So, this was clearly racist misinterpretation from the context, but I still didn't understand enough to know exactly why it was racist misinterpretation and was curious.
For anyone else curious, this is maybe a good read:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-to-speak-gibberi...
It starts with the knee-jerk conservative anti-woke reaction, which peaks here:
> A reader in the comments suggests that these students should listen to MLK’s oratory and take a lesson. Absolutely. King was a master of rhetoric. That is the way to change minds. The teachers who are instructing these kids in this sort of thing are guilty of intellectual abuse, as are the CEDA officials who reward it.
But the updates after that, explain what is really going on:
> Rod, this post needs a serious correction. While that debate was ridiculous, it is entirely typical of what college “cross examination” debating has been for decades. The trend has been for (mostly white) debaters to talk about nuclear war in a debate about education policy, the environment in a debate about military policy, post structuralism pretty much whenever they feel like it, etc. etc. It’s a ridiculous form of debate but it isn’t some weird black thing. The reason these black students are debating like this is that they are competing, in a league with teams from schools like Harvard and Yale, that rewards this style of debate.
And the author is slightly magnanimous in his apology:
> UPDATE.3: To be perfectly clear, I concede that I was wrong to say that this team broke the rules of debate by refusing to address the topic, instead choosing to rant about racism, and to say that the woman who looked as if she were having a psychotic break (which she does, to the untrained eye) was doing anything wrong. I learned from readers that the Towson team’s bizarre display is actually well within the rules and the custom of competitive debate. So, congratulations to them, I guess. I learned something new today: Competitive debate is a completely insane phenomenon.