Episode 193: Being A Woman In A Man's World
This episode is dedicated to Shanda Renee Johnson. Recent publication of the sexual harassment of female journalists in baseball prompted Lindsay, Amira and Brenda to discuss their experiences working in male-dominated fields, the challenges of which are compounded by race. They talk about the historical leadership of Black women speaking out, like that of Civil Rights Activist and current Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, the importance of self-made communities for survival and the need for consistent accountability for perpetrators of sexual assault, harassment and racism to create change. Then they burn more news from sports that needs to be burned, celebrate those bringing light, including Torchbearer of the Week Toni Breidinger and share what's good and what they're watching: The Australian Open!!
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Links
Five women accuse Mickey Callaway of lewd behavior: https://theathletic.com/2360126/2021/02/01/mickey-callaway-mets-lewd-behavior
New York Mets GM Jared Porter acknowledges sending explicit images to female reporter when he worked for Chicago Cubs: https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/30737248/ny-mets-gm-jared-porter-acknowledges-sending-explicit-images-female-reporter
Transcript
Amira: I would like to dedicate this episode of Burn It All Down to my godmother, Shanda Renee Johnson, the woman who taught my mom how to braid hair on a Cabbage Patch doll so I didn’t look a mess; taught me how to play cards, Taboo; how to shake a tambourine; taught me how to love, and open doors, and treat everybody like family, love them fiercely, and make the world a better place. Renee joined the 484,000 people in the United States who’ve lost their lives to COVID, two weeks ago. I’m rejoicing that you are free from pain, but you did not deserve this. This country failed you. I love you very much, and we will miss you. Sleep well.
Lindsay: Hi flamethrowers, Lindsay here. I wanna thank Amira for the beautiful opening, and wanna keep everyone who has lost loved ones close to our hearts this week. Also wanna wish everyone a Black History Month, and I wanna give a quick shoutout…I usually don’t do this at the top of the show, but Athletes Unlimited softball just released a great documentary series hosted by friend of the show Ari Chambers about the Black players and their league and about being Black athletes in softball, and I just recommend everyone checking that out. It’s in our show notes, and it’s just a great watch, for sure.
This week on the show I’m joined by Amira and Brenda. Once again, they’ve left me alone with the professors, so we’ll just see how this goes. See if I can survive, see if I’m on my best behavior! Hopefully I will not be getting a grade at the end of this episode, [laughs] but we’re gonna be talking about being women in a man’s world, essentially. There have been a lot of sexual harassment talk for women in media, specifically related to baseball, and we just kind of wanted to use that as a starting point for a conversation about sexual harassment in the workplace, and of course all the intersectional ways that impacts our lives, and kind of where we can go from here.
Amira: How many stories are not written because people are like, “I don’t wanna deal with harassment today,” or “I don’t wanna do this” – particularly I think about Black women, like, what isolation do you choose? It’s like choose your own adventure.
Lindsay: But first, look…We’re in the middle of the Australian Open and that means it’s Serena Williams time, and that means it’s time to talk not only about her play on the court, which has been phenomenal so far – we’re recording this on Sunday, right after she defeated Sabalenka in the fourth round and make it to the quarterfinals. But she’s wearing something fabulous again, and so I just had to ask my co-hosts: what is your favorite Serena Williams tennis outfit of all time? Amira?
Amira: Yeah, I think it’s the current one. I think it’s this Flo-Jo inspired Nike one-legged catsuit that she’s currently wearing in the Australian Open.
Serena Williams: Her outfits were always amazing, and so this year we thought, “What can we do to keep elevating the Serena Williams on the court?” and the Nike team actually thought of this design, of inspiration from Flo-Jo, and I was like, oh my god, this is brilliant. So brilliant.
Amira: It’s not really a surprise. It’s Flo-Jo and Serena. And her ass in that catsuit is magnificent, and it’s sittin. I mean, that thing is SITTIN! So, yeah, I would have to say it’s this current one.
Lindsay: That’s a good choice. It’s a very good one. Bren, what about you?
Brenda: I covet to this day what she wore 21 years ago – what!? I don’t even believe that’s real! At the 2000 Australian Open she wore a color block Puma outfit that I would wanna wear at every single occasion in my life if I could get my hands on it, and I wouldn’t do it justice, but it's just so cool and clean, like the lines of it, and it looks so comfy, and it would just pack everything in right. So, that’s mine.
Lindsay: I was actually going back through time and looking at all the Puma stuff from the early days and falling in love with it as well, Bren. [Brenda laughs] Obviously anything catsuit-related is legendary, but I have a special place in my heart for the denim skirt that she wore, [laughs] the denim and the crop top. I think it was really really ahead of its time. Honestly, let’s bring it back, right? Because now there’s jeggings, right? The denim look doesn’t have to be real denim, you know? [Brenda laughs] So that's very in right now. I think have Serena Williams to thank for that, I really really do. So, I think that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately, but honestly they’re all just so great. Well, okay – not ALL of them. There have been some missteps. [laughs] I love her, but we have to be honest.
Alright, so, in January, ESPN reporters Mina Kimes and Jeff Passan reported that New York Mets general manager Jared Porter had sent explicit, unsolicited texts and images to a female reporter in 2016, culminating with a very explicit photo. The woman, who was a foreign correspondent who had moved to the United States to cover Major League Baseball, at once point ignored 60 straight text messages from porter before he sent the final explicit photo. After the report came out, Porter was fired from his job as the general manager of the New York Mets, but of course that wasn’t the end of the conversation.
This month Brittany Ghiroli and Katie Strang at The Athletic reported about Mickey Callaway, the former New York Mets manager and current pitching coach for the Los Angeles Angels. They said that he had aggressively pursued at least 5 women who work in sports media, sending 3 of them inappropriate photographs, asking one of them to send nude photos in return. He explicitly made comments on their appearance that made them incredibly uncomfortable, at one point making her physically uncomfortable as she interviewed him, doing her job. So, the 5 women who spoke to The Athletic under the condition of anonymity said that these actions spanned five years, multiple cities, and three teams. More than that, they were warned about his behavior from fellow media members who worked in baseball. One of the women said it was the worst kept secret in sports.
I wanna read something that friend of the show Lindsey Adler, who is a Yankees reporter for The Athletic, wrote. Lindsey said, “What I would like to be clear to people who care about baseball is that for every Jared Porter or Mickey Callaway, there are 200 otherwise good people brushing off smaller sexist insults and indignities. Processing the gender imbalance is a daily practice.” She wrote this in a piece for The Athletic back in January.
She said, “From my perspective, being a woman in the sport is hard to describe. It’s both difficult and totally fine at the same time. Sexism is often tough to describe, to convey, to make credible to people who don’t experience it themselves. I find value in people being outright misogynistic to me instead of subtly condescending in a way that makes me wonder if I am being talked down to because I am a woman, because I am a small-ish young-ish person, or if the person I’m talking to is just an asshole. Sexism is nebulous. It’s insidious. People often think of it like some sort of wrecking ball: Clear to see, totally destructive. It’s not a wrecking ball. It’s some sort of airborne particle. It floats around and we live in its world, not the other way around.”
So, I should mention Callaway has been suspended, but not officially fired from the Los Angeles Angels. But I just wanna talk about that. I’m a woman in sports media, we all are to some extent. I also know academia can be an incredibly male-dominated field, especially history and historians. So, I kind of want to open up to a discussion about that, about how we’ve handled it, and about what we think going forward.
First, I wanna say of course that this is nothing new. In baseball in particular, if we’re talking about baseball, female reporters weren’t even allowed into locker rooms until Melissa Ludtke’s lawsuit in 1978, which is pretty startling to think about, and even to this day there’s still people arguing that women should not be reporting in men’s locker rooms, even though it is a place of business, right? That is where they’ve decided that that is where you go to get quotes, right? If they didn’t want people in the locker room, well, there are tons of sports where you don’t go into the locker room to get quotes, where the players meet you outside afterwards. That could be an option. But they’ve decided it’s a place of business.
But anyways, I just wanted to throw it I guess first to Brenda – I know you’ve done a lot of studies about the formal workplace from a historical perspective, and how sexual harassment has been dealt with.
Brenda: Yeah. I think that the quote about “it’s pervasive and nebulous,” the idea that we’re living in that world and that it’s around us all the time is really so powerful and wonderful…Wonderfully articulated, not wonderful that we’re living here. [laughter] But it is important to recognize that there's so much grassroots activity that has brought this to light and has created structures for us to use, even if they’re incomplete. So, anti-sexual harassment campaigns came right out of the civil rights movement as well as the feminist movement in the 1960s. There’s this idea as women moved into the formal workplace it caused more and more, in a professional sense, of these cases to be able to concretize, right? So, the Cornell case in 1975 is very famous, where the woman was persistently sexually harassed as a staff member at Cornell and then fired, and so there were some very clear cut cases because they were in formal workplaces. We can get into the ways in which that protected a certain privileged kind of woman vis à vis the more vulnerable women who have always worked in the non-formal workplace.
But in any case, in the 1970s a lot of different organizations and lawyers began to take these cases to court, and I think we should just recognize Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was then in 1970 the assistant legal director of the ACLU and a civil rights activist, who came up with…I mean, not single-handedly, but certainly a tremendous amount of work using the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for gender discrimination under Title VII of the civil rights act in 1964. The statute says that employers cannot discriminate against their workers based on race, religion or sex – and sex just got in there at the end! [laughs] Like, it almost just wasn’t even in there. So, Norton was appointed the first woman chair of New York City’s human rights commission. She remains the delegate – I know this will be close to Lindsay’s heart – from DC to Congress.
So, this was amazing in terms of her and the rest of her colleagues trying to push this forward. I think we have a big debt to pay, and also just to think about the cost, the personal cost, for some of these women in their careers. I mean, I think about Anita Hill, right? 1991. Think about the fact though that once she filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the number of complaints doubled within like two years. So, just to kind of shout out some of that history, I think it’s really important when we’re thinking about how do we even have a basis. So, there’s one thing when it’s nebulous and we know how insidious that is, and then there’s the whole legal thing, which is just the tip of the iceberg.
Lindsay: Amira?
Amira: Yeah, I’m really happy that you mentioned Eleanor Holmes Norton, because Norton was a Black woman who also formed a group about African American women for reproductive freedom, and was really one of many Black women who had come out of the civil rights movement and were kind of marginalized, sidelined within women’s liberation, and moving into the 70s and 80s started forming their own groups that sought to talk about both racial and sex-based discrimination, and couple that under civil rights laws and really push for legislation in these areas. I think it’s really important because it’s part of this notion that Black women are the canary in the mines, that if you do what’s right for Black women it’s gonna raise all boats, right? For Black people, for white women as well. I think this is important, and for me personally to start the conversation, because when I think of this I can’t entangle it from race.
Even as we’re talking about places of employment and sexual harassment, it’s very hard for me to even wrap my head around that without thinking about the fact that a lot of this gets professionalized as white women are moving into the workforce towards the back half of the 20th century, because Black women who predominantly worked in precarious labor positions in households as domestics, right? One of the biggest things of their job was trying to avoid being sexually harassed and raped by white employers. It also reminds me, in Black women’s history, we kind of have these twin peaks of understanding between testimony, right? So, the long history of Black women like Eleanor Norton, like Anita Hill, who speak up, who testify, who use their voice to raise the issue and to push back on this. We know there’s a long history there.
It’s Black History Month, I’ll give you a book recommendation: go check out Danielle L. McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street, about the Montgomery bus boycott. One of the things she does is show you that Rosa Parks was a rape justice advocate who toured the country getting justice for Black women, but it also shows you that the Montgomery bus boycott was about bodily autonomy and led by Black women. But the reason why I mention that is because the other peak, the other kind of pole of understanding, is something that Darlene Clark Hine calls the culture of dissemblance, which speaks to another long history, which is of Black women who don't say anything, particularly when it means that it might cast aspersions or have consequences for Black men.
When Lindsay was talking about baseball and I think about my research in baseball, this is also what I came back to. I think about the historical subjects I write about who were in baseball as athletes and as reporters, and I’ll be in the archive and I’ll see somebody saying the strike zone is “pussy high” or I’ll read about an anecdote of some reporter talking about Effa Manley, somebody talking about her “womanly wiles,” or seeing Toni’s face in Buster Haywood’s lap, or somebody “running their glove up a body” as somebody sliding into second. And then I’ll go to the women’s words and they’ll say, “They were like 26 brothers to me.” And I see that culture of dissemblance in action, and I feel like that for me, that area between those two things, is very much on my mind, the forefront of my mind, when we talk about what survival looks like in these male-dominated work spaces, in these white work spaces. How do you survive? We know that testimony has a lot of consequences, and I think dissemblance has just as many.
Brenda: I think that is so…I mean, one of the things about that too is the way in which globally that's true, about anti-Blackness and the way in which women are in these positions. Just to briefly mention for people who don’t know, other recent pervasive sexual harassment has occurred in both the Barbados football association and the Haitian football association. These cases have been going on for two decades, and part of the problem is that in these Caribbean cultures which also grapple with racism and hierarchy the women have had to face that same question: these are Black men in powerful positions, if I’m doing this it has another context that’s just laden…If I’m gonna speak out and I’m gonna go through a court system that I already don’t trust, that’s already stacked against me, and now I have to do it in a very public way and in a way I might be accused of “tearing down” some professional Black men. So, it’s interesting for me to hear, and I see a lot of parallels with what’s going on in global football as well.
Lindsay: Yeah, and we look at this from a structural point of view which is so important, and then there’s also the deeply deeply personal. I know for me, hearing from my friends who work in baseball, baseball in particular but also who are beat reporters in other men's sports, even the most liberal and outspoken and safe and secure job-wise and powerful among them, the amount of things they’re conditioned to swallow and just to deal with on an everyday basis – from those who are women of color to the racism that they face, those who are non-binary face targeted harassment in that way, and of course there’s the sexism.
There’s also of course, I think, a part of what Lindsey Adler wrote really stuck out to me was the talk about the stuff that you can’t see, that you can’t maybe fight about in a courtroom, that isn’t so blatant. For me it’s the fact that if you’re a woman or any non-cisgender male who is not “conventionally attractive,” which usually means thin, that you’re often in sports media not even let into the door. So, if you’re considered “conventionally attractive” enough to get in the door then you’re harassed, and if you’re not you’re not even allowed into these spaces. There’s something just so gross about that.
I think about the ways that I have chosen to structure my career as a fat woman who has structured in a way where I’m not even thinking about on-camera opportunities, do you know what I mean? I don’t even let myself consider that as a possibility, because I just know it’s not possible for me. But you see a lot of overweight men on TV all the time. And it’s even more than that – it goes down to sources, it just goes down to the way that a lot of fat women will tell you, we can tell you if your boyfriend is really a nice person or not by the way they treat us, because there’s so many men who only treat women like “human beings” – that’s human beings in quotes because, you know, whatever – but if they do wanna sleep with them. So, even if they’re not gonna go after you, even if they’re happily married, even if they come off as an ally, they literally do not know how to converse with someone of a different sex if they do not find them conventionally attractive.
It’s something that’s really hard to explain, but it has impacted me in my sources, it’s impacted me in all of these ways where there's this whole group of people who can't even really look me in the eye, who all of my thin friends think are great allies, think are some of the best allies in the business. And they won’t even look at me. So, it's just so insidious and there’s so many layers to it. Of course I keep thinking about how the female reporter that Jared Porter targeted was foreign, that English wasn’t her first language and she was alone in the city. So anyways, I’ve just been struck by all the layers to this and how I know it's impacted all of us. Bren?
Brenda: Oof. I’m so sorry, Linz. All of it is so awful.
Lindsay: It’s all so awful.
Brenda: It’s all so awful. I think for me, there’s so many ways in which it’s impacted my enjoyment of my career, and the questioning of myself and my security. There’s been a range of things. One of the things I’ve faced is not being funny in terms of gender discrimination, like, I’m not gonna go to a bar with a bunch of male colleagues and laugh off whatever, and sort of say it’s bad but not really, and working for an NGO means that I’m quite identified as a person who will be very publicly critical, whether it’s in writing or in talks or working in grassroots organizations. So, I’ve been denied credentials, even when writing for Sports Illustrated and the Guardian, which you would think are outlets that might deserve something. [laughs] I’ve been denied credentials for the Women’s World Cup, I’ve been harassed on Twitter – not in a sexual harassment way, but by Alex Stone from FIFA who will argue with any type of criticism that I have to say. He’s the head of their publicity.
It’s also come in this grassroots way where I am a white woman that works on Latin America and I go down there, and so the fact that I’m a gringa is compounded by the fact that I’m a woman. So, after publishing books and articles on this and even when male scholars know that, they will literally start to tell me that soccer is a sport with 11 people on each side, that there’s this complicated offside rule, and I just have to sit with that shit. Like, I just have to sit there, and what am I gonna say, you know? So it’s been really hard.
Then of course in academia, I mean, there was multiple instances of sexual harassment, especially as a graduate student when you’re the most vulnerable. So, we’re coming to this over and over again, right? Whenever you’re at the beginning of your career, whenever you’re the most vulnerable this is most likely to happen. It’s not the only time, but these men know who they’re picking. This isn't like…Now that I’m a full professor, I will tell you: I know that this would be less likely. It’s not that they are not going to do it ever, but that is a calculation that’s being made all the time. So, it’s not just happenstance.
Something that just infuriates me about that is there’s an assumption when it’s written about and when it’s looked at by different organizations that the women’s career isn’t going to be as brilliant as the man’s. So, “it’s tragic that the man had this flaw” rather than “it’s tragic that we might've lost a genius,” or “it might’ve impacted this young woman who had this hugely bright future ahead of her. That’s so rarely considered, and I find it infuriating.
Amira: Absolutely. I mean, I think that one of the things about history that a lot of people don’t know, like, our job interviews used to be conducted in hotel rooms, right? Like, at this massive conference, in hotel rooms, when you’re a grad student and you’re going in and you’re sitting and interviewing for a job literally on a hotel bed. Then there was a reckoning, ish, and then that started to get phased out and now everybody’s kind of doing everything on Zoom. But the field has definitely reckoned with this, like so many industries have. But I think that here’s the thing for me: when we think about Me Too or we think about these racial reckonings or whatever, it’s often the stories get told – going back to thinking about dissemblance – as just the tip of the iceberg, right? Like, even here we're consciously editing and redacting the harder parts, right?
Brenda: Mm-hmm.
Amira: Each time we’re telling you just the tip of the iceberg. We’re just trying to articulate the tip of the iceberg, right? But there’s this whole underbelly that’s even in this space, which is a safe space, I know we’re not engaging with, right? I think about that a lot. I just wrote about this for Modern American History, for a journal about Black professors, about Black In The Ivory. I realized that even in those answers we were just like, here’s a little bit of stuff. I think that, for me, when I think about this what I come away with the most is this profound sense of isolation that comes. Whether it's the isolation of kind of keeping it in, or letting a little bit out here, a little bit out there. I think for me this is absolutely compounded by race, and so when I’m in this group I can let y’all see the underbelly of the iceberg when it comes to sexual harassment, when it comes to kind of gender-based discrimination, but I know that there’s stuff that I hold back. When I'm talking to Black men, we definitely can do that kind of iceberg work around race, and it takes a lot for me to try to figure out, okay, what can I then disclose to them in other ways? And I just feel isolated. Just profoundly isolated in all of that kind of maneuvering.
I think about that, you know…We talk about this, Brenda, like how it’s compounded by sports, it’s compounded by history, it's compounded in all these spaces we work in. And I think that's really true, because not only do we work in an academy, in a profession that’s grappling with this, but in sports which as Lindsay said has its own really deep-seated ways of reminding you you’re less than. I think that I’ve watched male colleagues who do sports history or sports studies, especially Black men, get through doors and open doors that aren’t there. I’ve made calculations, like when people are being condescending, that’s fine. I’ve made calculations, like, how do I play this game? Do I let them think I’m this naive? Because I get more if they’re like, hey, I’m gonna take credit for you, or you're gonna be like my little sister, whatever. I’ve had to really figure out when are people being genuine, and when is it wrapped up in other things.
That hard math is a hard calculation to be doing, constantly. Like Brenda said, that part of my brain…What thoughts am I missing out on? What research opportunities am I shying away from? To Lindsay’s point, what stories are you backing off of, you know? What calculations are you making? And maybe that kind of goes into this next part, Linz, and maybe I’ll just pose the question: how do you see this impacting what stories are told in reporting and history and media? Like Brenda said, the consequences here are not just individual feelings. What else do we see going on?
Lindsay: Yeah, I mean…Perfect transition, thank you! I think about this all the time. The two stories we cited at the top of the show were primarily written by women. I know that Jeff Passan helped Mina Kimes with that story, but she was the one who originally got it back in 2016, so I think about how these stories of sexual harassment in sports, of sexual assault in sports, of these realities, how many of those are swept under the rug. I think about how few women and especially Black women being in sports media impacts the framing of stories. There was this study from a few years ago by the Women’s Media Center that found that in the general population 55% of stories written about campus sexual assault were authored by men, compared to 31% by women. But in the sports section that was drastically more skewed towards men, and we know that about 90% of writers are men, white men in particular. This trickles down, right?
That same study found that male sportswriters sourced other men 81% of the time in their stories about sexual assault in college sports, and only quoted women 7% of the time. Of course, that doesn’t add up to 100 because some of them they couldn’t define gender or didn’t know or it was anonymous. Whereas female sportswriters quoted other women 49% of the time in their stories. That is 7% vs 49%! Like, that’s a huge difference, and that isn’t even broken down by race, and I’m sure that it is predominantly white. So, this just extrapolates. It’s only kind of now that a few more women have gotten in the door that we’ve started to push forward the conversation of sexual assault in sports a little bit more – and it sucks that that has to fall on women, right?
I know that I didn’t set out wanting to write about domestic violence and sexual assault in sports. I didn’t even start out wanting to write about women's sports, necessarily. But I saw how few people, first of all when Ray Rice happened, I saw how poorly everyone was doing both, and a lot of the men didn’t even try to cover it with grace. They were just automatically like, oh, women, you do this hard work, and pushed it off.
Of course as I got more into the industry I realized how much women’s sports were being left out and was able to find a niche for myself in that world. But you know, so many stories are left on the cutting room floor because of who is and who isn't let in the door. Then of course there’s there framing. I mean, I know a lot of people have been watching that Britney Spears documentary lately from the New York Times about how women were talked about in the early aughts and late 90s, and sports media was doing that too, you know? That's the same. That’s the same world we all grew up in. So, all of this just impacts the framing.
Amira: Yeah, I think about this a lot around what you said, about not even going into this to work on what a lot of us work on now. I think about that because there’s this way that I really tried to avoid doing Black women’s history because I didn’t want to be typecast or put in a box or all these things that were actually really attached to messages that I was receiving. And even sometimes I still feel this way, like, it’s not fun being the “well, actually…” person, right? It’s not fun being–
Lindsay: It’s not! [laughs]
Amira: You know, being like, “Okay, this is great, but actually…” It makes me so mad, because why isn’t it fun? Insisting that people recognize that Black women exist is not actually doing evil work. Why does that make me feel really shitty for reminding people that Black women exist? And they don’t feel shitty for forgetting in the first place. That’s something that I’m still kind of grappling with, but I do think that this calculation I think about in terms of considering the cost, there’s this book that is a kind of classic published in 1982 on Black women’s studies, and it’s called All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, and it was edited by Gloria Hull and Patricia Bell-Scott and Barbara Smith. I always knew of this text, but I never really got the “brave” part. I was just like, “some of us are brave…yeah, okay.” But I didn’t fully understand it, and as my career has continued I get it more and more and more and more and more.
When the editor from New Republic called and asked me to write a piece on Kobe, I was like, fuck no! And I think about that because to me that’s when I really, I think, first fully fully felt what bravery meant. I think about that because I did of course write the piece and the harassment came and stuff like that, but what I tried to do in that piece is find that voice of Black women who are caught between Black patriarchal worship and a lot of white feminists who were kind of flattening other parts of this. The feedback I got from them made it worth it to me and fortified me and made me brave, but I was talking to some Black men recently and they were like, “We would’ve told you to stay out of that,” or, “Sometimes you gotta learn how to stay away from that,” or, “It’s not worth the trouble,” and that’s when I really realized what that bravery meant, and I get it. Now I really get it.
It’s that considering the cost, but how many stories are not written because people are like, I don’t wanna deal with harassment today, or I don’t wanna do this. Particularly I think about Black women, like, what isolation do you choose? It’s like choose your own adventure, right? How are you gonna do it? If you stand up and center it on us, that’s that isolation because it just feels like there’s no home. So, I get the bravery now.
I thought about that this week, I just wanna point out, Jamie Goodall wrote a piece for Made by History about the Buccaneers, you know – Brenda had made this point before we talked about the Super Bowl – and did a history of pirates around Tampa Bay and stuff like that, and Dr. Goodall is a historian of military history at the Army Center, and it was like sports plus history plus military… [laughs] The harassment she received for writing this simple piece giving you context about pirates was wild, and just what you would expect. I think about that and I think about her willingness to still publish that and still give people this context, and that to me, that’s that bravery, and I really understand that now.
Lindsay: Of course, then this conversation has to switch to: is the any way to change this? We could go on and on, we could have a month’s worth of episodes on the topics we discussed prior to this. But I keep thinking about how these systems were built. I’m gonna do this weird thing and actually just quote myself [laughs] from something I wrote in Power Plays a few months ago, because I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I don’t think I can summarize it, so I might as well read what I wrote already. But this was when all the stories about sexual harassment within the Washington Football Team came to light by the Washington Post reporting, and I was kind of thinking about how some parts of that story which were during HR there was a formal training and then the women would be taken aside by other women and be told, “Hey, there’s this clear staircase where if you walk up it people can see up your skirt from the bottom, so avoid taking that staircase,” and things like that.
The truth is, most women who have risen to positions of power within this sports industry have done so by brushing off harassment and finding a way to be one of the boys. So, the survival skill that gets passed down from generation to generation is often tolerance, because that’s how they’ve climbed up the ladder. So, the advice often given to people who are being marginalized by those who are at the top isn't always about how to get justice or how to make the harassment stop or how to teach men to be better or how to make the workplace safer. The advice is about what staircase to avoid and which bathroom to cry in, which member of the PR staff you don't wanna be stuck with late night in a press box, which big money donor gets a little bit too handsy after his second vodka on the rocks. The advice is never, it seems, about changing the system so it’s more inclusive – it’s about how women need to change so they don’t disrupt the system. So that it keeps working as is.
On that note, Lindsey Adler of The Athletic reported that Major League Baseball has updated its policies on sexual harassment and workplace discrimination as a result of the Jared Porter and Mickey Callaway stories. They’ve established an anonymous hotline to report harassment discrimination, which will be offered by a third party, and they’ve implemented mandatory anti-harassment and discrimination training for team executives. Will this do anything? Is there any way to change the system that was built, literally, with see-through staircases? [laughs] Like, that’s how the system was literally constructed. Bren?
Brenda: I just wanna emphasize once more and call back our recent episode on corruption, about the importance of institutional change and not just throwing money at short term projects to try to “short term educate” [laughs] on this issue. I also think I find it incredibly frustrating to hear people equate accountability on these issues with cancel culture. I don’t know any powerful men who have been unfairly “cancelled.” So, let’s talk about that, because as far as I see nobody’s really lost anything that didn’t deserve to lose everything. I just want to say, I think the independent stuff that I hear in that policy is encouraging. I think it has to have teeth. I mean, the fact that the NFL and Dan Snyder and those things were allowed to go on for years and that he league doesn’t really have a way in which to address this – that is corruption, and it’s corruption because there’s nobody to hold anyone else accountable that is independent and powerful enough to implement.
So, yeah, I think those are good structural changes and I think there’s ways in which we can talk about culture shift and changing people’s hearts and minds, but if they’re not gonna change their hearts and minds then I’m perfectly happy to have legal consequences and shaming.
Lindsay: Amira?
Amira: Yeah, I’m gonna shrink the scale a little bit since I’ve been talking a lot about isolation, and I’m gonna think about what I think about combatting isolation which is self-made communities. Obviously that’s how BIAD got started, but specifically I wanna talk about what’s fortified me is Black women and Black non-binary people who also study sports and are in the academy and who’ve absolutely been what I call my fictitious cohort, my people, and so I wanna shout them out. I wanna shout out Courtney Cox and Sam Sheppard and M. Aziz and Sam White, Paulina Rodríguez, and the folks who have been that self-made community that makes isolation have a little less teeth.
I think that finding those spaces, creating those spaces – and we’ve seen that historically with these groups such as some of the stuff that Brenda was talking about, we’ve seen that now with this podcast, and I think that using those networks to find communities that you can show the entire iceberg to is a kind of individual way that points to survival while the policies and the corruption and all that happens. It’s not a fix, it’s really a bandaid, but it's also survival. So, that’s the other thing, I think, is community.
Lindsay: This week for our interview Shireen speaks with the freestyle football phenom, Lisa Zimouche, on her sport, the global influence she has, and why she feels that her sport can open spaces for racialized and Muslim women.
Lisa Zimouche: I want the discipline to grow, of course; more competitions, and more diversity the competitions, and in the people that are playing. I’d love to have who speak, you know, more than being a freestyler, we need freestylers who speak about a topic maybe deeper than freestyle. I would love to have more women in it, of course, and more women from Africa, more women from Asia.
Lindsay: Alright friends, it is time for our favorite segment: the burn pile. Once again, our entire episode could be a burn pile this week, but we like to have a specific place for some of these stories to go. I’m gonna start, and I wanna put the Washington Football Team back onto the burn pile I alluded earlier in the episode about the sexual harassment within the Washington Football team, and a lot of reporting on that has specifically centered around the way that cheerleaders have been treated and exploited within the team. So, what is the team’s solution to that? Is it to pay cheerleaders more and figure out ways to respect them? Nope. It’s to completely put on hold their cheerleading and music programs, and hire a rebranding consultant to partner with. [laughs] I’m sorry. A fucking rebranding consultant! That’s the burn! That’s just the burn, right there. [laughter] This is not what you do! You don’t just get rid of all the women and then work on your new public image! You do the hard work internally, and guess what? That all has to happen before any PR campaigns. So, that was quick. Burn, burn, burn that bullshit. Burn. [laughs]
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Bren?
Brenda: This is just a searing, quick burn. This week Bayern defeated Tigres in the World Club Cup in Qatar, which happens between the club teams that have won their respective confederations from all over the world and then they compete in this thing, and lots of people think it’s stupid for a lot of different reasons. Of course, COVID, yada yada, it’s all bad. But they have yet to establish a women’s version of this in any kind of proper or interesting way. On the one hand I wanna burn it because, okay, if it sucks and is stupid, why do we want women in it?
But just at the basic level, women’s football has progressed to the point where I do wanna see these different clubs from different confederations play one another. There are enough professionals to do it, and if it’s hokey and it’s dumb then why can’t women’s football participate in that? [laughs] If it’s gonna kind of highlight and underscore the advancements that have been made and get some of these women onto platforms that they can jump off of to maybe get scouted and to grow that part of the game. So, I wanna burn that they have yet to establish this very basic tournament for women, and that, okay, the fact that it sucks is often used to stymie that. So, yeah, I wanna burn that. Okay, burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Amira, take us home.
Amira: Yeah, surely. So… [pause] [laughter] Sorry. So, it’s so ridiculous. A few days ago, the Jacksonville Jaguars and Urban Meyer announced that they were hiring Chris Doyle to be the director of sports performance. Chris Doyle, the announced in a tweet, had served as their head strength and conditioning coach for the University of Iowa from 1999 to 2019, participated in 16 bowl games and saw 55 players selected for the draft, and they welcomed him with much fanfare. You know why his date ended with the University of Iowa in 2019? Oh, that’s right, because he was fired after being accused of racial bias my multiple Black people, bullying from multiple football players.
He has over his career put 13 Iowa players in the hospital – that only got him an award! He was college football’s highest paid strength and conditioning coach. After Black players in Iowa raised their issues with him there was an investigation, the university decided to sever his employment, but not before paying $1.1 million to him to go away from Iowa. It took him only 8 months to fail upwards and find a job in the NFL when Urban Meyer called him. Urban Meyer sat in front of reporters and told them – well, not in front because it’s a pandemic, but you know – told reporters that he wasn’t concerned about all of that because “I have known Chris for close to 20 years.” He said he had no worries about the allegations because he’s known him this long. This is ridiculous.
As Rod Graves, who's the director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, said, that when Urban’s sitting there talking about “I’ve known him for 20 years so he’s fine” – that's the good ol’ boy network! Hiring this person who just got fired because of racial bias and also just being a really shitty person, at a time when the NFL cannot hire any Black people in coaching positions, is just too much. I would be more fiery about this but he's widely tendered his resignation and he will not actually be working at the Jacksonville Jaguars, but I just want to end by echoing Sarah Spain, who had a great tweet on this, to remind people that him being out of work for 8 months with a $1.1 million severance is not “cancel culture.”
Lindsay: [laughs] Sorry.
Brenda: Exactly!
Amira: It’s just not. It’s just not, you know what I mean? People are running around talking about “give him a second chance!” Bitch, 8 month is not…! [groans]
Brenda: Yeah!
Lindsay: Can I get cancelled? $1.1 million and an 8 month vacation? [laughs]
Amira: Yeah, right?! What the fuck. What the hell. It’s ludicrous. I’m glad that sense has home to the Jaguars, but really mad that it was seen as an acceptable move in the first place and that the good ol’ boys network that excuses this behavior also sustains it by these hires, and I’m glad that this part ended but I will not be surprised to find him employed in the near future. My point is: burn it all down.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Alright, after that burning it’s time to talk about our torchbearers of the week . First of all: our retirees of the week! This is a group award. WNBA greats Crystal Langhorne and Renee Montgomery both announced their retirement from professional basketball this week. They’re gonna be very missed on the court but are both doing incredibly important work off the court and we’re gonna see a lot more of them. Then of course the Lamoureaux twins, Jocelyne and Monique – both announced their retirement in twin fashion together. They are women’s hockey legends and, you know, just for Shireen if you wanna go back and watch that gold medal match from Sochi and wanna see them at their best, that would be great. So, all of them will be missed but we’re grateful that we got to see them all play. Bren, who is our jaw-dropping shotmaker of the week?
Brenda: Paige Bueckers, the UConn freshman whose improbable three-point shot gave the Huskies a 63-59 overtime win over the South Carolina Gamecocks in the battle between No. 1 vs. No. 2 last week.
Lindsay: Woo! Amira, who’s our performer of the week?
Amira: Our performer of the week is Warren “Wawa” Snipe, a rapper and American Sign Language interpreter, whose soulful signing of the national anthem during the Super Bowl stole the show. I highly recommend you check out the video of him signing, and also his music.
Lindsay: And can I get a drumroll please?
[drumroll]
Our torchbearer of the week is Toni Breidinger, the 21-year-old race car driver who became the first Arab-American female driver to participate in any NASCAR national series when she competed in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series at Daytona over the weekend. We love that. Go, Toni, go! Alright, what is good? Ooh, Brenda, I like what I see from you in the notes!
Brenda: [laughs] Yeah, what is good for me this week is I’m scheduled – all the fingers and toes crossed – as part of phase 1B of New York to be vaccinated for COVID-19 for the first dose on Wednesday at SUNY Albany. I’m so grateful to all of the people that have made this happen in whatever way, and I’m so not grateful to the failed state we have that I am signed up for it before probably plenty of other people that it should be distributed to, and plenty of other countries. So, there is a part of me that feels a little sad, of course, and sad for the tragedies that have already befallen. However, there is mostly a ton of enthusiasm and excitement about this for everyone in my life and society in general to get that herd immunity, please. So, I’m psyched.
Lindsay: Yay! Amira?
Amira: Yeah, I’m really happy about the Australian Open, which is an insomniac’s dream. [laughter] At 3 in the morning I’m up and tennis is on. Serena and Naomi both stressed me the hell out yesterday, but they had wonderful matches. That was really good. I also just started my first talk of my busy season, and I was so honored to join the folks up at Queen’s University on Zoom to do a talk. Thank you to our friend Courtney Szto and Mary Louise for the invite, and also I have an upcoming talk at Vandy with out friends Andrew Maraniss, and Lou and Derrick and Andrew Williams. We should have a fun ride with that. Also, 42 Today is out now, which is a book that Michael Long edited, with a forward by Ken and Sarah Burns and essays by Howard Bryant and Yohuru Williams and Jonathan Eig and a lot of other people including myself. I have a chapter in there about Jackie Robinson and Black women athletes, and the book is now out! So, go check it out: 42 Today. And that makes me really happy.
Brenda: [clapping] Yay!
Lindsay: Yay! I don’t know if this is really what's good, but I am the least handy person, [Brenda laughs] like, I did not grow up in a DIY household, okay? I just did not. We were not always the most wealthy, but where my parents had money it was to go ahead and pay for things to get done, right? We didn’t try and fix it ourselves. My mom would occasionally late at night try and change the colors of all our pillows, but it would end up just looking like badly bleached red pillows [laughs] and things like that. But I’m a home owner now, and came about it in a weird way, and I’m trying DIY. It took Serena’s match, the entire match basically, for me to re-upholster one dining room chair. I thought it might take 20 minutes – it took me the entire Serena match. But I did it! And I also painted a really ugly table and now it doesn't look so bad, although I did get way less paint than necessary, so that's a learning experience. You know, just keep me in mind as I go through this process for the first time as a 34 year old woman who did not get any skills, was not taught any skills of this kind growing up. Just none. Just zero, okay? But it’s fun, it's fun to have my place looking better.
Alright, so there's a lot actually we’re watching this week. The NCAA softball season and the NCAA soccer season have both hit and kicked off, respectively, so keep an eye on that. We’ve got the late stages of the Aussie Open, so by the time you’re listening to this I think the quarters will be done but the semis and the final…I mean, all the players left are so good. I’m so excited. We’ve got of course NCAA women’s basketball and on Thursday night there is a Tennessee-South Carolina game that I’m super excited about, so that’s probably my game of the week that I’ve got flagged. Then the UEFA Champions League starts today, the day that this comes out, at 3pm with Barça vs PSG and that continues throughout the week and next.
Amira: I wanted to wish everybody a happy lunar new year – we are now in the year of the ox, which started on Friday. Best wishes to all those who are celebrating. I also thought it was a good time, as we move into the lunar new year, to also recognize that we are seeing an unacceptable and horrific rise in violence against Asian Americans. Hate crimes against Asian Americans have been on the rise since the beginning of the pandemic, fueled by xenophobic and racist attacks by too many people in this country. We had some conversations about this in episode 144 and 149 about the coronavirus and Asian athletes and racism, and also in episode 160 for Asian American and Pacific Islanders that we talked about and showcased Asian athletes. I want to also draw your attention to local groups such as the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council or the Asian American Federation from New York who are also accepting donations and trying to help combat and stop these vicious attacks that are happening more and more frequently and especially in the last few weeks have been targeting Asian elders in Chinatown in Oakland, and it's awful. So, please, happy lunar new year, and let’s use this time collectively to do better and combat racism against Asian Americans and attacks on them as well.
Lindsay: Alright. We wanna thank you all so much for supporting Burn It All Down. Remember, our Patreon is the place to be. We had so much fun watching the Super Bowl with our patrons, and perks like at are available if you go to patreon.com/burnitalldown and just go to our website, burnitalldownpod.com and that’s where you can find links to everything you need, so I’m not gonna go through the big list. But what can really help us is rates and reviews on Apple Podcasts. On behalf of the whole team, especially Amira and Brenda who are here with me today: burn on, but not out, to steal a line from Bren.
Brenda: It’s open access. [laughter]