me access to most spaces. Dr Shanara Reid Brinkley explains that the image of a successful debater is signified by a white, male economically privileged body which has led to cultural values, behavioral practices, and physical flesh being barriers to entry into the community
This leads to exclusionary knowledge production in round.
Dr Reid Brinkley furthers

The process of signifyin’ engaged in by the Louisville debaters is not simply designed to critique the use of traditional evidence; their goal is to “challenge the relationship between social power and knowledge.” In other words those with social power within the debate community are able to produce and determine “legitimate” knowledge. These legitimating practices usually function to maintain the dominance of normative knowledge-making practices, while crowding out or directly excluding alternative knowledge-making practice. The Louisville “framework looks to the people who are oppressed by current constructions of power.” Jones and Green offer an alternative framework for drawing claimsin debate speeches, they refer to it as a three-tier process: A way in which you can validate our claims, is through the three-tier process. Andwe talk about personal experience, organic intellectuals, and academic intellectuals. Let me give you an analogy. If you place an elephant in the room and send in three blind folded masked people into the room, and each of them are touching a different part of the elephant. And they come back outside and you ask each different person they gone have a different idea about what they was talking about. But, if you let those people converse and bring those three different people together then you can achieve a greater truth.” Jones argues that without the three tier process debate claims are based on singular perspectives that privilege those with institutional and economic power. 

I contend that the LD community must move towards a double consciousness where privileged folks leave their ivory tower and  incorporate the content and aesthetic of performance debate to advocacys. We must interrogate privilege and performance. This is uniquely important for privileged people.
First, Debaters must practice double consciousness in this space in order to create holistic inclusive and  epistemically sound advocacies, deconstruct the privilege tied to normative communication, train debaters for the real world, and ever have effective dialogue

Dr. Reid Brinkley writes
http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/ 

Bankey’s positioning of himself at the borderland while excluding (multiply situated) black people in debate from that same space makes little sense to those familiar with the history of race in America. Black people have never not had to be in close relation to whiteness.  This is Dubois’ theory of double consciousness (which, though especially emblematic of black experience, is a way of understanding the world that can be learned by non-blacks). Black people have always existed in an in-between space of blackness and whiteness with anti-blackness serving as the context for this relationship. Black folks in America are always already in an interracial relationship with whiteness; this is especially true in the context of debate. The tone of Bankey’s criticism assumes black people exclude white people from their space, but MPJ and other debate practices demonstrate the direct manner in which white people exclude black people from interracial dialogue in the debate space. An even more recent example of how structural racism functions is the exclusion of Elijah Smith, the reigning NDT champ, from the Kentucky Round Robin, and the attempt to change the rules pertaining to transfer students.  We are disappointed by this addition to the consistent complaint made by whites that black people must be constantly accessible to whites even while white people disavow the structure of policed segregation in supposedly common spaces.  In fact, it seems quite likely that this thesis will inspire debate arguments that produce exclusions of black students rather than an inclusive space of participation. We find it highly unlikely that it will produce an authentic communication or disalienation.  There are countless examples of the manner in which black people attempt to meet the communicative and bodily expectations of dominant culture and dominant debate.  Code-switching is part and parcel of our interracial romance with debate, an example of our commitment to compromise. Black people often code-switch into “white-people speak” when dealing with white people while using black language and tonal intonations (regionally specific) when in majority black spaces (in fact, it seems that it is when we “speak authentically” in the presence of whites—share ourselves with whites—that we are charged with the crime of being “intentionally” unintelligible). Within debates, (vis-à-vis framework for example) there is a denial or a disavowal of even the possibility of an engagement across rhetorical difference, which is the move Bankey makes. He refuses to code switch in the thesis by not attempting to understand the kinship networks in debate for black people or to engage in rhetorical practices to demonstrate a commitment to engaging difference at the level of method and performance.9 How often do we (Don’t) encounter white people who can code-switch (and no we don’t mean the latest hip hop slang) into the communicative and socio-political practices of black culture? The black is always already at the borderland. But double consciousness is something that for most people—especially non-blacks—must be learned and practiced.  We believe that these kinds of practices and attempts on the part of black people to meet whites more than half-way are evident for those who choose to see.  But also we must point out that in communication studies code-switching, the vernacular, counter-publics, and many other concepts evoke the double-sidedness of rhetorical practice in ways that complicate the very notion that there could ever be a pure communication.  We therefore invite Bankey to read the Communication Studies section of the library as well as the Black Studies section. Our relationship to debate can easily be described as an interracial love affair. The debate community is majority white and whiteness characterizes the performative and stylistic norms of competitive policy debate.  We need not only refer to Reid-Brinkley’s thesis for this kind of analysis.  Shelton K. Hill and Pamela Stepp’s work on black participation in debate and white stylistic practice has been overlooked for far too long.  We think that our relationship to debate is a romantic/desirous coupling, a flirtation across racial lines that has often left many of us bruised and bloody at the hands of whiteness and white people. We are in an abusive relationship, one that denigrates and maligns our black thinking while engaged in (neo-)liberal efforts to capture our black bodies. Nonetheless, we work to create an erotics of debate that can affirm our selves in the face of such denigration.  The borderland space that black debaters, judges, coaches, and directors occupy offers a unique perspective from which to view both the beauty and the ugliness of our community and its practices. Such a perspective provides new insights and new avenues of engagement toward changing the conditions necessary for producing new knowledge—the kind that does not block the development of black thought based on misdirected accusations of anti-intellectualism.Signifyin’: Why Only The White Trickster (Gamester) Gets to SpeakBankey argues that Reid-Brinkley’s interpretation of the potential benefits of the use of signifyin’ as rhetorical strategy in interracial deliberation ignores the notion of trickery which is foundational to the practice of signifyin’. However, Bankey adheres to a simplistic understanding of the practice of signifyin’ within black culture and thus Gates’ definition of signifyin’ and the significance of the trickster figure. First, Bankey focuses on the trickster figure in the Esu story because it seems to mirror the interracial context of debate. While Gates’ discussion of the Esu story is important, attention to the various kinds of singifyin’ deployed by black cultures across the diaspora gives a fuller account of the diversity of signifyin’ practices. Playing the dozens is an example of signifyin’ in the contemporary context of black America. Signifyin’, or the dozens in black culture, does depend on the use of misdirection in order to signify on one’s verbal opponent. Yet, it is a fundamental misreading of signifyin’ to assume it depends on an inauthentic form of communication. The dozen’s are played within black culture: some scholars are even analyzing the use of singifyin’ amongst black twitter users who mark their blackness through black language and cultural practices that are designed to signify to black readers. Bankey misunderstands the potential significance of signifyin’ as a potential rhetorical strategy in debate. The Esu figure is not just a trickster or figure of chaos; (s)he is a teacher, and (s)he guides and develops those (s)he encounters. The method of teaching may be painful, but (s)he provides important lessons. The Esu figure might be characterized by this “partial list of qualities” which “might include individuality, satire, parody, irony, magic, indeterminacy, open-endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance, uncertainty, disruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, closure and disclosure, encasement and rupture.”10 Esu is a “classic figure of mediation and of the unity of opposed forces.”11 In the context of black-white relations, the point is not just to trick one’s opponent through misdirection, it is also an attempt to highlight the seeming inability of white people to speak from and through black linguistic practices. Basically, white people require racialized others to speak in their coded language practices to the exclusion of other possibilities. In other words, Bankey’s thesis lacks any analysis of power that might suggest that communication is structured by a dynamic in which some forms of communication are hegemonic and some marginal.  It assumes that we all communicate in the same way, and then blames black people for not communicating in the appropriate manner to soothe white anxieties.  There is little distinction between the academic claims made by Bankey and the common complaint made in society that black people are intellectually lazy, illiterate, dumb, or obstinate for speaking in ebonics, or for rapping, rhyming or using figurative language.  These assumptions are symptomatic of a direct refusal to communicate in a full sense of the term through the privileging of a majority-controlled means of communication.  We think that so long as this refusal continues, “authentic communication” or “disalienation” remains impossible. Given the status quo, the use of black language practices within the space of debate is a potentially effective training ground for producing individuals able to engage in public deliberation across a diversity of cultures and communities. We train debaters to speak to elite populations and institutions, but we are failing to prepare them for the contemporary political and social sphere with all of its potential cleavages.Bankey’s turn to Watts’ critique of the use of signifyin’ as a rhetorical practice in interracial deliberation is also nonresponsive to the realities of the competitive debate context. For Bankey and Watts signifyin’ is a practice of obfuscation one that violates attempts to create the “authentic communication” Bankey’s thesis calls for.  But even for Watts some play on, and appropriation of, a dominant text is part and parcel of “speaking unmasked” in public.  As example, Watt’s draws upon Dubois’ rewriting of the patriotic song “America” as “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”12  Furthermore, to demonstrate a tenuous link from Watts’ criticism to the Reid-Brinkley dissertation, Bankey must make a number of faulty assumptions. First, the Louisville team signifies on the opposition. The discussion of the cross examination period is particularly instructive. Reid-Brinkley notes that cross examination is often an opportunity to flex both intellectual and attitudinal muscle as common practice in debate competition. In addition, she argues that the Louisville women appropriate this traditional performative strategy for cross examination, but with a signal difference. They flex their attitudinal muscle through a black women’s performative style that seems disquieting for their white male opponents who are not only unsure how to read their dismissals, but are surely confused about how to respond to them. It is not that their opponents fail to “understand” their language, but that the opponents have little lived experience from which to draw upon to read the Louisville women’s bodies, tonal inflections, etc., which they use to mark blackness through black cultural practice. Opponents miss the “meaning” or “significance” of the performance though they may understand the words.  Again, analysis of such rhetorical situations can only be enriched by an understanding of double consciousness.  We recognize Watts’ criticism as a cautionary tale about the potential for signifyin’ practices to disrupt communication. However, Bankey has demonstrated no clear link indicating that the signifyin’ practices Reid-Brinkley discusses and those occurring in contemporary race-centered debate practice falls prey to such a critique. Competitive debate is a unique environment. The practice of signifyin’ alone would fail to meet the communicative standards necessary to have a fair debate. Yet, none of the students involved in race-centered debate practice depend on signifyin’ or even black aesthetic performative practice alone from which to build their argumentative strategies. This argument is akin to the “race baiting” arguments those on the right deploy against any politic conscious of race.  It also reveals the value of double consciousness, and the unifying possibilities that can come from signifying in political discourse.  For example, Robert E. Terrill argues that Obama successfully used double consciousness rhetorically in his “A More Perfect Union” speech to respond to racist claims made by the political Right and to present a vision of unity across racial difference.13 To imply that contemporary signifyin’ practices are only aesthetically valuable is disingenuous.  While performance is clearly important, an engagement with history, politics, and philosophy is also incredibly important. To ignore the collaboration or permutation, if you will, of performance, with history, theory and argument is yet another attempt to denigrate black thought as anti-intellectual.
Second, Style is significant. The Performative breaks from normative performance tied to double conciousness break down the hegemonic exclusionary order of debate

SHANARA ROSE REID-BRINKLEY writes

2008  BA, Emory University, 2001 MA, University of Alabama, 2003,THE HARSH REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, DOCTOR OF PHILIOSOPHY
ATHENS, GEORGIA
http://athenaeum.libs.uga.edu/bitstream/handle/10724/12500/reid-brinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf?sequence=1

Significant for this project is the importance of style and identity performance as a rhetorical strategy in social movement rhetoric. Specifically, this project investigates the significance of sub-cultural style as a strategy for confrontation in “militant” rhetoric.42 Dick Hebdige defines sub-cultural style as “…the expressive forms and rituals…of subordinate groups.”43 The use of African-American and hip hop music and aesthetic styles in the traditional spaces of academic policy debate may operate to combat the ideologies of whiteness that actively maintain the dominant, normative order of debate. Hebdige contends that sub-cultural style is a “challenge to hegemony” that “offends the silent majority.”44 The use of African-American and hip hop cultural styles in debate are “improper” and as such function as “tactics” that “insinuate” themselves “into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance.”45 As a “tactic,” the use of sub-cultural style is a maneuver through enemy territory in an attempt to negotiate dominant norms. Style, according to Hebdige, can either maintain or subvert social dominance. He notes that as a means of resistance style can be a means of revolt; a “refusal” to perform the self through the normal practices of a community.46 He further contends that if language “shapes and positions the subject” then the “ways in which things are said” result in “rigid limitations on what can be said.”47 And, if there are limitations on what we can say, then there are limitations on what we can be. 

 Third, In round discussions of how power exists in the communitty put issues of exclusion onto the communities agenda AND forces an immediate discussion. 

SHANARA REID-BRINKLEY also Writes

BA, Emory University, 2001 MA, University of Alabama, 2003,THE HARSH REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, DOCTOR OF PHILIOSOPHY
ATHENS, GEORGIA
http://athenaeum.libs.uga.edu/bitstream/handle/10724/12500/reid-brinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf?sequence=1

Zompetti’s fears are fairly reasonable. The Louisville Project has not convinced the debate community to change its normative practice. Given the adversarial nature of tournament competition, opposing teams seem most concerned with developing viable strategies to beat Louisville inside the tournament round. Such a competitive atmosphere may not allow a resolution of conflict between the Louisville team and other community members. Yet, it seems that attempts to engage the structural barriers that maintain the lack of community diversity seems to not have substantially increased racial and ethnic inclusion. That the Louisville team shifts the discussion on racial inclusion into actual debate competition forces the broader debate community to significantly increase its discussion of the problem. In other words, the Project may not directly result in sweeping changes in the policy debate community, it did create a rhetorical controversy that forced the issue of racial exclusion and privilege onto the community’s agenda. Thus, I argue that the tournament round is a critical plateau from which to  142 Force a reflexive conversation about the normative practices of debate that might operate to maintain racial exclusion and privilege.

Verse three-Hii power by Kendrick Lamar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep0hay4Qw54 

Who said a black man in the Illuminati?
Last time I check, that was the biggest racist party
Last time I check, we was racing with Marcus Garvey
On the freeway to Africa 'til I wreck my Audi
And I want everybody to view my autopsy
So you can see exactly where the government had shot me
No conspiracy, my fate is inevitable
They play musical chairs once I'm on that pedestal
Frightening, so fucking frightening
Enough to drive a man insane, a woman insane
The reason Lauryn Hill don't sing, or Kurt Cobain
Loaded that clip and then said bang, the drama it bring is crazy
Product of the late 80's
Tryna stay above water, that's why we shun the navy
Pull your guns and play me, let's set it off
Cause a riot, throw a Molotov, somebody told me them pirates had got lost
Cause we been off them slave ships
Got our own pyramids, write our own hieroglyphs

Tournament: Sandburg Convocation of Eagles | Round: 1 | Opponent: FREEBUMP | Judge: FREEBUMP
At birth, I was handed a microphone
placed on a stage
and begged for encore performances.
It doesn’t matter what I say
spaces for faces like mine
made this my birthright.
Silence was an option
never forced, only chosen
yes I chose it
solely focused on making my home, but I was closing
this off.
I always talked but never listened.
I always thought but didn’t get it.
This isn’t how you live if theres a difference in your body,
If there’s a difference in what you are thinking, if there is any difference this is
not your home
not your stage
not your microphone
because it’s mine.
I always talked
sustaining my silence
creating the violence
Today, we get violent.
Today, I speak what matters.
Today, my silence ends.
They won’t like that
act as if its equal
see no difference
keep your ears closed
eyes shut
Be powerful
Be smart like philosopher kings
but never sing
never dance
never feel
Be numb
Be Suit and tie
you can fly
but only if you clip the wings of others
forget about your brothers
and sisters
that you know
and you don’t because its closed
open this and more here
with more than words
Hear how words work hurt against family
We are family
Family
can we have home together now?
Where every person matters
See me for me and Her for her
the story she can tell you
The knowledge she can give you
if you listen with more than spread centered ears
and flow censored minds
Where privilege isn’t invisible
in my peers leaders teachers
speak consciousness
till they can’t ignore themselves
no matter how hard they try
Where Activism Happens
as we act within this
or rap with in this
unmasking difference
eliminating the need for survival tactics
as opposed to those that practice them
Where every sound matters
even if its
poem spoken from that space inside
story in song that words cant describe
may all voices find a roof overhead
but never ceilings
a home but
no limits
no chains
no excuses
no barbed wire fences either
either we speak truths in unison or
this burns itself to the ground
and no one makes it out
Not sister
Not brother
only silence
 

Both debate rounds and the debate community as a whole exclude students from spaces that I have access to because I am white, heterosexual, able bodied, economically advantaged, and male. White privilege is able to commit structural violence because of individual complacency. We cannot ignore these realities.
Elijah Smith writes: 

http://victorybriefs.com/vbd/2013/9/a-conversation-in-ruins-race-and-black-participation-in-lincoln-douglas-debate
At every tournament you attend this year look around the cafeteria and take note of which students are not sitting amongst you and your peers. Despite being some of the best and the brightest in the nation, many students are alienated from and choose to not participate in an activity I like to think of as homeplace. In addition to the heavy financial burden associated with national competition, the exclusionary atmosphere of a debate tournament discourages black students from participating. Widespread awareness of the same lack of participation in policy debate has led to a growing movement towards alternative styles and methods of engaging the gatekeepers of the policy community, (Reid-Brinkley 08) while little work has been done to address or even acknowledge the same concern in Lincoln Douglas debate. Unfortunately students of color are not only forced to cope with a reality of structural violence outside of debate, but within an activity they may have joined to escape it in the first place. We are facing more than a simple trend towards marginalization occurring in Lincoln Douglas, but a culture of exclusion that locks minority participants out of the ranks of competition. It will be uncomfortable, it will be hard, and it will require continued effort but the necessary step in fixing this problem, like all problems, is the community as a whole admitting that such a problem with many “socially acceptable” choices exists in the first place. Like all systems of social control, the reality of racism in debate is constituted by the singular choices that institutions, coaches, and students make on a weekly basis. I have watched countless rounds where competitors attempt to win by rushing to abstractions to distance the conversation from the material reality that black debaters are forced to deal with every day. One of the students I coached, who has since graduated after leaving debate, had an adult judge write out a ballot that concluded by “hypothetically” defending my student being lynched at the tournament. Another debate concluded with a young man defending that we can kill animals humanely, “just like we did that guy Troy Davis”. Community norms would have competitors do intellectual gymnastics or make up rules to accuse black debaters of breaking to escape hard conversations but as someone who understands that experience, the only constructive strategy is to acknowledge the reality of the oppressed, engage the discussion from the perspective of authors who are black and brown, and then find strategies to deal with the issues at hand. It hurts to see competitive seasons come and go and have high school students and judges spew the same hateful things you expect to hear at a Klan rally. A student should not, when presenting an advocacy that aligns them with the oppressed, have to justify why oppression is bad. Debate is not just a game, but a learning environment with liberatory potential. Even if the form debate gives to a conversation is not the same you would use to discuss race in general conversation with Bayard Rustin or Fannie Lou Hamer, that is not a reason we have to strip that conversation of its connection to a reality that black students cannot escape.

Style is significant. Performative breaks from normative style break down the hegemonic exclusionary order of debate

SHANARA ROSE REID-BRINKLEY writes

2008  BA, Emory University, 2001 MA, University of Alabama, 2003,THE HARSH REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, DOCTOR OF PHILIOSOPHY
ATHENS, GEORGIA
http://athenaeum.libs.uga.edu/bitstream/handle/10724/12500/reid-brinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf?sequence=1

Significant for this project is the importance of style and identity performance as a rhetorical strategy in social movement rhetoric. Specifically, this project investigates the significance of sub-cultural style as a strategy for confrontation in “militant” rhetoric.42 Dick Hebdige defines sub-cultural style as “…the expressive forms and rituals…of subordinate groups.”43 The use of African-American and hip hop music and aesthetic styles in the traditional spaces of academic policy debate may operate to combat the ideologies of whiteness that actively maintain the dominant, normative order of debate. Hebdige contends that sub-cultural style is a “challenge to hegemony” that “offends the silent majority.”44 The use of African-American and hip hop cultural styles in debate are “improper” and as such function as “tactics” that “insinuate” themselves “into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance.”45 As a “tactic,” the use of sub-cultural style is a maneuver through enemy territory in an attempt to negotiate dominant norms. Style, according to Hebdige, can either maintain or subvert social dominance. He notes that as a means of resistance style can be a means of revolt; a “refusal” to perform the self through the normal practices of a community.46 He further contends that if language “shapes and positions the subject” then the “ways in which things are said” result in “rigid limitations on what can be said.”47 And, if there are limitations on what we can say, then there are limitations on what we can be. 

In round discussions put issues of exclusion onto the communities agenda AND force an immediate discussion. 

SHANARA REID-BRINKLEY also Writes

BA, Emory University, 2001 MA, University of Alabama, 2003,THE HARSH REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE, DOCTOR OF PHILIOSOPHY
ATHENS, GEORGIA
http://athenaeum.libs.uga.edu/bitstream/handle/10724/12500/reid-brinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf?sequence=1

Zompetti’s fears are fairly reasonable. The Louisville Project has not convinced the debate community to change its normative practice. Given the adversarial nature of tournament competition, opposing teams seem most concerned with developing viable strategies to beat Louisville inside the tournament round. Such a competitive atmosphere may not allow a resolution of conflict between the Louisville team and other community members. Yet, it seems that attempts to engage the structural barriers that maintain the lack of community diversity seems to not have substantially increased racial and ethnic inclusion. That the Louisville team shifts the discussion on racial inclusion into actual debate competition forces the broader debate community to significantly increase its discussion of the problem. In other words, the Project may not directly result in sweeping changes in the policy debate community, it did create a rhetorical controversy that forced the issue of racial exclusion and privilege onto the community’s agenda. Thus, I argue that the tournament round is a critical plateau from which to  142 Force a reflexive conversation about the normative practices of debate that might operate to maintain racial exclusion and privilege.

My method and performance of spoken word can help to provide a way of engaging these conversations to create a deeper understanding and scholarship with an impact. At its core, Spoken word interrogates privilege through an intersectional lense through a variety styles.
Lisa William-White writes

https://www.academia.edu/639777/Scholarship_Revolution 

I . . . write in ways that recognize the importance of theories that inform a critical approach to methodology – a critical approach guided by political theory that matters on the ground, but at the same time believing in the power and beauty of cultural expression.On poetic expression . . .In the poetics of struggle and lived experiences, in th eutterances of ordinary folks, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflections of activists,we discover the many different cognitive maps of thefuture, of the world not yet born.Yet, on Black culture and expression:There is something to be said for the dynamics of  power, where non-Blacks have been afforded the privilege to interpret and—given the racial politics of the nation—to legitimate or decertify Black vernacular and classical culture in ways that have been denied to Black folk . . . The interpretation or appraisal of Black life and art . . . the power to shape a lens through which this culture is interpreted, and is seenas legitimate, or viable, or desirable, or real, by the dominant culture. That is at stake. . . .Here, I argue that Spoken Word (Tedlock, 1983, 1991),as a poetic storytelling method, moves critical qualitative research methodologies forward; heightening the potential for undertaking 21st-century, radical, “literocratic” (Fisher, 2005,2007), and interpretive scholarship with, within, and about,Black, ethnic minority, and youth cultures. As an art form,Spoken Word elevates and privileges local and cultural epistemologies through radical and revolutionary perfor-mance texts. Spoken Word presented here, is an embodi-ment of critical theory, where discourse centered on the intersections of race, class, identity, lived experiences are named, analyzed, and interpreted in critical performance narratives (Conquergood, 2002; Denzin, 2003a). Merging the social sciences and the humanities—blending narrative,radical performance text and popular culture, the power of Spoken Word, embodied within hip-hop culture, elevates the work of a new generation of scholars (Akom, 2009; Bradley,2009; Bradley and DuBois, 2010; Brady, 2003; Chang, 2005;Dimitriadis, 2009; Fisher, 2005, 2007; Forman and Neal,2004; Hill, 2009; Rose, 2008; William-White, 2011).In reflecting my “spoken soul” (Rickford and Rickford,2000), this piece pushes the boundaries for envisioning the possibilities of Spoken Word, while also expanding the foci of ethnopoetics
interpretative potential. Here, my linguistic message about American capitalistic society, in tandem with its stylized social commentary, illuminates its scholarly potential.Furthermore as you read, my piece neither advocates for interpretive research focused on some essentialist notion of  poetic features or literary characteristics within the art form nor advocates for discourse centered on what constitutes authentic themes or representational identities within texts. Discourses centered on these concepts defy the creative,dynamic, and innovative quality of Spoken Word (Has). Rather,I champion the potential for, and recognition of, a research methodology where content is framed in context; and where discourse, linguistics, and critical theory allow for conceptual, analytic, nuanced, and stylized performative possibil-ity. And equally important, I call on the humanities and social sciences to reject the “concomitant fascination”(Madison, 2008) with the usage, and appropriation, of cul-tural and literary forms of Black, ethnic minority, and youth expression that is absent of intensive examination of issues within a sociopolitical and sociohistorical context. With that said I’M CALLIN’ FOR A SCHOLARSHIP REVOLUTION! Not to be dramaturgical or theatrical Not to be sensational or emotional but to take knowledge and make it practical, Merge critical theory discourse, Activism and teachin’, Consciousness raisin’Signifyin’,Rappin’ andPreachin’ with substance for IMPACT, Currently what we, in the Academy, lack and NEED to get back Or at least GET-on-Top-of-dat!