Demographic Underrepresentation: questions and rosters in qb

[KGeee]

It was our first time exposed to the ACF circuit. Definitely interesting...always good to get more exposure, even if it isn't what you're used to. I thought the questions were well written for the most part, but that there could have been a few more "minority" questions. I think that we had reached a level in practice that we were comfortable how we were performing and seeing new talent definitely opened our eyes, especially those facing other schools for the first time.

[DumbJaques]

I thought the questions were well written for the most part, but that there could have been a few more "minority" questions.

Perhaps you will be voting for our "forgotten moments in black history month" theme. . .

Seriously, what do you mean?

[KGeee]

I thought the questions were well written for the most part, but that there could have been a few more "minority" questions.

Perhaps you will be voting for our "forgotten moments in black history month" theme. . .

Seriously, what do you mean?

They just seemed to appear every other packet...I'd have to have the packet to back me up, or prove me wrong...Ibut other than Ham, 3/5th slave law, Black Panthers, the bonus on Invisible Man/ralph ellison, I don't remember many other minority questions. there was almost no hyphenated american lit. And yes I would vote for that.
On the other hand, I loved the lit. questions...seemed well-written.

[Mettius Fufetius]

I admit it: Furman wrote the ghost riding tossup. The perpetrator has not yet explained himself.

As far as hyphenated 20th c. American lit, you can add at least the August Wilson bonus.


-Nathan James

[KGeee]

I admit it: Furman wrote the ghost riding tossup. The perpetrator has not yet explained himself.

As far as hyphenated 20th c. American lit, you can add at least the August Wilson bonus.


-Nathan James

That was either our bye round or we didn't get to it...would love to see the whole packets because it did have some good questions in it.

[DumbJaques]

You're complaining because only ever other packet included a question on something related to African-American history (correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be using the term 'minority' to refer exclusively to that)? Are you serious? If I understand you correctly, it seems like you would have preferred every packet to include a question about black culture or history. That's ridiculous. I thought you meant like, non-western, which is a very reasonable complaint if indeed a packet lacked stuff that wasn't about Europe or America. But to expect a specific ethnicity within a certain country to come up more often than every other packet is, in my opinion, unreasonable and detrimental to quizbowl. For one thing, there is (with good reason) a distribution requirement that is designed to make the competition as balanced and fair as possible. That distribution requirement usually includes like 1/1 American history, 1/1 American lit, and substantial limits on how much American stuff can even be asked. So when you say that 1/0 or 0/1 every other packet isn't enough, you're kind of implying that 1/5 (or more) of the American allotment be given to things related to African Americans. Whether or not that qualifies as a proper portion of American history and culture isn't even worth getting into, because using racial quotas in quizbowl is insane (and makes me think of CBI). Sure, a tournament should try to have a broad reach across social groups and histories, and most usually do, but I don't think any group has the right to assert it should make up a certain percentage (certainly not something on the scale of 1/5 or greater) of its larger group's distribution requirement. I would love to see 1/1 Asian history and literature, but it ain't happening (nor should it, because the rest of the world is important to, and other topics would suffer). I assure you there are some very, very odd things certain people on the circuit would like to see 1/1 of, but the responsibility is for balance. Unless it was like, 1/0 out of three packets on African Americans, and like 10/10 on Confederate history, I'm not sure where your complaint about the set is.

[Mr. Kwalter]

What I want to know is what exactly you (Kyle) want. Is it just "African-American" and "Mexican-American? literature, or do you also want a 1/1 Maxine Hong Kingston distribution per tournament? Or how about Jewish lit, should we increase the number of Jewish lit and history questions? Also, you know what else has a hyphen? "Non-Western." Theoretically, every ACF and mACF tournament should have at least 1/1 world lit and 1/1 world history per packet, and half of myth and religion is supposed to be non-Western (whether they make it into the first 20 questions in the packet is another story). I'm not really sure you know what you're asking. There's a reason that "minority" American literature is represented the way it is. In the grand scope of things, i.e. when you take into account that quizbowl deals with an entire world's worth of material, American minorities become even more minor. Yes, we should absolutely make an effort to significantly include Black and Hispanic authors, but we have to remember that their significance in the larger world canonical picture is minimal.

[vandyhawk]

I don't think there's really a reason to give Kyle a hard time here. From what I gather, they've only ever played HCASC, and from the couple HCASC packets I looked at one time, I can see how going from that to a standard circuit event would make one question the lack of "minority" questions. That being said, Eric makes a good point that there shouldn't be any specific minority quota, as long as there is reasonable coverage.

[Captain Sinico]

I want to echo what Matt said here and I think it bears repeating. Perhaps we could try to be more understanding (and that's me saying that. Me.) of what people's expectations are and how their new experiences differ from those and not respond as though someone who's just noting "wow, this is different from HCASC" is fomenting some revolution to undo the game as we know it.

MaS

[Mr. Kwalter]

I didn't mean to come off critical, I really just hijacked the thread to make a point about the issue. I met Kyle and his teammates in Oklahoma and I really enjoyed seeing new faces in the region. I'm delighted that they enjoyed themselves and I sincerely hope that we'll see them at SCT. If you have any questions about quizbowl in the region, Kyle, please feel free to email me at ekwartler at gmail dot com.

[KGeee]

. Yes, we should absolutely make an effort to significantly include Black and Hispanic authors, but we have to remember that their significance in the larger world canonical picture is minimal.

For real, man? I'm not talking just lit...I was complimenting the lit questions, but concerned with the lack of other minority questions. I think it may be part of the reason that there are so few hispanics or african-americans involved in quiz bowl (I saw none.) I liked the question involving Fred Hampton, but there is so much material out there (the blood bank, the stop sign, open heart surgery, dry cleaning (Praise God for dry cleaning), Fritz Pollard, the cloning of the AIDS virus, jazz music, rock music, the synthesis of ribonucleic acid (RNA). etc. just waiting there to be accessed. Is Ghost Riding more important than that?

It's just the views of an outsider who hasn't been in the academic circuit, outside of three years of hcasc, since elementary. Not trying to pull a Che Guevara on ya'll, but that's just how we came out of the tournament feeling. To each their own.

[Deckard Cain]

I didn't notice a dearth of minority questions, but maybe that's because the numbers of them were basically what I'm used to. The topics you mention are definitely fair game for questions, and in fact I believe I've heard questions on all of them in the past. And I'll echo Kit Cloudkicker's comments on coming to SCT - I'm not too familiar with HCASC, but I expect that it's closer in gameplay format to what you're used to seeing.

[KGeee]

And I appreciate he tournament being put on and know how much work goes into writing the questions, but I like people critiquing the questions I write, so it's not personal-but that's just how I feel.

[Rothlover]

I personally take KGeee's comments as more of an indictment of how HCASC conditions through small-minded pandering than anything else. HCASC is like the Torah Bowl we had in HS, except our high schools made us aware of College Bowl ( though it may have been). It has to be a big leap from having Andrew Young tus at events where Andrew Young is in attendance (among 100 similar q's) to seeing the proportional African-American content that generally exists in decent circuit events.

That said, quizbowl clearly lacks enough Jew questions...

[KGeee]

I personally take KGeee's comments as more of an indictment of how HCASC conditions through small-minded pandering than anything else. HCASC is like the Torah Bowl we had in HS, except our high schools made us aware of College Bowl ( though it may have been). It has to be a big leap from having Andrew Young tus at events where Andrew Young is in attendance (among 100 similar q's) to seeing the proportional African-American content that generally exists in decent circuit events.

That said, quizbowl clearly lacks enough Jew questions...

Personally I think it's somewhere in between. Quiz bowl doesn't have enough of the questions and HCASC focuses too much on them at times, but being at HBCU's-it's expected. And there really aren't enough Jewish questions. (And there weren't any Young toss-ups that year at the NCT that I remember, but there were in previous years). It's just like discussing show-style bands at a traditional school...most traditional schools will talk about the tuning (which can be true), or how they learn by rote (which may not be true), or just simply frown on it, but I'm getting completely off topic. Back on topic-it all boils down to how much value you place in a subject. Come to think of it I don't think I heard a single dictator question, either-and they definitely had a world-wide influence. And the minority questions do not just apply to last weekends sword bowl, but as a whole.

Continue with the disagreeing...

[dtaylor4]

Just to clarify: I'm not taking a side in this debate.

KGeee: OK, this tournament may not have had any questions on dictators, or whatever. Before making any judgments on collegiate quiz bowl as a whole, go to a few more tournaments. The entirety of what is asked in collegiate quiz bowl cannot be found in one tournament. HCASC is played by HBCU's, while collegiate quiz bowl can be played by any team of four (or fewer) from the same school. To bring back Chris' point, there is so much covered in the college canon in terms of subject matter and ethnicity, that some areas may not come up as much in an individual tournament.

Again, before making any overall judgments about the circuit, go to a few more tournaments (if you want to try deeper waters, I suggest ACF Regionals).

[KGeee]

Just to clarify: I'm not taking a side in this debate.

KGeee: OK, this tournament may not have had any questions on dictators, or whatever. Before making any judgments on collegiate quiz bowl as a whole, go to a few more tournaments. The entirety of what is asked in collegiate quiz bowl cannot be found in one tournament. HCASC is played by HBCU's, while collegiate quiz bowl can be played by any team of four (or fewer) from the same school. To bring back Chris' point, there is so much covered in the college canon in terms of subject matter and ethnicity, that some areas may not come up as much in an individual tournament.

Again, before making any overall judgments about the circuit, go to a few more tournaments (if you want to try deeper waters, I suggest ACF Regionals).

That statement about the HBCU's was not meant to back any of my points. I thought it was a good tournament overall and I'm glad I went, but just wanted to add my two cents (whether they are wanted or not).

[DumbJaques]

(whether they are wanted or not).

Please don't take the fact that a couple of people are disagreeing with you as an indication that we don't want you to post. The whole point of the 'discussion' section is to discuss stuff, which ideally involves debate. So don't worry about it.

My original criticism was based on the fact if you reserve quotas (especially such high quotas), other topics suffer. It's not right to reserve a quota for a racial subgroup in quizbowl, it doesn't inherently have more or less value than anything else. Since you exclusively were using examples from black culture, I'll go ahead and use that as a model: Consider that, oftentimes regardless to relevance to the 'real world' or even academia, certain topics have a finite amount of things that can be answers to bonuses in quizbowl, and even less that can be answers to tossups (assuming a lack of suckage in answer selection). If you weigh the total amount of things that can be answers from black culture, and require them to be asked about as often as you were talking about, you end up with an incredibly disproportionate percentage of askable black culture represented versus percentages of other topics. That isn't at all exclusive to one ethnic group; in fact, it really applies to all of them. The Jews (to use the other example mentioned) have been an incredibly important force on the shaping of world history and culture. But despite this unquestionable importance, there is a finite amount of askable Jew stuff. Bottom line, quotas based on race or religion or any subgrouping of human social groups is detrimental to other topics and has no pragmatic purpose, which leads me to conclude that its primary motivation is some kind of PC crap.

This brings me to Kgeee's other point, that the absence of this quota in some way makes quizbowl less appealing to minorities. I think this is a baseless argument, in that the basic assumption is that a minority who showed up at a practice would want to stay if he heard a tossup on african american or hispanic american history, and be less inclined to if he did not. The only way this makes any sense is said person was able to get that question, in which case his primary motivation would be that he got a question, not that it was about a minority topic (this also assumes that being an ethnicity makes you better at your culture's related qb askables than people of a different ethnicity, which I would argue is just plain wrong). In any event, even if having more minority questions would offer some marginal gain in minority participation, that doesn't justify overhauling the question distribution (again to the detriment of other topics). The assumption that minority players are so inherently disadvantaged that they need "easy" or "friendly" questions to be encouraged to participate, that they are only able to compete and be interested and go through the challenging first experiences everyone else goes through when they are given questions that they "should" be able to answer because of the color of their skin, is to me tantamount to adding tossups on the history of retail or makeup, because girls will know that stuff and be more encouraged to join. In a word, it's all kinds of retarded, and in my white, male, majority view, offensive.

[Matt Weiner]

Before we get too wrapped up in the more abstract discussion I'd like to point out two things about this specific tournament:
-as a packet-submission event, answer choices were largely guided by what individual teams chose to write on, and any overall trends were arrived at in a completely random fashion. One such tournament could have 3/3 questions related to black culture in every round, another could have almost none, and no conscious intent should be read into either.
-tossups on things like "ghost riding" do not displace tossups on Adam Clayton Powell or Charles Chesnutt, due to the separation of the distribution

My comment on the general issue is that, while specific quotas go too far, it is a good idea for packet balance to suggest that at least a handful of questions across all topics deal with something that might be considered "underrepresented." To me, even devoid of any political connotations, looking for answers from black history or women's literature or what-have-you is a good way to find new askable topics that haven't been written to death.

[DumbJaques]

My comment on the general issue is that, while specific quotas go too far, it is a good idea for packet balance to suggest that at least a handful of questions across all topics deal with something that might be considered "underrepresented." To me, even devoid of any political connotations, looking for answers from black history or women's literature or what-have-you is a good way to find new askable topics that haven't been written to death.

True, but isn't that only because they haven't been written to death, not because they're from those certain minority topics? I'm all for the promotion of underrepresented topics, it's one of the main ways the game evolves and it keeps players learning and things more competitive. But when we choose underrepresented topics, it wouldn't result in one specific one being overrepresented, and I'm sure you'd agree we shouldn't choose them based on the fact that they relate to the history of minorities and their cultures.

[First Chairman]

I can sympathize with KGeee noting an absence of more diverse answers (as per underrepresented minorities in history or literature or science history etc.), just as many of us can say how a packet or tournament lacked or had much fewer questions about a certain war, period of time, or literary subgenre. In many packets I have written or edited, I have made sure that in many of the major categories that some underrepresented minority representation is at least in play. In High School Celebrity Shoot, I make sure that there is a good proportion of answers that reflect international as well as cultural diversity. All that can be done is to make sure that the writers are encouraged to explore those topics.

Obviously any February African-American history month packet is different from a standard qb packet.

[KGeee]

(whether they are wanted or not).

Since you exclusively were using examples from black culture, I'll go ahead and use that as a model: Consider that, oftentimes regardless to relevance to the 'real world' or even academia, certain topics have a finite amount of things that can be answers to bonuses in quizbowl, and even less that can be answers to tossups (assuming a lack of suckage in answer selection).

.

Actually, some of those examples were from Hispanic and Asian American cultures. I don't think the game needs to be "dumbed" down by any reason, but I just didn't get the relevance of certain toss-ups in today's culture
, such as the ghost riding one. What I really don't understand is why there were plenty of Asian (I include Middle-Eastern in this just for this particular case) participants, but no hispanics or african-american participants. You shouldn't have to go throughout the school to look for one just to put on the team, but why don't they want to come on their own? Is it the questions? The lack of them at the schools?

[First Chairman]

Actually, some of those examples were from Hispanic and Asian American cultures. I don't think the game needs to be "dumbed" down by any reason, but I just didn't get the relevance of certain toss-ups in today's culture
, such as the ghost riding one. What I really don't understand is why there were plenty of Asian (I include Middle-Eastern in this just for this particular case) participants, but no hispanics or african-american participants. You shouldn't have to go throughout the school to look for one just to put on the team, but why don't they want to come on their own? Is it the questions? The lack of them at the schools?

Removing HBCU's from consideration from the equation, a census of college populations shows that there are remarkably few Hispanics and African-Americans who attend college in the first place (maybe no more than 15% combined) at the popular colleges. If anything expense of higher education prevents them from participating, so if you see them, it is more likely at the community college level (someone from that circuit confirm with me [stares at Chris]). We also can go into the issues of stereotype threat being an additional factor in how one chooses activities. We could also look at various fraternities and wonder how people decide to rush certain groups over others just by seeing the makeup of that said frat. The answer is obviously a question of psychology that I don't have the expertise to go into great discussion on this.

One of the questions I have been investigating is whether this threat also exists in the high school level. You can see early on that we have many Asians (eastern and southern, not really Middle Eastern or Arabic) and Caucasians in that pool with a few underrepresented minorities thrown in. I do think that there is something related to peer pressure and conforming to expectations that is at play, but change can happen with the right focus and leadership at the administrator and coach level. Right now we are seeing more girls/women take part in the game at the high school level which does not necessarily get translated up into college (though I think that is an area of improvement over the past few years). We awarded Paul Cain from Ysleta High School (TX) with our Benjamin Cooper award for his service to promoting quiz bowl in El Paso which has a very high Hispanic and underserved population; many of his quiz bowl students have used that experience to gain confidence in themselves and gone on to college, though not always to continue with qb.

PACE is always seeking individuals who want to develop leadership skills in the high school and college game, and I have made it clear we welcome and will support those from underrepresented backgrounds who decide to join our cause and organization.

If this goes on, we're splitting this discussion.

[e_steinhauser]

What I really don't understand is why there were plenty of Asian (I include Middle-Eastern in this just for this particular case) participants, but no hispanics or african-american participants. You shouldn't have to go throughout the school to look for one just to put on the team, but why don't they want to come on their own? Is it the questions? The lack of them at the schools?

Recruiting anyone to become an active member of a quizbowl team is often a very hard sell. The biggest quizbowl clubs I know of have, at most, maybe 30 regular or semi-regular members out of a campus of more than 10,000 full-time students. Generalizing to the rest of the nation, it's a safe bet to say that less than 2% of a campus' full-time undergraduates are in any way involved with quizbowl. The biggest determining factor as to whether any individual will play collegiate quizbowl is if they had previously played in high school. Given that the high school circuit is overwhelmingly suburban middle-to-upper-class, you will have a fairly self-selecting group.

[Matt Weiner]

I don't think the game needs to be "dumbed" down by any reason, but I just didn't get the relevance of certain toss-ups in today's culture, such as the ghost riding one.

Again, that is for the portion of the distribution dedicated to pop culture topics--it's not supposed to be relevant to anything, necessarily. It was there instead of a question on Family Guy or Dan Marino, not instead of a history or science question.

What I really don't understand is why there were plenty of Asian (I include Middle-Eastern in this just for this particular case) participants, but no hispanics or african-american participants. You shouldn't have to go throughout the school to look for one just to put on the team, but why don't they want to come on their own? Is it the questions? The lack of them at the schools?

Well this situation does improve somewhat when you look to areas of the country other than Oklahoma, yeah...college populations are to some degree reflective of the population of the areas they draw from and the southern plains are not exactly known for being the most diverse place in America.

[Stained Diviner]

Oklahoma is actually a very median state when it comes to minority population.

Here in Illinois, it seems like the biggest predictor as to whether or not a high school will have a team is whether whites are a majority at a school. There are plenty of teams in poor white rural areas that do not necessarily send almost all their students to four-year colleges, though most of them only play a small number of matcher per year. Teams from schools that are majority African American or Hispanic are extremely rare.

In high school, the existence of a team depends more on faculty and administration support than student support (though there are exceptions to that rule as well).

I think the problem is deeper than some people are making it out to be, though I don't think it is due to any racism of people associated with quiz bowl.

[ValenciaQBowl]

Since Tom asked (and maybe this should be split off into another thread if it's going to keep going), I'll say that a big CC tournament in Florida looks very different from most four-year competitions. There are many more Hispanic and African-American players, and very, very many more females--women constituted just over 50% of the field at my Delta Burke tournament this year.

But I agree with Matt: though some of that may be because CC populations are more diverse than those at most universitites, much more of it is because we're Florida, not Oklahoma. However, when I write questions, I write by content area distributions, with little consideration of the players (outside of including some Florida-specific stuff).

[Zip Zap Rap Pants]

Oklahoma is actually a very median state when it comes to minority population.

Here in Illinois, it seems like the biggest predictor as to whether or not a high school will have a team is whether whites are a majority at a school. There are plenty of teams in poor white rural areas that do not necessarily send almost all their students to four-year colleges, though most of them only play a small number of matcher per year. Teams from schools that are majority African American or Hispanic are extremely rare.

In high school, the existence of a team depends more on faculty and administration support than student support (though there are exceptions to that rule as well).

I think the problem is deeper than some people are making it out to be, though I don't think it is due to any racism of people associated with quiz bowl.

Yeah I think a lot of it has to do with faculty, because I remember a fair number of VHSL teams that had a good deal of blacks/hispanics (and in fact one that was all black), and some of those teams did pretty well, but they rarely ever go to a non-VHSL SB, non-BoB tournament,* so it probably has something to do with coaches/administration not placing a lot of value on it. Actually I snail-mailed a good deal of Peninsula teams hoping they would come to the Col. Ebirt Tourney because of proximity, and a lot of these teams are from the big urban Hampton/Newport News schools like Denbigh, Warwick, Phoebus, Hampton High etc., but as usual, they don't do much aside from VHSL and BoB, so we'll see what happens.

As for the college level, let's face it, at non-HBCU that have teams, the club will start out with more whites (and East/South Asians) simply because of greater numbers at that college and because more of them were more active in it at the high school level. Then those whites and Asians probably have a couple of friends who did quizbowl, and they get them into the club, or they just have more white and Asian friends respectively just as members of every race in America generally have friends not of their own race but will still associate more with members of their own. So in that way the whole thing kind of compounds itself to where often the composition of a qb club is overwhelmingly white/East and South Asian. I think though that if more HBCU branched out from HCASC college quizbowl would seem much more diverse, but that almost goes without saying. By the way FWIW our club has a Persian co-president, a couple of Asians, and two black girls, one of whom will probably show up to Sectionals, and that's out of 20-25 on our roster (though about 10 are really active), so that's not bad for an almost 80% white school.

*for those new to this board like KGhee, VHSL SB - Virginia High School League Scholastic Bowl
BoB - Battle of the Brains, a central and southeast VA TV quiz show

[Mr. Kwalter]

Well, here at UT, there are more Jews than Black people but there are tons and tons of Hispanics. We have one guy from El Paso on the team, and he's about as white as one can get. Then again, there are currently maybe 10 active members of the UT club, and there are 52000 students here. I agree with Kyle that there should be more African-American and Hispanic-American students along with women in quizbowl, but there's no good answer as to how to accomplish that. I don't think the minorities run away because they feel alienated by the questions. They run away because 99.9% of students run away, and they're, well, minorities already. There may be a problem with institutional prejudices among select minority communities imposed by themselves and reinforced by others, but we can only (and fairly futilely) fight half that battle. Being from an HBCU, a perspective pretty much hitherto unseen in these parts, you have a unique perspective on this issue that I think all of us welcome.

[KGeee]

And I also wondered about the women. We ended up with an all male team, but probably 45% of our campus tournament was women. We invited them, called their home, emailed them, etc. but could not keep them involved past the first meeting. I really don't get that at all. We usually have at least one woman among the men and HCASC teams, as a whole, usually have better women-to-male ratio (two all-woman colleges), but it's not great. I know some aggressive women, so I don't think that is it...

[Zip Zap Rap Pants]

Just as oftentimes quizbowl clubs are started by whites/Asians, at least from what I've observed more often than not clubs are usually started by all males. Why that is, is a bit of mystery. Anyway, usually in the early stages of a club it's pretty much a gentleman's club of just 8 or 9 guys, and heck my freshman year at Maggie Walker GS (which has had a team since the early 90's) we almost never fielded more than 2 teams and most of the time they were all male and we even were supposed to dress at least business casual at tournaments, but all of that started changing by the end of that year. By my senior year usually 4-5 teams were fielded and the club was probably 1/3rd female or somewhere close to that. At the college level, clubs usually have fewer active members than on the high school level (which is kind of counterintuitive except for the fact that club members almost always have to have done quizbowl in high school to be interested, and most of those that did it end up too busy to do qb on the college level). So with that the problem is even worse as there are usually just a few dedicated founders, so the club may perpetually be viewed as a "gentleman's club" or a "weird guys that are all in the sci-fi or Ravenclaw club and never shower and go on weird trips on the weekends for apparently no reason other than bragging rights club," in either case, without significant expansion it's hard to attract more girls.

Fortunately we had one girl in our founding group, so somewhere around a fifth or a fourth of our membership is now female, which of course isn't ideal but it's not too shabby for the college level. We haven't gotten any of them to tournaments yet, but hopefully that will all change at Sectionals...

[Your Genial Quizmaster]

I was editor-in-chief of Sword Bowl, and just off the top of my head, I can offer one more observation germane to the discussion. From the questions as submitted, there wasn't as much African-American history as usual. But on the literature side, the problem wasn't as much one of underrepresentation as it was a shortage of *unique* questions on African-American literature. One Ralph Ellison bonus made it into the tournament set, but I also edited out a very similar Ellison bonus and a tossup on Invisible Man. Since there was already a tossup on "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", I edited out a Langston Hughes tossup.

There was a similar problem with African literature questions for Sword Bowl -- most of the questions submitted were about Chinua Achebe. I did keep his stuff in one bonus about characters and replaced him in another bonus with another African author.

Anyway, you get the idea. I remember a previous tournament where four different teams submitted bonuses on Toni Morrison works, while that time there were no questions about Alice Walker or Jamaica Kincaid or Gloria Naylor. Another time it must have been National Write Questions About Zora Neale Hurston Month. (I remember noticing that Hurston didn't come up in the Sword Bowl submissions, which was the exception rather than the rule.)

Besides the repetition in the source material for any given tournament, there's also the ebb and flow between tournaments. Civil rights history (a topic of particular interest to me, one I wrote about a lot in college) seems particularly prone to that pattern. I'll get six or seven questions on the movement in the Sixties for one tournament, and zero for the next one. I think the Black Panthers tossup was all I got for Sword Bowl.

These issues are far from unique to African-American or other minority-themed topics, but they're probably noticed more when they affect topics with a history and/or perception of underrepresentation. When I edit out multiple Keats questions and am left with almost no British Romantic poetry, it's not as evident. Nobody noticed at COTKU last October when I edited out multiple tossups on specific books of the Bible because for some reason four different packet authors chose to write a tossup on Nehemiah. (That's still far short of the record, which goes to one year's TrashMasters submissions, I think 1999, where out of fifteen rounds submitted there were seven tossups and one bonus about Furby.) Oddly enough, it *does* get noticed, and editors even get called out, if there's a lack of balance within a science category -- e.g., too much organic chemistry or not enough astrophysics.

Just further food for thought...

[grapesmoker]

Without knowing any of the specifics of Sword Bowl, I just want to make some comments on this general theme.

First, I personally think that good quizbowl tournaments on average do a pretty good job representing all the various cultures of the world, as well as of American life. That doesn't mean that any one tournament has a quota on some particular ethnic group, but I think that if you go to a lot of good tournaments, you'll find many questions on whatever general cultural themes you're looking for. For example, until I started playing quizbowl, I knew nothing about Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Alice Walker, James Weldon Johnson, or August Wilson, just to name a few African-American writers that I'm now better acquainted with.

The other issue of concern is what makes a good question. Regardless of who invented the traffic light, I'm having a hard time visualizing a solid pyramidal tossup on traffic lights. A tossup on the guy who invented traffic lights would be equally problematic (some time ago there was a spate of Philo Farnsworth tossups which I wasn't too keen on, for example). Particularly when writing science questions, I feel like we should be sticking to, you know, actual science. If you are writing about some person, then that person should have enough information available about him to construct a pyramidal tossup. Einstein and Landau might be canonical examples, as many, many things in physics are named after those guys.

I echo the sentiments of other posters who don't think that allocating a part of the distribution to "minority questions" is a good idea. I think we should make an effort to be diverse in our question writing, but when I say diverse, I just mean that we should try to cast our question-writing nets as wide as possible (subject to the above constraints, of course), not that we should include certain topics just because we're trying to round out some pre-allocated culture distribution. Sometimes when I write about world history I'll write about Asia, other times Latin America, still other times Africa (not many Antarctica questions, though, sorry); all depends on what I'm interested in at the moment. I think if everyone does that, the results will average out over the long haul.

[DumbJaques]

(not many Antarctica questions, though, sorry)

U R A H8ER JRY

Seriously, Antarctica theme round for ACF nationals anyone?

[First Chairman]

In many distributions, the TD's and editors have the right to suggest that each team contribute at least one tossup and one bonus for the purposes of "expanding the canon" which should include questions on more underrepresented topics or cultures as needed. At least for packet submission, you should have a couple of questions that ought to work and fulfill that requirement (though the problems Charlie stated are not avoidable). Getting people in the habit of writing questions in those other areas is hard for people to do... let alone getting anyone in the habit of writing questions.

[Your Genial Quizmaster]

Tom Chuck wrote:

Getting people in the habit of writing questions in those other areas is hard for people to do... let alone getting anyone in the habit of writing questions.

Which brings me to my next point -- but I'll put that under the other thread, "Sword Bowl discussion."

[vetovian]

There's something I find puzzling in talk about "underrepresented topics" in quizbowl. Any judgment of whether or not a particular topic is underrepresented depends on both
(a) empirical knowledge of how often the topic comes up; and
(b) normative criteria of how often the topic "should" come up.

But where do the criteria in (b) come from? It's standard for American quiz bowl tournaments to ask for a certain number of questions on American literature and on American history (as well as a certain number of questions on science, on geography, on social science, etc.). These are all perfectly reasonable requests. And if a tournament director believes that a certain topic has been underrepresented, he can ask specifically for some minimum number of questions on that topic. I don't see the harm in that, other than the fact that if it's a topic that quiz bowlers don't know much about, then there's a good chance there may be a lot of repeats on the topic. But I've seen guidelines that have cited poetry as an underrepresented topic and have therefore included minimum quotas for poetry. The point is that there is no One True Distribution.

I disagree with comments by DumbJaques:

I'm sure you'd agree we shouldn't choose them based on the fact that they relate to the history of minorities and their cultures.

and:

Bottom line, quotas based on race or religion or any subgrouping of human social groups is detrimental to other topics and has no pragmatic purpose, which leads me to conclude that its primary motivation is some kind of PC crap.

Why should the primary motivation matter? The pragmatic purpose of quotas is clarity for the writers. For VETO, we ask that packets include at least 4 tossups and 4 bonuses related to Canada or Canadians. Announcing this guideline helps non-Canadian visitors: they know that since this is a Canadian tournament, they should include some Canadian questions. But how many? They don't want other players to complain that they haven't written enough. But obviously it's harder for non-Canadians than for Canadians to think of Canadian stuff to write about. The guideline tells them what they need to know to keep the other players satisfied. For similar reasons, I think that if a HBCU hosted a packet-submission tournament, it would make perfect sense to specify a certain minimum number of questions on African-Americana -- and I'd even say that it would be better if such a quota were specified explicitly than if it were not. A non-HBCU might as well try the same thing if it has a special interest in attracting HBCUs. Cornell did something analogous in 1997 after it realized that there were a bunch of fledgling Canadian teams nearby, and in order to lure them it announced that it would use an NAQT IS question set with additional Canadian questions written in-house. And this experience may be instructive: Queen's came with three teams; I came with an MIT team specifically because I wanted to play quiz bowl that was more Canadian-friendly (or Canadian-skewed, if you will) than other American tournaments I'd been to -- I wouldn't have made the trip otherwise -- and there were a couple of other Canadian players on other American teams who might have come for the same reason. Two other Canadian schools had been planning to come, but they were totally new to quiz bowl and couldn't get their act together in time. But overall, Cornell got some Canadian players who wouldn't have come otherwise, and certainly gained a lot of goodwill from Canadian quizbowlers.

[Matt Weiner]

"Underrepresented" in this context doesn't refer to things that are underrepresented in quizbowl, but rather in academia as a whole. It's a catch all term (perhaps an awkward one) for all "minority" content as well as questions about women's history and such.

[DumbJaques]

I disagree with comments by DumbJaques:

Dude, that's kind of not the same thing. If a tournament is looking to attract teams from another NATION, that skews things a bit. For example, when we include our distribution requirements, we in maintstream do so with a clearly Western and American perspective, the reasons being that basically 100% of the teams (unless it's a Canadian tournament) are American and Western. If A HBCU wanted to host a tournament primarily for HBCU and noted that they would be having African-American culture requirements, that's cool, just like it's cool to have questions that draw on a more complex knowledge of Canada than hockey and people named MacKenzie. That isn't at all what we're talking about here. My point was that holding racial quotas for quizbowl questions at a mainstream tournament, even if done to encourage participation by said race, is just wrong (for all the reasons I iterated above). A Canadian tournament having Canadian questions isn't a racial quota, it's, like, your national history. It's not analogous.

Also, this goes back to the assumption that a black player would somehow 'need' questions on his own culture to feel welcomed in the sport. When you've lived your whole life in a country that isn't America, it's not unreasonable to substitute some of the US-centered focus for your own national one. But African Americans are AMERICANS. Making the assumption that they can understand Ellison but can't handle Shakespeare or something is dumb, and is harmful to quizbowl in the same sense that racial quotas in most things are harmful. The assumption that someone will be worse at the general, balanced canon that inherently favors no American over another because they have dark skin is not helpful to our activity.

[Stained Diviner]

I agree that strict quotas are wrong, especially when the question set is as small as a single round, but there are certain topics that should come up during the course of a tournament. If you are going to play 12 rounds during the course of the day, you should hear at least some questions related to African Americans, just like you should hear some questions related to the 19th Century, human biology, etc.

This is the editor's responsibility because it is reasonable for a single round to not include African Americans, the 19th Century, or human biology.

The original complaint that started this thread was probably off because of a disagreement as to how much African Americana is enough, but it would have been justified if there had been none or only one question in the actual tournament.

On a related note, it is odd calling minority topics underrepresented, because my sense is that at most universities and in good quizbowl the topics usually are fairly represented.

[KGeee]

[quote="ReinsteinD"]

The original complaint that started this thread was probably off because of a disagreement as to how much African Americana is enough, but it would have been justified if there had been none or only one question in the actual tournament.
quote]

Here is where I disagree. Being in the United States, you focus on what impacts the United States. I think there should be AT LEAST one per twenty-two questions through the diversity of the writers, even without a quota.

[e_steinhauser]

Here is where I disagree. Being in the United States, you focus on what impacts the United States. I think there should be AT LEAST one per twenty-two questions through the diversity of the writers, even without a quota.

I'll assume you mean one per packet as opposed to 22 questions. Consider the distribution requirements for ACF Regionals:

5/5 history
5/5 literature
5/5 science
3/3 religion/myth/philosophy
3/3 fine arts
2/2 social science
2/2 trash/current events/geography/general knowledge

Right off the bat, you're not going to find any minority-centric content in good science questions (hard science, not biography bowl), and it's very slim pickings in RMP, fine arts and social science (particularly when concepts and works are emphasized over people).

That leaves us with history, literature, and the nebulous "your choice" category. At most, in a well-written packet you're only going to have 5 American history questions and 5 American literature questions to work with. Throw in the possibility of a current events or general knowledge-style question that could deal with America, and you have maybe 12 questions out of 50 that could reasonably deal with American minority-centric topics, of which maybe 10 make it to the final packet. Also consider that a number of history questions will focus on specific incidents or legislation, and the questions should be spread out over a wide swath of time.

Right or wrong, given the relative dominance of white men in writing American history and culture, I don't see it as unreasonable to conclude that a well-written, well-balanced packet may not contain any American minority-centric questions.

I don't think anyone will disagree that over a full set's worth of questions you should have several, but my main point here is that there's a lot less room for any sort of ethnocentric questions than KGeee seems to think.

[salamanca]

As far as ACF tournaments go-- your question (be it on Inuit gods, the works of Soyinka, or the Arc de Triomphe) will have a much greater chance getting used if it is well written and there isn't a repeat. The distribution guidelines are sketchy boundaries for submission tourneys. If you deviate too much (e.g. having a Henry James theme round) that could be problematic, but I would say that if some packets happen to have 3 questions concerning Latin America and two on Japanese culture/ historical events and they are all well written, then that is ok. Not necessarily preferrable, but ok.
Note that when I am putting together completely self created packets, that I do fret more about meeting all the distribution requirements (that matters to me), but I think, at least for sumbission events where it is hard enough to get 10/10 usable questions, being overly concerned with sub-dists is a luxury few can afford.

peace,
ezequiel

[Your Genial Quizmaster]

Revisiting this topic, I kept thinking there were more minority-themed questions in Sword Bowl than this discussion would indicate. So I went back through the Sword Bowl 2007 (and 2006) packets, scanning through the answers for African and African-American topics. I did find fewer such questions overall in Sword '07 vs. Sword '06, especially history tossups (I only saw two, down from 5 in 2006.) Again, that's partly due to what was submitted and partly due to what had to be edited out for duplications or overlaps. Still, over 14 rounds, they did fall a little short of the one-per-packet level Kyle suggested. Depending on what you include, I counted ten to thirteen tossups, four full bonuses, and parts of seven other bonuses in Sword '07.

Those numbers were lower than I expected -- I knew I remembered editing more African and African-American questions than that. So I went through the high school tournament I edited last September -- and what a difference! Out of 11 rounds, I counted 15 to 17 tossups, 9 full bonuses, and parts of 11 others on African or African-American topics. I know that's anecdotal evidence, but it does illustrate how much the balance can vary from tournament to tournament without any conscious effort.

Kyle, if you'll send me your e-mail address [to utcquizbowl at gmail dot com], I'll be glad to send you our fall high school set. Take a look and see if that affects your impressions of the independent circuit.