Mya Whitaker was a senior at Skyline High School when she participated in her first debate tournament in 2009.
Her opponent was 14, and the topic was brownfields—land that has been abandoned because it’s contaminated. Oakland’s brownfields include areas around the Coliseum, West Oakland, and Foothill Boulevard and Seminary Avenue.
Whitaker, 17, was confident she would beat her opponent. She lost.
“It was a humble moment. The whole time I’ve been in school, people are telling me I’m so smart. But when I get into my first round, I get whooped by a 14-year-old. Something’s wrong,” Whitaker recalled in a recent interview. “But I stuck with it.”
Whitaker went on to become the first Oakland citywide champion for the Bay Area Urban Debate League, which was operating as a pilot program in 2009. Fifteen years later, Whitaker runs the organization as its executive director. In the intervening years, she graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in communication and served as program director of BAUDL for eight years before becoming executive director. In 2018, Whitaker ran unsuccessfully to represent District 6 on the City Council.
The pandemic hindered participation in youth debate programs, but over the past two years, Whitaker has overseen an expansion of the organization to schools in Oakland, San Francisco, Emeryville, and Vallejo. In 2023, the Bay Area Urban Debate League served 300 middle and high school students. For the last three years, the organization has also hosted dozens of students at a summer debate camp on the Laney College Campus.
“I think we’ve grown regionally because our people have moved out. There’s a lot of push out, and some of our families still wanted their youth to be able to participate in our program,” Whitaker said. “So we just go where the need is.”
Urban debate leagues serve students in low-income communities and provide debate opportunities for students and schools that otherwise would not be able to afford debate teams. Whitaker and her team hope to continue to grow the organization to reach more Title 1 schools in the Bay Area. Staff at BAUDL are passionate about supporting youth of color and low-income students in pursuing debate, which offers valuable skills they can use in college and in adulthood, like argumentation, research, writing, critical thinking and analysis, and logic.
Competing on an uneven playing field of ideas
Debate tournaments are often dominated by private schools and students who can afford to travel across the country for competitions and pay for premium coaching and research databases.
“We’re limited geographically by where we can drive to, while private schools fly all over the country to compete. We’d love to provide that for them but we don’t always have the wealth of resources to do that,” said Amy Gorell, the debate coach for Oakland Technical High School. “A lot of private institutions have multiple coaches for one school; sometimes we have one coach servicing multiple schools.”
Beyond the difference in resources, debate topics can also be more personal to Bay Area Urban Debate League students, said Ellyana Thornton, a junior at Emery High School. Past topics have included issues like poverty, criminal justice, immigration, diplomacy, and military intervention.
“For me as an [urban debate league] debater, social justice issues are what I relate to the most, and those aren’t as accepted in these white spaces, because they can’t relate to them or they’re uncomfortable talking about them,” Thornton told The Oaklandside during debate practice last month.
Thornton is one of four students from the Bay Area Urban Debate League who have qualified for the urban debate league national championship in Chicago next month. BAUDL is sending eight students in all, including two teams of two and four additional students to watch and support the competitors.
For Emery High School coach Jessica Wright-Crichlow, Thornton is her fourth debater to make it to the national tournament in her ten years of coaching. While Wright-Crichlow says she has a fear of public speaking and was never a debater herself, she finds it rewarding to guide students through the high-stakes competitions.
“My strong suit is support and guidance because a lot of my debaters get to the national tournament and nerves get to them and I have to talk them off the ledges,” she told The Oaklandside.
BAUDL students train to compete in policy debate, where teams of two argue for and against a particular policy question that is selected for tournaments for the entire academic year. This year, policy debaters are considering whether the United States should enable wealth redistribution through a jobs guarantee, an increase to social security, or providing guaranteed income.
Community support helps the debate league grow
On tournament days, BAUDL provides transportation, breakfast and lunch for students. The group hosts five tournaments each school year, plus two workshops. Fundraising is a major way the organization sustains itself and is able to send students to travel tournaments. A recent fundraising drive raised $93,000, Whitaker said. In May, BAUDL will host its annual awards gala, where students, coaches, and teams will be honored.
Whitaker, the executive director, is encouraging the Oakland community to support the organization so that it can continue to provide professional development for Oakland youth. Beyond donations, the group could use volunteers to hear students’ arguments, and introductions to new schools that could use a debate team, Whitaker said.
“We like to highlight how important it is for them to stand on what they believe in and learn how to advocate for themselves,” Whitaker told The Oaklandside. “And they learn how to code switch and articulate themselves, especially going into these jobs that we want them to have to be able to pay to live in Oakland. We’ve got to stress that the skills they practice in debate transfer into real-life job placement.”
On a recent Friday afternoon, debate students gathered at BAUDL’s office in downtown Oakland. College pennants hang on the walls around the room, and trophies and plaques memorialize winners of past tournaments. On the white board, there’s a list of all of the campuses with a debate team, and the ones they hope to expand to in the fall, like Fremont, McClymonds, Oakland High, and AIMS.
The students who are there are part of the organization’s student leadership council, who participate in travel tournaments outside of the urban debate league circuit. They’re reviewing their performance in the Cal Invitational at UC Berkeley, which was held the previous weekend.
Emily Ng, a sophomore at Oakland Tech, says she got into debate thinking maybe it would help her win an argument with her dad. With guidance and support from Gorell, the Oakland Tech coach, Ng is competing at the national tournament in Chicago in April. She encourages more students to get into debate, even if they don’t think they have the skills for it.
“Debate is a wonderful opportunity. You don’t have to be great at writing or reading to be good at debate,” she said. “I’m 100% a STEM person, but I’ve managed to find success in debate. There’s a part of debate for everyone.”
