By Todd Lassa

If there is a more provocative debate topic than “Resolved: America is a racist nation,” it has yet to be written down. When liberal and conservative members of Braver Angels tackled the resolution in a national debate Thursday evening, they generally dug to the core of the issue, citing both American and personal history, with far less concentration than usual on current events. There was much more nuance than one might expect from this resolution.

Braver Angels debates are not held to declare a “winner” or to convince liberals or conservatives to switch sides. In fact, while the “affirmative” side of the resolution, that America is a racist nation, is generally associated with a left-side point of view, the first debater to speak on this side was Luke Nathan Phillips, a self-described conservative and Braver Angels staffer. As the first affirmative debater, he “urged fellow conservatives to take [the issue] more seriously.”

“Over the course of our history, it has [become] an even bigger deal than people make of it,” Phillips said.

Conversely, the debate’s third speaker in the negative, arguing that America is not a racist nation, was another Braver Angel staff member, Monica Guzman, who usually identifies as a liberal. 

“To me this is not just about a story, this is about a headline,” Guzman said. When I look at the resolution, (asking) ‘Is America a racist nation?’ I’m looking at a headline.”

While Guzman has “deep concerns about how seriously people are taking the racism that has (permeated) American society,” she believes the goal in raising the issue is progress against such racism.

In the end, affirmative and negative Braver Angels debaters almost rendered the resolution moot. Both sides seem to agree that the people of the United States have by a plurality always strived to reach for the ideals that our Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution, even if most of those Founding Fathers owned enslaved men and women. They agree that the American experiment is a work-in-progress, and affirmatives and negatives alike believe we have come a long way since the Civil War, since Reconstruction and resulting Jim Crow, and since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

If you are at all interested in this debate topic – and why wouldn’t you be? – please watch the debate on Braver Angels’ YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtlZ4t6aS4rAJoPyYD9DGLA

Meanwhile, read the left column for a few select comments by affirmative debaters, and the right column for select comments by negative debaters on the subject of racism in America.