Episode 146: WNBA Free Agency, Black History Month, and Jade Withrow from Cheer
In this week's episode, Lindsay, Amira, and Shireen talk about the NBA All-Star Dunk Contest controversy, and break down all the WNBA free agency news (7:28.)
Then, Amira interviews Jade Withrow from Cheer about.her experiences in competitive cheerleading and the reactions to the docuseries (21:12).
Finally, the groups look at the history of some phenomenal black athletes and ties their stories to today's world in honor of Black History Month (39:17).
As always, there's the Burn Pile (1:01:30), BAWOTW (1:12:40), and What's Good (1:15:44).
Links
Mainstream media is sleeping on the most exciting WNBA free agency season in history: https://www.powerplays.news/p/mainstream-media-is-sleeping
The 2020 WNBA free agency period is going to change the league as we know it: https://www.sbnation.com/wnba/2020/2/14/21136562/wnba-2020-free-agency-change-league
The winners and losers of the 2020 WNBA free agency: https://www.sbnation.com/wnba/2020/2/11/21131731/wnba-free-agency-2020-winners-losers
Traveling teen mistakenly taken down by local police. ACLU has filed a lawsuit: https://qconline.com/news/local/traveling-teen-mistakenly-taken-down-by-local-police-aclu-has/article_9fb0f0e2-b90f-52f2-ab5c-79cef4d10368
Tunisian Woman Sara Haba Becomes First Lady To Reach Makkah on Bicycle: https://www.thelivemirror.com/sara-haba-first-woman-reach-makkah-bicycle/amp
High school basketball team honors missing indigenous women: https://www.coloradopolitics.com/news/high-school-basketball-team-honors-missing-indigenous-women/article_964f3d94-a5b3-5315-bd6e-da93c352b2f7
Transcript
Lindsay: Hello everyone, and welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast that, by episode 146, we hope you both want and need. My name is Lindsay Gibbs, I’m the author of the Power Plays newsletter, and as you might’ve guessed already I will be your host for today’s podcast. I am so excited to be joined by my two dear friends and co-hosts, Shireen Ahmed, in Toronto, Canada, who I hear has some big time hot takes on the dunk contest, which we will get to very shortly. Hi Shireen, how are you?
Shireen: Good morning, I am mad! But we can talk about that.
Lindsay: I’m really shocked that we have strong feelings off the gate, that’s very unusual for us, so! Coming from the Penn State area herself – I forget where it is exactly, Pennsylvania – what’s the name of that place? State college.
Amira: State college.
Lindsay: I kept wanting to say ‘College Park’ but that’s Maryland! So anyways, they’re all very similar names, all these university towns. We’ve got assistant professor of history and African-American studies, is that correct? Did I do that right?
Amira: Yes, it is.
Lindsay: Dr. Amira Rose Davis, hi!
Amira: Hi!
Lindsay: Alright, I’m off to a really smooth start, so we’re just gonna keep going. Today’s episode we are gonna talk about some WNBA free agency news, because as you might’ve guessed that’s literally all I can think about these days. Then we’re gonna have a very exciting interview for you: Amira interviewed Jade Withrow of Netflix’s Cheer about her experiences in competitive cheerleading and the reactions to the docu-series. So that is a big treat. Then we’re gonna look back to some big moments in Black history for Black History Month and kind of connect the past with the present, as we love to do. But first, as mentioned, the dunk contest. Shireen, I’m just gonna throw it to you, do you think that justice was handed out? Do you think this was a fair contest?
Shireen: Okay, so let’s start with the fact that I do love and respect Dwayne Wade. Let’s just start there. Okay…
Lindsay: I’m feeling a “but” is coming.
Shireen: There is a definite “but” here. However, and I do appreciate me some Common, I do. I feel like he’s in the Pharrell level of never aging. Now, I thought that Scottie Pippen and Chadwick and Candace Parker, it was a great great great group of judges. I felt that way. However, when Aaron Gordon does what he has to do and literally jumps over Tacko, who’s 7 feet, and does it with a windmill smash into the net, I have a problem with it. Now, we all know Dwayne Wade shows solidarity with people he loves, but that doesn’t mean that you give someone a lower score for a dunk than they deserve, I do not understand why Aaron Gordon did not have 10s across the board. I find that suspicious. I wanna trust the judges for this absolutely concocted, fake thing. But it’s a real thing, there’s a real-ass trophy that comes around, particularly with what happened was Zach LaVine in 2016, there’s a bit of sadness there for Aaron Gordon.
And for those that don’t understand what I’m talking about, Dwayne Wade formerly played with Jones Jr in Miami, so Derrick Jones Jr was up in the final against Orlando Magic’s Aaron Gordon, and you’re like, I’ve never actually heard of these people, because they’re not main starters or superstars. But they are in the right of this competition, this skills challenge is the big deal for All Star Weekend which is happening in Chicago. So I watched with my family, and we were all, after every dunk, we’re like “Oh! Oh!” Even my nephew was doing it, and he’s two and he was really cute. Sorry, I left a little sad. Do I believe in the system? Do I believe in the system anymore? No, I don’t. Sorry.
Lindsay: And if you can’t believe in the system for the All Star dunk contest, what can you believe in? Amira?
Amira: There’s no hope for any of our institutions.
Lindsay: Amira, did you watch this? Do you have any takes?
Amira: I just caught it this morning, like I refreshed it because everyone was quite angry. My only take is that…I literally can’t muster up enough energy to get worked up by any of it. I did really enjoy Candace’s face-
Lindsay: Oh my god, Candace Parker’s face. Beautiful.
Amira: -during AG’s second dunk, when he jumped over Tacko, was the funniest face I’ve ever seen. I love that instant meme type of thing. That was my only kind of…I was surprised when I woke up to see how passionate people were being. I wasn’t surprised by the passion, but I don’t know. Sometimes the dunk contest is a snooze fest or it’s kind of like blah, but this one turned out to be around the board really great and then ended in controversy. I mean, give the man a trophy. It’s an All Star skills competition, give trophies to everyone! I really don’t care. Everybody should feel good. Let’s make everybody feel happy.
Shireen: Participation ribbons?
Amira: I don’t even care at this point. The world is burning and everything’s going to shit. If they could’ve tied and had two trophies it would’ve been wonderful and then everybody would’ve been happy. People would’ve obviously still been mad because there’s always something to be mad about but I’m unabashedly this week Team Self Care and Being Happy, and if it makes people happy to say people tied at a dunk contest then okay.
Shireen: I think that tying was the plan, actually. A news report came out, and I did some digging into this, because I was upset, they were supposed to tie, essentially. But somebody went awry on the judges’ table, and everybody’s pointing fingers at Dwayne Wade, saying because he played with Jones Jr, that he was the one that scored Aaron Gordon too low.
Amira: Well, there’s three other people that scored him a 9.
Lindsay: I’m gonna cut this conversation off because we’ve established a good conspiracy theory to start the episode, so…I think that’s how I’d like to start every episode, to be honest, but we’ve got a bunch to talk about, so let’s keep moving on. Before we do though, I wanna give a shoutout to our patrons, patreon.com/burnitalldown is how you can make sure that we keep doing this independent, intersectional feminist podcast every single week. This is episode 146! We have not missed one single week and we’re super proud of that. The only way is because of our supporters on our Patreon account, where we have some behind the scenes footage, Patreon-only segments for our supporters, sometimes there’s some merch involved, so be sure to get on that. Alright, it’s been a big week in WNBA news because of free agency. Shireen, get us started.
Shireen: Thanks Linz, and first of all we will get into Lindsay’s coverage on Power Plays, about media coverage of this event, because that’s always a very relevant topic we talk about. WNBA free agency is basically, for those that don’t follow very very closely or understand what’s happening, it’s a time when there is basically movement within the league for players and teams to sort of, I don’t want to say exchange players but sort of do trades and negotiate new contracts, stuff like this. Now we saw some really big movement; there’s a specific person whose work I’ve been following in addition to Lindsay’s, in addition to Howard Megdal, who I think is really dedicated and has been following this for years, Matt Ellentuck actually had some really succinct writing and roundup on SB Nation, which is really interesting because he also commented, and I think this is very relevant, that there wasn’t necessarily a lot of drama in this league, and I think that’s a really interesting point, and now that there’s some big movement from main players from team to team and I think that’s really interesting, because I thought that there was some pretty good…Not Liz Cambage drama, this past year I remember seeing some drama, but anyways, the point is it’ll make the teams’ rivalry a little more intense when those big players or mega-stars go up against former teams. That was a point that I found really interesting.
So basically some of the biggest moves so far is, I’ll just round them up: Skylar Diggins actually is gone to Phoenix, Angel McCoughtry is gone to Vegas…This is really fun for me: Katie Lou Samuelson was at Chicago Sky, and Azurá Stevens – Azurá has actually been on our show before, I interviewed her – she was at the Dallas Wings, there was a trade between them and so Dallas took Katie Lou Samuelson for a first round draft pick as well and gave Azurá to Chicago, so now Azurá Stevens joins her former UConn teammate Gabby Williams and Kayla Anderson, who I’m currently obsessed with, of Team Canada, in Chicago. So I feel like Chicago might be my new favorite team, nobody tell Kia Nurse this, or Layshia Clarendon, who’s now with her at New York Liberty. Now there’s a lot of things I’m missing but of course I’m relaying this all back through how I feel about this.
Lindsay: Which is basically the UConn players.
Shireen: Which is basically UConn. I mean, come on, let’s be honest. With the exception being the Canadians, right?
Lindsay: Yes.
Shireen: So now that being said, I think there’s a lot of interesting things and Amira, Linz, you can jump in at any time and give me your feelings, because I’m wanting to hear them. But before we do that, I did want, Linz, I would love love love for you to talk about what you observed, what you saw, and how that’s relevant to all this.
Lindsay: Yes, like you said and like Matt Ellentuck wrote at SB Nation, this has been one of the most exciting overall free agency periods in WNBA history, and it’s not by accident, right? We just signed this new CBA which upped the caps by a lot, so it gave teams more flexibility to work with. Another thing it did was it decreased the amount of times that teams can apply the core designation to a player. So core, if you’re familiar with like NFL stuff and the franchise tag, that’s essentially what it is. It’s a team who has drafted a player and puts this tag on them so they can’t enter free agency when they’re supposed to. It’s a way to kind of keep the stars in markets, but what it ends up doing is limiting player movement of their biggest stars. So because of that we had a case when DeWanna Bonner could be traded and finally leave Phoenix for the first time, she’d been there for 10 years, and now she’s gonna be in Connecticut, which is a huge power shift. We have Jonquel Jones and DeWanna Bonner which…Oh my god, there’s no way anyone else on the court will ever get a rebound. I just keep thinking about those games in Connecticut and getting a little scared.
But it’s been really exciting, because this is what the players have really worked for, is to get to an offseason where the players have a little more say, and of course some of them are realizing that the grass isn’t always greener, right? Some players are being traded that don’t wanna be traded, and are realizing…But that’s part of the business too. It’s part of all of this as well. It’s been absolutely thrilling. We’ve had other free agency seasons that’ve had some drama but it’s usually like one or two storylines that kind of dominate everything, like the Liz Cambage stuff last year. This year it has just kind of been non-stop and it’s been a lot more reminiscent of what we see in NBA or NFL free agency where there’s just round the clock stories happening. Unfortunately it hasn’t gotten anywhere near the coverage that the NFL or NBA free agency season would get, and I would never expect it to be at that level yet. Sometimes I feel like I’m the players being like, “I’m not asking for millions yet,” I’m just asking for a little bit more, you know?
But what was disappointing, as I documented on Power Plays, I spent over two days on Tuesday and Wednesday, I watched seven hours of ESPN talking head shows, which is a lot, there were zero mentions of WNBA free agency. Once again, this was right in the thick of it. I also looked at all the coverage of the local papers in all these markets where a lot of drama was happening. While there were a few that made the front page, Angel McCoughtry in Las Vegas was the best, where she got an above-the-fold front page of the sports section, with a color photo, got really the star treatment. There were just a lot of other papers where the coverage was much more hidden, much more perfunctory. One of the reasons I look at it like this – a lot of people got mad at me because they said, if you’re looking for coverage here it is: this article was written this day…But one of the reasons I did this in the way I did, which was looking at the front pages of newspapers and the big ESPN shows, is because I wanna see if the coverage will reach people who aren’t looking for it, who aren’t trying to chase it down, because that’s how you grow, that’s how you get new fans. Unfortunately this, to me, hit home that we’re not even close to being there yet.
It was really disappointing because when you really look through these papers, when you really listen to all these ESPN talk shows, it’s being filled with so much crap. They’re talking about so much crap that have zero stakes and I’m like, couldn’t you spend 10% of that time talking about free agency stakes? They’re big time stories! You could get so much exciting coverage out of this because the stakes are so much bigger. So that was disappointing for me, because everything was so exciting. Amira, what are your thoughts?
Amira: I have more questions than thoughts. One, I thought it was very exciting. I really enjoyed everyone trying to keep up, right? Which I think is a marker of a really fun, chaotic free agency, which is what we’ve come to expect in a lot of major sports leagues. NFL free agency is still a few weeks away and we’ve had speculation and drama and all this stuff, and so I felt like an onlooker that that shift was palpable. I really appreciate your points about he media and all the other considerations of this, but I wanna return to the game itself: I, like you, was like, yo, Connecticut is stacked. And this is a team that was good last year!
Lindsay: They were one game away from winning it all!
Amira: Right? Exactly! But I wanted to get your opinion on any other teams that now you think were enhanced by moves made, or teams that you think got worse?
Lindsay: The Phoenix Mercury now have Skylar Diggins-Smith, Diana Taurasi, and Brittney Griner. I mean, those could very easily be three of your five starters on the Olympic team. There’ve also been rumors that Tina Charles was gonna join them, although if you look at the cap situation for Phoenix that looks next to impossible, because they’ve been giving out some contracts that are head-scratching, and I must say it’s been a very weird feeling this week to look at some of the contracts that’ve been given out, they’re too much. I’m like, this is a sign of progress, right? I’m so glad I feel like some of these women are getting too much money. It’s all relative of course, they deserve every penny, but you know, within the systems. So that’s been kind of a fun thing that’s been going on. Connecticut is gonna get ridiculous.
The Los Angeles Sparks, Kristi Toliver, who I covered a lot, she was on the Washington Mystics last year, huge part of their championship winning team. She decided she wasn’t getting enough money, essentially Washington was offering her a lot of money for two years, but she wanted that third year guaranteed, and Washington was looking at its future and feeling like they couldn’t promise that much money three years out, because they wanted to be able to sign a lot of their younger players, and she wanted that guaranteed third year, so she ended up going back to the Los Angeles Sparks where she was before the Mystics, where she won a championship in 2016, so now she’s reunited with Candace Parker and Chelsea Gray and Nneka Ogwumike, so that is gonna be a big boost to their team as well, and in Vegas now you have Angel McCoughtry who people had forgotten about because she was injured for all of last season, we didn’t see her play in Atlanta, but she’s now gonna be there with Liz Cambage and Kelsey Plum and A’ja Wilson. You’ve got another Team USA Olympic gold medalist on that squad.
And we’re talking about all these teams and we haven’t even mentioned the Seattle Storm, who won it all two years ago, and the only reason they weren’t in the conversation last year is because Breanna Stewart and Sue Bird both didn’t play. But Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart will be back! There’s just so much excitement, I think the teams that are stuck at the bottom are the Atlanta Dream and the Indiana Fever, they did not get much better. It’s been surprising to see the Minnesota Lynx – of course we love Cheryl Reeve here at Burn It All Down – but they have been very quiet this free agency season, and they need to make some moves because it’s one of those climates where if you’re not improving you’re kind of going back.
Amira: Yeah.
Shireen: I have a question: when does the WNBA season start?
Lindsay: It’ll start in mid-May.
Shireen: And how will it be affected by the Olympics?
Lindsay: It’ll take a month break for the Olympics, so that won’t be a big issue. Of course you’ll have some players who play for international teams who will make different decisions about how much they’re playing in the WNBA this season, we’re just gonna have to wait and see because there is a break during Olympic play. And since it’s Black History Month I do wanna give a shoutout. First of all, I love labor wins, as we all know, and let’s never forget that the WNBA players had to fight to get free agency in the first place. They got their first free agency through collective bargaining in 2003; Pamela Wheeler who was the executive director of the players association for about 15 years told me a couple of years ago that that was her crowning achievement. When I look back at the leaders of the players association, the executive directors of the association, so people who aren’t in the league itself, you basically have Pam Wheeler and Terri Jackson, and then if you look at the presidents of the players association, the players themselves, all of them Black women. So I need to give a shoutout to Coquese Washington who was the first, then you had Sonja Henning, and then it was Tamika Catchings, and now it’s Nneka Ogwumike. We’re here reveling in one of the most exciting free agency periods women’s sports has ever seen, because it’s taken a lot of work to get here, and we have Black women 100% to thank for it.
Alright, next we have our interview with Jade Withrow of Cheer.
Amira: It’s now my absolute pleasure to chat with Jade Withrow. Some of you might have already watched Cheer on Netflix, we’ve been talking about it a lot on the podcast, you’ve heard us mention it here and there. I noticed Jade when I was watching Cheer and I immediately wanted to reach out and chat with her about her experience both on the Navarro team but also in competitive cheerleading as a whole. Jade, welcome to Burn It All Down.
Jade: Hello everybody!
Amira: So first thing’s first, this show has just taken off. What has this been like the last few weeks?
Jade: It has honestly been so insane. As we were filming the show it never came into mind just how big it really would get. There’s another show that had tried to film cheerleading and get it out into the world about everything that goes on behind the scenes, but this show was really the best that we’ve had as a whole for the cheer world. It’s really got personal lives as well as the hard work that goes on behind the scenes. It feels so good for people that don’t even know anything about cheer to be watching the show and actually appreciate it, because I feel like it’s just been one of those sports that have just been ghosted or not really been taken seriously, it’s just been really crazy. It feels really good for all of us.
Amira: Certainly. Now, how did you get into cheerleading?
Jade: So I did gymnastics for like one year when I was 9, and I took about three years off and I started becoming friends with this girl in 7th grade that did cheerleading, and I was still keeping up with my tumbling, and I wanted to get back into some kind of sport, so I just started going to practice with her and I just fell in love with it instantly, I’ve been doing it ever since.
Amira: That’s great, and I think that one of the things the docu-series does so well, it shows that this is absolutely a sport. The injuries, the strength, the conditioning, it’s certainly a sport. What has the sport meant to you, as an athlete?
Jade: Honestly, I have given, ever since I’ve been in cheerleading, in 7th/8th grade, I have done absolutely nothing but focus on it because it’s been so addicting. I’ve fallen so in love with it and I just went head first into everything. I worked my butt off for so many years, like I was in the gym 24/7. I was at school and then I’d force my mom to drive me to the gym and I’d be there all day, every weekend, throughout the week, and it’s just been so addicting. The feeling of all this hard work throughout the year and then going and performing with your team and doing well at competitions and going to the big national championships or the world championships at the end of the year, going and doing the best with your team and walking off the floor knowing you couldn’t do anything more is really what keeps people coming back, because that feeling is really indescribable.
Amira: Yeah. One of the things that people have a very visceral reaction to were all the injuries and the way that it seems like ‘next one up.’ Certainly when you’re building towards a championship is a mentality, but also we’ve had conversations in recent years about brain injury in football and the cost of injuries in sports. What do you think about these conversations around public health and sport and how does cheerleading fit into that? How do you prepare for injury?
Jade: Honestly with cheerleading there’s kind of no way to prepare for it. As an individual it would be very smart of you to take preventative physical therapy but there’s really no way to prepare for it other than, if you’re trying a new stunt or skill, to have others around you try to be there and catch you if you fall. But cheerleading is so dangerous because you’re just throwing yourself around and anything can happen at any time, even if you’ve done a skill for years you can show up one day and just in the middle of the skill roll or break your ankle. It’s just so harsh on your body, I honestly think that cheerleading has more injuries than any sport just because it is a complete full contact sport all the time and if you’re on a team that practices as much as we did at Navarro or Cheer Athletics, we practice every single day. Just going through that it could be very dangerous but we also try to take as much precaution as we can with having people around and doing things as safely as possible.
Amira: So now you have left Navarro, you’re at Kennesaw State right now, right?
Jade: Yes, I am.
Amira: Is that a transition that a lot of people make out of Navarro to four year schools?
Jade: Yes, typically there are some people that just want to go and get their two-year degree but for the most part cheerleaders do transfer to a four year university afterwards.
Amira: How is it being at Kennesaw State? Is it a similar competitive environment, is it a different type of cheerleading? What is that adjustment like?
Jade: It is just a different type of cheerleading, because at Navarro we compete with partner stunts, so every single stunt we do is one boy and one girl, whereas here at Kennesaw we’re in a completely different division, we’re small co-ed D-1 I believe, and so it’s more of a group stunt. There’s three people underneath and one flier on top. It’s just a little bit of a transition but that’s typically what you do in all-star cheerleading. It’s not too different from the competitive side, from all-star, rather than Navarro, but typically the competitive side is just about the same because we all go to the same competitions, it’s just as important in every single division. It’s very serious here as well.
Amira: That’s great. One of the things I noticed in terms of it is when I first heard about Kennesaw’s cheerleading program was actually a few years ago when cheerleaders took a knee and protested in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, and it seems to me like there’s more women of color on the Kennesaw team and on other teams vs your experience at Navarro, is that right?
Jade: Yes, typically that’s what you see, but I don’t really know if there’s any reasoning behind that, maybe just the areas or the amount of people that try out. I’m not really too sure on the details of why that is.
Amira: Yeah, it’s interesting because for a few of us millennials Bring It On was our first depiction of cheerleading, which obviously is showing a white school learning different moves and then Gabrielle Union and the Clovers using very different rhythm and throwing different stunts and having different resources. I think that the conversation around race and cheerleading is still there, but I wasn’t sure if it was a sport that you see getting more diverse, because I was shocked when I started watching Cheer, I was like, oh wow, this is not my concept of what cheerleading looks like.
Jade: Yeah no, definitely at Navarro and just cheerleading and a whole I do see it getting more diverse. Just a few years ago I cheered at a different gym, just being a little bit younger and watching cheer videos from a few years back you could tell how different that was on the floor, there would be some gym routines that would have people of color on the floor and they would be each other’s opposites, it was a little bit more pleasing to the eye instead of just having everyone mixed up, I think. Gyms and teams are starting to bring in and attract more people to just get out of their comfort zones maybe, because we are seeing that and it has really grown.
Amira: That’s great. Now this was a big point raised on the docu-series, what is the future? What happens after college? Is there any way to continue cheering? What does it look like?
Jade: After college and kind of what I’m doing right now, I chose not to do All Star cheer this year, I’m just focusing on school, but you could also try out for the USA team. There’s no age limit on cheerleading, other than college, but there’s no age limit on All Star or for USA, it’s really just when your body can’t handle it anymore. But yeah, after college if you wanna keep cheering competitively if you wanna try out for Team USA it only goes on through January-April and you have to complete little challenges every week on your own and then as a team practice for about 2 1/2 weeks and then you compete, so it’s really easy for you to be able to keep doing what you love but also be working a job or living a normal life outside of it. Then if you don’t wanna keep competing you could become a choreographer or a coach, still be in that all star world if you’re really into it, which I honestly see myself doing this for a very long time, personally.
Amira: Yeah. Would you like to coach eventually?
Jade: I’ve actually coached before, and I would still love to do it now. I still have a passion for cheerleading but I think I’m just going to try and compete as long as I can, but aside from that I just want to start learning more about myself. That’s what’s made the transition here at Kennesaw a lot easier because I actually have time to focus on myself and I’m realizing that I’d like to go into the fashion industry and open up a store one day, so that’s kind of the plan right now.
Amira: Wow. Now, if I could just go back for a second, who does Team USA compete against?
Jade: Team USA is almost the closest thing you could get for cheerleading in the Olympics, you know how in the Olympics there’s Team USA and Team Japan and all these different countries, it’s the same thing, it’s just not in the Olympics. It’s different, instead of the All Star worlds it’s called IC worlds, it’s right after the All Star worlds in Florida. Then some years other countries will invite us to go compete there and so actually this year we have the amazing opportunity to compete in South Korea in September.
Amira: Wow.
Jade: Yeah, it’s awesome.
Amira: What are some of the other dominant countries in competitive cheerleading?
Jade: Canada, for sure. Canada will take it home, they’re so good. The US definitely dominates in cheerleading because it’s been here the longest, but Canada is right there with us. They’re only in 2 or 3 divisions I think, where they dominate every other year, but other than that there hasn’t been too many other countries that are coming and I would say dominating, other than Canada, but there are some countries like Chile which is definitely stepping up, they’re making it in the top 10 every year, and to be a different country where cheerleading is so new, to even be able to make it to worlds let alone make it in the top 10 is really huge for them and I think that’s so awesome.
Amira: Yeah, that’s great. This is something you’ve spent so many years on, and you’ve talked about fashion and you’re thinking about your next chapter in cheerleading. Is it a little scary? I think it’s scary…when you spend so many years on a sport and you grow past the institutional development of it. There’s all these opportunities for cheerleading at the youth level and then at the collegiate level, and then even though there’s opportunities after that it drops off considerably.
Jade: It does, and it is just a little bit scary going into cheerleading and spending all these years pouring your heart into it, it definitely is a scary thought to think a lot of cheerleaders that are so deep into it, once you’re getting older and the doors are starting to close for you, it’s almost just like, oh my god, what am I gonna do with myself? What am I gonna do every day? That thought is just a little bit scary, but if you’re able to relax and find hobbies that you’re into you should be able to do it okay, but it’s definitely a little different.
Amira: I’ll end by asking you, what do you wish that the documentary showed more of or what do you want people to know, what takeaways do you want them to have when they’re watching Cheer or thinking about competitive cheerleading?
Jade: That’s hard one just because it did show a lot. I kind of wish it showed just a little bit more of the struggle, the struggle with some things that happen at practice. It did show a lot of injuries but there were way more injuries and things that had to be done because of it, and I kind of wish it showed that or at least had talked about it, just because I don’t think it did other than one injury, other than that we’ve had many more injuries that happened that had a very big impact on the routine and I wish that had been touched on. That happens more often than you would think, and teams have to make big huge changes that are really stressful, more than you would actually expect. So that’s just one thing I would have touched on, but I think other than that it was really well put together.
Amira: Yeah certainly, and it’s got so much attention, it’s really been great to get to know at least the portrayed version of the personalities on the team and to see what it takes to be a competitive cheerleader. So thank you so much for joining Burn It All Down. We wish you well, we’ll be checking you out and definitely welcome you back anytime and we wish you all the success.
Jade: Thank you so much for having me.
Lindsay: Alright, we’re gonna go talk some more Black history now. Amira, why don’t you get us started?
Amira: Yeah, so we are in Black History Month, still. Still here. I did want to take this opportunity at Burn It All Down to recognize Black History Month, we’re going to have a Black History Month-centered hot take available for you shortly, but in this episode I wanted to talk about some historical Black sporting moments and connecting it to today so we can look at the continuity of the Black experience in sports in the United States. So I’ll start, and I want to start by recognizing the centennial of the Negro Leagues. So, for those who are unfamiliar with the Negro Leagues, I'm referring to Black baseball leagues that were professionalized a hundred years ago this week.
There were a few different professional Black baseball leagues for both men and women as early as the 1880s and you saw various professional clubs – the Dolly Vardens was a Black women’s professional baseball team, you saw semi-pro teams, but it wasn’t until Rube Foster walks into a room in Kansas City a hundred years ago this week to formalize talks about a national Negro League and creates a governing body, the National Association of Colored Professional Baseball Clubs, this brings together some of the disparate places Black baseball was being played at the time, and it is initially composed of eight teams including the Chicago Giants, the Cuban Stars, Dayton Macros, Detroit Stars, Indianapolis ABCs, the Kansas City Monarchs, the St. Louis Giants.
Now, over the next 40 years Black baseball would become one of the biggest economic contributors in the community and made Black businesspeople a lot of money. It was a focal point of community formations and downtime and a chance to come and celebrate together. It launched the careers of many sportswriters, and it was typical of what Black people had to do in times of intense state-sanctioned racialized segregation and that’s build their own institutions. I think one of the things to remember about Black baseball is that it’s not existing by itself, it’s occurring in a moment when Black colleges and Black medical facilities and schools and sports leagues, a variety are emerging in response to the fact that the doors of other establishments have been shut to us, have been shut to the Black community. That is the place in which Black baseball emerges and it has multiple decades of thriving…It reshapes a few times, you have the Colored World Series and then the Negro World Series, the have All Star games, they have competitions against white teams, and then of course between the sportswriters and fan support and the players themselves, there’s a push to integrate the majors, there’s a constant tension between investing and building up your own institutions and still trying to break into mainstream white institutions.
Unfortunately a result of that tension means that a lot of times the cost of integration is the destruction of your own Black institutions, and that’s one of the things we see happen with the Negro Leagues. We see when Jackie formally breaks the color line in ’47 you start to see a slow exodus, and when the major leagues are coming and getting these players they’re not compensating Effa Manley, they’re not compensating the other managers of the Negro Leagues, and it’s devaluing it. This is when the women that I write about in baseball come in as attractions in different ways to continue to amplify the league and make it relevant. The most successful team that continues to thrive is the Indianapolis Clowns which is essentially like the Harlem Globetrotters, they do tricks and stuff on the court. Unfortunately by the mid ’50s but certainly by the ’60s you have the League all but being gone. I think that’s a really important thing to consider when we’re looking at the celebration of the league because if we pull it to today we see the dearth of Black American players in baseball.
Obviously I’ve been heartbroken because the Red Sox used to have Black people and then they, you know, in one fell swoop let both Mookie and David Price go. There’s not that many Black American players left in the majors and it kind of feels now that you could feel like that’s inevitable. You could forget that there was a moment when baseball was a major, major sport in the Black community and I think that’s some of the importance here, it’s that it’s easy to feel like what we have at present is how it’s always been, that it’s always been inevitable that basketball or football are predominantly Black sports, or it’s always been inevitable that Black kids and girls don’t play baseball when we have a history to the contrary of that. I think that’s some of the importance of remembering this history, so I’m really excited to see some of the efforts happening around the centennial of the Negro Leagues and the celebration.
The MLB and the MLB players association announced the $1 million donation to the Negro Leagues baseball museum – shoutout to Bob Kendrick, he’s the president of the museum. If you haven’t had a chance to go and you ever find yourself in Kansas City please, please stop by NLBM. It’s an institute that is really working so hard to preserve the memory of this league, but also there’s going to be a celebration in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues in June: there’s a patch that will be worn by all Major League teams, I’m really excited about this kind of recognition and I hope that we can push it to not just be formative but help it to coincide with real development of the game that diversifies and creates equity and access to baseball.
I’ll finish here: if you want to read more about the Negro Leagues I highly recommend friend of the pod Shakeia Taylor’s piece this week about Rube Foster’s vision that’s on Baseball Prospectus called We Are the Ship, All Else the Sea, a famous quote from Foster. Also of that title, Kadir Nelson’s beautiful book on the history of the Negro League is an absolutely stirring, artistic rendition of the leagues and a great history of it as well, so go out, read about the league, look forward to more celebration. That’s kind of what I’m thinking about in terms of Black history and sports this week. Shireen, what do you got?
Shireen: I have a couple of different things, and thank you very much for all that stuff. I think as a non-Black person of color it’s really important to keep understanding that you don’t only have to wait til February to learn about the contributions in history of Black folks, don’t do that. It’s not great. Anyways, this is a reminder to myself of course. There’s a couple of people within the sports history thing, and I’ve been emboldened in my knowledge by Amira, and thank you for that, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about Angela James. I’m gonna talk about Angela James, because I stan her. You know how much I love Canadian women’s hockey, and she’s a stalwart of that program.
For those of you who don’t know Angela James, I’m so sorry but you’re about to. Angela James is actually from Toronto, she was born in ’64 and she was known, although I don’t like these terms, she was known as the Wayne Gretzky of women’s hockey. I don’t love that for obvious reasons, I just think of her as Angela James, I don’t think anything about Wayne Gretzky actually. It’s perfectly amazing to think of Angela James as Angela James. She dominated in the 80s and 90s in hockey internationally and she led the Canadian women to four world championships in ’90, ’92, ’94, ’97. She was one of the first three women to ever be inducted into the Ice Hockey Federation’s hall of fame, which is the international one, and then she was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2010, and she was one of the first two women: the first openly gay athlete and the second Black athlete. I think this is really important, I mean, there’s obviously more people I want to talk about.
I follow a sports sociologist named Dr. Ornella Nzidukiyimana, and she goes by @OraRunsWild on Twitter, and she’s at StFX University in Nova Scotia. She collects so much cool historical information about Black athletes in Ontario and in Canada generally, and she actually pointed out something about Willie O’Ree who is known as the first Black hockey player in the NHL, and there’s potential showings for the documentary that was made about him called Willie, and they tried to do it on demand in different Canadian cities. Dr. Courtney Szto noted this, a lot of the NHL players of these cities did not even tweet out a link, so as with what happens with on demand films you have to buy 50 tickets minimum for the documentary and then they’ll show it. It didn’t happen in many cities, I think it was only like Calgary and Montréal who were able to move forward. So that’s something to be said: does the hockey community actually wanna be inclusive when NHL teams in those places aren’t actually amplifying the stories and the history of Black hockey players? Like, come on.
But Ornella did point out that it wasn’t necessarily only Willie O’Ree as the first Black hockey player. There was in ’57 the Quebec Aces, it was a team in the minor leagues, named Stan "Chook" Maxwell, he was also from a Miꞌkmaq community in Nova Scotia, and he wore a Bruins jersey as well and suited up with Willie O’Ree but ultimately ended up staying in the juniors which is why he doesn’t get the same level of accolades as Willie O’Ree does. But I think it’s really interesting to find out these tidbits of information that are actually really crucial, and I just found out last night – this has nothing to do with sports but part of my own interest – there’s a story about, and I retweeted this, there’s a story about the only Black passenger on the Titanic and I wanted to find out more about that and I will keep you all posted because I will start finding out about that, I found a link that someone sent to me in French and I am going to do some digging. He was in the first-class cabin and I wanna find out about that.
There’s one more thing, I don’t want to take up too much time, but I’m very excited about this. This isn’t historical but it’s very very important, it’s happening in the present. I am super obsessed with Black Girls Surf, I’m super obsessed with women of color surfing generally, but this is something I really love. There was this really beautiful article in Marie Claire saying ‘Meet the African women defying stereotypes to ride waves.’ It’s by Olivia Adams, we can put a link to this in the show. I don’t like the lede of this, but I’ll blame editors. Anyway, it’s talking about in Senegal and different places there’s a woman named Rhonda Harper, who’s the founder and coach of Black Girls Surf. She goes to these places in western Africa and North African countries and is teaching women and creating spaces for surfing.
I just think this is really beautiful and relevant because there’s a huge lack in surfing of Black women and women of color generally. I’ve followed surfing in Bangladesh, I’ve followed surfing in Iran and I will continue to do so, surfing in Palestine, and I think this is beautiful and important. As we know, surfing is becoming an Olympic sport this year and hopefully we will see one of these athletes from Senegal, that’ll be really important. Her name is Khajdou Sambe and she’s from Senegal and hopefully she’ll be part of the Olympics, which would be historic, so it kind of is relevant. Anyway, that’s my thing.
Lindsay: That is all amazing. I wanna talk a little bit about Black quarterbacks and in particular a legendary Black quarterback that a lot of people don’t know about which is Marlin Briscoe, who made history in 1968 with the Denver Broncos as the first Black quarterback to start a game in the NFL. This came after he was drafted into the league as a quarterback and before he was forced to change positions to wide receiver.
Amira: Hm. That sounds familiar!
Lindsay: Yeah. Which might really sound familiar to a lot of what’s going on today. I was lucky enough to be able to interview Mr. Briscoe for a few hours a few years ago in a story I was writing about Cam Newton and Black quarterbacks and I was surprised at how much of his story I didn’t know, so I thought I’d share a little with you all today. Briscoe’s journey started when he was nine years old and went out for peewee football, and he went to the quarterback line because he worshipped Johnny Unitas – this is in Omaha, Nebraska – and the coach looked at him like was nuts and said, “Son, do you wanna go to the running back line or wide receiver line, or the defensive back line?” That’s what the coach asked the nine year old, but Briscoe didn’t budge and he said no sir, I wanna play quarterback. Briscoe said that, to his credit, which is a little generous, the coach said okay, you’re a quarterback. Just went with it.
So Briscoe ended up developing into a phenomenal scrambling quarterback in high school and when he realized that his first choice of college, the University of Nebraska, wasn’t willing to let a Black man be quarterback, he ended up at Omaha University for college where he led an explosive offense by throwing for 5,114 yards and setting 22 school records. Despite his success in college his greatest challenge was convincing an NFL team that he could play quarterback; in 1968 only one Black quarterback had ever taken a snap in the modern NFL, which was Willy Thrower, a backup quarterback on the Chicago Bears, who took a few snaps in relief of George Blanda in one game in 1953. As Briscoe told me, “They denied access to that position to the black man, because it was held in such high esteem, because it was a position of power on the football field.”
So it wasn’t really that surprising when Briscoe was drafted in the 14th round of the NFL draft, back when there were so many rounds, as a defensive back by the Denver Broncos, but he did not go down without a fight. Briscoe went up to the general manager of the Broncos and told them that he would play cornerback, which is on defense. He would play in defense but only if they gave him a 3-day trial at quarterback. He said, “They thought I was crazy — how is a 14th-round draft pick going to negotiate his own contract?” But Briscoe was really smart, because his college coach told him that Denver was the only team in the league that held their practices and training camps right outside in the city in front of media and fans, so he knew if he was good enough in that 3-day tryout that it would be seen by people other than just the team, and it worked. He was very impressive in that 3-day tryout and he was one of a bunch of quarterbacks that made an impact. He told me that all of the other quarterbacks would get 10 reps, while he would only get five or six, and he would always have to go last, but he made enough of an impression that Denver Post columnist Dick Connor wrote a column advocating for the coaching staff to give Briscoe a chance to be quarterback.
Now, here’s a twist: Lou Saban, noted racist and the head of the coaching staff, was the head coach, so he wasn’t quite swayed and Briscoe was named the starting defensive end. He ended up injuring his hamstring in preseason and Briscoe feared everything was done, but it actually ended up being a blessing in disguise because he sat out the first two games of the season, which means he didn’t get a chance to be impressive at the defensive end position, and during those first two games the offense was horrible, so when he came in for that third game he went to his locker and found a quarterback jersey hanging there. He was the backup quarterback in the game against the Boston Patriots. The offense struggled so much during those first two series that with just 10 minutes left in the game Briscoe came onto the field and he ended up almost leading the team back to victory. He was nicknamed ‘The Magician’ after that.
The next game, he said, when he was named the starter for the next game, there was so much excitement around his talent that a thousand more people showed up than had come for the previous game. He ended up for most of that season splitting playing time with their quarterback who was injured, once his collarbone healed, Tinsley was his name, Briscoe and Tinsley were splitting playing time, but Briscoe was convinced if he showed enough that he would be able to take over the position the following year. But this is where the story gets really sad, is that coach Saban had other ideas. During the offseason Briscoe found out that Saban had signed a quarterback from Canada, and while he had been forced to start a Black quarterback previously that year, Saban was determined that that would never happen again. Briscoe demanded to be out of his contract, and Saban obliged, but not before calling all other NFL teams and encouraging them not to sign Briscoe. He ended up signing with the Buffalo Bills as a wide receiver, a position he had never played before, and in a twist he ended up rooming with the first Black quarterback to be named the starter for the season in Buffalo, which was Joe Harris. He watched as Harris got all this hate mail and he wondered why he hadn’t received hate mail himself. He ended up finding out that one of his teammates would hide the hate mail from him, would intercept the hate mail from his locker and make sure it never got to him when he was on the Broncos.
It ended up that Saban became the coach of the Bills a year later, so of course he had to get rid of Harris and Briscoe. Briscoe ended up going to the Miami Dolphins as a wide receiver, and he was on that Super Bowl team, the undefeated team that didn’t lose a game. He was a wide receiver on that team with Bob Griese, a white quarterback, who was universally praised for his scrambling abilities, the same scrambling abilities that Black quarterbacks were and still are criticized for. So in that story you just see how much effort was put into keeping Black men out of the quarterback position and how time and time again they had to prove themselves and today we are seeing a bunch of Black quarterbacks thriving in the NFL but it’s not without some of the same racism and stereotypes that Marlin Briscoe had to deal with back in 1968.
Amira: Yeah, and that’s the point, is that this is very much all living history. Black history is American history, it is worthy of consideration every day of the year of course, but I’m glad that we do have moments where at least we can pause and reflect and say, what are the continuities and shared struggles? Where do we go from here? There’s such a rich history of resistance, of tenacity and determination, and really instructive about that the things we’re seeing in Black sports today are not always new. I think it’s just really important to reflect on where we’ve been and be really clear-eyed about where we’re going.
Lindsay: Alright, now it’s time for the burn pile, the segment we wait for all week and build up to. Shireen, wanna get us started?
Shireen: Sure. I had about 10 things to burn by Tuesday but I’ve narrowed it down. I just want to offer a trigger warning about anti-Blackness and police brutality here, because some of the details of this are really jarring. I saw a piece about the Eastern Illinois University swim team and the only Black swimmer on that team, whose name is Jaylan Butler, he was assaulted by police on his way back with the team – on the team bus – from a swimming meet. They had stopped at a rest stop to pull over and stretch their legs, they were coming from a swim meet and this is a quote from Jaylan Butler directly: “I was blessed to have parents who gave me the proper tools (for reacting to law enforcement), which they hoped I'd never have to use. It could have gone a different way.” He’s now 20 years old, this incident happened about a year ago. And then he says, “A kid like me, who has stayed on the straight and narrow, could've been killed. I didn't resist at all. I complied before they told me to do anything.”
Now, Jaylan Butler got off the bus like anyone else, there’s huge signage about the bus being a school bus, he’s wearing a varsity athlete jacket to match the bus like all the other athletes on said bus. He got off to take a selfie with a sign that said something about the importance of buckling seatbelts and how it’s the law, which is completely normal, and within a couple of seconds there was cop cars everywhere. Two specific cops got up, and he put his hands in the air, dropped his phone and got on the ground before they even approached him. They came to him, they pressed his face into the snow, and had a knee in his back. The bus driver’s account of what happened was he was startled and said, “Something’s not right.” This bus driver is actually a former Navy vet, and he was like, something’s completely off and yelled at them to say you’ve got the wrong guy, he’s a part of us.
Apparently the Rock Island sheriff’s department and these two cops said they thought Jaylan had hijacked the bus. Like, a young fit athlete who’s wearing the same jacket as the bus and the signage on the bus of Eastern Illinois, and anyway I’m brining this up because the ACLU has filed charges against the Rock Island sheriff’s department and has named the two officers. This is a constant reminder of how Black men are criminalized, and a 19 year old, an athlete, can’t even take a selfie without cops telling him – they told him they would blow his head off. This is enraging constantly, and it’s one thing to say we do our part, but if the Rock Island sheriff’s department is not taken to task on this they’re not being held accountable. This isn’t about the fact that he has a 4.0, this isn’t the fact that he’s an all star swimmer, this is the fact that they’re criminalizing young Black bodies, and it’s not okay.
Jaylan had that team to back him up, but still, to put him in that position…He’s completely traumatized. It affected him at school, it affected his ability to do anything, and there’s no doubt this would be traumatizing. The aftereffects and the mental health burdens of these young men is not acceptable. It’s a form of torture. I wanna burn all of that; I’m so grateful to the ACLU for taking this, I’m so thankful to Jaylan himself and his family for their bravery around this because coming out to the media again is another burden, it’s so much psychological labor. If there’s a way to support the ACLU please do it, they take on cases that require this time and attention, so I wanna burn the Rock Island sheriff’s department, they’re fucking racist bigots, and I swear I hate all of it. Just burn.
Group: Burn.
Lindsay: Alright, another trigger warning for sexual abuse here, going back to the Nassar case for another burn, because it just keeps coming. This week I guess the good news is that former Michigan State gymnastics coach Kathie Klages was found guilty of lying to the police; the 65-year old could be sentenced to up to four years in prison. This was the gymnastic coach that was told about Nassar as far back as 1997 when Larissa Boyce and a friend who has chosen to remain anonymous were teenagers and came to Kathie and she dismissed their complaints. She supported Nassar so much that when he was let go from Michigan State University because of sex abuse she had her gymnasts write him letters to support him, because she didn’t believe it was true.
The part I really wanna burn here is from an ESPN report that came out in this trial, another woman came to ESPN on Friday last week and told ESPN that in 2011 Kathie Klages recalled complaints about Nassar from other gymnasts. The woman said that she had also raised concerns – her daughter was 8 years old when she saw Nassar alone in the basement in Michigan State’s Fieldhouse during a gymnastics camp. The woman was not aware that her daughter even needed to see a doctor, and learned afterwards that her daughter had felt uncomfortable and his treatment was weird and hurt. So she approached Kathie Klages, and Klages told the woman that she had heard similar complaints in the past from other young gymnasts and that younger gymnasts were simply not yet used to seeing doctors by themselves. “The girls call him Doctor Larry,” the woman remembers Klages telling her. Klages then went through and talked about his credentials and how lucky this woman was to have Nassar treating her.
So it’s just another case of the fact that people knew about Nassar and so many abuses could have and should have been prevented. Kathie Klages on the stand did not apologize, she continued to say that she did not remember any of this, she had no recollection of ever being told about Nassar. She continued to lie until the last moment and never did take responsibility for it. Throw it onto the burn pile. Burn.
Group: Burn.
Lindsay: Amira?
Amira: Yeah, like you and Shireen said, there’s a lot of burnable things and I kept thinking for a lot of them, are we still on this? Like, Stephen Flamhaft, a life member of US Soccer, used his time at the annual meeting to censure the US women’s team for their sportsmanship and goal celebration. I was like, are we still on this?! It’s annoying. Jim Justice, who’s the governor of West Virginia, who also randomly coaches a girl’s basketball team, and when a team, who’s predominantly Black with two Black coaches, was playing against his and got into a little tussle and left the court, he later lambasted them and said, “I want to tell you, they’re just a bunch of thugs.” I’m like, really? We’re still doing this? Well, yes we are.
But the thing that feels familiar yet again, that I wanted to rest on to burn, was the case in Connecticut of three high school girls, represented by their mothers, filing a lawsuit over a policy of transgender athletes participating in sports. The reason why I wanna rest here is I’m really upset at conservative pacts that use…This is common, right? They use people to go after this. We’ve talked on the show, we’ve burned many times a lot of the bills. The one in Arizona I burned two weeks ago, that bill. This lawsuit is fronted by three girls in Connecticut and is particularly chilling because they’re making blanket statements but they’re targeting Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, who we’ve talked about on this show. Shoutout to friend of the show Katie Barnes, their piece They Are the Champions profiles Yearwood in particular, check it out if you’re not familiar with their story. But they mention both Terry and Andraya by name. They have this weird matrix where they’re arguing that collectively they took “more than 85 opportunities to participate” away from female track athletes.
It’s more of the same drivel we’ve seen in other places but the fact that the families and this pact are putting three young girls to be the face of this, they have them on these steps reading these statements; I want them to know that they’re not the enemies. I wish somebody was there to say that somebody else getting access to space is not harming you in this way. Instead of an opportunity for solidarity and community building and equity and inclusion this turned into…the lessons that they’re taking away is detrimental, are harmful. A lawsuit that by name targets Terry and Andraya is disgusting and harmful. So this is, yes, familiar, we’ve seen it in many states, but it’s a particularly awful form of it. I looked at their press conference with them standing on the steps and all I could feel was sadness…It’s not even anger, it’s this deep well of sadness and disappointment. And that’s kind of where I’m at with that.
I wanna burn down this lawsuit for sure, but I also just wish there was more collective conversations and less eagerness to use this as a way to adjudicate people that you wanna render disposable and to legislate people out of their existence. I wish that these girls did not become the mouthpiece of that, because then you have five girls who are by name thrown together, on either side of this, that could’ve been teammates, and it’s disappointing that this is where we’re at. So burn it down.
Group: Burn.
Lindsay: Alright, after all that burning it is time to lift up some badasses this week. First of all, I wanna congratulate former Burn It All Down guest and New York Liberty player Kia Nurse who won the Suzy Batkovic medal and the league MVP of the Australia women’s basketball league, the WNBL. The Canadian national – I wonder who wrote this one?
Shireen: Whee!
Lindsay: The Canadian is the first import to do this and averaged 21.3 points per game.
We also wanna congratulate US women’s national team anchor and World Cup champion Crystal Dunn for 100 caps with the team.
Jenavee Peras hit a home run in D1 softball against–
Amira: Yes! My girl!
Lindsay: –against Alabama after giving birth 19 months ago, she did this in just her first start with UCLA. Amazing.
Sara Haba, a Tunisian, is the first woman to reach Mecca by bicycle. It took her 53 days to go on the pilgrimage.
Megan Youngren became one of 63 women to officially qualify for the US Olympic trials in the California international marathon, her time was 2:43:52, and this means that on February 29th she will be the first openly transgender athlete to compete at US Olympic marathon trials.
Also wanna give a shoutout to Zaya Wade, who at just 12 years old, the daughter of Dwayne Wade and Gabrielle Union Wade inspired the world this week when she announced, “Just be true to yourself, because what’s the point of being on this earth if you’re gonna try to be someone you’re not. It’s like you’re not even living as yourself.” It was so great to officially meet you this week Zaya, and you are making such a difference.
Can I get a drumroll please?
The winner is: the girl’s basketball team at Ignacio High School in southern Colorado. The team united with the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement by taking a team photo with body paint on each coach and player. Everyone on the team had a red or black handprint painted over their mouths to show solidarity with Indigenous women who went missing or were killed. The red paint is symbolic, because red is the only color that spirits can see in Native American culture, and the mouth cover placement gives voice to those who have been displaced – that’s what advocates of the movement have said. The majority of the team is part of the Ute tribe. We want to give a shoutout to them, we’re so inspired by their advocacy.
Alright, I think we made it here to the end. Shireen, what’s good?
Shireen: Oh my god, first of all I’m so happy that Jeremy Roenick was fired from NBC, I’m just gonna start with that, because he’s a sexist asshole and he was making what everyone calls an “inappropriate comment” – he was sexually harassing a coworker! I’m glad his ass is fired, hate that guy. It’s family day weekend in Canada, and I’m enjoying it tremendously. I’m also enjoying Netflix tremendously and low-key may or may not have a crush on a Catholic priest. I saw a movie, The Two Popes, and loved it. I haven’t seen Parasite yet but I think
Lindsay: [laughing] What did you say?
Shireen: The Two Popes? I know, this didn’t go where you thought it would!
Lindsay: Did you just say you had a crush on a Catholic priest?
Shireen: Maybe! Maybe.
Lindsay: Alright, keep going, keep going.
Shireen: I also have constantly been taking recommendations from Amira, I have finished watching Cheer, I watched all of Sex Education in like a week, I finished watching Fleabag, hence the Catholic priest.
Amira: Yes!
Shireen: Love, love it. I also wanted to shoutout Dr. Janelle Joseph, Sabrina Razack, and Dr. Margaret MacNeill of the U of T kinesiology department, because I’ve been hanging out there. I’m very grateful to Jessica Luther, who’s constantly giving me Dev Patel updates, his cinematographic life and what movies he’ll be in. Lastly happy birthday to Meg Linehan, I love you, and…What else? Everything is good. I have an espresso machine now so I am very well-caffeinated as you can tell, yeah. I have a lot.
Lindsay: That’s amazing.
Amira: Lindsay’s like, how is that possible?!
Lindsay: Like, MORE caffeinated? Oh gosh. Amira?
Amira: Yeah, I’m excited because I will be heading to Portland this week to see our friend Jules Boykoff and speak at Pacific University, so I’m really excited to go see him and meet with the students there. I’ll be talking about the history of Black women and the Olympics, I’m really looking forward to that. And of course, P.S. I Still Love You dropped this week and Jordan Fisher, who as you all know is one of my favs, starred in it. And the biggest moment around that was not even the movie itself but the fact that my pre-teen cuddled with me on the couch while we watched it together! And she was only slightly moody. So, you take that when you can get it.
Lindsay: I finally saw Parasite last night, and whew, it’s good.
Amira: It is, it’s so good.
Lindsay: Wow, I mean, I’m gonna be thinking about that for a long time. Also, I’m shocked Amira let me say this, but we are on an official countdown to the 90 Day Fiancé tell-all
Amira: I’M SO EXCITED!
Lindsay: TLC has a countdown on their network like you would for a political debate during an election, and I think it’s deserved.
Amira: It’s so deserved! I’m so ready. What did Mike do?! I’m so excited!
Shireen: What is this?
Lindsay: 90 Day Fiancé, the television show.
Shireen: Oh, the TV show. Okay okay okay okay. Alright.
Lindsay: Well friends, I think that’s all for today! You can follow us on Twitter @burnitdownpod, send us an email at burnitalldownpod@gmail.com, that’s also on our website, burnitalldownpod.com, we’re on Facebook @burnitalldown, and what would really help us, a little Valentine for us, if you will, would be to go to Apple Podcasts and leave a review – leave a 5-star review, I’m just gonna ask for it! Because that really helps us find other people who really, as Jess would say, need this podcast in their lives but don’t yet know it exists. We will be back next week friends, thank you all.