WASHINGTON – Before the Howard University and Morehouse College football teams squared off last Saturday at RFK Stadium for the AT&T Nation’s Football Classic, debate teams from both HBCUs tackled some tough topics during the “Game Before the Game.”
The verbal showdown featured fiery rhetoric, sharp witticisms and even a few personal barbs as both teams sought to score points with an enthusiastic crowd.
The near-capacity audience at Howard’s Cramton Auditorium was so engrossed in the debate that many ignored repeated pleas to hold their applause until each debater finished his or her spiel.
If any one thing distinguished the debate, it was the fact that when the teams had to argue against something that enjoys widespread support among African-Americans, or conversely, for something that is widely rejected by African-Americans, they did so from a perspective that emphasized themes of empowerment and enfranchisement.
Leaders of both teams said that from a strategic standpoint, it was expedient to advance their arguments in a way that they thought would play well with the predominantly Black audience, as opposed to simply co-opting familiar lines of attack that have already been advanced in mainstream society.
Thus, when Morehouse found itself arguing in support of a national law that would require voter IDs, it did so in a way that addressed the concerns of critics, such as the NAACP, who charge that proposed voter ID requirements are actually conservative-backed attempts to disenfranchise the minority vote.
For instance, to allay the concerns that requiring a voter ID would place an undue financial burden on the poor, the Morehouse team — acting as federal lawmakers — advocated for the federal government to shoulder the cost for the poor to obtain documents necessary to get a voter ID. They also sought to make it convenient for the poor to obtain a voter ID at the local post office or DMV.
