Episode 185: Year in Review: Surprises, Memories and Takeaways
It’s hard to wrap up such an abnormal and difficult year. But Amira, Jessica, and Brenda look back on some of the most surprising and memorable moments of 2020 -- and share some lessons they learned. [6:28] Also, before 2020 comes to a close, the NCAA sneaks in one more trip to the Burn Pile [39:10]. Plus, you’ll hear this week’s Torchbearers, starring Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer [48:28], and what is good in our worlds. [51:50].
This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is a member of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Amira: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I’m Amira, and I’m joined today with my co-hosts, Jessica and Brenda, to bring you the last episode of BIAD – where we’re all talking – of 2020. Of course, like we always do, we’ll wrap up the year with best-of episodes, but this is our last full show coming together, talking live with you, well, recording together, of the year. I’m very excited to be joined by my co-hosts to talk about the year that was, which was a mess. Let’s just say that.
Brenda: When they finally called that, I was like, alrighty…Now nobody’s going anywhere for a while. [laughs]
Amira: And of course we’ll burn some things, we’ll shout out some torchbearers of the week, we’ll tell you what’s good in our lives.
Jessica: I am just so thrilled to watch a sexy, steamy historical romance with a diverse cast!
Amira: Then we’ll send you off into the new year with lots of things to burn on about. Before we get to all that, y’all, we have just a few weeks left of 2020. So I really wanna know, during that kind of foggy gray limbo period that stretches the last two weeks of the year where you don’t really know what day it is – I suppose you could say that for all of 2020 though, but I’m wondering, are there specific things that you’re looking forward to or that you’re doing? Holiday traditions you might be having in the next few weeks?
Jessica: Yes, so, tonight I’m really excited because we’re going down to the trail of lights, which is the city’s big outdoor thing. You normally walk it; one year Aaron and I did the 5k where you run though it, but I did that once and I’m like, that’s enough! [Amira laughs] But this year it’s drive-through, and so we’re very excited to be able to go down and participate in that, so I think that will be a lot of fun. We’ll probably sing Christmas carols as we go through it, because that sounds like a very Luther family thing. So I’m looking forward to that.
Amira: I love that. Brenda, what you got?
Brenda: I mostly tried to give my children the gift of outdoor hiking and hating on your parents during the holidays by marching them through whatever local hike I can get them to with bribes and threats of, “I’ll return all your presents.” [laughs] That’s very effective, I’ve found. So this is my chance to use the holiday spirit to get them to actually move, especially during this COVID time. So, I love taking a hike on Christmas day, New Years day, and just getting out. So, that’s kind of my tradition. I’ve heard about this new cellophane ball game…It’s not new, but that thing. I wanna try that thing, it’s new for me.
Amira: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Brenda: Okay, right, so here’s the thing: you take some cool-ass present and you start to wrap different presents into saran wrap, you know? Or cellophane, whatever.
Jessica: No, I don’t know. [laughter]
Brenda: Okay, so I just learned about this! I just learned about this. I’m super psyched about it and I’m gonna do it. Then you put little tiny presents in the cellophane ball and then you wrap it into a huge ball and you play with all the kids or whoever you’re with, and they have to unwrap it but the person has to roll doubles. So, you’re trying to unwrap it and you get all the prizes that you unwrap until the person next to you rolls a double.
Amira: Every bit of this explanation has made me more and more confused. [laughter]
Jessica: We’re gonna need a video.
Brenda: I’m gonna make a YouTube video! I could do a how-to, like a WikiHow.
Amira: So, I’m not doing that. [Jessica laughs]
Brenda: Yet! Yet!
Amira: Yet!
Brenda: You haven’t seen this amazing thing!
Amira: We’re just blobs. We’re just trying to exist, and me and Michael are in that furious, like, “Let’s finish this stuff so we can stop caring about things” phase.
Jessica: You’re not a blob! Your entire Instagram stories are you working out! [laughter] I object!
Amira: I mean, in my home gym. But I will say, of course Peloton has a lot of holiday content and best-of-2020 content and stuff like that, but I’ve been doing with the kids…So, me and the kids just did a holiday Broadway yoga. Billy Porter singing O Holy Night while you’re doing yoga to it is tops, let me tell you. So that has been fun, and we’re gonna do gingerbread houses on Christmas eve – of course, Michael’s birthday is the 23rd, so he doesn’t like his birthday, but he’s 35, so it’s a fun year. We’re gonna drag him into festivities. All the presents are wrapped and under the tree! I got them under the tree. We don’t do…I don’t know, if you have children who are listening who still believe in things, pause it. We don’t do that at our house. [laughs] Mostly because I want credit for the hard work that I did to get my kids things! [Jessica laughs]
But also, every year I wrap most of the presents but I leave one thing out so that if they choose to want to believe Santa brought them one thing. Whatever, cool. My older kids don’t really care, so we’ve all been kind of at least doing the pretense of it for Zachary. Zachary was watching a show the other day and he goes, “Ugh! This is a lie, because Santa’s not real.” And we were like, what do you mean?! [laughs] So, the older kids have decided that they’re going to make him believe in Santa. I was like, can we all..If nobody in this house cares, we don’t need to make him care. But they have decided that they are personally invested this holiday season in bringing back Zachary’s holiday spirit. So it’s been a lot of extra dramatic festivities and Zachary is completely unbothered by it.
Alright y’all, I don’t even know how exactly to wrap up a year like 2020. We talked about this a little bit last week when we talked about SI’s terrible Sportsperson of the Year list, but this is the time for all of those lists. One of the things I mentioned was that it was just so hard to make a normal list in such an abnormal year. But I did wanna try to at least have a discussion with y’all as we sit here at the end of this wild, rollercoaster year, to look back on things that were memorable, things that were surprising, things that we have learned during this time. So, let’s try to end this year that was. There was a lot of surprising things this year, I know, but what surprised you the most? Jessica.
Jessica: Yeah, I found this incredibly difficult to do. I actually went back and I tried to find something earlier in the year, pre-pandemic, that surprised me a lot. I came across the AP’s reporting about how the Saints, the NFL team, colluded with the Catholic church to cover up the church’s sexual abuse. It was actually my burn back in late January on episode 143, and I had just forgotten how incredibly shocked I was by this whole thing. So, as I did then, please indulge me and let me just read the first two sentences of the AP’s reporting, because that’s all you need. Quote, “The New Orleans Saints are going to court to keep the public from seeing hundreds of emails that allegedly show team executives doing public relations damage control for the area’s Roman Catholic archdiocese to help it contain the fallout from a burgeoning sexual abuse crisis. Attorneys for about two dozen men suing the church say in court filings that the 276 documents they obtained through discovery show that the NFL team, whose owner is devoutly Catholic, aided the Archdiocese of New Orleans in its pattern and practice of concealing its crimes.”
Part of this is just that is shocking all by itself, and then it just doesn’t matter! It’s the perfect microcosm of how little we care about what these teams do, right? We could talk about that all through COVID, but here’s just a perfect example of the really gross way that these teams operate. So, I’m gonna put that down as one of my most surprising things. But then of course I have to just say the Washington NFL Team changing its name was genuinely surprising.
Amira: Absolutely. I will riff off of that because I think that what most surprised me was that we hit some line in the sand where all of a sudden this iteration of Black death and protest led to actual movement on things that people have been protesting for decades. So, you have the Washington football name change, you recently have the Cleveland baseball team change their name, you had the Mississippi state flag change – which for me was wild! And one of the big pushes was Kylin Hill and other college players, unpaid college laborers in this state, said I’m not playing another game for Mississippi State under that Dixie flag. People have been saying that…Literally, I’m a historian! I’m in the archives of people saying that same thing in the 70s, you know?
It just hasn’t mattered, and all of a sudden this year this became…I’ve asked myself this question over and over again, particularly after George Floyd, because it wasn’t even the first video of a Black man losing his life while saying “I can’t breathe” that we’ve seen on camera. But yet – and that’s probably why it’s so surprising – it’s because it feels like we’ve been here before, we’ve seen this before, but there’s some switch that flipped. The name changes, the flag, even NASCAR going as far to ban the Confederate flag…I mean, enforcing it will be another thing, but remember they couldn’t even get it banned, they never even took that step after Dylann Roof wearing a Confederate flag murdered 9 people in a church! So, I think that all of those things together were definitely the most surprising thing for me. Bren?
Brenda: Yeah, this was so hard because all of these things were really surprising to me. Any kind of change that was gonna happen, especially during this administration, the Trump administration, during this moment which was a very contentious election year, I just…All of it was surprising to me, and also because I wasn’t going anywhere that’s all I was paying attention to. So, I was surprised all day, in good and bad ways all the time, I felt like. [laughs] So, it’s like, “What surprised you?” The whole damn year! But one thing in terms of thinking about international politics and the global impact of Black Lives Matter was the Chilean constitutional movement. So, in 2019 Chilean students started a massive protest movement that resulted in the very conservative president, Sebastián Piñera, having to concede – not resign! He almost had to resign, but instead of resigning he said okay, I’ll give into the demand that we rewrite the entire constitution. That to me was just, wow! I mean, it’s a dictator’s constitution, it was done by Augusto Pinochet in 1980.
I mean, it’s just amazing to think about what it means, and then they went a step further and made gender parity among the constituents mandatory. That means it will be the first constitution in world history that has equal participation of women writing it. That is totally a reflection of the last five years of the feminist movement. That was shocking to me. It’s a model, I think, for everybody. I think we should look at it really carefully. Now they’ve said there’s mandatory seats for Indigenous people, and again, direct action is a really important component of this. The sports figures that have stepped up…I’ve studied their history over 120 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it. You know, Jean Beausejour, who’s half Mapuche and half Haitian descent, will be one of the constituent representatives, the famous Chilean national soccer player. That’s just…Wow! I’m wow about that.
Amira: Hand in hand with surprise – sometimes there’s overlap – but what has been the most memorable thing, good or bad? I know for me I think about March a lot. We all have been living in this for many months now, but I think about that week when sports first shut down. I don’t know if anybody’s gone down YouTube rabbit holes like I do all the time, but one of the things that I return back to watch a few times are clips from Big Brother Canada, I guess, because they’re in a house, they’re locked down, they don’t know what’s happening in the outside world. So there’s this series of updates they’re given about COVID-19, and the first one’s explaining to them what it is, it’s rather benign. The second one is reading them how it’s spreading, and they’re crying and they’re shocked. The third one is shutting them down because they’re a big gathering. I always think about like for us, since we were getting the news it was constant and it was fast and it just kind of piled up. You didn’t really have time. But when I look back at it I think that week especially, like when the NBA and then all of a sudden March Madness, I remember we even recorded something earlier in the week that was like, “Will they or will they not play March Madness? What will it be like without the fans?” That was our discussion, and within like 48 hours it had been canceled, the NBA had stopped. It’s kind of wild to even still think about, and I think for many people who had kind of been hearing this or weren’t paying attention to the news sports stopping was the signal, like, this was something to take notice of. This was gonna fundamentally impact everybody, change ways of life, shut things down. I think it really was sports grinding to a stop that signaled we are approaching something unprecedented. So, I don’t think I’ll ever forget that. Brenda?
Brenda: I mean, the March Madness, just to think about that for a minute, I know how much of NCAA revenue that was. I remember calculating it and being like, there’s no way that these people will not find an angle to do this. So, you saw them hedging and hedging and hedging and hedging and putting it off and putting different things forward. When they finally called that I was like, alrighty! You know? Now nobody’s going anywhere for a while. [laughs] That was, for me…Just working at the university, that meant we’re not going back. If they’re not going back we’re not going back, and we’re done, and we’re done for fall and we’re probably done for spring. I also think throughout that period I was really tense about the election in ways that even though we were talking about it on the show and we were talking about how the Trump campaign was mobilizing that “Should sports be on? Should sports not be on” as a way to kind of comment on COVID more generally. It just amped up everything I felt about sports and politics [laughs] in a sort of really disturbing way. I’d really like to just appreciate as the year ends, I mean…It’s not a partisan show because we’re not promoting any one particular party. But man, I’m so glad he lost. To never have to think about…Ojalá, never!
Amira: Right. [laughs]
Brenda: But to think to yourself that a sports team could actually win something and my immediate thought won’t be, “Are they going to go to the White House, and how will this fascist president support or not support this team? Or use or not use this thing?” The prospect of that is like a shiny light at the end of the tunnel.
Amira: Absolutely. I mean, I just think about what you said…I think you’re right and that I didn’t realize either how anxious I was about it until that day and that week where I wasn’t eating, wasn’t sleeping, and it just felt like something cracked. Oh my gosh! The hellscape we’ve been living through. Jess, what’s memorable for you?
Jessica: I know, that elevated my heart rate just even thinking about all of that. I will say, again, really difficult to answer this. But I will never forget where I was when I learned that Kobe Bryant died.
Amira: Yes.
Jessica: I know on episode 144 we did a really deep dive into everything around Kobe and all of our complicated and conflicted thoughts about that, but it was so jarring. That’s one of those things that I just feel like whenever I look back on it I will remember exactly where I was sitting and what was happening when I got that news, because it just felt otherworldly in some way. The other thing that I find incredibly memorable was I saw that the Bucks were not gonna take the court, and I didn't believe it.
Commentator: This game should technically be starting in about three minutes or so, and nobody’s on the floor. It’s very empty here in the arena…
Jessica: I ran to my television to turn on NBA TV so that I could follow it, which…Was that the only time this year maybe that I ran to my television to follow something in the moment?
Sterling Brown: We are calling for justice for Jacob Blake and demand the officers be held accountable.
Jessica: I just was riveted following along and seeing all of those dominos and just, again, there’s a visceral quality to those two memories that I will carry with me forever probably.
Amira: Then also what’s terrible about that for me is I still am surprised by it. I’m probably once a week, like, “Kobe Bryant’s dead.”
Jessica: Yeah. When I see pictures of Gianna, like, every time I get…
Amira: Every single time.
Jessica: There’s still an arresting moment.
Amira: And on top of that it’s because for me one of the most memorable things about this year is just unrelenting death, like, every day it’s people we know, we don’t know, it’s another thread about somebody. My colleague at Ohio State, Hasan Jeffries, wrote a stirring thread to his Aunt Bea who just became one of the over 300,000 people we’ve lost to COVID-19 in this country. Check out that thread, I’ll link it in the show notes. But it’s like Chadwick Boseman – Kobe and Chadwick were the ones that made me sit straight up, like, that disbelief. Naya Rivera, Alex Trebek…There’s just so many people whose names we know, whose names we don’t know, every day. I don’t know if you can even quantify that type of memory, but I think of that when I think of 2020, alongside of the abnormality, I think of death, and I hate that. I hate that. Well, that got dark. But I do want to know out of this year, out of this mayhem, what have you learned? What will you take with you? What have you learned from a book, from a podcast, from a sporting – what have you learned? Lindsay, I just wanna give a shoutout to my co-host here, as soon as I asked this she was like, “I’ve learned a lot about pandemics and testings and protocols, more than I ever thought I would need to know to cover sports.” True! Absolutely, we’ve all become minor epidemiologists in many ways! [laughter] But other than that, Bren, what have you learned this year?
Brenda: I mean, in terms of specifics I guess one of the things that I feel really lucky about in my life is NGO-ing, podcasting, professoring – my job is to learn all the time. So, I do feel like this is an impossible question in part. On the funny side I’ve learned that there’s no end to my students’ grade complaints, [Amira laughs] no matter if there’s 300,000 people dying! This is the most important thing at 1am on a Saturday to approach me about! Love you, students. In terms of other specifics, I do think one of the shows that stood out to me was Crip Camp on Netflix, which was recommended to me by my sister, who is quadriplegic, and my brother, who is gay. So, what it basically does it show…It’s this touching upstate New York summer camp for the disabled and it shows the intersection that grew between the Black Panthers, the LGBTQ community, and disability rights activists in the 1970s. It really blew my mind! That’s something I didn’t know and I’ve studied all those things, and so I was really grateful for the recommendation.
Also, from doing the Fare report on minority representation in US Soccer with Jermaine Scott, I learned how sophisticated is this generation of young Black soccer players, how strategic and how invested they were in community relationships. I always learn from all of you how to say things better, ask questions better, and think better, so I feel like I’m always learning a lot. I guess if there’s any big big abstract takeaway, I’ve learned more patience about everything, you know? Not traveling like I usually do, I have to sit still a whole lot, which just is really not my natural state. So I’ve learned that.
Amira: I would echo that. It’s been a hard lesson. [Brenda laughs] I can’t say I’ve welcomed it with open arms…
Brenda: No! [laughs] Not at all!
Amira: Exactly! But learning how to sit still, to be an active listener; to have patience with myself, with the kids, with all of it; to have grace with myself. Those have been big lessons, I think. In terms of BIAD I’ve really learned a lot about climate change through our climate change episode and I see it everywhere now. Like, that’s how I measure when I learn things, I see it everywhere. That’s how I feel about that episode and really being about to connect it from the Gulf Coast to Kenya to the west coast and think about wildfires and think about all these things is something that’s really stuck with me. But then also the moment at the US Open after Naomi Osaka won and she won wearing a mask with the name of a Black life that has ended too soon, and Tom Rinaldi said, “What do these masks mean to you?” And she said, “What was the message that you got?” That was just such a lesson on how to set boundaries, how to teach less when you’ve already taught, how to set your own terms for the conversation.
As someone who’s been called on many times over the last few months to explain and explain and explain again things that have already been explained and written about, to a point of exhaustion, it was just a reminder that there are ways to reframe the question and reflect it back on who’s asking to insist that there’s boundaries. [laughs] Like, Google is free, and here’s things I’ve written. Also, this is not about me, this is about learning for other people and just being able to capture those moments and realizing you don’t have to take the conversation in the way that it’s framed to you if you feel like you need to push it forward and push it further. So I would say patience, grace, and part of that grace is having the ability to ask the questions back on folks who are questioning you. Jess?
Jessica: Dang, I wish I’d gone first on this one. That was good, y’all. I was thinking as y’all were talking that, one, I learned that people are incredibly selfish in a way that I never understood before. I was thinking back on my year and I felt I was very lucky this year to get to work alongside Jon Wertheim again for a piece on the Dallas Mavericks, and then for the last few months I’ve been working alongside Kenny Jacoby and Nancy Armour and an entire team at USA Today to report on LSU. Then of course Burn It All Down all the time. It’s really something to work alongside incredibly professional people and to see them do their craft and to be able to take pieces of that with you and to make yourself better at all these things that you do. That’s always great, that kind of learning. I will say, because of the book I’ve been doing a ton of interviews and you kind of do the same interviews over and over, you know? The same kind of questions, right? So, you get good at your answers, and you also just hear yourself a lot [laughs] in a way that sucks, that’s even different than the podcast, because it is just like, oh, here I go again saying literally the same thing that I said two days ago! I just find that uncomfortable.
But I will say that it made me recognize that on episode 169 of the show we talked about ownership and sport, and like Amira was talking with climate change, it was one of those things I had never…I was like, US blinders! I had just never really considered all the different ways that ownership could work and does actually work around the world outside of the structure that I am just so used to, and I found myself talking about it! I was just like, Brenda Elsey was just like coming out of my mouth [Amira laughs] as I’m doing interviews, right? I realized that I kept wanting to talk about that. It just had an impact on me and really made me think. Those are the best, like, I find those moments so invigorating when you’re like, wow, I can’t put my brain back the way it was before and I’m so happy about it.
Amira: I loved how you phrased that “can’t put my brain back how it was before.” The last thing I wanna ask you, looking to the future – I won’t ask you to make predictions about 2021! As we know, all of our wants and needs and predictions for 2020 did not come true! [laughs] So, instead what I wanna ask you to close out this segment is: what self-care or community care practice will you be taking with you into 2021? How will you care for yourself and your loved ones and those around you? And if that’s still a lesson in process, where are you on your journey? Jess.
Jessica: Yeah, I still feel like I’m still pretty bad at this part of my life. But I will say, therapy, working out, baking, reading romance novels, in my head those are the big four. I’ve used them all year, I’m gonna continue into 2021. I wish that in this country, and the US in particular, we had better access for people for therapy. I really heavily leaned hard on my therapist at certain parts of this year in ways that I just feel incredibly thankful that I even have the ability and the means to do that – even the time to do that. I’m talking to my therapist in two days [laughs] and I was like, we gotta schedule just before Christmas to make sure that I can be ready to go into the holiday unburdened in a way that only therapy can really help me do. So I’ll definitely be keeping that up.
Amira: Bren?
Brenda: Yeah, just to speak to that, I appreciate all of the therapists out there who are also doing really hard work on Zoom. If teaching is hard on Zoom I can’t imagine what it’s like to absorb all that they’re absorbing and processing of other people over Zoom, and with the holidays coming I do really worry about people that always have kind of difficulty post-holiday comedown and what that’s gonna look like after nine months of lockdown in New York. Just like, damn. That’s worrisome. So, echoing that. What am I gonna take? Well, if running saved my life over lots of years it’s never saved my life more often than this past one, so I’ll keep on running. But this time I’ve incorporated a new twist, which is that I call people on my jogs! That’s one of my big personal growths, because I’m super notorious for not being able to call people, so this pandemic has forced me to use the phone because I can’t look at the screen anymore, I can’t use my fingers any longer.
So I call people on my jogs and they’re really nice even though it’s windy, and I’m gonna keep doing it because it makes me happy and keeps me in touch with people because we talk every day, so now I’m calling people every day and that’s a good thing. I’m gonna bake the same amount, but Jessica Luther [laughs] inspired all of my spoon cake spinoffs. It is the one cake I can eat, and I realize that people like baking because it makes other people happy and I know that’s really obvious but it never really worked for me because I don’t really like it. [Amira laughs] And now I realize that everybody else likes it! Then they get so hyped! They’re so pumped. My kids are like, SPOON CAKE! SPOON CAKE! Right?
Jessica: Yes!
Brenda: And I’m like, alrighty!
Jessica: Yes!
Brenda: You can hear in the background my daughter Julieta, “Can you make spoon cake today?!” [Amira laughs] So I’m gonna keep on doing that, and I’m gonna keep on not tweeting a whole lot because I don’t wanna really connect with most of the people on there. [laughter]
Jessica: I love you, Bren.
Amira: I love you so much! [laughs]
Brenda: Love you too.
Amira: Yeah, I think my community care practice is about communication and accountability and being able to show up for each other even if that just means simply saying, “What do you need? What can I give you right now?” I think that those things are good practices that have forced a new sense of communication, especially in a year where you can’t hug and you can’t touch, you have to get better communicating. My self-care has been very obvious, it has been riding headfirst into the Peloton cult. [Brenda laughs] It’s the best cult, and it has been wildly productive for me in a return to my body, in mental health, in the ability to literally structure my day that if you know me at all you know I’m very ADHD and it’s very hard to [laughs] do almost everything. But especially write and structure my day with the kids at home, it has been literally the thing that I frame my schedule around. But the facet within that that I think is really important because I work out so much now, and so often, I’ve really had to go into stretching and restorative yoga – and these are the things I hate! 2019 Amira would never. But I literally have had to find the value in both preparation and restoration, and I’ve been able to take that out of just Peloton and bring that to my everyday life.
So I’m trying to prepare more, I see the value in what preparation can do. I’m trying to restore myself more and really even when I don’t think my tank’s on empty. Like, I’m the type of person who waits til my gas needle is below E and my light is on to get gas. It drives my husband crazy because he never lets it go below a quarter tank, and I’m like…We were driving to see Jess in Austin and I’m just like, la la la! Having a parent-teacher conference, I’m driving down, and Michael’s like, “Do you not see that you have zero gas?” And I was like, oh yeah, I’ll just find a place to pull over! It was this huge argument, very scared, because I’m like, whatever! Because I never paid attention to it. So I’m just trying to get better, maybe not at filling my actual gas tank up earlier, but my actual self is not waiting until I hit E and burn out to slow down. So I think that that is one of the best things that Peloton has taught me that I will continue to take into 2021 when books have to be written and things like that.
We are taking a break from our weekly interviews because it’s such a busy time of year, but that does not mean that we don’t have lots of content for you to catch up on. If you haven’t caught up on our recent interviews over the last few weeks I highly recommend you check them out. Dr. Adia Benton, cultural anthropologist, chatted with Jess about COVID, sports bubbles, fandom, and where we were with the pandemic. I did a hot take with Mickey Grace, who is the LA Rams scouting apprentice and a high school football coach, and the CEO of WeCOACH, Meghan Kahn; we talked about barriers to women in coaching and women in sports generally speaking. I also interviewed Erica Dambach and Ann Cook, the head coach of women’s soccer here at Penn State, to continue our discussion on coaching. Lastly, I did a hot take this week with Howard Bryant on who really benefits from the MLB’s decision to designate the Negro Leagues as Major Leagues.
Howard: These African American players have already carried the pain and they’ve already carried the consequences of segregation, they carried it for their whole lives. Doesn’t the institution have to carry something too? Or do you just get to decide with a pen stroke that now everything’s fair?
Brenda:
Amira: Lots of interviews for you to catch up on if you haven’t yet, and we will be back [laughs] soon with regularly scheduled new content, new interviews for you. Alright y’all, it’s time to light this burn pile one last time for 2020. Jessica, what are you burning this week?
Jessica: Alright, so earlier this week the Cleveland baseball team announced that they would finally be changing their team name after decades of protest from Native and Indigenous people. They won’t actually do it for another year or so, in the same way they slowly retired the racist caricature of Chief Wahoo, but it’s a significant change nonetheless. Also, immediately after the team announced this, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue – both are Republicans running for Senate seats in Georgia, Loeffler being a co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream and who seems to live permanently up Donald Trump’s ass, [Amira laughing] and Perdue being a man who is apparently too scared to show up to debates against his opponent – they released a joint statement in support of the Atlanta MLB team’s name. Quote, “We adamantly oppose any effort to rename the Atlanta Braves, one of our state’s most storied and successful sports franchises. Not only are the Braves a Georgia institution – with a history spanning 54 years in Atlanta – they’re an American institution.” They say the normal garbage excuse for Native mascotry, which is that this name somehow “honors” Native heritage. This is all political bullshit, of course.
This is also just a very funny and ridiculous statement because Native people have been on this land for literal millennia, so the phrase “a history spanning 54 years” is so laughable. I read that and I thought, that’s it? Only 54 years? It’s important to recognize that it’s not just the name, it’s all the shit that goes along with it, especially the racist tomahawk chant that they do at the games. On episode 128 back in October of 2019 we dug into the Atlanta team’s name, so if this is of interest to you I suggest you check that out. We talked about it then because Atlanta and St. Louis were meeting in the NLDS and Ryan Helsley, a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and a member of the Cherokee nation, criticized the Atlanta team’s use of the tomahawk chop during their game, saying about the chant and everything surrounding it, “It's about the misconception of us, the Native Americans, and it devalues us and how we're perceived in that way or used as mascots.”
Atlanta has acknowledged repeatedly that the tomahawk chant in particular is bad and they shouldn’t use it, including in response to Helsley in 2019 and earlier this summer after the Washington NFL Team changed their name. The team knows this all sucks and yet they don’t care enough to actually do anything. Loeffler and Perdue of course of course of course are happy to exploit that for their own political gain. In response to Loeffler and Perdue’s statement about the team, Cherokee nation principal chief Chuck Hoskin Jr told CBS news, “While some team names may not appear derogatory or offensive as others, the usage and imagery misrepresents the culture of our people. All across the United States, fans embrace stereotypes of American Indians — war bonnets, face paint, crying war chants and making tomahawk-chopping gestures — and mock our culture as though we are vestiges of the past. This does not honor Cherokee traditions, nor do they honor our fellow Native brothers and sisters.” Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: Okay Bren, go ahead.
Brenda: Okay. This week friend of the show Jules Boykoff tipped me off to the fact that there had been the release of the Paris 2024 Games program – apparently I don’t follow the IOC closely enough to see this type of information! So this week Paris 2024 president Tony Estanguet claimed this program highlighted gender equality. To be fair, it’s the first Olympic Games that will have equal places for men and women: 5500 each. But not in the world’s most popular sport it won’t! Once again the women’s slot in the soccer tournament will remain 12, compared to 16 for the men. The women’s tournament was started in 1996 with only 8 teams because the IOC and FIFA figured there wouldn’t be enough talent and there would be a general lack of interest. I would think that by now they would reconsider such claims in terms of women’s soccer, especially on the heels of the 2019 World Cup, but no. Let me tell you the second thing that just pisses me off: not only is there this weird kind of gender equality, which is just we have these spaces rather than taking a qualitative look at what that would mean. In addition to it it just has this amazing way to continue to perpetuate the dominance of the US…Well, North America, I should really say, and Europe, because in those 12 spots there’s only…Okay, I can say it’s okay to have 1.5 for South America, I guess. But to have 1.5 – and by the 0.5 that means South America has to have a playoff with Africa – but to have 1.5 slots for a continent that has 56 countries in which there is tons of women’s soccer…Stop! That's the worst! That’s the worst. So, I wanna burn the ongoing ineptitude and superficiality of the IOC’s promises for gender equality. I want to complain, because FIFA has a lot to do with this, that they are complicit in ongoing stupidity around gender equity, and that they continue to kind of push a tacit racist and imperialist agenda. So, I wanna burn all that. Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: I’ve talked over the last week about Florida basketball player Keyontae Johnson and I’m so pleased that he’s sitting up, he’s breathing on his own, he’s talking. He recorded a video thanking everybody for their well wishes…That’s just an exhale, it’s just a breath there to say I’m so glad that he is on the road to recovery. What I wasn’t pleased to see while he was in a medically induced coma: the NCAA retweeting and amplifying the Florida basketball account saying if you really want to help Keyontae send letters to Keyontae. So they started a campaign called Letters for Keyontae, saying this will help with his healing – write him letters, here’s the address. Now, this sent me up a wall. For his team, for his family to say hey, send letters – that’s one thing. For NCAA, who loves to pretend that they don’t have power when they actually could use their power for good, jumps in the fray to say, “Hey, if you want to help, send letters.” No! Keyontae doesn’t need your letters, he needs worker’s compensation. [laughs] That’s just straight up what it is.
If you recall, the reason why we even have the term “student athletes” is because so many people who got injured, who even died playing collegiate sports, became a liability to schools and to the NCAA, so they came up with this fun little term "student athlete” to deny them worker’s compensation so they could point and say, no, they didn’t get injured performing a job, they got injured as students who happen to be athletes. This has held up in court even though the person who came up with that legal justification in the 80s before he died was like, “No no no no no no no, y’all took it too far! I didn’t mean that to be binding forever, you’ve gone way past the point.” I couldn’t help thinking about this again this week because it’s unclear who’s footing the bill for his hospital bill. It’s unclear how much the school gets covered. He’s being transferred from hospitals; a lot of that secretly ends up falling to the families because, again, they are not covered legally by the same way that if you or I were hurt and we all are workers for the university, Brenda – if you or I or Jess was hurt doing work for the university and being able to claim worker’s compensation, you know that you’re protected in some ways. That’s something that Keyontae Johnson does not have the luxury of having.
So for the NCAA in this moment where they have done shit all to stop COVID’s spread within their jurisdictions, they’ve done shit all to protect players’ health and safety. If they even right now are pretending to give a damn about players and health and safety of one of their star players and the best they can come up with is to amplify a request for fucking letters? This organization is useless upon useless. They have so much power and yet will never wield it in a way that could do any kind of fucking good. They just are here to harm, harm, harm, and take, and have the audacity to sit up here and tell us that a fucking letter is gonna pay bills and help somebody get better. [sighs]
It wouldn’t be a burn pile to close out the year if we weren’t throwing the NCAA on it in some way, so I would like to throw them on for this. Again, Keyontae Johnson, I’m glad you’re okay. He does not need letters, he needs worker’s compensation, and he needs to be able to play under a governing institution that actually gives a damn about his health and safety. Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: After all that burning it’s time to highlight some torchbearers of the week. First, honorable mentions, and I’ll start first. I wanna shout out Jackson He, who is an American football player for Arizona State University. He was born in China and last week he became the first Chinese-born player to both carry the ball and score a touchdown in Arizona’s 70-7 victory over whatever team they were playing.
Amira: Not only did he break barriers in that way, he did so while rocking a jersey with his name spelled out in the Chinese characters, which drew a lot of attention and I thought was really cool. He said after, “I never thought that was gonna happen. It was a surprise and honor to have my actual name on the back of my jersey. It really means a lot, I appreciate the equipment room for doing that to me.” He was wearing a custom shirt that said, “Chinese people can ball too.” So congratulations, Jackson, on being a barrier-breaker on your touchdown. He walked on to the football team last year, but also as he said, being a role model for Chinese youth around the world, you certainly can ball too. Next up for torchbearers, Jess, what do we have for the “things that took to long but we are happy to see” variety?
Jessica: We’re thrilled that Cleveland will be dropping and replacing their team name, that the MLB is finally recognizing that the Negro Leagues were Major Leagues – a specific huge thank you to Native and Indigenous activists who have protested the Cleveland baseball team’s name for many decades, and to the historians and families of the Negro League players who have long advocated for more attention to the Negro Leagues. Again, make sure you check out Amira’s hot take this past week with Howard Bryant for more on the Negro Leagues and the MLB.
Amira: Alright, Bren: what do we have as our referee of the week?
Brenda: Well, referee of the week has to go to Kathryn Nesbitt, the first woman to officiate a championship match in professional men's sport in North America when she officiated the MLS Cup this year.
Amira: And can I get a drumroll please?
[drumroll]
Have to do it my damn self! [laughs] Our torchbearer of the week, of course, goes to Coach Tara VanDerveer who surpassed Pat Summitt for the most victories in Division 1 women’s basketball with 1099 victories when #1 Stanford won 104-61 over Pacific. VanDerveer passed Summitt, of course who was a legendary coach at Tennessee, and obviously has the whole season to continue to add to this record. Phenomenal coach, of course will be a hall of famer, and it’s been so great to watch all of her players past and present celebrate her this week. Chiney Ogwumike wrote a wonderful op-ed about celebrating her coach’s huge milestone, so from us here at Burn It All Down to Coach VanDerveer: congratulations on the record books, you are our torchbearer of the week.
Alright y’all, what is good in your worlds? Bren.
Brenda: I feel like I’ve exhausted all of my positivity [laughter] throughout the show! Okay, okay, I’ve got one. I got one. Well, I loved our secret Santa, BIAD holiday party, which was really really really fun. Yeah, I got a cool present, so our producer Martin Kessler got me, and I got a cool shirt. I had asked for a not so awesome looking sweater…I don’t think we’re allowed to say ugly sweater anymore. So I got actual, literal fascism, which came from one of our episodes where Amira and I were complaining about politics.
Brenda: We are on the brink of actual fascism.
Amira: Actual, literal fascism.
Brenda: Actual, literal fascism!
Brenda: I feel like that really worked for us.
Amira: Great banter.
Brenda: It was great call and response. So, I would like to also say that I’m excited for my children getting their holiday presents because we are bored and we need things to do and I refused to buy them anything for like a month because it’s coming up, so I’m psyched to have some cool new things to do, games and whatnot.
Julieta, off-mic: I could hear all of it. [Amira laughs] And when are you gonna make a spoon cake?
Jessica: Please keep that.
Amira: As Brenda tries and fails to keep surprises from her kids. [laughs] Well, I have to say that I loved our first annual BIAD holiday party. It was a lot of fun. We found out that me and our producer Tressa have the same exact birthday, like literal June 4th 1988. It’s very exciting. I just had a lovely time gathering, I actually dressed up, kind of. I put on a bright shiny ornamental shirt. But it was fun to break bread with all of you guys and get some presents. Shireen got me a Goodnight Peloton book – love that! [laughter] Also, it’s my husband’s birthday in three days. He hates celebrating his birthday, he especially hates that he’s turning 35. I will be safe talking about it here because I don’t think he’s gonna listen to this episode before his birthday but if he does we’ll find out! So I will take this space to say happy birthday, Michael. I am thrilled that you were born, obviously, and I will take every moment to celebrate you because you are a rockstar. Jessica?
Jessica: Yeah, so, I also enjoyed our secret Santa, it was very fun. I met Lindsay Gibbs many years ago on the Twitter because we both love tennis a whole lot, and so Lindsay got me the Olympia Ohanian doll, the Qai Qai doll that she is famous for carrying around with her everywhere, so that was very sweet and very tied into my long history with Lindsay. I’m excited about taking a break. [laughs] Just having a little downtime. One of the things that’s good is I really loved The Mandalorian season finale, so if anyone wants to talk to me about that that was wonderful. Then I’m super looking forward to Christmas day because we get Wonder Woman 1984 on HBO, we get Soul on Disney+, and then we get Bridgerton, which is a Netflix series based on a very famous romance novel, The Duke and I by Julia Quinn. I am just so thrilled to watch a sexy, steamy historical romance with a diverse cast on Netflix, starting on Christmas. So that’s what’s good.
Amira: That’s also what we’re watching this week. [laughs] So, there you go. [Brenda laughs] There you have it, y’all. Well, I just wanna remind everybody that this will be the last full Burn It All Down of 2020, but as a reminder we have two best-of shows airing the next two weeks of the year to round out the year. The first will be our best-of segments which will feature our favorite segments of the year all put together in one nice little episode for you and tied with a bow, and we follow that up with our best-of interviews. So check those out when they drop over the next two weeks and we will return in the new year with more content, more burnable things, more torchbearers to highlight and all of that jazz. So that’s it for this episode of Burn It All Down, on behalf of me and Jessica and Brenda.
This episode was produced by Martin Kessler, of course; Shelby Weldon is our social media and website person, and also shoutout to Tressa who produces our interview episodes. You can listen and subscribe to Burn It All Down on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, anywhere you get your podcasts. We’re on Instagram @burnitalldownpod, on Twitter @burnitdownpod. Check out our website for previous episodes, transcripts, links to our show notes. You can also from there go directly to our Patreon as well as our Teespring store for late presents, for new year’s joy. Once again, thank you to all our patrons who support us, to all flamethrowers who listen and who have been on this wild ride with us. It has been another wonderful year for our Burn It All Down community and we look forward to burning on but not out, and we’ll see you in 2021, flamethrowers.