Devil’s Advocate

Speak of the Devil

Is being the Devil’s advocate always a good thing?

SAMANTHA MCDONOUGH, REPORTER

We frequently see people being the Devil’s Advocate to jusitfy things, even unjustifiable things. How can Clayton avoid justifying things like imperialism?

ART BY SAMANTHA MCDONOUGH

Earlier this year, I was sitting in my world history class doing an independent PearDeck because my teacher was out for the day. The unit was American imperialism, and we were watching videos, reading excerpts and highlighting important text. It covered how and why Hawaii, the Philippines, and other countries were imperialized by the US. I was going through the PearDeck pretty quickly, until one of the slides caught me so off guard I had to screenshot it.

The slide had an excerpt from a speech talking about the Philippines and the reasons behind it’s imperialization by the US. There were two different instructions: one being to highlight the speaker’s justification behind it, and the other was to highlight the sentence or phrase that best justifies the imperialization.

It’s really hard to highlight the defenses of Philippine imperialism when you are Filipino.

This got me thinking: why was this question here?

As weird as it was, I ignored it and tried to push it out of my mind, but on the second to last slide we were asked yet another question: Are we pro or anti imperialism?

I couldn’t just ignore it now.

Imperialism has its roots in extreme racism so why would the question “Are you pro or anti imperialism” be asked?

Kids are going to say racist things, and they did.

I understand the point of these questions; it’s important to see both sides of an argument, but is it necessary in all cases?

I’ve been in discussions where the topic was gay rights, and have heard someone say “Just being the devils advocate here; They [the LGBTQ community] shouldn’t be allowed to get married because it’s just wrong.”

And that’s the issue with playing the devil’s advocate: people use it as an excuse to say bigoted things under the pretense of “showing the other side.”

But the other side doesn’t always have to be seen -- playing the devil’s advocate in a conversation about fascism where it’s not needed doesn’t excuse you from the title of “fascist.”

Not only that, devil’s advocacy can just be cruel.

Being LGBTQ+ and hearing someone say that you don’t deserve certain rights or that your existence is wrong is one of the most damaging things to happen in a classroom environment.

Having to justify slavery to understand the South’s point of view in the 4th grade for a grade isn’t the “make sure you listen to all sides of an argument!” lesson people may think it is. Being told you barely count as a person because somebody decided to “show the other side” does not explain the effects of saying or doing those things anyway.

In the middle of writing this article, we had a debate in history class where about half of us had to defend traditionalism.

Again, a little iffy, but not so bad that it needs to be talked about, but we didn’t get to choose the teams. The pro-traditionalism team ended up being all of the people of color and assigned female at birth people in the class. We spent 2-3 class periods defending why we don’t deserve human rights, culminating in a period long debate where my (pro-traditionalism) team said some heinous things.

Our team had bi-racial people defending eugenics, women talking about how they don’t deserve to vote, claims that mental illness isn’t real, and multiple allusions to how people of color don’t deserve rights.

Regardless of whether the team of white boys or the team of all the women and people of color were assigned traditionalism, it would be insanely uncomfortable. Even when we expressed this to our teacher, she seemed confused on why we would be uncomfortable claiming that we don’t deserve to be treated as humans.

It’s one thing to hear people saying you shouldn’t get personal for a debate, but it’s a whole other thing when you have to defend it for a grade. ”Showing the other side” lessons need to be taught out of the context of “defend form of bigotry here.” The position of “Devil’s advocate” is used for bad ice cream flavors or if LaCroix is good, not about human rights. The people whose rights are being debated are in that classroom, and do not want to or be able to defend the imperialization of their heritage.