Interview: Benji Hart, on Abolition and Sports
In this extended conversation, Amira Rose Davis interviews Benji Hart, a Chicago-based author, artist and educator whose work centers Black radicalism, queer liberation and prison abolition. They dig deep into the intersection of sports, police and militarism, and how to imagine radical futures and spaces of liberation. 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.
Transcript
Amira: Hey flamethrowers, Amira here, and I am so pleased to be joined today in conversation with Benji Hart. Benji is a Chicago-based author, artist and educator. Their essays and poems have appeared all over the place – Teen Vogue, Time magazine; Advocate also has their work. They have workshops for organizations and academic institutions. They are an activist, they work with many groups in Chicago like National Bail Out, and are currently creating new work, I hear, and basically is one of the illest people I know. So, I had to call Benji up to ask them to join me on Burn It All Down to talk about abolition and the ways in which it applies to sports and helps us think through sports, and I see this as very much a part of thinking about Black futures: Black futures in sports as well as in other institutions, and what does it mean to dream radically. It’s really the only conversation I wanted to have for Black History Month, which is a month that a lot of people use to kind of pause and look backwards and, you know, I spend a lot of time in the past, so I wanted to use this opportunity to connect with Benji and look to the future a little bit. So, Benji, welcome! Welcome to Burn It All Down.
Benji: Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited and honored to be here. I wanna start off by saying I know nothing about sports, [Amira laughs] so I feel a little sheepish, a little embarrassed being here. But I’m also really excited and honored, a) because I think I have a lot to learn, I know I have a lot to learn from you. But I’m excited to learn specifically about your analysis on sports and its intersections with all these other spheres and struggles, because that’s something that is not my area of expertise. But I’m also really excited to talk about abolition in this context because I don’t think that these are conversations that come together explicitly all that often. So, I’m really excited to be here and be a part of this conversation.
Amira: I’m overjoyed, and part of the reason why I’m overjoyed – and full disclosure, it’s because Benji is fam to the biggest level, like, literally we grew up together. I think that one of the extraordinary things about that and about these familial relationships is that we have seen many iterations of each other, and also watched ourselves go on these different pathways to bring us to this moment in which I feel like I’m really excited to have a conversation with you about how our worlds can kind of think through each other and combine and collide. So, I am just super hype.
Benji: Same! I’m so excited.
Amira: Alright. I had this thought a while back actually, you know, we think structurally all the time – we think about things we want to burn to the ground and what we wanna rebuild in its place – but oftentimes a lot of the things we are talking about are kind of reform actions or kind of baby steps that leave systems intact that continue to exploit and harm and extract from people. So, I wanted to actually think through and talk about abolition in the realm of sports in the way we’re seeing it talked about with criminal justice and some other things. So, that’s kind of where I wanna start. If you could tell me how you define abolition and how you came to the kind of abolition work that you do?
Benji: Absolutely. Amira and I grew up together – I’m originally from Amherst, Massachusetts, that’s where I spent most of my young life. Speaking for myself, growing up as a light skin middle class child of professionals in a college town, I really did not have much personal contact with the police, and in fact come from a police family, have family members who are officers. So I had a very kind of traditional but also limited understanding of what the policing system even was, what it looked like, who it impacted and targeted, because I actually hadn’t had a lot of personal contact with it.
It was the summer that I turned 18 and I was staying with friends of ours in the Bronx, New York, that I was first arrested and first violently targeted by the police, and that was really a life-altering experience for me, particularly as a middle class Black person who did not grow up in the Bronx, did not grow up in the neighborhood I was staying in visiting folks, and seeing how drastically different other people’s experiences of the police system was from my own. The violence of that first interaction and kind of the arbitrary violence of that first interaction was what really made me start to evaluate what is the system actually designed to do? Because clearly the things that I’ve been taught or told it does it’s not actually responsible for achieving.
That’s really kind of set me on the path to learning more about not just the current iteration or the current nature and layout of the police and prison system now, but also its roots and its history – why it was created, during what political moments and climates it took the shape that we are now all currently navigating. And that little by little – it did not happen all at once – but little by little it really led me down the road to abolition, and to not just the belief in the necessity of the total destruction, the total burning down of the police, prison and military systems, but that those are actually achievable goals, that that’s actually possible for us to achieve and that there’s historic precedent for those demands and for that vision of a police and prison-free world actually being achieved.
Amira: I think that part of it, to me, speaks to thinking through the ways we interact and associate with these systems. I think that applies to sports in the sense of, like, a lot of times we are recipients of sports in certain ways that tie us to family. We’ve been watching sports with family members and we have fuzzy feelings around it, right? Or you have played sports, whatever. I think that it’s one of those things that until you had that experience that you had in the Bronx with a sporting institution in a variety of ways, whether it’s you saw the Ray Rice tape or you noticed something different in how commentators talk about Serena’s body vs other tennis players, or whatever it was, right?
I think that’s what it speaks to, there’s something, and there’s something, flamethrowers, that have brought you to the podcast. There’s something that has gone off to say there’s more to it here. But the thing that I really wanted to kind of then pick up on what you said, which is that this is possible. I think that that’s so important because I talk about how hard it is for me to even imagine…Like, right now I’ll be honest, I can’t even imagine next week. 2020 has especially warped my sense of time where it’s hard for me to think about and concretely plan for a week out. So, in that vein, it’s really hard sometimes to imagine what a better future could be like. We’ve been talking on the show about does anything even matter anymore, especially as sports have kind of gone on through a global pandemic. It feels like nothing matters, and it can rob you of hope, or just of that persistence to push back.
But one of the things that you had raised before to me when I was thinking through the ways that I felt like, well, how can you imagine these futures? And one of the things you said was, well, abolition already exists, right? In some of these institutions – we were talking in the context of the institution of higher education – you pointed out that abolition already exists there, over a conversation on campus police. So, I was wondering if you would articulate that for us about the ways in which abolition already exists in certain places, because I think that this is also something that we see and we know in sports. The way you frame it all of a sudden made it real for me.
Benji: I appreciate that. Word. So, yeah, and also to wrap up question one and lay the foundation for question two, I would define abolition as both a political philosophy but also an organizing strategy. It’s not just a theory, it’s also a lens for identifying and engaging in principled and material political struggle. In other words, it’s not just an idea or a theory that we talk about, it’s actually something that guides, demands actions and strategy for all kinds of social movements that are happening currently, but certainly the movement for Black lives and certainly the fight for Black liberation, and it is the belief and the understanding that the police and prison system is fundamentally rooted in anti-Blackness, rooted in capitalism, rooted in patriarchy, rooted in basically every toxic system and value set you can name, you can think of, and that it is that way by design.
It was created to uphold a racial hierarchy, it was created to protect property, it was created to further colonialism and imperialism at the expense of women, at the expense of trans people, at the expense of Indigenous people, Black people, immigrant people, and that the only way for there to be sweeping and intersectional liberation, liberation for all oppressed people, all oppressed communities, is for those systems to be abolished and for different systems of public safety to take their place. And when we say different systems of public safety we’re also fundamentally talking about reimagining what is public safety, and abolition really imagines public safety as not about control, not about policing, and not about punishment, but about providing people with the basic resources they need to survive, making sure people are protected and that communities are protected through having access to resources – to housing, to education, to a thriving wage, to healthcare and mental health care, and that those are the things that actually curb harm, curb violence, and that punishment fundamentally does not and that we have centuries of evidence to actually make that something we can say confidently and definitively.
So, abolition is twofold: it’s about both destroying these harmful systems and the larger structures of violence and inequality like capitalism and imperialism that they protect, that they make possible and able. But it’s also at the same time about imagining what is possible beyond them and in real time trying to build up and build out those alternatives. As you say, that can seem like a huge or daunting challenge when in actuality there are all kinds of examples in our world right now to help us think through what a police and prison-free community, what a police and prison-free neighborhood, what a police and prison-free society can look like. I think when we talk about what are the concrete models or concrete examples currently that can help us envision abolition.
I think the two primary places for us to look – which are both complicated examples – are, one, oppressed communities. How do communities that are targeted by law enforcement already function in a way where they know when there’s harm and when there’s violence happening on a community level law enforcement is not gonna be the ones to step in and solve it and therefore folks, be they undocumented folks, be they Black folks, be they trans folks, already know they can’t look to law enforcement and therefore are coming up with their own alternatives and their own ways of dealing with harm and violence and creating accountability that don’t rely on the police and prison system – which is one conversation to have.
Then I think the other side of that, which is what you were alluding to, is the fact that wealthy communities, white communities, elite private institutions, gated communities of all kinds are already functioning in many ways without police and prisons, that when wealthy people commit harm, when people with power and resources and means commit violence, the automatic assumption is not that the police need to be called. The automatic assumption is not that person needs to go to jail. There are all kinds of alternatives that are offered, and that’s often without even a discussion. Again, both of these are complicated models, because I would say while both of these are important examples or important lenses for us to think about police and prison-free world, also both of them are not ideal.
Something Black feminists have said for a long time is that when we talk about wealthy communities or wealthy white communities as examples of police and prison-free communities we’re not saying that that’s what we want to emulate. We’re not saying we want every community to look like a wealthy white community, we’re not saying we want every neighborhood to look like a wealthy white neighborhood. We’re saying the exact opposite, actually. But what the kernel is there that I think is important to tease out or to expand on is it’s very often the same people saying, “It’s impossible, we can’t abolish the police and prison system,” themselves are actually living in a world without police and prisons, who themselves are actually very rarely coming into contact with the police and prison system and in fact only or most commonly when they come into contact with it it’s because they’re calling it on someone else or they’re using it to protect themselves and protect their property from Black folks, from poor folks, from folks with disabilities on and on and on.
But I still think it's an important example because it exists, because we actually already have lots of examples of people using other mechanisms and other ways of creating accountability that aren’t police and that aren't prisons. Then of course I think the next question is: are those effective? Are those actually the methods that we're trying to emulate or duplicate? Because in many ways they’re not. Again, I’m not trying to say, yeah, the way wealthy white students are treated on a college campus when they commit harm, that's the way everyone should be treated. I don’t believe that. But at the same time, the examples abound of ways that people live their lives without the police and prison system and navigate harm and violence with the police and prison system.
Amira: Absolutely. I mean, it’s like when people were drawing the distinction between the way the Capitol police and folks were not exacting force on the insurrectionists on January 6th, the clarifying part of that to your last point there was we’re not asking you to shoot them, we're asking you to be cognizant of the fact that, like, don’t shoot us the way you don’t shoot them.
Benji: Exactly.
Amira: One of the things that I wanted to point out is that there’s a very interesting way that sports played a role in kind of the rise of carceral politics in the 70s and 80s. My good friend, Theresa Runstedtler, past guest of the show, her next book is on this and she already has an article out about it where she looks at the rise of the NBA, especially in the 70s and early 80s, and the way that these really high-profile Black men, the way that the league tries to discipline them for on-court infractions like the famous punch and stuff like that, that sets up this idea of punitive response, right? And that continues in a very public way, this notion of this is how we keep Black folks in particular in line, is we police everything, right? What the league did with that, everything, which meant dress code, on the court actions, off the court actions, et cetera, was attached fines and suspensions to all of it.
I think that that’s one of the things that we talk about in the sports world a lot, and we talk about this in the context of COVID when the Blue Jays and other teams announced that the way they were gonna try to keep players from breaking COVID protocols and stuff like that was to say, okay, we’re gonna fine you and if you break protocol again we’re gonna call the police on you. Just thinking about an employer telling an employee that the way we’re gonna make sure that you are doing what we say in terms of what we think is gonna best ensure your health and safety is by threatening you by A) the loss of a pay check, and B) with calling the police.
Then we've also had these kind of conversations, especially around sexual assault in sports, when leagues are handling it or setting up their own justice system away from a kind of court apparatus where it’s like the biggest thing up for debate is if they’re gonna get a 4 or 6 game suspension, even though the thing that is earning them the suspension is that they beat their wife black and blue and we have documented evidence of that, and what to do with that. So I think that there’s ways in which the sports world are already having conversations around policing, around imprisonment, around punitive justice, certainly around restorative justice when it comes to sexual assault and what these things look like.
My co-hosts of course are so on top of this, like, “Somebody paid their due, why can’t they get another job?” – talking about Chris Doyle, who’s a coach at Iowa who put multiple players in the hospital because of his tactics and then was also super racist, and to get him out of Iowa they paid him a severance package of $1.1 million and then he was out of a job for 8 months before he got rehired in a bigger league, right? The way that the defense of this was like, “But he already suffered, he already paid his price, he already did this.” So, I think that we are seeing these conversations in the sports world, but somehow they are disconnected to the larger conversations – which is funny to me, and why I bring up this history is because they’ve always been intersecting, because as we know sports is a hyper-visible spot for a lot of these tensions to kind of get center stage.
I really like how you framed abolition as both a theory and also like an organizational tactic. I think about this…Brenda raises this question a lot, about what would feminist football – football meaning soccer here – what would feminist football look like? And is it just like, okay, now we have the Women’s Would Cup out of FIFA, but we already know that FIFA is terrible, right? We already know this about FIFA. Is feminist football really just including women within the system? What would it look like to reimagine the game of football from a feminist standpoint? It wouldn’t just be the same model, and that is a question in theory but it’s also a question that as we’ve seen, especially with football players in Latin America, it’s also an organizational tactic about what is required in order to make that happen and what that looks like.
But I think that it also made me think about this conversation on representation, and we had this preceding the Super Bowl a few weeks ago about this way that some of the teams involved in the game were being applauded because there were Black coaches on the sidelines or there was women coaches, there’s a woman reffing the game. I think the question that Bren posed in that episode was: do we give a damn? We all resoundingly were like, ugh…Like, they’re there, but that doesn’t fundamentally change the fact that all of this is bullshit. I think that I would love to talk to you about that kind of same idea of representation that we're seeing within the sports world, right? Like having a Black coach or having a woman athletic administrator, stuff like that. We even highlight them sometimes on our torchbearers, but we also know and we also talk about how if we’ve just talked about how corrupt the NCAA is, having a woman who's in the NCAA doesn’t actually fundamentally change the system. I think that there's very similar conversations happening in terms of representational politics outside of sports.
Benji: Absolutely, and I think that ties in to something that I wanted to highlight too in some of what you just shared, since a lot of that history was new history to me. I think the examples of kind of punitive practices that you outlined throughout sports history I think is extremely important because it shows that policing, police departments and prisons and jails, are not the only institutions that participate in policing. I think that’s really important because…I mean, for a number of reasons. But something I really believe in my work and I’m trying to highlight more explicitly to people is that I actually don’t think police and prison abolition is very radical. I think in a lot of ways it’s actually a really sensible and in some ways simple strategy that actually is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the work that we have to do to actually dismantle racial capitalism, to actually dismantle white supremacy.
There’s so much beyond just abolition. I still think abolition is a very important starting place and that’s part of the reason I believe in it so deeply and am so invested in that fight. But your examples are important because if we abolished police today, if we abolished prisons today, that in and of itself does not mean white supremacy is done, and that in and of itself does not mean that the systems of violence and harm and inequality, that the police and prison system protects and enables will immediately go away when those protective buffers are taken away. I think your examples of the ways that these punitive measures in sports are unequal, and that even when folks are engaging in what we could argue are non-carceral solutions to dealing with harm and violence.
There is still deep embedded racism, deep embedded misogyny, deep embedded homophobia and transphobia in terms of how those consequences are distributed, who has the power to distribute them, who gets punished for what. There’s still tons of harm and violence and racism happening there even though technically a police department isn't involved, someone going to prison isn’t involved. There’s still, as you say, an investment in punishment that is still inherently racist, sexist, homophobic and all these other things. I think that’s so important because coming out of 2020 defunding the police, conversations about abolition, conversations about reform and rethinking law enforcement and “mass incarceration” are much more mainstream and much more popular right now – which is a good thing, but it also means that we have new organizing work to do in terms of clarifying, okay, what does abolition actually mean? And what does a police and prison-free world actually look like?
Because we’re not all in agreement about that, and many of these institutions – academic institutions, even sporting institutions that are now adopting more of the language of abolition or the language of restorative justice or transformative justice, these kind of buzzwords that come out of movement, that are more and more being adopted by the institutions that they were originally created in opposition to – means that we now have to do the work of clarifying what those terms actually mean. They become more mainstream and they become more acceptable, but there’s tons of organizing left to do now in terms of clarifying what that means, because per your point if abolition means we’re gonna abolish the police department and then the university will have its own police department it’s like, okay, then that’s not abolition! Okay, but then we’re just changing who’s doing the policing, we’re not actually talking about fundamentally different structures of how we address harm and violence and inequality in our community.
That's frankly to be expected, but it’s an important reminder of how much work we have left to do. I think this ties back to your other question because I think one of the things we need to be vigilant against is institutions adopting our language and institutions adopting the language of movements to paint themselves as progressive, and that goes hand in hand with these same institutions essentializing identity to also protect themselves and to also not just make it look like they’re doing work that they’re not actually doing, but actually enabling the same harmful patterns to continue but now it’s a Black woman doing them or now it’s our first gay provost who’s supporting these awful policies that are actually harming a lot of our trans and queer students, you know? It’s all so frankly predictable at this point. But I think that's really important that these conversations about representation aren't just about the visuals of the queer athletes or the Black coaches or the women in leadership roles, it's actually about how those identities are used to mask the harm to women, the harm to Black folks, the harm to trans and queer people, and how that’s on purpose. It’s not accidental. It’s a strategy for actually allowing the harm to continue.
Amira: Absolutely, and we’re looking directly at Lori Lightfoot when we say this, just to be clear and explicit. [laughs]
Benji: Thank you so much.
Amira: This is so important because this is something…I was just on a panel earlier today and somebody asked a question, like, how do we square the NFL’s commitment to racial justice with the treatment of Kaepernick, and I literally laughed. I didn’t mean to, but I laughed because I was like, what commitment to racial justice? [laughs] Because they painted “END RACISM” in the end zones, right? That same idea of the reappropriation of language, and not just language of symbol – and this is a conversation we’ve had around kneeling, right? Like when the whole team kneels along with Jerry Jones for a photo op, kneeling doesn’t mean shit. What kneeling is used to convey at this point, especially if you were kneeling in opposition to the playing of the anthem because you were using this time to disrupt business as usual, and now what has become business as usual is having a whole team kneel for the anthem then that action, that gesture, is just symbolically nodding in a way, right?
Like, take it or leave it. If you’re somebody who’s like, you know what, when I see the national team kneel I know they mean Black lives matter. But it’s like, is that what it means? [laughs] What? That’s the value that people have assigned to it, but in action and in operation it’s not doing anything. That’s not actually a commitment to anything.
Benji: That’s right.
Amira: Except for touching your knee to the ground.
Benji: That’s right.
Amira: I think that this is one of the most important things about watching closely after…We all know the summer was a particular moment, and then watching closely the actions of these sporting institutions in the wake of this, like, one of the things that came out of the wildcat strike and collective organizing around not playing until some things were addressed around police brutality is that Miami-Dade County PD patterned with the Miami Heat, and the Heat were like, yeah, we’re gonna invest in a training program for them to learn how to not use force. I was like, wait, so what you got from this moment when there was very clear calls to defund the police, what you got in this moment about police brutality is that you are going to give Miami-Dade PD – that has a budget of over $800 million – more money!? It got swept up in this moment of “look at all the good that teams around the league are doing for their quote-unquote commitment to racial justice” when no, actually this being bundled in is masking the ways, to your point Benji, that it’s not just decoration but it’s actually the ingredient of what's making this system keep going.
Benji: That's exactly right. I think it’s important…Look at me, I know something about sports! [laughs] I think it’s also important to name in that theater or sort of in that moment the role that Barack Obama played, speaking of Black faces in high places and speaking of folks from oppressed identities–
Amira: Look at you! Look at you!
Benji: Me, I read the news! I read the news! [laughter] But speaking of folks with these identities who don't just – I love your analogy – don’t just serve as decoration but actually play a crucial, pivotal role in these moments of arbiters to actually allow the harm and allow the violence to continue. From my perspective as an outsider and someone who’s rarely tuned into what's going on in the sports world, to see first Black women and then them being followed by Black men leading these calls that weren’t just symbolic but were really actually posing a threat to the league’s ability to function and forcing folks with incredible money and power inside of those institutions to take a stance and to actually be held accountable for where their money and power actually originated…Some really radical and exciting things – the wildcat strike, I was like, we're on the verge of something here!
And for Obama to come in and say no, what y’all need to do is form a social justice and equity committee, or…I can’t remember exactly what the phrase was, but for it to be “no, what we actually need to do is to find a secure location where we can just talk about this more and the league can partner with police departments and do some anti-bias training” is like…It was textbook, actually, the way that he served as a powerful Black voice to discourage other Black people from taking radical direct action, which is what they were doing on their own, which is what they were doing independently. And that was heartbreaking for me. That was like we were on the verge or something incredibly powerful there, and Obama played a very important role in stopping it from happening.
Amira: Yeah, no, first of all I’m proud of you. Second of all…But I would have to say I don’t think we were on the verge of something. I said at the time and I stand by that now, which is the moment was really important because it showed the possibilities, right? It was a window into the possibilities. I think a lot of us got commissioned to write pieces on it that Thursday, and by Sunday it was over, right? [laughs] But I think for me the reason why I say that is because one of the things that I have studied historically is how fast athletic activism is disrupted, and how powerful the call to kind of get back to work becomes, and all of the various ways institutions will figure out – especially sporting institutions – how much can I give that still maintains power.
Because right now the balance…And this is why. It’s because the balance of power is so…There’s such a disparity between athletic labor and ownership and management and sports media. There’s such a disparity, and it’s obviously ridiculous which is why in that moment it was really inspiring because you’re like, “Yes! If everybody just stops playing, look!” You know what I mean? But at the same time it’s like, it very quickly becomes, okay, how much can we give? Like, we have a million cookies over here are y’all are fighting for crumbs. It takes nothing to take one of our cookies, crumble it up and toss it, and y’all are so busy watching those crumbs fly towards you thinking you’re getting something that you don’t notice we still have all the cookies.
To me, that has been the story of how athletic activism has been neutered over time, whether it’s early Black college protests in the 70s that then influenced the scholarship to become a 1 year renewable thing so your job became a lot more precarious, right? Or it’s the way in which media covers it or whatnot. But for me in that moment I was like, absolutely you’re on the verge of something! And I also knew that that night people were already on the phone talking about endorsement deals and sponsors and “you don’t wanna lose this” or pointing to people who have lost stuff, who have been disposed because of their action, who have become warnings. Colin Kaepernick is but one, right? Craig Hodges, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf are still here. They’re still here facing these consequences. I think that’s…You know, when I talk about feeling like how do we even imagine this, I think that imbalance to me is what feels so disheartening sometimes, is that even in these moments where I feel like we’ve walked up to the precipice of a new chapter, I’d say this year over any other years I feel like there’s been more strides taken.
I think the WNBA certainly has laid a blueprint and part of the blueprint though has been that they’ve reached out to scholars and grassroots activists, right? They said hey, we have a particular platform but it’s only fortified by these other connections. To me that is the blueprint because it’s about connecting people power in a way that can disrupt these other things, and it matters, to your point, who you call, right? Who you get on Zoom with. The WNBA didn’t call Obama. I mean, they talked to Michelle at one point…But they talked to Kimberlé Crenshaw, right? They talked to grassroots activists on the ground in Atlanta when they were mobilizing the vote. But I think that the other part of that is it can’t just be one call.
Benji: That’s right.
Amira: So, to me it’s like what do we do, like, even taking those moments as this is an amazing time, and then also not feeling personally disappointed but also understanding the conditions in which people are laboring under. I wrote a Bitch Media piece about this. I don’t think abstaining from play looks the same across the board. I think the WNBA has fought tooth and nail to be able to get onto the court. Their abstention of playing is actually removing themselves from a place where people don’t want them in the first place. So I don’t actually think seeding that is the same effect as when the NBA would do it.
Benji: That’s fascinating.
Amira: So I think that that to me, you know, when we think about these institutions and we think about the complexities, like, this is the way when we think about…You know, we talk about intersectionality, we can talk about that, but this is the way to me that it comes to the fore.
Benji: That’s powerful. That’s beautiful. I really love what you’re saying about athletes and organizers working together, because I totally agree that’s when the most powerful and the most exciting moments have happened in the last couple of years is not when athletes are looking to institutions or people with power, people above them to kind of give them directives, but when they’re looking to folks on the ground, looking to poor and working class Black folks, looking to activists actually doing work on the ground to give them their directives; the most incredible things have happened as a result of that. I think Kaepernick is a complicated example of that because I know he’s been glorified in ways that other people haven’t and got the shine and got the credibility that other people have not gotten, even though I know he’s also following the lead of a lot of athletes before him.
But something I think he has gotten right is A) talking to organizers on the ground and specifically talking to Black women organizers on the ground, and B) using his platform to pose a threat, and we all know he’s actually lost things as a result of that, and I think folks with power and privilege – even Black folks with power and privilege, even women with power and privilege – that’s something that we should actually prepare to do. I appreciate your talking about sort of the initial chapter opening with the wildcat strike. That was just the beginning of something but not necessarily…It could have gone a lot of different ways and it went one particular way. But I think that’s an important thing that I’m sort of interested in learning more about is, yeah, what are people prepared to give up? Because I think that’s a huge question in all organizing or all efforts that actually pose threats to these incredibly powerful and wealthy, incredibly venerable and entrenched institutions. There’s always gonna be pushback and the institution has so much more power to harm us than we do to harm it, so what are we willing to give up in that fight and what are we wiling to withhold knowing what the consequences could be. I’d love to hear about that from the sports perspective or the athletes’ perspective.
Amira: Yeah. We’re coming up on the anniversary of the Fight of the Century, which is Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, March 8th 1971, which was huge of course because Muhammad Ali, the sacrifice he made when he refused to submit to the draft for the Vietnam War was so vast. It’s very hard to even contend with now because we know he comes back and then he has all this success and we forget that for 3 years his belt was taken away, his livelihood was taken away, he was in prison, right? Kind of looking backwards we can see that it was gonna work out more or less for him, but at the time how does one know that?
Benji: Yes.
Amira: That is something that’s really really really powerful. So, the Fight of the Century took on a lot of power because in his absence in those 3 years Joe Frazier had come up, had gotten the heavyweight title, had become this prolific fighter, and this was pitting two heavyweights who had not been defeated yet together. Muhammad Ali helped write the narrative himself. He said the only people who are backing Joe Frazier are the KKK, town council people, the police and the military. [laughs] Like, he was very clear in terms of drawing sides. So it was kind of this big fight.
But I think about this in that question about sacrifice, like Maya Moore stepping away to work on criminal justice reform and to help free Jonathan Irons from prison, right? The WNBA players like Renee Montgomery and Natasha Cloud who opted out of the season. I think about the people who give up little things daily in ways that we can't see because they’re rendered that disposable by the sport, right? And I think about that sacrifice a lot, especially for people more precarious, especially for people who are women, who are trans people in sport, who are already at the margins of the sporting sphere where it’s very easy to kind of grind them up and discard them and nobody even knows.
But I think the other part of this conversation that that touched on is – and this is what also made me think of Muhammad Ali – I always push athletes to be seen as laborers, right? Now we have a lot of work coming out about sports as labor; me and Bren are working on a project about this. There’s certain things we know obscure this, like the number of dollars at the end of their pay check, for some athletes of course, obscure this. Also this idea that it’s leisure, it’s recreation, it’s fun or whatever, also obscures this in certain ways.
But I also think about it in terms of…You mentioned you also have police in your family and things like that, and I think about this complicated relationship about thinking through militarism and policing and athletes in terms of cannon fodder in a sense, and the forced choices that people make when they are trying to figure out how to get into institutions that are telling them they’re gonna take care of them, institutions that prey particularly on Black and poor people. My husband’s family are all Philly cops, or they were athletes, or they were athletes who became Philly cops, right? I think that connection between being in communities in which you’re told that your way out of this community – because there’s no way to think about actually uplifting or demanding resources or opportunities within that community, the only path you’re given is an exit plan – and if that exit plan is labeled military, police, athlete or maybe entertainer, then to me I think especially when we’re talking about Black folks it’s interesting to think about the entanglement of those three things when we see…
And for us, like in the sports world, we see this intersection a lot in terms of who’s policing the games, who’s hired to police these games. We see this in the pay for play military hyper-Americana anthem…Not just the anthem – the reunions, things like that, all of these things are baked into the spectacle and sometimes when I’m looking at it and there are so many players who when they were kneeling and the trolls were coming after them were saying like, “My dad’s a cop” or “My mom’s in the air force” or X, Y, and Z. I thought about what does it look like to look at the NFL for instance as an institution that we can see as tangled up with these other kinds of forced choices, especially given what we know about CTE, what we know about brain trauma, what we know about the way that especially affluent white kids are leaving the sport because of how much it’s wrecking the body. What we know about the lawsuit that’s being brought by former players who are saying, hey, you’ve now abandoned us and we have medical bills and ailments.
Benji: Yes.
Amira: Vincent Jackson just died, and how many more people are gonna die super young after they’ve had a career in the NFL? I think that’s just but one example. So, for me I think about the intersection of these things in very particular ways and I was wondering if you also had ways where you thought through this kind of intersection of sports and these kind of military systems and police systems.
Benji: Yes, I think there’s so so much to unpack there. I feel like there’s a book for you in this, because it’s not gonna be my book. [Amira laughs] But the fact that Kaepernick was originally kneeling in the midst of this patriotic nationalist spectacle that itself was actually paid for by the military, that the military puts tens of millions of dollars to the NFL, to other sporting associations for these exact spectacles. I think for athletes to hijack those spectacles to make a political statement on the military’s dime is actually quite brilliant, so I just wanna highlight that as good organizing because the appropriation as you’ve pointed out of that initial act and that initial statement I think loses some of the ingenuity that it began with, some of the creativity that it began with.
But I think these connections really abound and I think a lot about the police in my family are also athletes and I had not actually in my head made that connection before. But I think about the way that institutions even on a college level but certainly on a professional sporting level really deify and put athletes up on this pedestal that gives them incredible visibility and power and social importance, and when you get to the professional level a lot of money and a lot of resources, that it makes it hard to see that as an oppressed person, like, someone who’s making $20 million a year and owns multiple homes. It’s really hard to see that person as exploited.
But I think things like the wildcat strike show how quickly these people that in our eyes have all this clout and power and platform, how quickly they become workers and how quickly their efforts are put down when they stop playing their position and they stop playing their role. I think there’s a complicated connection to police there, and I say this as someone who, you know, the police officers in my family or the former police officers in my family are all Black, are all poor and working class people, that participation in the military and participation in law enforcement are…I wanna tread carefully, but I think there’s a connection there about sort of the way those positions are deified and held up as the epitome of public service and the folks who are holding our communities together, and that there’s a lot of pomp and circumstance and–
Amira: Romance.
Benji: Romance and in some cases resources, in other cases the illusion of resources. When you are an officer or when you are a soldier you’ve got this equipment that’s many thousands of dollars, sometimes many millions of dollars that you’re operating, you know? You’ve got access to an incredible amount of resources. Then that feeling of importance, that feeling of romance disappears when you’re a vet. It disappears when you’re no longer the star athlete, you know? When you have PTSD from serving in a war or when you have brain trauma from how many times you’ve been tackled. It’s complicated for me to talk about police as exploited people because I’ve received so much violence from the police.
But I know from having family members that are police the ways that that system has taken advantage of them, and folks who actually needed help, folks who actually needed resources and support to deal with their trauma were actually just given a gun and were like, here, take out your trauma on folks with disabilities, take out your trauma on poor people who are stealing from the store; and the complicated ways in which I think the police system and the military system, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you had some examples from the sporting world, actually takes advantage of people's trauma, takes advantage of people’s lack of access to resources to woo them into this system that tells them it’s caring for them and then is ultimately exploiting them.
Amira: Oh, absolutely, and the way that I think you just framed it too is we know within these systems there’s these levels of power, right? So, we know that Black and brown people are on the front lines more often. We know that there’s multiple marginalized officers who have a lot of internal trauma and then, like you said, but then the stuff is directed outwards. I think that you see that in sports in particular ways because, like you said, the example of really well paid athletes is like, they take up a lot of our vision. But generally when we’re thinking of athletes we’re talking about like Olympians right now who…Postponing the Olympics for a year fundamentally really…There’s a young woman in Jersey who’s cleaning houses to sustain this year, right? Because in the Olympics your opportunity to earn is every four years, and if you miss it it’s gone. College athletes are completely exploited and get no compensation, right? So there’s all of these degrees to it.
But what I think about and what that reminded me of, and my colleagues who study this more closely would be better attuned to this, but what it reminded me of when we were talking about it is the kind of sense of access or resources or whatever is given to say football players on college campuses that when they’re working through something or whatever the institution is pretending to care by throwing stuff at them, whether it’s tutors or girls or whatever. What we know and what we’ve seen through harm that’s enacted in those spaces is that women who have been raped have just become disposable within this and that they’ve redirected actions of people outwards, like towards other marginalized folks instead of inwards towards the institutions that’s creating these circumstances. Whether it’s sexual assault or the ways in which the institution will cover for somebody that is hurting people until all of a sudden they’re not valuable anymore, right?
But I thought about this…We had another conversation about how being precise about what we mean by “harm” – which is like, all that is hurtful is not actually causing the harm. It might be hitting you where the harm is, but what becomes really important is how can we be precise about what is harmful and what is hurtful in order to actually address harm. I think that sometimes we see that within sporting spaces a lot where what catches our attention is what’s hurtful, and the conversation being centered on the hurt actually obscures the roots of the harm. I think about that like with that you just said when people are like, we’re not dealing with your trauma but here’s a gun, right? The trauma and the way that institution has created that trauma are the roots, right? The institution itself is the roots but we focus then on the harm.
I think that I wanted to ask you what was it about sports for you that always felt as a place where you're like, “I dunno, I don't fuck with that.” [laughs] I’m wondering because sports feels so omnipresent that I'm wondering if you’ve ever considered your relationship with sports and why it’s not a thing for you.
Benji: I actually think it’s a good place in the conversation to discuss that because I think it has everything to do with masculinity for me, which is also another place where police, prisons, the military and sports intersect with one another, and I think another reason why there’s lots of overlap in these conversations and in these institutions because of the ideals of masculinity that they all uphold and the ways that they encourage and then protect people who are committing masculinist forms of harm, or toxic masculine forms of violence like sexual violence. The ways that police, the ways that prison personnel, military personnel and in certain cases athletes are engaged in that behavior in a way that is sometimes encouraged, sometimes they’re actually part of the job, part of the profession, and is certainly protected, certainly folks are protected from the consequences – as you say, so long as they are seen as valuable, so long as protecting them is valuable to the institutions that they represent.
Again we could do a whole episode just on that, I’m sure. But I have such early memories as a young…You know, I didn’t have the language at the time, but a young queer gender non-conforming person, I just had so many early…Some of my earliest memories of bullying, of ridicule – of being gendered first of all as a boy and then it being so clear that I did not belong with the other boys – was sports. Sports was one of the first places that I was gender segregated, because I never wanted to be around boys when I was little. I hated boys, they hated me, we didn’t get along with each other. I got bullied all the time. So, sports I think of as A) enabling the bullying because I had to be around boys, we were separated by gender so I always had to be around boys which was like my worst nightmare.
But B), that the competitiveness was celebrated and dominating other people was celebrated and physical strength and hurting other people was encouraged and celebrated, and that was just not who I was as a young person, and I was so often the target of people who had the ability to dominate, who had the ability to enact force on others, and sports being a place where that was deemed acceptable and often even encouraged. It was just a recipe for bullying for me, and honestly the first time I ever remember enjoying sports was in high school PE actually because I realized that I actually was good at some sports. [Amira laughs] It was funny to be a junior or senior in high school and be like, oh, I kind of like basketball! I kind of like soccer! And I lowkey liked gaming on straight people, that was the fun part. I was like, you think you bout to beat me, but you’re not!
Amira: [laughs] You thought!
Benji: You fucking thought. But it took me a really long time to get there because for so long that was some of the worst places where I was targeted for bullying, for harassment and just for mistreatment in general. Like, please let PE class be over so I can go back to a place where I can carve out a safe space for myself and gather the people around me who will protect me, because the locker room is not where that is happening, you know?
Amira: Yeah, no, thank you so much for sharing that. It’s so interesting to me, you know…I recognize and I honor and at some points witness that articulation of sports and the meanings the site meant for you, and one of the things that we track of the way that people inhabit sporting spaces that have similar experiences like you did, that contain all this toxicity, and then the way even people who have been harmed within sporting spaces find something akin to freedom or liberation within it, or at least a very liberatory sense of expression. Those are in some of the most progressive kind of gender rules that guard that sport that really disrupts it, really, or I’m thinking about Zorros, the gay Mexican football team that formed their own league to push back on homophobia in the sport and create a space for that.
A trans powerlifter here at Penn State who talks about powerlifting being a site of community formation, that was really really important. Or I’m thinking about many of our friends of the show, Native runners – shoutout to Jordan and folks who are running for the land and using these spaces of movement to also raise awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and to talk about Native history and to claim that space. So, for years what did become a very important space, like sports has for some people, is performance art. For me, I got the same thing out of performative spaces as I do athletic spaces. They were both healing for me because they created family, which you know is my original wound. So, for me both sites were incredibly sustaining, and for you performance art certainly has been that site.
Benji: That’s right.
Amira: So, I would love to end with just giving you space to tell us what you got going on or in what ways do you think of that art form and that performance as a pivotal tool for both self and perhaps larger projects of freedom-making and of liberation?
Benji: The flip that I offer to that is that I did when I was 16 start voguing and it became in a lot of ways my first passion, like the first love of my life in a lot of ways, and the ballroom scene is incredibly competitive, [Amira laughs] can be incredibly toxic, can be incredibly just…People do not necessarily treat each other well. So it’s actually in some ways a very similar environment of there’s the tight-knit family that can form that’s so beautiful and powerful and also there’s fierce competition that isn’t always healthy. I believe in healthy competition and unhealthy competition, and like I haven’t walked a ball in at least 3 years now, and a big part of that was I’m tired! [laughter] I’m tired of, like, the competitive part of sports that didn’t appeal to me is the same competitive part of ballroom that was never actually the draw and never actually the appeal.
So, all this is to say I get in the same breath how people can glean really different things from the same space, because ballroom for me was…The competition and the winning was never the most exciting part for me. It was the building of the craft and the celebrating of other folks’ craft and the building of family, so I really feel you sort of naming that as what you get from sports or have gotten from sports.
Amira: I love that.
Benji: I love that too, and in closing – what things am I working on right now? It’s actually really nice to talk with you and all this shared history we have in the arts because I’m working on a new performance, a new single or solo piece, solo performance, and it incorporates so much of my early loves. The piece is called World After This One and it’s looking at vogue, bomba, and gospel music as three examples of Black art forms that draw on the materials of the present to imagine liberated futures, and for me the whole piece is actually a complication of sort of the Audre Lorde quote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In a lot of ways I’m kind of examining the ways that Black people have always used the master’s tools in complicated ways but have subverted them, have rooted them in their own experience rather than in the experience that introduced them to those tools, and just sort of generally trying to rethink about how we understand Black people’s relationship to the master’s tools but also how Black people have always been thinking about impossible futures and imagining worlds that seem unimaginable to folks outside of the Black experience.
Amira: I’m so excited about that because, like you said, it goes back to what we started talking about at the beginning which is how do you imagine these radical futures – or not so radical futures! Sensible futures, and futures when we are sustained and we’re loved. I think that part of why I wanted to have this conversation with you is because we are family, and we talk about family and the way we found family in various spaces, but also that family is hard and family is complicated and family does not mean easy and warm and safe and loving all the time. It means a lot of different things, and for me it was like what does it look like to have a conversation that’s complicated and that isn’t soundbites and is actually trying to parse out some of the ways that military and policing and sports collide, and then also some of the ways that we can think through and think past moderation or think past reform and think more towards what does it mean to not just burn it all down in theory but as an organizational tactic, right? To borrow a page from the way you framed it.
Benji: Yes.
Amira: I couldn’t think of another better person to have that conversation with and to go into it knowing and feeling love and feeling safe and feeling like we can get into this even though like how said at the top, like, just let me tell y’all, I don’t know know about sports! [laughter] I think that’s it though, it’s like your willingness to still join me in conversation where we both are a little bit outside our comfort zones but willing to do this work and have this dialogue, to me, is the essence of literally what models for me is the communication towards these goals. Like for me, the beginning of imagining futures – and I talked about how I can’t even see past next week – I realized as we’ve been talking now for an hour and some change is that at the end of this I feel better than I did an hour ago about what it looks like to envision these things, and that’s a testament to you but also I think to be able to have these conversations.
So, I really appreciate you taking the time. I just appreciate you in general. Please please please, y’all, please check out Benji. You can find them on Twitter @radfagg or on their website at benjihart.com, also on Insta and Facebook, all the things of course. But thank you again for joining us here on Burn It All Down. We will certainly be keeping an eye on you; of course I will be in touch, because I didn’t even make you sing! And so therefore I will of course have to have you back so you can. [laughter] Because y’all know that I can’t hold a tune at all, and so that means that I make everybody else who can sing sing because hello, compensate me! I love you, thank you so much for joining me here on Burn It All Down.
Benji: Love you too, a pleasure, thank y’all so much for having me.