Episode 168: Alleged Abuse on the Washington NFL Team, and an Interview with Dr. Samantha Sheppard
This week, Amira, Shireen, and Lindsay discuss the recent alleged abuse of female reporters by the Washington Football Team [4:06]. After that, Amira interviews Dr. Samantha Sheppard about her book "Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen" [14:40].
Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile [37:12], the Bad Ass Woman of the Week segment, starring Rhiannon Walker [43:30], and what is good in our worlds [45:18].
Links
This isn't a story about Dan Snyder: https://www.powerplays.news/p/this-isnt-a-story-about-dan-snyder
Allegations against Washington NFL team are nothing new for this organization – it happened to me, too: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/brennan/2020/07/17/redskins-revelations-nothing-new-cesspool-nfl-franchise/5455505002/
Rhiannon Walker: ‘I want to move forward from this’: https://theathletic.com/1934661/
ESPN's Elle Duncan makes powerful plea for male allyship in wake of Washington scandal: https://ftw.usatoday.com/2020/07/espn-elle-duncan-makes-powerful-plea-for-male-allyship-in-wake-of-washington-scandal
Transcript
Shireen: Welcome to this week’s episode of Burn It All Down – it’s the feminist sports podcast you need. We at Burn It All Down are consistently inspired by the resisters and change-makers. We strive to get in good trouble. On that note, we would like to honor the spirit of disruption and the bight lights of the freedom fighters, Reverend CT Vivian and Rep. John Lewis. Both died on July 17th, and may they rest in power. During this COVID-19 pandemic we at Burn It All Down are extending our love and solidarity to those who are on the front lines of every sector, those who cannot stay home, those working from home that have gone back to work, staying in, caretakers, parents, animal lovers and folks in every community providing support systems online and where you can, and also to those missing sports – whatever the sport is that hasn’t come back – who feel isolated or trapped. We hope this show gives you something to think of and to laugh about and, well, burn.
I’m Shireen Ahmed, freelance writer and sports activist in Toronto, and I’m leading the toxic femininity charge today. On this week’s panel we have the fiery and brilliant Dr. Amira Rose Davis, escape room champion and assistant professor of history and African American Studies at Penn State; and we have the indomitable Lindsay Gibbs, with the most beautiful laugh and the mightiest pen, freelance sports reporter and creator of the Power Plays newsletter – sign up at powerplays.news – she’s in DC.
Before I start I’d like to thank our patrons for their generous support and to remind our new flamethrowers about our Patreon campaign. You pledge a certain amount monthly, as low as $2 and as high as you want, to become an official patron of the podcast. In exchange for your monthly contribution you get access to special rewards, and with the price of a latte a month you can get access to extra segments of the podcast, a monthly vlog, and an opportunity to record on the burn pile only available to those in our Patreon community. So far we have been able to solidify funding and proper editing and transcripts and production, but Burn It All Down is a labor of love and we believe in this podcast. We are so grateful for your support and happy that our flamethrowing community is growing.
We have a kickass show for you this week. We’ll be discussing the alleged abuse in the Washington NFL team, and then Amira has an interview with Dr. Samantha Sheppard about her new book, Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen. They talk about what to make of Colin Kaepernick’s new media deals. So, let’s dive right in here. First thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna do a quick rapid-fire question. So my question to you two: friends, what thing happened in sports that you did not expect?
Lindsay: I have to say, everything in NASCAR, like all the people saying Black lives matter, NASCAR having PSAs about race, the support for Bubba – I know it hasn’t been perfect, but what we’ve seen I never would’ve expected six months ago, ever. Maybe two months ago.
Shireen: Amira.
Amira: Well, them shutting down in the first place is still…I mean, part of that’s disbelief about the pandemic. And then also the Washington football team name change, just because Snyder is such an asshole that I never thought…But anyways, I’m so so glad. Everybody, hear the hot take about that if you haven’t yet. Alright, bye.
Shireen: [laughs] Mine is gonna be for sure Don Cherry getting fired. I know it was before 2020 but it was almost like it was a precursor to the interesting things that would happen in the realm of sport. Amira, can you get us started on this conversation please?
Emily: “I had a week, maybe, or so, that was great, and I was like, yes, this is exactly what I wanted and what was explained to me, and this is gonna be great. Then you get your first screaming at for something that’s not your fault, and then somebody makes the comment to you about what you’re wearing and it just snowballs from there. It really took most people no time to comment on my appearance, and it really took no time for Mitch to let me know that I was incompetent of doing small tasks.”
Amira: That’s the voice of Emily Applegate in an interview recently released with the Washington Post. Emily and fourteen other former employees of the Washington football team have gone on record, with tremendous reporting by Liz Clarke and Will Hobson, to talk about the frequent sexual harassment and verbal abuse they endured as employees of the Washington football team. This report on WashPo includes interviews with former and current employees, anonymously, many who’ve signed NDAs and have therefore requested anonymity to speak. So today we’re gonna have a talk about this report and all of the ripples, all of the consequences or not, and the patterns of abuse that we see within this organization and more generally. Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah, to start this out I wanna say, for last week, every day DC media started kind of teasing this story, like, people within DC media and then it spread to national NFL media, they started saying, “A big story about the Washington football team is coming down the pipes, bigger than the name change, this might really be the end for Dan Snyder!” Multiple people starting Monday would tweet this every single day. “This is big, get ready!” It was a very get-your-popcorn-ready type of thing. It led to a lot of speculation on message boards and on Reddit – which I guess is a message board – and really just throughout the internet. It was incredibly gross because it was very clear early on that this was going to be an actually very serious story that probably had actual victims and real people, and when it came out late Thursday afternoon there had been already three and a half days of baseless speculation. It made me so angry.
I kept thinking about the women who came forward in the story who had to watch that speculation happen in real time. But it really made me wonder, why are we centering this as a Dan Snyder story? This is not a story about Dan Snyder. I want Dan Snyder to leave as much as anyone, but this is not a story about Dan Snyder, and these men who are wanting to make this a story about Dan Snyder really makes me feel like that just wanna change the subject, they don’t wanna have the real conversation about sexual harassment within the sport industry that need to be had.
Amira: And in many ways this is not a new story. The locker room has been a bastion of abuse and harassment, particularly for women in sporting roles, for a very long time. Just a kind of historical look back for those who haven’t been as familiar with this history, in the 60s it was really unheard of to have women sports reporters generally, but especially in locker rooms. In the 70s what you saw, for instance by the mid-70s, only 7% of American credentialed journalists, for instance to the Olympics, were women. So you had a relatively low number, and the NHL actually broke the barrier here after the All Star game where they credentialed a lot of women to go and report in the locker room, but it wasn’t until the late 70s where Melissa Ludtke had to sue – she was covering the MLB for Sports Illustrated and Major League Baseball issued a ruling against her, issued a statement that said that they refused to have women in the locker room because they wanted to “protect the image of baseball as a family sport” and “preserve traditional notions of decency and propriety.” However the US district court in 1978 ruled that it violated her 14th amendment right and the fundamental right to pursue her profession, and that’s one of the barriers that fell. It hasn’t been peachy keen since then; really since then we’ve just seen a litany of stories.
This is part of a much longer history of abuse that women reporters have faced for trying to do their damn jobs, both as reporters and as employees working within these locker room spaces. So if you’re kind of gleefully watching this with popcorn because you feel like it’s karma for taking so long for them to change the name, or if you’re like “what can we expect from that cesspool,” etc etc, know that it’s happening so many other places as well. I just burned last week the Boston Red Sox for decades of abuse of predominantly Black club house attendants. These harmful occurrences within these sporting spaces that are tightly wrapped so you can't see the inner workings and therefore in the dark a lot of things can happen, is the bigger picture on which we’re planting this story centered on Washington.
Shireen: Another thing that as Amira just mentioned what I think is really important is it’s really easy to dislike this team, but the other thing is that this history of misogyny is not new to this team, and of course racial abuse is clear, but homophobia, sexual harassment and racialized abuse don’t happen to be necessarily far from each other most times. A story came out in 2018 at the New York Times about what cheerleaders who worked with or work with the NFL team, what they’ve experienced. It was stuff as harrowing, like, they felt that they were quote-unquote “pimped out” to season ticket-holders and suite box holders and expected to go and perform and be pretty and do topless photoshoots, and were whisked away in a private jet and expected to literally be kind to…It was insulting and it was abusive and it was unnecessary. I just want to really, like, this conversation that we're having about accountability and what that looks like, but not to be, as Amira said, gleeful about any of this, because there are still very very real victims here. Amira?
Amira: And I think that last story gets to one of the most frustrating parts of this report, be it cheerleaders, team employees, league employees, reporters, right? It’s almost like women’s bodies in sporting spaces are the problem, right? They’re treated as such. They’re treated as ornamental, they’re treated as something that needs to be disciplined or commented on because they’re encroaching, right? When I mentioned that lawsuit in the late 70s one of the things that was said was that the headline in Time Magazine when the lawsuit came down saying that women could actually report from locker rooms, was that ‘The last bastion of male journalism has fallen,’ right? I feel like we’re still in a place where whether as athletes or workers in a variety of roles, that women within sports are fighting tooth and nail to hang on to the small piece that they’ve been given, right? They’re tossed crumbs and told to say thank you. Everybody’s sitting in chairs and you’re told to sit in the back of the room and thank people for being there. The fact of the matter is that this is their jobs that they couldn’t do, whether it was cheerleading or reporting or working for the damn organization. They couldn’t do it! They couldn’t do their jobs – that, to me, is the thing.
Lindsay: There’s a quote in our friend Dr. Brenda Elsey’s book which she co-wrote with Joshua Nadel, Futbolera, which is a book that deals with women’s soccer/football in Latin America and so you’d think, well, why I am quoting that book? This quote comes from a century ago, like I said in Latin America, and talking about a different sport, but Brenda’s brilliant. The quote I keep thinking about is, “In looking through media correspondence and memoirs of the time, it is apparent that men viewed sports clubs as an escape from domestic life. Women’s presence, unless as a spectacle, ruin that escape from familial obligations in the eyes of many men.” That comes up time and time again.
The part of this report from the Washington football team that really sticks out to me is the fact that there was a plexiglass see-through staircase in the lobby and it went up all the way from the locker room, and so men in the locker room would look up women’s skirts at this plexiglass see-through staircase, and I can’t stop thinking about this damn plexiglass staircase. It is a fucking metaphor about how this space is literally not built with women in mind. This space was literally not built with any idea, any compassion that women would be a part of this at all, and if they were gonna be a part of this we’re gonna humiliate them, we’re gonna degrade them. I think there are fucking different versions of this plexiglass staircase everywhere.
Shireen: What ends up happening is that women are associated with and work with those places that inherently feed into this system, in the industry of sexism, are talking about it. What happens is there’s a bit of a backlash there and I think that that’s something else that we have to keep in mind, that this is complicated and it’s multi-layered. We stand in solidarity with those that were affected by this, but also those that are working hand in hand with places that continue to propel and prop up this type of system of toxicity. It’s a fucking mess. Next up, Amira’s interview with Dr. Sam Sheppard.
Sam: I just think it’s a lot of fun. I must say, this is the best thing I’ve ever written. You’re probably thinking, I haven’t written anything else! That stuff is really good too, but this is the best.
Amira: That’s Dr. Samantha Sheppard, talking to me about her new book Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen. Dr. Sheppard is an assistant professor of cinema and media studies in the department of performing arts at Cornell University, and this is another Burn It All Down scholar spotlight.
Sam: Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate being on here with you – for many reasons, one of which is that your work has been really really helpful to me and I really appreciated your great read of A League of Their Own. This book is about sports films and yeah, your read of that opening moment…Not that opening moment, but that moment with the–
Amira: The 21 seconds, yeah. [laughs]
Sam: Yeah. [laughs]
Amira: Of Blackness.
Sam: Of the Black woman throwing the ball, was really helpful.
Amira: Thank you, that's super meaningful to me. I’m beyond excited for this brilliant work of yours. I love on the abstract of your book one of the things it says is, “It’s not only about the skin in the game but the skin in the genre.” What you’re really looking at here is Blackness in sports films, I’m so here for this. Where did this project start?
Sam: So Sporting Blackness really has been a project that’s been in the works since I was a graduate student. I’m trained in cinema and media studies but I have a deep appreciation and respect for sports; I’m, I guess, a former soccer player. At the end there for Dartmouth I was really playing the bench but, you know, not even bringing shin guards out after a while! [laughter] Just chillin. But no, I have a really deep love and affection and appreciation but also a deep ambivalence about sports. I was interested in what I thought was a really neglected genre of sports films where you see just these groups of Black men and occasionally women onscreen and people were not talking about them because sports films themselves are usually considered to be quite popular fare, largely innocuous, melodramatic. It’s the Cool Runnings bit, you know, just really a lot of clapping for, like, nothing. [Amira laughing]
People don’t really respect the genre unless it’s like Raging Bull or something. What I was really seeing was, how can we understand issues of race and representation beyond just pointing out stereotypes – “Oh, this person is athletic, their body is like jazz,” – you know? Things like that. To really think through the formal consequences both in terms of what happens in cinema but also how we can read performativity and athleticism in a more complex and consequential way. So this book is really that study; it’s a study that looks at embodiment, looks at performativity, looks at Blackness as a theoretical motor, that performance is contested by Black bodies on screen, and specifically offers this framework to think about the ways in which Black bodies are made to mean and mean again on screen, particularly through this concept I coined called ‘critical muscle memory.’
Amira: Right, so you coined this term critical muscle memory. Can you break this down for us?
Sam: Obviously it's a term with muscle memory that makes us think about human kinetics, but also for those who are well up into their Black studies, think about critical memory and Black memory and Black memorial practices and through trauma studies. Critical muscle memory gets at that body, kinesthetic and cinematic histories that end up becoming represented on screen in really complex ways. Sometimes the representation themselves and their originary source historical period, but also manipulated through the camera, whether that be through the framing of a shot or the use of cameo, of genre and production mode. So I look at documentaries, I look at experimental video, I look at short films, I look at Hollywood film, I look at the unfortunate vast nothingness of Black women representation, which is just tragic because we are just so damn excellent in sports–
Amira: Yeah.
Sam: –that it’s just cruel, the lack of stories that are told on screen. I hopefully do it in a way that means that it’s meaningful across disciplines, to people who study film, people who study African American representation in general, people who study African American studies, sports studies and of course American studies.
Amira: But also I would say it’s a really important read for all of us who are just lay consumers of these things, like, that to me is one of the critical things that your work is doing because all of us…It’s very easy to watch All American, it’s very easy to watch the game, it’s very easy to pop in and watch A League Of Their Own or Remember The Titans and, you know, obviously I’m a historian and nobody likes to watch movies with historians [laughs] – yes, I can actually enjoy things. But I think that one of the things you point to is there’s dangers but also possibilities, but real harm if what we receive is left uncriticized or unexamined. What is the most surprising thing as you were doing this research, as you were pulling it together, as you were doing this analysis. What surprised you the most about what you discovered in the process of writing this book?
Sam: I think that’s such a great question because as you know when you’re writing you’re with something for a very long time and so things don't often creep up on you because you feel like you’ve been searching for them forever. But there was a paragraph on Boobie Miles in that dissertation and what surprised me is that paragraph would become chapter two, which is about him as a sort of Black familiar racial icon in his trans-media representations.
Amira: Boobie Miles, the former standout Texas football player, one of the main subjects of Friday Night Lights, the book by HG Bissinger – of course, that book would become a movie which would become a TV show. His media representation wouldn’t stop there, of course. In 2010 Big KRIT would release the song Hometown Hero, a clip of which you just heard, featuring clips from Boobie Miles’ character in Friday Night Lights, and of course a few years later would follow up with a song titled Boobie Miles.
Sam: The ways in which his body and his story has been morphed so much on screen…And when I first started the chapter I didn’t even fully realize where I was going until I finally heard Big KRIT. I first heard “Boobie Miles” and I was like, okay, fine, yes, it’s a song. But when I heard his first engagement with Boobie for Hometown Hero, and I was like, there’s something happening – Black people are taking Boobie back. He gets to be the hometown hero, he’s not in Friday Night Lights the book as this injured, failed Black body; he’s not in Friday Night Lights the movie as this pathological failed Black body. He’s not cut up and spliced into the television show as Smash and Voodoo and whatever Michael B Jordan’s character’s name is…I should know because I wrote it down somewhere, but he’s not those people who need white redemption, right? He goes back and he become that hometown hero, which is what he always was.
I end it there in the book, and I think I later had to put something in a footnote. The footnotes are also where the business is at, people! Read the footnotes. But there’s something really interesting…I was surprised because I thought, oh, this is gonna be his last time working on screen and it wasn’t because, for those who don’t know, Boobie James Earl Miles of Friday Night Lights infamy is currently incarcerated. So the last time actually he’s seen on screen was in the documentary about HG Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights called Buzz, who goes to visit him in prison, so his last screened version is the arc that the total pathological arc that is created in Friday Night Lights the film, right? We know when he gets injured and can’t do nothing but play football that he’s gonna go from siting in his uncle’s car to not finishing college to this assumed place of the prison, right? Visually, in our heads, and it becomes screened in this very traumatic way.
I’m glad that in the book it ends with him becoming this hometown hero, it ends with Big KRIT using his virtuosity to basically own the southern landscape sonically and visually, as opposed to what ends up happening cinematically which is that he becomes this after effect that is all too common, just like the injury narrative, all too common. I say all too common not because of just the numbers but in terms of the cultural imaginary of what we think is supposed to be common. So that I would say is perhaps the most surprising – and also my favorite chapter – of the book.
Amira: So, the last chapter you talk about the revolt of the Black athlete and depictions of that and I thought that was a good entry point into a discussion about one of the things that we’ve seen recently, is a lot of news about one Colin Kaepernick and some moves that he’s been making. What does this mean, right, about perhaps if you were to prepare an epilogue or continue to track the evolution of this, when it’s not only about the depiction of the revolt of the Black athlete but also a Black athlete who’s been in revolt, who’s also guiding the production in a way that is framing the new depictions of his own story, but also larger images and messaging.
Sam: Such a really great question. I have been thinking ever since I saw the Variety announcement about Kaepernick’s new deal with Disney, right? So Disney, ESPN. Disney is well known for its sports films; you named one of them earlier, the Titans was so popular. They also gave us the Air Bud series.
Amira: Yes. [laughs]
Sam: They’ve given us Million Dollar Arm, Glory Road, The Rookie, Miracle, Mighty Ducks, I mean…If anything, it’s interesting that we think about…And it’s Walt Disney Pictures and Buena Vista the distributor, but that this deal is happening, as you said, alongside other major conglomerate deals that he has helped broker, with Amazon/Audible and of course Netflix. I think what’s really interesting, because I’ve been trying to tell people that as a person that writes about sports films, Colin Kaepernick has so much pressure in certain ways to narrativize the end of his film, right? The thing is, we all want Kap to get a job, right? Get him back out there, right? Like, oh, does Kap have a job? Y’all wanna sit here and play Lift Every Voice but does Kap..? And I keep thinking, I was like, think about this cinematically, right? We’re in the third act and this generation’s Denzel – which may also just be his son, John David Washington, or actually let’s be honest, Chadwick Boseman, who’s playing every single, like–
Amira: Black bio.
Sam: Right? So, Chadwick Boseman is Colin Kaepernick in KAP: THE MOVIE, right? So think about that third act, right? That’s what we’re trying to figure out, what that third act is. Usually we think, okay, we need a sports film arc, so it pushes this kind of narrative that there needs to be this happy resolution. We don’t want Friday Night Lights, we don’t want them to get to just two inches from the line, you know? We want a big story, Varsity Blues kind of ending, “left side strong side” moment. His life may not actually be that way. It’s the biggest gamble. I’m not saying I don’t want this man to work, that’s not what I’m saying. I want him to have all the things. It’s the biggest gamble for him actually to play. So instead to play with your image–
Amira: Absolutely.
Sam: To play with your media, to play with your story is actually super powerful as opposed to writing that third act, the way in which we have been culturally accustomed to have to tell this story, like, he has to win the big game or this movie is just a little different than the other ones, right? He stands for something. It’s the same reason why, look, we still have not narrativized Tommie Smith and John Carlos, right? There’s been a recuperative gesture, there’s been…You’ve got your Arthur Ashe Award, right? They show up in some movies, they show up in Remember The Titans behind Julius, but they don’t have their movie because writing that third act it’s really problematic, right? It’s interesting that these deals are kind of happening, but the problem that I sort of see with these deals is that they are functioning though like all kinds of sports media and sports films.
So, ESPN, who’s working with Colin Kaepernick – which is crazy! ESPN, the same people who fixed their face every day to say Colin is this and that, now they’re like, Jimmy – ESPN’s president – is now like, “Colin has had a singular path as both an athlete and an activist.” So ahistorical! [laughs] You know that is so ahistorical. And as the nation continues to confront racism and social injustice it feels particularly relevant to hear Colin’s voice on his evolution and motivations. So that’s what ESPN’s president is saying, because that’s what they need it to be. To be a sports film it has to be a singular narrative. We can be a team sport, but we need to focus on one person. We need what’s-his-face from Glory Road, we need Derek Luke in every sports film–
Amira: As Colin. [laughs]
Sam: –as that person to focus on, right? Because he's a singular story, right? We’ve already been told: be wary of the singular story, because we know that he’s not. We talk about athletes and activism in media, it's like, wait, so Craig Hodges, does he have a singular path?
Amira: Right.
Sam: Or are these like, how many paths, how many roads are we supposed to look to…?
Amira: Or considered women, then-
Sam: No! [laughter]
Amira: Maybe we’d be in a forest with multiple paths!
Sam: Never! Don’t even do it. But it’s interesting that he would have…It’d be interesting to see what kind of “control” he has to tell this story, and will it be the Disney story? Will it be the McFarland, USA story? Because that’s what the narrative arc is doing. My friend, Kristen Warner, an amazing scholar, has this term called “plastic representation” and it really gets at the idea that people are really okay with just taking this image as something, as opposed to thinking about…Like, it’s just plastic. The substance or the cultural specificity or who’s controlling all of this stuff. So, looking back at ESPN, Amazon, Netflix…Michaela Coel couldn’t even work with Netflix!
I’m not saying that Colin does not have control, I’m saying that he doesn’t have a way in which his voice is gonna be foregrounded, but I’m just saying that Disney has a sporting arc, a sporting media arc, and this version is gonna, yes, let Colin be a hero, a singular athlete, which is exactly the opposite of what's supposed to be happening. He should be a refraction, you should look through him to see many others, the multitudes, because that's what I think his silence, the strategic silence, has been about. Listen to all the voices, not just my own. So this moment where he’s becoming this singular path, singular voice, singular athlete, singular activist, and he’s becoming mediated. It’s a really really concerning way to think about how his narrative is going to be controlled, especially because the third act isn’t written. And trust me, nobody is gonna watch the Colin Kaepernick movie where he then goes and he becomes a movie executive at the end.
Amira: Yes.
Sam: That’s not the switch up!
Amira: Exactly. First of all, to move from silence to now having very real platforms on which to speak, even if it’s mediated, is so interesting to try to track the kind of evolution with that, and in what ways does that space that once was silent, that amplified others, become a lean-in to the singular symbol and reinforce that, that actually now takes up spaces, that elides the work of others like the WNBA is doing – where’s Maya Moore’s media deal, is the other way of putting it.
Sam: That’s exactly…That’s such a good key point. I wanna even go back to your point about if he were to come back into the league and not just be bad, which would be one thing, again, it would just screw up the third act of the film, right? He’d be good, but remember: sporting requires such excellence that “good” is…It has to end in the Super Bowl, right?
Amira: Right.
Sam: It has to end in that moment. Being, like, 7 for 6 or whatever, that is not enough, the bar that has to be cleared in this sort of narrative world. So it's interesting that the thing about what happens in my last chapter, I don’t look at the Ali film, despite people wanting that, but I talked about a different film, a film called Hour Glass by Haile Gerima, because the protagonist just stops playing. It’s a conscious choice. It’s a revolutionary literacy that comes from reading about the same things that we know Colin has begun to throw himself into, you know – talking with Harry Edwards, learning about this history, going back and figuring out what the framework for his present moment and present choices are, and it’s like, and then for this character to go into the Black community, and it kind of ends on an ellipsis, like, it goes through an open door. You don't know what's gonna happen. The thing is unwritten. I think that is what’s so interesting about this narrative, the potential of his story is that we don’t know what’s gonna be written, but because we have an understanding of how media industries work, because we have an understanding of how Stuart Hall has already talked to us about “double movement” and the ways in which resistance will be co-opted, renamed and then capitalized on and sold to you on that new platform, you know, Disney plus plus. [laughter]
We already can kind of see where this is going, so there’s a way in which…I think his story is interesting, I don’t think it’s singular, and perhaps I maybe don’t also think it’s that interesting. That’s the thing! This is a story of resistance, this is a story of, yes, amplification. The things that he’s amplifying are interesting because they’re harrowing, because it’s looking at injustice, it’s unsettling, it is enraging, it is revolutionary. What he's looking at, not looking at him. I think that’s the difference. So if he took his story and what we see it becomes a look out, a refraction…He’s looking out with his gaze, but looking at him, we’re just gonna get: he was adopted, like, it’s not Brian Banks, but look, it’s not that far from it either. It’s an arc, I can get you there. It’s the final moments of Cool Runnings, you don’t have to win the game, Colin Kaepernick, you won the claps. [clapping]
Amira: Right.
Sam: Claps from your enemy, from ESPN! ESPN is now slow clapping to the whole thing! That’s the thing.
Amira: Bars. I mean, fire. Ugh. Okay, so speaking of fire and Netflix – this is a terrible transition – I couldn’t let you leave without asking you for your very sophisticated analysis about the ways Blackness is working in everybody’s new favorite quarantine sport, The Floor Is Lava.
Sam: The Floor Is Lava is a personal favorite in my household. I rooted so hard for a trio of young Black men to get across. I think they all went to UCLA [Amira screams] – two of them were basketball players! [laughter] When he flipped it and that last one jumped in and yelled, “This is for Nipsey!” – I was rooting so hard for them! The other thing is, I learned that when it comes to Black subjects lava does not discriminate! [laughter] You got to hold on! And honestly, if you don’t have upper body strength you’re not getting through this game.
Amira: The ancestors are not gonna carry you to the end!
Sam: Also, I don’t care for the ‘Africa’ room or whatever that is. I don’t like that one!
Amira: Oh, the Africa mess!
Sam: Yeah, I don’t like that room! But I will say, it is an easier one – easier than the space one.
Amira: Which I think is the hardest. So, flamethrowers, if you’re liking any part of this discussion, I have to encourage you to go to Patreon and check out our latest Behind The Burn with me, Jess, Brenda, plus our angsty teenagers, breaking down all things The Floor Is Lava. But anyways, I just couldn’t let you leave without picking your brain about that. Thank you so much again for coming on Burn It All Down. Again, check out Dr. Sheppard’s book, Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen. It’s out now with University of California Press; you can also find it supporting local bookstores who have it, or check out Amazon.
Sam: Powell's has it.
Amira: Powell’s has it. Look, you can get it. Get the book.
Sam: Yes. Contact me, I’m on Twitter @samshepphd – if you can’t find a copy, I kindly bought ten of my own I can send to you [laughs] because, well, everybody needs free books.
Shireen: Onto everyone's favorite segment, the burn pile. Lindsay, can you get us started please?
Lindsay: Yeah, so this week we found out that reigning MVP Elena Delle Donne was not given a medical exemption for the WNBA season despite the fact that she has lyme disease. This puts her in a precarious position because the medical exemptions were if people were “high risk” – that means they would get to sit out this season and still receive their salary. She’s working out something with the team where she’s gonna work out in DC and rehab, the team’s still gonna pay her, but it’s still obviously not an ideal situation, and this brought up a lot of questions about the treatment of lyme disease, it brought out a lot of questions about the validity of this process that the WNBA and the WNBA players association concocted for players, but the thing I wanna burn is A) we’re in a pandemic, if there is any doubt about science and the condition. You give people a pass. [laughs] Like, you give people a pass! That was my overall thing.
I’d also like to burn the lack of transparency that the WNBA and the WNBA players association has had about this entire process. I completely understand that we need to keep people’s health in mind, not asking them to out any health conditions, but the process itself should be a little bit more transparent, that’s how things like this should be able to go. I’d just like to burn the fact that any player felt at any time that they were literally choosing between their life and playing the sport that they love – it’s not a position that any athlete should have to be in right now. I know that so many are, so many without the resources of Elena Delle Donne and the front line workers are right now, and I would just like to burn all of it because we just gotta take care of each other. That’s all we’ve got. So let’s just burn the WNBA’s denial of this decision and, yeah, that’s it. Burn.
All: Burn.
Shireen: So, the NHL awards nominations are upon us, and the season was obviously bizarre because there’s a global pandemic. I’m just gonna quote Hemal Jhaveri, who we had on episode 126, she’s a writer at For The Win, and speaking about this specific thing that I’m burning: the Lady Byng trophy. Let’s talk about the Lady Byng. The Lady Byng actually goes to a player who has “exhibited the best type of sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct.” You’re like, oh, what a great award! We’ve had some really nice people in the past win this award. So, our finalists are Nathan MacKinnon, Ryan O’Reilly and Auston Matthews. Wait…What? Auston Matthews? The same Auston Matthews that harassed a female security guard in September – and when she confronted him, he pulled down this pants and mooned her? Because that’s fucking “gentlemanly” behavior? No. No, no, no! No!
And the NHLPA are the ones responsible for this, because they’re the ones that put in the votes, the players association, and I think it’s garbage. I think it’s unacceptable. If we like a player personally, doesn’t mean we have to be okay with their sexual harassment of others. I’m sorry, this is terrible and an indication to how the NHL is really really bad at understanding how to handle anything around domestic violence, interpersonal violence, harassment – and remember, it’s the only league that doesn’t actually have a policy on this. I wanna take that, burn it, and throw it, torch it in the burn pile. Burn.
All: Burn.
Shireen: Amira.
Amira: Yeah, in the last few weeks we’ve seen an alarming amount of anti-Semitism, particularly from Black men in athletics and entertainment. I just wanted to address that. First of all, to say that it’s absolutely abhorrent, it’s anti-Semitic, even if people are confused with that classification. I mean, read a book, please. But it is, and there’s no place for it. There’s none. I would like to start by saying from DeShaun Jackson’s sharing a fake Hitler quote…First of all, it’s fake. But even if it wasn’t, there’s nothing that should say to you, “cool, I’m gonna share a Hitler quote.” Nothing. Nothing. I don’t even have to contextualize that, because there’s nothing. To Nick Cannon, who’s obviously not in sports but when we see other people like Dwayne Wade or Stephen Jackson defending them, and then reigniting long-held debates about Minister Farrakhan, it feels like we’re kind of on a wheel, around and round and round again.
We have too many truth-tellers who aren’t homophobic, who aren’t misogynistic, who aren’t anti-Semitic. We have too many of them to give people like Farrakhan a platform. We have too many truth-tellers for people like DeShaun Jackson and Stephen Jackson and Dwayne Wade to think that this is the anti-Black conspiracy. Look around! White supremacy is everywhere. Just because they’re saying something that you wanna hear that uplifts you in one way doesn’t mean you ignore all the other hate they’re spewing. Stop giving them platforms! Stop co-signing when people try to defend their platforms! Get behind somebody who’s for all of us, because, hi, Black Jews exist! This is anti-Semitic and it needs to stop, especially during a moment where we’re seeing a rise of anti-Semitism and violent crimes against Jewish people. Cut it out. If you’re not for all of us, which includes Black Jews or Black women or Black gay people – if you’re not for all of us then you can’t be pro-Black. So shut down your anti-Semitism, shut down your other stupid ass comments. Take your Hotep asses somewhere else. We don’t need it here, we don’t. Burn it down.
All: Burn.
Shireen: After all that burning, we would like to lift up some incredible people. First of all, our heartfelt condolences to the family and community of Olympic figure skater Ekaterina Alexandrovskaya, who died at 20 in Moscow. She attained Australian citizenship in 2016. Then she and partner Harry Windsor represented Australia and won the 2017 World Juniors. We are thinking of her family and friends during this time.
We’d like to shout out the women of the Afghanistan women’s national team, who stood up – including Khalida Popal and Kelly Lindsay both former guests of BIAD. This week, the Court of Arbitration in Sport finally implemented a life ban on former Afghanistan football association president Keramuddin Karim.
We’d like to shout out NWSL player Bethany Balcer, who opened up about having an anxiety attack while on the pitch during the Challenge Cup. Too often, we only talk about mental health struggles when they’re far in the rear-view mirror, but athletes like Balcer help change the conversation forever with their honesty.
Can I get a drumroll please?
Our badass woman of the week is Rhiannon Walker. We at Burn It All Down offer our love and solidarity to her. She who wrote a very poignant and powerful piece for The Athletic about moving forward from sexual harassment. We also want to express solidarity with Nora Pinciotti, the other reporter who went on the record about harassment in the story, as well as Emily Applegate and the other 14 former Washington employees who spoke to the Washington Post about the harassment they received.
Now, what’s good? Lindsay.
Lindsay: You know, it’s been a little bit better of a week. I’ve gotten caught up on sleep, I’ve prioritized that, because I haven’t slept in about a month for more than five hours a night, so gotten a little bit caught up on sleep this week. I’m just feeling better all around. It’s taken a lot of hard work to get here but I’m gonna enjoy it. It turns out that taking your pills on time and doing a little exercise and eating well-rounded meals and sleeping makes you feel better. [laughs] That’s really annoying! But I’m gonna keep it up. So that’s what’s good right now.
Shireen: My what’s good, and I usually have a wide variety of things…I’m just gonna get straight to it and say: PORTLAND THORNS, BITCHES! – only team in the NWSL to score in the quarter finals. Whew. I’ve been enjoying the Challenge Cup tremendously. I have also been enjoying the tremendous Challenge Cup because my team won, so I’m very very excited about that. Also, thank you to Dr. Amira Rose Davis for continuously giving me ideas on how to spend my time. Amira introduced me to this thing a couple months ago, and it’s wild, y’all: it’s an audiobook, so, somebody reads a story to me. I’ve never…You know, I listen to a bunch of podcasts but I’ve never tried an audiobook. So I’m very excited about this. The first one I started was on her recommendation, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. It’s just incredible. It’s a very cool feeling.
Also, acupressure mats – if those of you that heard the show last week, Amira got one, and when I was listening to the show I was like, I want one of these things! So I promptly went online and got myself one and I’m really enjoying it. I will give you a full review next week because I just feel like I need to use it more than three times to give it a fair review. But those are things that are really good. My zucchini plant is giving me a little bit of stress, but I just think that she’s just being a little bit moody and it’s fine, because it’s really hot up here. But that’s about it, so, yep. Amira, what about you?
Amira: I searched really hard to have a what’s good that isn’t Peloton-related this week. [laughter] I’d like everybody to know that. So, my what’s good will be: me and Mari watched Fighting With My Family – I don’t know what took us so long to discover this movie. I scrolled past it every time I saw it because it was, like, The Rock and people wrestling, not my thing, but OH MY GOOD IT TOTALLY IS MY THING. First of all, the main character is played by Florence Pugh, who is a genius. She’s Amy March in the revival of Little Women if you remember, and also Lena Headey is her mom! That’s Cersei. First of all, did you know we needed an Amy March-Cersei matchup? I didn’t know I needed it! But they have range and they’re brilliant and it was gorgeous, it was a beautiful real-life movie about a family from Norwich, England, and the daughter goes and gets a spot in the WWE and it’s a true story, and it was delightful and it was funny, and they said the phrase “fuck me dead and bury me pregnant” [cackling] and that phrase is literally my what’s good. So, there’s that.
I also want to, on a more serious note, talk about losing just absolute titans – CT Vivian and John Lewis – on the same day. If you are unfamiliar with CT Vivian, he was a field general for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was a minister and civil rights fighter. He was such a powerful man. John Lewis, of course, was former chairman of SNCC, a congressman, and if you haven’t checked out March…Or, actually, his documentary Good Trouble about his life is now available, or watch Eyes on the Prize and see both of these men. But I just wanted to say as a historian and generally as Black people: we’re losing our stories, we’re losing our ancestors in real time. The congressman was the last living speaker at the March on Washington in ’63.
Sometimes I think we’ve taken for granted their being here and their leading, or we’ve mocked them or said they haven’t gone far enough, and we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, we’re walking because they walked. We’re voting because they got their heads beaten on the road, literally, bleeding out on the road, on the concrete, so that we could vote. The years they’ve seen…Talk to your elders, capture their stories. Listen. Listen to their words. It’s so important to do that and to give people roses before they pass. I’m, in another way, so grateful that both men had long lives. That was a privilege that not everybody in the movement had. They buried so many people, they went to so many funerals. The fact that they lived this long is in and of itself phenomenal for the work they were committed to, so it’s also very hard to lose them on a week where we’ve seen police beating protestors, where we’ve seen tactics used against civil rights protesters being wielded today, where people have the nerve to have their names in their mouths that are completely antithetical to their entire body of work.
Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, you are the systems they’re talking about – maybe tweet the right fucking picture of the Black politician that you’re trying to mourn. It’s painful, because even in death it feels devoid of humanity and compassion the people get it that wrong. So I’ll just end by saying that we have to resist romanticized memorials, as if the work that they were committed to had been done, as if we have reached the mountaintop, as if it’s over. It’s impossible to romanticize them that way, because the fight is still very clearly raging on. CT Vivian said, “People do not choose rebellion, it is forced upon them. Revolution is always an act of self-defense.” And I wanna leave you today with the words that John Lewis spoke at the March on Washington.
JL: To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we have long said that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now! We are tired. We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again. And then you holler, “Be patient.” How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now.
Amira: Don’t be patient. Stir up some good trouble. Go forth, flamethrowers, with the light and the leadership and the blueprint that these men have given, that women have given, that fighters have given, that the generations that we walk in the wake of have given to us. It is a privilege to follow behind them. Let’s do it.
Shireen: That’s it for this week in Burn it All Down. Although we are done for now, you can always burn all day and night in our fabulous array of merchandise including mugs, pillows, tees, hoodies, bags. What better way to crush toxic patriarchy in sports and sports media than by getting somebody you love a pillow with our logo on it? Check out our Teespring store. Burn It All Down lives on Soundcloud and can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn – anywhere you find podcasts. We appreciate your reviews and feedback, so please subscribe, rate, and let us know what we did well and how we can improve. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram @burnitalldownpod and on Twitter @burnitdownpod. You can email us at burnitalldownpod@gmail.com, and check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com, where you will find previous episodes, transcripts, guest list, and a link to our Patreon. We would appreciate you subscribing, sharing and rating our show, which really helps us to do the work that we love to do and keep burning what needs to be burned. We wish you safety, health and whatever joys you can muster in this chaotic and unprecedented time. As Brenda always says: burn on, and not out.