ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Afropessimism has radical liberatory potential as a heuristic for engaging in political and social activism for Black youths and young adults. It discusses Christina Sharpe’s theory of “wake work” as a heuristic for engaging in Black political action. In the spring of 2017, Rutgers University’s Nick Nave and Devane Murphy, a team of two Black students won the two national policy debate championships, uniting the crowns for only the second time in policy debate’s history. Black debaters radically engage the debate community’s exclusion of Black students from successful participation, of Black scholarship and of Black political concerns from competition. Communal acceptance in policy debate depends on the willingness of the ‘other’ to share the values, practices, and traditions of the community. Black Framework is the technical argument that Rutgers uses to win the debate, but the debate is really about the “aesthetic” and “material” forms of anti-blackness that constitute community relations.
