Student Playing Devil’s Advocate Coming Very Close to Just Being Flat Out Racist
In high school English classes, one of the most dreaded units has to be the argumentative unit. There’s nothing worse than being chose to debate against a topic that you wholly agree with. Luckily, in Mrs. Avery’s class, debates are not randomly assigned, so if you agree with a topic you get to argue for it, no matter how popular of an opinion it is.
“We’ve all been in a situation where we end up arguing against something we don’t believe in,” says Jessica Avery, a 36 year old teacher at Lincoln High School, explaining her debate philosophy to her students, “Here. I’ll show you with a topic. Everyone who disagrees with slavery stand on this side of the room, and those who agree step to the other side.”
As expected, the entirety of the class chose to side with basic human compassion. That is, for about ten seconds before Xander Bauman controversially stepped across the room to side against the majority.
“What?” said Bauman, shrugging “I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate.”
Never deterred and always professional, Avery took this new development in stride, stating that this would be a good time to ‘flex our debating muscles’ and started a mock debate between the two sides.
It started out fine, but as the debate continued, Bauman’s points seemed to straddle the fine line between useful to the debate and just flat out racist.
“Sure,” said Bauman, pushing up his glasses, “No human race should ever be enslaved. But if we were to enslave a race, why shouldn’t be the blacks?”
This brought about some light protest, but Bauman simply reminded his debate opponents that he was just playing Devil’s Advocate, no more, no less.
“To Europeans at the time, they were most definitely an inferior race,” he continued, “animals, even.”
The uproar in the class continued, but Bauman simply repeated he was just playing Devil’s Advocate.
“Sure, I think Devil’s Advocate is an important school of thinking that can enhance a debate when applied correctly,” says Grant Fischer, one of Bauman’s classmates, “but Xander’s getting a little carried away, don’t you think?”
Xander went on to reinforce his “not heartfelt in the slightest” claims with talk of Social Darwinism and some questionable and largely unrelated to Devil’s Advocacy criticism of the teaching of critical race theory to students.
However, Bauman’s arguments would be shut off before he could get the entirety of his final argument out. He claims he was just going to say “What if African Americans really are just Nickel and Diming the good American citizens?” But you never really can know in the Midwest, can you.
