Upon release of a new debate topic about racial justice and whether or not African Americans should get reparations, I was immediately terrified of what could become of the topic. A mass of racist interpretations that I feared ran in my head, “it dehumanizes them”, or “slavery happened a long time ago”, and worst of all, “there’s no obligation to pay because African Americans benefited from slavery.” I cringed. Here I thought this would be the worse topic I would ever debate, but after a few debates at Yale University’s Invitational, it came to be the best topic I ever experienced. There were no encounters of repugnant racist arguments, but I did experience something else. Firstly, an essential part of arguments is an impact, which
