It is with great sadness that I announce that no Filipino team managed to finish within the top 32 spots in this year’s Worlds Universities Debate Championship.
To add insult to injury, no Asian team broke as well. The break rounds will be essentially a Caucasian-dominated field. I know it’s unspeakable and often hush-hush, but racism has always been an issue in the Worlds. This Worlds will go down as one of the most poorly adjudicated tournaments in a long time.
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To be fair to my teams adjudicators, I really believed that we were adjudicated fairly in all but one round. For the other teams though, it was a totally different story.
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ateneo got 12 points in the first 5 rounds, i saw in the net… sad that they weren’t able to break. at least jess lopez was a breaking adj
??????
Lewis Iwu is black. Samir Deger Sen is Asian. (Oxford Team A) The universities maybe be ‘caucasian’, but the competitors are from different backgrounds and races. Otherwise, if it was a foregone conclusion that only “caucasian” universities will go to the finals, why join at all?
sorry for the truncated post…
I think that no matter how skewed (racism/bias) a competition is, a very good participant will always win out in the end.
cheers,
nash
i’ve been to worlds. whilst there are motions which are skewed to Europeans (eg sociolegal issues) there are still a lot of motions which Asians and Filipinos can debate. if you start checking the website of oxford, you will know why they won. it’s not because they are oxford, but because in their first course on politics, for instance, they study liberal democratic philosophy. even UP cant teach such advanced course to their university students!
And don’t get me wrong, I am for Asians winning a Worlds title. A few yrs back RK almost brought it home. But as I say, it’s tough competition. besides, we have to admit we are not native english speakers. no matter how fluent we are (and believe me we are one of the best!), we cannot match their mastery of their own language. that matters a looooot in debate and argumentation
Cheers,
Jojo of UPD
“we cannot match their mastery of their own language”
I thought I’d never hear this.
And this:
“think that no matter how skewed (racism/bias) a competition is, a very good participant will always win out in the end.”
Both the cynic and the optimist have very distinct views that I do not share.
Nash: That is just so naive. You don’t even know what you’re talking about.
Sorry Aids if you defer on my view :)) We’re good. F*****g good in english I would say. But here even in the academic world I know that my writing will still not match those works of my colleagues with whom I give all my respect. It is not just in debate. A native speaker will always have the advantage of knowing their own language. It is a matter of knowing the language.
This does not mean I don’t believe racism does not exist in these tournaments. I know racism when i see one. I live in a country where it pervades in society but pretends it does not exist. But that is another issue altogether.
I may have been gone in the debate world that long that I don’t feel it a passionate issue as you do. But I’m sure you know also that training and mastery of language are key aspects in debate. :))
I don’t think it’s fair to call it racism, but there certainly was some discrimination in Worlds 2008 that, while invisible to participants from the West (especially Canada, the US, Britain, and Australia) was a very tangible aspect of the the Worlds experience for an Asian participant.
It was probably unintentional, but at the same time efforts could (and should!) have been made towards attenuating a bias that only becomes felt during rounds, and only by teams unlucky enough to be coming from the wrong countries.
Peace.
I don’t mind being naive but I stand by my earlier comment, if one is really really good, these biases are inconsequential. That’s not optimism. Of course, if something is really rigged, then there is no point crying over it as certainly, why would anyone want to top such a competition.
But having read the motions, I would agree with Jojo, the topics are skewed toward concerns more at home with the winning countries.
And finally, please don’t assume too much about my ignorance. It’s overrated.
cheers,
nash
Nash: The assumption there is that debates can have a check and balance mechanism on whether or not a right and just decision was made. There lies the fault in your initial premise.
Adjudicators judge debates and they can decide to favor any team without any consequence. ERGO, your whole claim that “you can’t keep a good team down” doesn’t hold much water.
Ateneo A was screwed by an Australian judge by giving them 69s (scores 6 points below the absolute mean for this tournament).I can’t imagine how two of the best speakers in Asia could deserved such low scores.
[...] because I consider Ateneo A, Ateneo B, UPD A and UPM A as superior teams compared to them. So there Jojo, an Oxford education doesn’t guarantee a good grasp of global politics. They totally sucked [...]
oh an australian judge eh, maybe has something to settle with stiff competitors during australs…
In a world where “English-speaking” countries outsource their communications to “ESL” and “EFL” countries, I’d still contend that the barriers of communication are indistinct at least, and gray at most.
This means that the problem is no longer the ability to understand or communicate. God knows even Asians have to put up with American, British and Australian accents, and be forced to parse through all the mish-mash. But is the same rigor also applied to Asians? Is there really true prioritization of arguments over inflections? How do we really know this is unintentional? Does intent even matter when subsequent results are unchangable, set in stone?
People go to the Worlds each and every time hoping that things would change. It is, after all, the most liberal community created. That’s why people want to win it. A competition that tags itself as a World Championship, despite all its misgivings, has the prestige that other people of the non-debating community would also understand. Even track and field events in the Olympics, marred by doping scandals, hold the same prestige as they did.
Something is definitely wrong. And a Worlds is not a Worlds when ASIA, the biggest contributor of teams in the tournament, has been disenfranchised and is left to compete for non-”main” break awards.
We’re not gaining any credibility by throwing around the term ‘racism’. It implies that the biases we allege exist are race-based. Other people don’t see that and point to empirical evidence (Iwu, for example).
The handicaps we experience results from our being Asians who come from Asian institutions that do not have resounding names in the white community. Arguably, because they think we have not proven ourselves in white-dominated universities, we’re probably not good enough to be their peers (This is an explanation for non-white success stories who debated for predominantly white institutions.). Or maybe because our accents are far different from theirs, they don’t bother to hear through our accents and understand the material we bring to the table (even if WE listen through THEIR accents).
I agree with some of the posters. Most of the time, these heuristics are probably not even conscious. But bigotry is almost often unconscious, and conscious efforts must be made to counter them.
In order to counter bigotry, people must accept it exists. But herein lies the rub: how do we PROVE that bigotry does exist in Worlds?
Maybe the sheer volume of anecdotes we all have to share about our experiences in Worlds are enough to convince us victims of bigotry, but it will hardly be good enough to convince the bigots.
At break night, I heard an Oxford judge shout: “there are four types of teams here: ones that can debate, then ESL, then EFL, then Learn-To-Fucking-Talk”