Episode 123: Live from Nashville – at AMEND Together’s SHIFT Conference
The crew is all together for this *LIVE* show recorded on September 9, 2019, at the Music City Center in Nashville as part of AMEND Together’s SHIFT Conference, which focuses on challenging and changing a culture that supports gendered violence. (www.amendtogether.org/shift)
After a short discussion about one wild weekend in sports, [4:10] we dig in by first talking about the ways in which sports culture supports gendered violence and toxic masculinity. [22:37] Then we discuss ways in which sports model inclusive, feminist, and non-toxic practices that might lead us to eradicating some of the bullshit. [43:17]
Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile, [57:17] our Bad Ass Woman of the Week, starring Bianca Andreescu, [1:00:31] and what is good in our worlds.
Links
This former NFL player turned gender activist is here to clarify what feminists really want from men: https://qz.com/work/1408519/this-former-nfl-player-turned-lgbtq-activist-is-here-to-clarify-what-feminists-really-want-from-men/
COACHING BOYS INTO MEN: https://www.futureswithoutviolence.org/engaging-men/coaching-boys-into-men/
Ending Dating Violence on Campus, One Athlete at a Time: https://progressive.org/dispatches/ending-dating-violence-on-campus-one-athlete-at-a-time/
Inter fans tell Romelu Lukaku monkey chants in Italy are not racist: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/sep/04/inter-fans-tell-romelu-lukaku-monkey-chants-in-italy-are-not-racist
Young Female Football Fan In Iran Sets Herself On Fire To Protest Jail: https://en.radiofarda.com/a/young-female-football-fan-in-iran-protesting-jail-sets-herself-on-fire-/30146238.html
Education Department Hits Michigan State With Record Fine Over Nassar Scandal: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/politics/michigan-state-larry-nassar.html
N.C.A.A. Drops Michigan State Inquiry Over Nassar: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/sports/ncaa-michigan-state-nassar.html
Kent State calls off double-OT field hockey game so football team can launch fireworks: https://sports.yahoo.com/kent-state-maine-temple-field-hockey-football-194210435.html
After 9 months without pay, Jamaican women’s soccer team goes on strike: https://thinkprogress.org/its-a-slap-in-the-face-jamaican-womens-soccer-team-goes-on-strike-after-9-months-without-pay-e1aeaf0ac2fd/
Caster Semenya joins South African football team JVW: https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/49605649
Finnish FA announces equal pay for male and female players: https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finnish_fa_announces_equal_pay_for_male_and_female_players/10956220
Help My Bahamas - by Jonquel Jones: https://www.gofundme.com/f/xs2z5-helpthebahamas?utm_source=whatsApp&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet
WFS 2019 rewards the Afghan national women’s team for their bravery: https://www.womeninfootball.co.uk/news/2019/09/05/wfs-2019-rewards-the-afghan-national-women%E2%80%99s-team-for-their-bravery/
Raptors' Brittni Donaldson is NBA's 10th female assistant coach: https://www.cbc.ca/sports/basketball/nba/brittni-donaldson-raptors-promotion-1.5275247?__vfz=medium%3Dsharebar
Transcript
Amira: Welcome to Burn It All Down. It may not be the feminist sports podcast you want, but it's definitely the feminist sports podcast you need, and we are live in Nashville, Tennessee! Before we go much further, I would first like to acknowledge that we're on the traditional land of the Shawnee and Cherokee peoples, past and present. We honor that and acknowledge the ongoing effects of settler colonialism. I'm Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of history and African American studies at Penn State University, and I am joined today by my full crew, my team, my squad, the tenacious Lindsay Gibbs, freelance sports reporter out of DC. We're announcing again because that's just how we do. The brilliant Brenda Elsey, my fellow historian, associate professor of history at Hofstra University. Say hi again.
Brenda: Hi again.
Amira: The phenomenal Jessica Luther, freelance reporter based out of Austin, Texas.
Jessica: Hello!
Amira: And the fiery Shireen Ahmed, all things brilliant, reporter from Toronto.
Shireen: She the north.
Amira: Okay. Not yet Shireen. Today we're going to talk about the ways in which sports is a space of toxic masculinity, a site of harm, and a place that can perpetuate violence against women, against marginalized people. And we're also going to shift in our second section to talk about how sports can also be a site of response to that. A place where people come together, a progressive site where people push the boundaries and actually seek to eradicate half the stuff that we profile on the first section. And of course like we usually do, we're going to shout out some badass women of the week and we're going to definitely burn all the things that need to be burned. But first, this was an exciting sports weekend. Football's back. I don't know how I feel about that to be honest, but it is there.
Jessica: I don't know. I think your Pats are fine.
Lindsay: Yeah I think they were okay.
Amira: The Pats were fine. They were wonderful. The US Open happened. So what are your takeaways from the sports weekend before we dive in?
Lindsay: I am excited about men's tennis for the first time in a while thanks to ... which is not a subject we we're going to get often on the show. But I love Daniil Medvedev, the Russian, I don't know if you saw took Rafael Nadal to five sets. I'm really excited about his future. And of course it was great to see Bianca Andreescu, we’re sad about Serena but Andreescu, another star. So I love seeing like new faces come up that I think like we're going to see, you know, I love seeing the start of like what could be legendary careers. So that was for me really great.
Jessica: Yeah it was really fun because we actually watched the women's final together which is really stressful.
Amira: Watch is a term…
Lindsay: Yeah. I have a picture of Amira hiding in a stairwell, unable to look.
Amira: Sports is stressful!
Jessica: I did a lot of pacing, which normally I can hide. No one knows it's happening. So that was very fun for me to actually share that experience. And of course I was very sad about Serena. I really want the 24, probably not as much as she does, but that would be nice. And yeah, Andreescu was amazing and I always enjoy thinking about the future of women's tennis. And I was, yeah, I was shock that Medvedev didn't get rolled over. Like I actually told them, I thought it would be a really-
Lindsay: Well he was down two sets in the break. So he was about to.
Jessica: I didn't know he was on a break in the third. Wow. I missed all of it. But yeah, that was really exciting. Good tennis weekend.
Amira: Yeah. And we all watched the Antonio Brown drama unfold with his like, highly technically produced commercial. It was very ... it was a weird weekend. But we start with this to show we're sports fans at our core, right. And part of the podcast, as you'll see in a second, is saying that we don't have to accept sports with toxicity in it. We don't have to accept sports with sexism and homophobia and racism. We don't have to accept sports like that. We love sports and it's actually our love of sports that bring us to burn things that we wished didn't have to exist in it. And so as we head into this next section, I think that that's really important to think about. So too often though, as much as it's invigorating and it gives us adrenaline to watch, I'm curled up in the fetal position because I can't watch Serena not move her feet.
Jessica: She wasn't moving her feet.
Amira: She doesn't move her feet!
Brenda: The serve. The serve.
Jessica: Oh, let's not stop. Okay.
Amira: But too often is also accompanied with some really toxic stuff and that's where we want to start today. So to kick us off, Jess, what are some of the ways that American sports culture and sports culture in general supports violence against women or toxic masculinity? What do you see? What do you see going on?
Jessica: That's a really big question Amira, and I’m actually going to be really basic in my response this morning and I just want to talk about the very real problem within sports and the way that we treat women's sports as if they are inferior to men sports, that they are somehow outsiders to sport or interlopers within a male space and within real sports. I was once talking with an athletic director, or actually the athletic department administrators, including athletic director at a D1 school, and they asked me, I'm always writing and talking about the culture of athletic departments and normally I cover football, so football teams. And they're like, but what do you mean by that? Like what is that? That's a difficult idea.
And I said, but I thought the simplest starting point to determine the culture of the sporting space was whether or not your athletes felt like the women in the department were less than. Whether or not they were somehow inferior to the men around them. Because from there we can extrapolate out, right? All the ways that women get devalued and that that kind of stuff really does start at the top. And it's about ... we're having a discussion in this country right now around the US women's national team and the idea of equal pay but also equal resources and whether or not you're covering them the same. I mean there's so many ways that within sports, the way sports structures are built, the very base, the fundamentals of it are set up to devalue women and start this entire cycle and process that we're talking about. So I was just going to throw that out as like the first thing. I know it's basic on some level, but I feel like we have to keep really spotlighting that that is one of the basic structures of how sport is built.
Amira: Yeah, I mean just yesterday, what was it this weekend, where Maine and Temple field hockey was going into double overtime and they're playing on a neutral site at Kent State and they were in the middle of their ... they're about to start their double overtime and they were told at 10:45 in the morning that they actually had to stop playing because Kent State football was kicking off at noon and they had to ready the fireworks for it. So they cleared the fields.
Jessica: So they canceled the ... Yeah. It was a no contest.
Amira: It was a no contest decision.
Jessica: The administrators called it.
Amira: And I think that that's just a stirring example of exactly what you're saying, Jess.
Jessica: And I also think like when we get down to gendered violence and we think about spaces where the person harmed is an athlete and the person harming is an athlete, that person speaking up within a space like that, especially when you talk about the gender dynamics… But I think this is true, even if it's both men, that's a really tough space to have a voice. You've already been told in all of the tiny ways that your voice and your value are so much less. And so I think you know, we can really think about what all of that is doing.
Lindsay: I mean, there's a case in Maryland, at Maryland University where they literally, there was a woman, female athletes and athletic department accused a male athlete in the athletic department of sexual assault and they paid for a lawyer for the male athlete.
Jessica: Talk about where your resources are going.
Lindsay: Yeah, just like a very stark example.
Amira: Exactly. And I'll piggyback on that with my discussion as well, and to think specifically about what is going on here in athletics. Right? So we talked about this a lot. It's really something to see somebody that has harmed you then be cheered by a hundred and some odd thousand people. So it's a particular dynamic in this sporting world that I think is really important. So the thing that I want to think about is a conversation that requires us to really think with nuance and intersectionality. This is brought up because Nate Parker is in the news, again promoting American Skin with Spike Lee and so he started to apologize for how he handled rape allegations in the past when he was actually a wrestler at Penn State's-
Lindsay: He's a director. Yeah.
Amira: Of American Skin? And when he was a sophomore at Penn State as a wrestler, him and his teammate Jean Celestin were accused of raping a fellow student. And one of the things that I want to parse out here is that in this space there's so many overlapping and intersectional things that are bearing down on a situation. And one of the responses that I saw very close to me were Black alumni at Penn state who wanted to say absolutely not. This is just dynamic that is born out of the fact that he's a Black wrestler at a predominantly white school and the accuser is a white woman.
And I think one of the things that happens is that all of these overlapping things can also become shields to deeper honest conversations. And so you have, yes, the exploitation of college athletes, you have the objectification of women, you have racism at play, that doesn't excuse harm. And I think that one thing that happens is we're very easily sidetracked by conversations that require nuance. And so for me, one of the ways that toxicity perpetuates is because we stay on the surface level with these conversations and can't grapple with the fact that Black football players who are exploited by the school and put into a situation where they're constantly told that they're valued but only on the field. That they're valued and therefore here's all of these things that are thrown at them, including women. Here is a cute tour guide to show you around. Here is a house party where you know, this is your reward for playing well.
But what happens when you become disposable? What happens when you break your leg? What happens when you no longer can catch a ball very well? What happens when you're disposable? Those same forces aren't going to protect you. They're not going to protect you. And that disposability works both for the students but also for the people who are feeling that harm. Because as Jess just pointed out, you can have an entire institution putting resources into protecting you, until they stop. And I think that it requires some parsing out because we're talking about individuals who are caught up in systems larger than them. And I think that it requires the ability to look at structural issues with the fine tuned microscope and to say, "This is about value. This is about power." Right? And too often we don't get to have that level of conversation. Shireen.
Shireen: There is a few hills that I will die on and one of them is going to be men who are, have been alleging abusers, whether or not they have been convicted by courts of law. There's a big difference between being found guilty and actually having been an abuser. There's a big difference. The system is not set up to support survivors and victims of abuse. One of those people who is occupying huge spaces in sport is Kobe Bryant. I've talked about this. I've written about this. I cannot watch a WNBA game without seeing his face. I cannot see tennis now without seeing his picture with these incredible athletes, and he touched my beloved soccer. He was around the US women's national team, he’s friendly. Having photo ops and amplifying women's game doesn't give you an opportunity to use that for your redemption arc. It doesn't work like that.
I am all about men unlearning, growing and changing, particularly men of color who are also victims in this type of system of law, they're often criminalized and not always given opportunities, but it's not a right. It's something that should be earned, and I don't think he's done the work. I don't see the sincerity there and I hate to have to save this and be like, "I used to like him a long time ago." No, it's not about that. I don't want to have to say that there's a hard stop for me supporting athletes when they've raped somebody, and I hate the fact that this happens. I mean he's done none of that and it makes me wonder are women's spaces in sports so weak- tennis, soccer, basketball- that we need him to amplify? No. We were doing fine and growing without him being on the sideline. We will keep going and I think, besides, if we want a single ambassador, it's going to be David Beckham for me for everything anyway, like let's be honest, but he's-
Jessica: Oh I really thought you were going to say Tim Duncan.
Brenda: I did too.
Shireen: Well he's my personal ambassador.
Jessica: Okay. Just didn't go where I thought.
Shireen: He's using, I feel like Kobe's using the universe and the growing sport universe for his personal gain and for what my friend Morgan Campbell was at the Toronto Star said polishing his post retirement image. I find it disingenuous. I don't want it. His interest in being involved in various women's sports, he's also said because of his daughters. Okay. So I understand that we all start at a place, men start thinking about women as humans because they have a wife, a sister, a daughter, and a mother. But for me, they need to have done many things to decentralize themselves from the narrative and not say, "I'm only caring about this because how it affects me." There's news flash, women are humans, deserve respect whether or not you have a sister or a wife or a girlfriend or whatnot, whether regardless of your situation, your relationship status, it doesn't matter. And not because you might have a potential victim in your family, you should just care. Period.
Amira: Bren.
Brenda: I hate going after Shireen. This sucks. All right. I guess what I want to put on the table is this really something, a hill I'll die on, which is mental toughness and the relationship between pain and masculinity that I think is really toxic in terms of, you said American sports, but I'm going to be very on brand and break that rule, the entire show. So this is way beyond the US. And it's particular to sport because it demands that the athlete accept physical strain and pain as part of their success. So it's not the same kind of sphere as any other sphere. It's really particular, maybe dancers, maybe piano players. And there's also like the implicit acknowledgement on our part when we love sports heroes that there was a degree of pain that you and I might not be able to tolerate, that there's a kind of discipline involved that we might not be able to tolerate.
And then there's also the sport market, which adds an economic incentive for hiding all of that pain. And I think the denial of physical pain has come with a kind of complete rejection of mental pain or emotional wellbeing that is really toxic and build a kind of toxic masculinity in sport. I mean it's also in Spanish fortaleza mental, the idea of mental toughness, is ubiquitous in sports talk, like psychology, sports science. There's dissertations written on it. Sports science, they hire trainers to get people to get them in this space. And in the case of soccer, which is what I work mostly on, it's used to tell people, athletes, officials, fans, just to get over it. And it really is a nuanced conversation because it's also about telling athletes they should accept racism and homophobia because they don't really deserve to have any sort of mental, whatever you want to call it, untoughness, weakness, that would be …That’s it.
And I do think the dehumanization of these athletes is key to understanding their violence against women and hating women whom they perceive as weak, hating the weakness in themselves. I think misogyny is a mental health issue.
Amira: It reminds me of what Michael Bennett was saying when we were, when Brenda was on a panel with him where you demand on the football field for me to be tough and to want to kill the person I'm lining up against, to have that mentality. And you teach that from a young age that you get on the field and you're ruthless, but you never teach me how to turn it off when I go home. Linds.
Lindsay: Yeah. Aren't they all brilliant? I learn so much every week. So I want to talk a little bit about what I think the media's role in all this, sports media. So I started thinking about this all on a different level a few years ago when I was writing about the legacy of the Kobe Bryant rape case. And I came across a study by Rene Franiuk, I hope I'm pronouncing that right. She's a professor of psychology at Aurora University. And years ago she did a study on the coverage of the Kobe Bryant rape case. And so she analyzed articles and headlines only 13 of the 156 articles she studied countered rape myths. And when I say that, I mean saying, mentioning when you're talking about the doubt, that a woman lies, mentioning the fact how rare it is for women to lie about this, the statistics that we have there. Do you know what I mean?
When Kobe Bryant's team is saying, "Well, she went into the room with him willingly." Do you know what I mean? Mentioning in the article, the fact that that does not mean she was consenting to sex. So we're not talking about the articles, whether or not they were saying Kobe was guilty or not, just whether or not it was responsible journalism of taking the things that the defense team or the public or that his supporters were saying and adding in the truth that we do know from society. And so only 13 of the 156 articles did that.
Furthermore, 27% of the articles said incredibly positive things about Bryant, as a person, or whereas only 5% of the articles mentioned anything at all positive about the victim. And 42.3% of the articles questioned the honesty of the victim. Whereas only 7.7% questioned whether Kobe was being honest in his defense. So this to me, I mean, this was of course about 15 years ago, but things haven't changed that much. I mean, you see the exact playbook that was laid out in the Kobe Bryant rape case by his defense team. We've seen that used time and time again and be it Patrick Kane, Ben Roethlisberger, Johnny Manziel, you see-
Brenda: Ronaldo.
Lindsay: I mean, you're just seeing it everywhere. And I think that's ... we thought a lot with Derrick Rose a few years ago, and so to me it's just the media perpetuates these myths and these narratives so much. I mean, how many times do we see a road to redemption story that is somehow about a quarterback like Ben Roethlisberger being able to redeem the fact that he was accused of sexual assault by success on the field. You can't do that. That doesn't work, right? You can redeem a bad performance on the field, right? You can redeem yeah, a mistake like you threw a lot of interceptions in one game and then you came back the next game and you didn't, that's a redemption arc on the field.
You have to do the work off the field to have your redemption narrative for things that happened off the field. It just goes on and on. I mean, there was a New York Times article a few years ago about Johnny Manziel after he was accused of domestic violence and it was all about like, Johnny Manziel as an entertainment, like Johnny Manziel's messes as entertainment, his domestic violence allegations, a very serious domestic violence allegations weren't mentioned until the 22nd paragraph of that article. And time and time again, we just see things like Tyreek Hill what's going on with him in the NFL. He is the abuse, the domestic violence and the child abuse. We see it looped into this general thing of off the field issues or “drama” or “problem.” You'll see it looped in with somebody smoking weed or being late for a team meeting. Right. They're all looped into the same thing. And I think like in the sports media and media in general is the messenger of this culture. And it is just, as long as these things keep happening, it's going to be so hard to see real change.
Amira: Yeah, certainly. I mean, we just saw Brock Turner back in the news and if you remember Brock Turner, they published his swimming times at the bottom of our article about him being accused of assault, like his swimming times were germane to anything, and just even this week when the young woman bravely decided to come forward and unmask her identity, the tweet out from, what was it, 60 minutes? The tweet out was “sexual assault victim of Stanford swimmer Brock Turner.” Well, you mean convicted rapist, Brock Turner. You don't mean this boy in this school. It's the most absurd thing. Like it makes me irritated.
Shireen: I just wanted to quickly jump in here and just say that, listen, Lindsay's piece on Kobe Bryant and his relationship with media changed the way that I look at media myself and I'm in the industry and I really, I recommend you read everything we do, and follow! But particularly this piece, Linds, from 2016?
Lindsay: Yeah, it was when Kobe retired. I wrote it to coincide with his retirement.
Shireen: And it really helps you frame and understand as somebody in the media looking at peers and saying, this is what we're getting wrong, and this is what has to happen. I really, really, really underlying that you should read that piece.
Lindsay: Thank you.
Amira: And part of the reason why I think sports matters is because we consume it so often. Even passively, even for people in the room who say, well, I'm not a sports person. Generally SportsCenter will be on in the back of a bar you might be in. Sports talk radio tends to be just like everywhere. There's so much money and power that go into sports. So you can passively be participating in the sporting sphere without even knowing it. If you go to a school, if you're at Vanderbilt, if you're at Penn State, right? The decisions that ... hell, if you're at LSU and you don't have a working library, but they have souped up new, what's it called?
Jessica: Locker room.
Amira: Yeah, it's wild.
Lindsay: You should go look at the videos.
Amira: So part of the reason why we take sports seriously is because unlike what the IOC or other sporting establishments might try to convince you, sports is always and has always been political. It's inherently political. And so taking it seriously is very important because too often it can be dismissed as…that’s just entertainment, or that's just fun and games. That's just hobby. No, there's like real lives involved with this. But because of that it's also a site that has enormous potential. I get kids who come to my classes on race, gender and sports who are so ready to talk about sports and I'm like, haha you didn't know you're not going to be talking about white supremacy, tricked ya! Plot twist, here we're going to smash the patriarchy. But because it's a door, it's an inroads to some of these conversations and that's why we take sports very seriously.
Thinking about that, I want to transition to our next segment with sports being this site that has possibilities moving forward. So Linds, I'm going to go right back to you. We've talked about how the media fails. Do you have examples of when the media is succeeding in pushing sports towards perhaps a more equitable future?
Lindsay: Well, I think I have examples of the media's potential too, if that works. You know I think, number one, it starts with getting more women in sports media and elevating more female voices. And I do think like Washington Post has so many phenomenal women in their sports department and on beats. ESPN has actually done a pretty good job recently of elevating women. And one of the important things I think that we're seeing both at the Washington Post and at ESPN is that the women aren't just sideline reporters all the time. They're not just the person coming in. Look, I write about the intersection of sports and culture all the time. So obviously I think it's very important beat, but I also think it's equally as important to have women just covering the NFL or just covering the NBA or just covering sport. Just writing up the games and doing the analysis and having their voices be part of those conversations.
I think hearing more women in the booth, right when you're turning on to games. Mina Kimes recently was doing some play by play and it's just a phenomenal talent. Of course, Doris Burke, Jessica Mendoza, getting these voices just, it starts to counter this thing that Jess was saying, which is that that sports is a male-only space and that women are outsiders. So the more we can see women as a part of that world, just naturally, that helps shift your perception of where women belong in society as a whole and helps to shift your respect for women. On the other hand, sports media has an obligation to treat women's sports as equally important as men’s sports. And we know that they don't even begin to do that. I mean, I thought actually the coverage for the most part of the Women's World Cup was great and they treat it like it mattered and it mattered, right? People cared.
And I think to me, that's a great example. If you put the resources into covering these sports and if you put your advertising budget behind it and you put your best talent on it, and you put the production quality…people tune in, right? It signals that people care. So I thought that was a good step and I'd like to see a little bit more of that across the realm. Couple of other ways I think like have that have been really impressive that women in sports have been doing lately coming forward with our own stories as survivors. What Breanna Stewart did last year, the WNBA All Star. I mean this was her MVP season championship and before the season started, she came out as a survivor of sexual abuse a few years ago, right after Ray Rice, it was Ruthie Bolton, another two time gold medalist who came forward saying, "When I was winning gold medals, I was being in an abusive relationship with my partner."
And I think what that does is that also helps change our perception of what a victim is. These are the strongest women in the world. Some of the most talented, brave, nobody could say anything about weakness or whatever. And so I think the media elevating those voices and those women having the strength to come forward and tell their stories, to me that's been also a really promising story. Layshia Clarendon, who we've had on the podcast a couple of times has also come forward with her story. I hate that women have to share their stories in order for change and I don't want that to be a requirement for anyone. But I do think it's important that the media, when these women do decide to come forward, share these stories. Because like I said, I think it just helps change the narratives of what we perceive victimhood to be.
Brenda: I also just want to add to your point that it's also inclusion and diversity. Like it works with the other spaces, makes it better. Like I'll never forget Aly Wagoner and they play by play for the World Cup. And at one point her male counterpart whose name I can't remember, conveniently said-
Lindsay: Very on brand!
Brenda: Very on brand. And he said, well, “all of these US women's athletes have been given hydration test every single morning and are monitored.” And Aly Wagner, he says, "Well that just meant that we peed in a cup and they saw if it was really brown or not." She was like, "That's as scientific as it gets." And it was like, it was such a good moment just because she was an athlete who had that experience and it made it smarter. So yes, it's important, but I also want to say like I mean-
Lindsay: No, it's about being better. It's better.
Jessica: It's better.
Lindsay: Like we're seeing women in the NBA coaching ranks and I think that's equally as important. And it's not because we want these to be token hires, it's because there's so many talented women out there and it does make everyone better. Why wouldn't we expand these pools.
Amira: Shireen what do you have?
Shireen: I like to be considered a positive person. Really-
Brenda: You mean glass half full…
Shireen: Half yeah. And I have been really coming to Nashville really surprised me. Shan Foster really surprised me. The Nashville Predators ... I see you back there Shan. I am Canadian and I love hockey. That is such a stereotype but it's real. I also speak French and drink maple syrup, but-
Jessica: It's true. She actually brought me a can of maple syrup when she came to Austin. That was like in her luggage.
Lindsay: A can?
Shireen: It's canned, for preservation in rural Quebec. I don't live in rural Quebec but it makes sense for those ... Anyways, we can talk about that on a Patreon episode. What I'm trying to say is I've been a lover of hockey my whole life and I also have, I'm like very aware of the fact that the NHL has no policy about DV and horribly handles anything that remotely comes to it. You know, Patrick Kane, for example, the Chicago Blackhawks was so badly botched the organization, there's countless, countless examples of how badly that was handled. But on the flip side you come and you see people doing grassroots level work. The Preds, I did not expect the Preds to be so invested in Amend. I did not know that they were affiliated the YWCA. It takes a lot for this group of women, this team that I'm on, to be shocked and surprised and happy that happened yesterday.
Lindsay: Shocked in a good way-
Shireen: Shocked in a good way! And it was uplifting and motivating as well. I mean you've seen places in the NHL, like Sheldon Kennedy came out with his story of abuse and likewise, I mean the way for men to unlearn and change toxic culture is to share things and as Terry Crews so eloquently said, "They don't have that knowledge." So we have to start in a place where that gets, that happens and I think allyship starts there and allyship in terms of more of just not only supporting women and non-binary folks in their journeys, but also standing up and being a leader in their own and own circles. I work with a former Toronto argonauts as a CFL team named Matt Black and he does a lot of work in locker rooms teaching about like anti-homophobia, anti-racism stuff. And that's a lot of work to sit down and have very uncomfortable conversations.
This work is not going to be easy. It's not going to be cheery. It's going to be hard and really make people shift in their seats and re-examine the way that they're thinking. And that is really important. So I've seen it, there’s a young man who's here named Kirk Richard, who started that, he intervened in a sexual assault. Kyle did I say Kirk?
Jessica: Kyle Richard.
Shireen: Kyle Richard. And he intervened in a sexual assault on his own campus. He ended up being shot as a result of ... twice, one in each leg and made it back safely to the field, I mean after recovery. But his intervention was not just physical, and psychological as well. And he took on this work and now Kyle it the head of an organization that's doing it. This matters, this matters because even what Shan said when he's walking with someone in Vandy campus, and that guy's like, you know, cat calling a woman, he's like, "No, don't do that. I don't want any part of that." It's a lot harder for young men and for men generally to be able to do that because they're not supported as they do it. They'll be called out.
I have three teenage boys and there's a lot of discussions about what's appropriate, what's not appropriate, what is okay, what's not okay. And one day, my oldest just said to me, "Well I can't say this. I can't say that. What can I say?" I'm like, nothing! You can actually sit and listen for a long time and then it'll come to you. And I just made that answer up on the spot like most of my parenting, but it was sit and listen, and if you don't know, ask, there's places you can ask. There's something so powerful about a man saying to a woman, "I need help with this. What do I do? Please direct me." It's really not that complicated. And so my job in this is to help my sons unlearn and to support men that are helping other people educate and unlearn. So I'm feeling really positive and for everybody in Nashville, Shan Foster is a gem. And if you want to send them to the home of the current NBA championships, we will gladly accept.
Amira: Every time Canada wins it just makes you more…like I can't. Jess.
Jessica: Yeah. I'm going to piggyback right off of what Shireen was talking about and I think one of the things that gives me hope and around gendered violence in sport is just how powerful sports are and that athletes and coaches really have the potential to push this issue and change how we talk about it and how we think about it. I'm a little intimidated because I'm about to talk about Brenda Tracy and she's sitting right here, but I think there are efforts right now in lots of ways to do this, and I just wanted to highlight some of those. So one of them is Brenda and #SetTheExpectation, which is her organization, and she goes around to talk to high school and college…Is there professional? Just with the Ravens, so professional teams as well.
She tells her story. I don't actually understand how she does this over and over again. But she also has started these pledges that she has, that the coaches have their players sign and it sets the expectation of behavior and pushes for then accountability if they fail and that behavior. Right. And again, we're talking about basic things that are just not yet done that this is important that Brenda's doing this work. She's also raising a ton of awareness. She was just here in Nashville last weekend for the first SEC #SetTheExpectation game. All the players are in the gear. She spoke beforehand on the field, she talks to the audience, they raised, she raises money. She's doing a whole thing right now for the University of Michigan and they're raising local funds for the efforts on the ground.
And I also wanted to talk about education efforts and Futures Without Violence has a program called Coaching Boys into Men. I've probably talked about it on this podcast and it's a really smart learning tool where they have integrated it. So if you're a coach and you want to have these conversations with your players, they've built it into the season and they teach these coaches how to do this work during the season throughout, right? So that they can integrate into the sport itself and into the training. And I just think this is so interesting and important because I do think there are a ton of coaches who want to do this work and have no idea how, they've come up through the same system. They got all the same messaging and now we're asking them to change that messaging, change the way they think to teach the younger generation. That's hard work.
So we have things like Coaching Boys into Men. I wanted to mention Starting the Conversation. I wanted to write about this forever and then maybe one day I will, it's a program in the state of Texas after everything happened around the Baylor sexual assault scandal in the state of Texas, there's a ton of conversation in the state and coaches, high school coaches, they had players coming to them wanting to talk about this. And as a group they were like, "We don't know how." And so they privately fundraised the Texas High School Coaches’ Association privately fundraised in order to fund experts to build these videos and supplemental materials called Starting the Conversation, you can find it online, so that they can start the conversation with their players. Right. And I just think, that I have lots of criticisms about my state of Texas and about sports and youth sports in the state of Texas.
But that's a pretty amazing thing that we're seeing, right. And Shireen just mentioned Kyle Richard and SUNY. I wrote a piece a couple of years ago, there were sadly multiple dating violence deaths of student athletes. And they got together, they decided, the athletes did, that they were going to partner with One Love and they were going to start to educate their campuses about dating violence. And they had the support of their athletic departments, their universities and the conference at large SUNYAC. And because they had that kind of institutional support, I mean, I talked to the woman at One Love and there was one guy who alone, a student athlete had done the workshop, which is an incredibly intense thing to teach about dating violence to thousands of students on his campus, in addition to being an athlete and a student.
And so the work is out there and they need the institutional support and we need to be figuring out ways to help the coaches who want to do this work, right? There are people who want to do it. And so part of it is ... and you can, in sport, this is one of the great things about it is that it will work. And you have a captive audience and they care deeply about what you're saying. So that's mine. That was really positive for me.
Amira: And on the point of captive audience, I want to highlight athletes who understand their platform and use it to push for change both within sports and with out of sports. So everything from Black girls creating space for each other within the sporting world…You saw Naomi Osaka and Coco Gauff at the US Open last week and just the small act of Naomi saying, "Stay on the court with me," and saying "We both made it here." And really replicating what we saw the year before with Serena and Naomi and saying, this might be a sport that we've had to break down the door to be in and to be a part of, but we have each other.
And we interviewed on Episode 92 Dr. Renee Hess, who started the Black Girl Hockey Club, the decal right here, little afro puffs, super cute. But thinking about organizations like that, that create space and then looking at the long history of athletic activism, and I say long history because I'm doing that to gesture beyond this kind of, looking at Colin Kaepernick to John and Tommie at the ’68 Olympics, but beyond that and understanding that all of those spaces were always multiple athletes using their platforms. So at 68 you also have Wyomia Tyus who protests not only racial injustice, but also pay equity, right? You have Venus Williams who's charge for pay equity at Wimbledon really set the standard first for a lot of the foundational conversations we're having now about pay equity, and the ability of athletes to also be canaries in the mine for other issues.
I'm thinking in particular of Serena Williams sharing her story about her fight after having her daughter and the way that that has lended awareness to the fact that black maternal death rate is three to four times the national average of white women, regardless of education status, of money, of anything like that. And she was able to use that to kickstart and really amplify a conversation that may have been pre existing, but now it goes to another level, and I think you have that with pay equity as well, and I'll toss it to Brenda because I know that that-
Brenda: Is very on brand. Yeah, I know. So what I think is positive, I mean, I think it's most difficult for me to be positive, right? I would say like I am for people who don't-
Lindsay: Oh, hundred percent. Yeah.
Brenda: They don't invite me to the parties. No, I mean it's labor unions and direct labor actions on the part of women. I think over the last five years it's been amazing, whether it's the best women's soccer player in the world, Ada Hegerberg deciding that she's not going to play in the World Cup because she isn't treated with equity. The Jamaican women’s national team is on strike right now because they haven't been paid and they don't have resources, so they're not competing. The Argentine national women's team went on strike in 2017, full disclosure that I do work for Fare, and even before that was involved in unionizing the Argentine and Chilean women, and they were making $8 every time that they trained and they went on strike because the federation didn't even pay the $8.
They weren't even asking for more! They were like, "Could you just pony up what you promised?" And what you saw in this past World Cup when you look at the disparity of those teams, it has everything to do with that. But the fact that they were even there, the fact that they even suited up and got on the field, had to do with the organizing and solidarity, transnational solidarity among women and among themselves. And so when Argentina went to play Puerto Rico it was the first women's friendly that had been held in Puerto Rico, last year. They called each other and met up through social media and they had seen the Argentine women protest and the Puerto Rican women said, "Well, if we go and we protest on the field, will you like just respect what we're doing?" And the Argentine women were like, "Hell yes. Absolutely." So kickoff happened, the Puerto Rican women just stand there and try to have a sort of group-
Amira: They covered their mouth.
Brenda: Yeah. Well the mouth and the ears. Right. And then, and you see the Argentine women just, you know [clapping] like yes. And so that type of solidarity and thinking about women athletes as workers and yes, that goes to college athletes as well, men and women, but I think is a hugely progressive thing.
Amira: Yeah. So I think that one of the things is that there is an effort to say there's things out there that are already kind of pushing sports into a new and better direction. And I borrowed this from Jess and her amazing book Unsportsmanlike Conduct, read it and get it. But one of the things that Jess does in the second half of her book is say everybody's using the same tired old play book. What does it look like to write a new one? And I think that part of this discussion is amplifying people who in various corners of the sporting world are going about writing and charting a new playbook for dealing with sports in general and confronting the harm that they can sometimes perpetuate.
Now it's time for our favorite part of the show. Are you ready to burn some things? [crowd wooing] I don't believe you. Are you ready to burn some things? [louder wooing!] All right. Lindsay, what are you burning this week?
Lindsay: Okay, so I want to burn the fact that the Washington Mystics are the number one WNBA team. Literally, they're the number one team in the playoffs and they have the likely MVP Elena Delle Donne. They all went to the US Open and were sitting in a box at the US Open this past week. And ESPN who finds every single athlete in the stands, every single C-list celebrity, did not even mention that the number one team in the WNBA was sitting in the box. During my two weeks of watching the US Open, I must've seen interviews with 12 injured Yankees, NFL players that I as an NFL fan had never heard of before.
I saw Kobe Bryant 1000 times. Kobe Bryant and Colin Kaepernick, which is just like a lot, but we're just going to move on, were there to watch Naomi Osaka and their presence made into ESPN's 100 character headline on their website about Naomi Osaka's win.
Amira: Literally Naomi Osaka wins comma, Kaep and Kobe watch.
Lindsay: And here you have…ESPN is the WNBA playoffs this month. Elena Delle Donne is a gold medalist. If you cannot promote Elena Delle Donne and the number one team, I don't know what you're doing. And they couldn't even be bothered to even show them in passing on TV. And I know it might sound like a small thing, but to me it's just like another example of how time and time again, we just ignore female athletes and it is ... we don't even do the most basic thing. And once you start recognizing this and seeing how little respect these women are given, even by the platforms, I mean, I'm sitting there watching Madison Keys’ match, the commercials are ESPN commercials about empowering women, and then they're not showing even like going to the box to like show. And it's not like they were all on Instagram, you know, you knew where they were because they, it's not like they were hiding, they were doing like their Insta stories from the box.
Jessica: They're WNBA players. You don't hide-
Lindsay: Like you can't ... it was the entire team! So I would like to just throw that onto the burn pile.
Amira: All right, Bren.
Brenda: Oh, mine's sadder. I want a more flame-ier one. Okay, well, I'm breaking the rules again, but soccer. I want to burn this scourge of racism in Italian soccer and it's not news to anybody who follows soccer. Black players have been racially abused the last few years in increasing numbers, verbal insults, monkey chants, black face, things being thrown at them. This season we've seen more of the same. And last week, a couple weeks, there's been two high profile incidents with Lukaku and Koulibaly, I feel like not that many people follow Italian soccer, but I promise you it's very important. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of passion. It's a big deal.
Amira: History.
Brenda: Yeah. History and what not. Anyway, so once again it happened and the Italian league’s disciplinary judge was figuring out if there was enough evidence. This is on television, this is recorded. Everyone's seeing it. The whole world is seeing it. Monkey chants at these players, in this case it was Romelu Lukaku and he's great. He's so great.
Shireen: He's wonderful.
Brenda: And you all need one of him saving things for you. And so you'll have to trust me, Google him. And the Italian judge said, the league's judge, the disciplinary judge who is supposed to fine and sanction when these things happen, decided there just wasn't enough evidence, that it was racist. There just wasn't ... it's video recording, he's crying, writing. And it goes back to what I was saying before about kind of recognizing pain in racism and homophobia in sports. And then the organized fan group of Inter, his club, his club that he plays for, wrote an open letter to him that he should be honored that they were making monkey chants at him because it was because he was so good. And to remember that Italian football fans are not racist because they quote “wouldn't do this in real life.” So this is Lukaku's real life, this is what he gets, what he shows up for work.
And I know I'm a broken record on this subject, but like it's not my ... I didn't break the record, you know what I mean? So I'm going to keep saying it again and again and again. So this week, Italian Serie A, you are on the burn pile.
Amira: Shireen.
Shireen: Just another trigger warning for my burn pile. I've been covering the story for about five years or more of women being banned from stadiums in Iran, women can't access stadiums there to watch any sport which is sanctioned by FIVB, volleyball, FIBA, basketball, FIFA. So this particular situation occurred and it's tied in to the men and the powers that be, that create these arbitrary rules for women that impact women. And it's not just FIFA. When I say that, it's actually the state of Iran that makes these rules but FIFA is complicit, because they continue to hold tournaments and matches there. So they'd been banned from stadiums since the revolution in 1979 and the continued silence and ineffective action from the AFC. And for those of you that don't know, underneath FIFA is another umbrella or under FIFA as an umbrella, rather, there's the AFC, the Asian Football Confederation, and Iran falls into their region.
They're the most useless, ineffective organization. So they're very well placed to be in football, and they have covered up everything from scandals of sexualized violence to literally going against FIFA's charter of ethics like article four which is to not discriminate on the basis of gender. Well when you keep women out of stadiums because they're women, that's kind of what's happening! I don't know why they need me.
Lindsay: A little, it's just subtle.
Shireen: I know I have to be very direct. I don't know. Yes. Anyways, so basically what ended up happening there was a woman who was arrested in March, 2019 between a transnational match between Esteghlal, which is a team in Iran, and the Al Ain football club, and they’re Emirati, and they arrested a 29 year old woman who had dressed up as a man to get into the match because that's often what supporters do because they don't have the right, they don't get their right to go and watch. They dress up as men and they sneak in. This is really dangerous and over the years I’ve tracked hundreds of arrests that have been made. They are usually detained, the translation is usually detained as opposed to arrested. But when you're forcefully kept in a place, I mean we can play with semantics all day.
She was released on bail, but because the staff judge was away for a bereavement, she would have to be postponed to hold out for a six months sentence. She was six months in jail. So she set herself on fire. So this is a story about self-immolation and how desperate…she also suffering from mental health issues. But she was ... her sister gave me an interview where she said that football is her joy and it brings her happiness, and imagine you can't have access to this. So as a result of what was happening around her, in her case, she set herself on fire and she's recovering. I don't know the status of her health. I have a contact at Open Stadiums, which is an organization, if you can support that would be amazing. They have been doing this activist work for 13 years to try to lobby FIFA, AFC, Iran itself to let themselves in the stadium. Where it stands now is Gianni Infantino, useless, actually has told Iran that if they don't start letting women into stadiums in October, they will not have any events there. But that's been happening since the time of Sepp Bladder and we all know what a gong show that whole thing is.
So I won't believe it until I see it, but women are starting to hurt themselves as a result of ... and this is part of the systemic violence. I need ... I don't want to say burn that because of the situation, but I just hate it. All of that.
Amira: We just boo. Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about the Crushers Club. I want to talk about the NFL and Roc Nation. I am so irritated about this. So the Crushers Club is one of the organizations that Roc Nation and the NFL identified as part of their #InspireChange initiative. It's a mess, but in particular the Crushers Club, which is led by a woman in Chicago, Sally Hazelgrove, went back and there was a wonderful thread on Twitter about her old tweets. In particular of the propensity that Sally Hazelgrove has for cutting off the young Black men's dreadlocks. Multiple pictures of her saying, and I quote, "Yay. Another Crusher, letting me cut his dreads off. It's symbolic of change and their desire for a better life." This is the program that is “inspiring change.” This is actual cultural harm. We saw this with the young wrestler in New Jersey Shireen wrote so eloquently about, Andrew Johnson.
Dreads are not a sign of lower class life. They're not an indicative of ... I can't even talk about it because it's racialized violence and it’s awful, and she's so damn gleeful, and she's using scissors that my children would play with! They're not, it's not even like the decency of going into a barber shop. She's a gleefully maiming these children! The rest of their Twitter is filled with sentiments from applauding the cops who shot and killed the Laquan McDonald. Listen, this whole thing, they hosted a day…They really love cops, it's like a whole thing. Including when they hosted a day with some of their young Crushers posting a picture saying, "Look, they can't wait to arrest someone especially they heard they can make 70K as a cop."
Right, they have a particular ... this is, yeah, this is inspiring change, Jessica! The fact that Roc Nation and the NFL have partnered with this facility to act as a shield to what Colin and Eric Reid and the McCourty brothers and players have been pushing the NFL on. The fact that this is their program that's supposed to be the action to the kneeling, that this is their program that's supposed to move them forward on social justice, and you're giving money, you’re giving a part of the $40,000, they’re going to get money for this, for this practice. I can't deal with it. Like literally I don't even have any more words. I just want to burn it down. Okay. Jess, bring us home.
Jessica: All right, so this week the Department of Education announced that it had found that Michigan State University has systematically failed when it came to protecting students from sexual abuse. After investigating how the school handled both the many reports of abuse by the gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, who we've talked about a lot on this podcast and Nassar's former boss William Strampel, and so the DOE has reached a settlement with Michigan State University that includes MSU paying a $4.5 million fine under the clery act, which is a federal law that's often discussed in conjunction with Title IX, it’s the one that largely deals with campus security and transparency. So if you're getting like a text message on your phone, that's something is a crime has occurred on your campus. That's under the clery act that universities do that.
The school has to do a host of other things as well, including MSU establishing a protocol to offer remedies to Nassar's victims like tuition reimbursement, counseling services, things like that, and hiring an outside consultant to assess their Title IX grievance procedures and then change all of it. But the $4.5 million fine is the largest clery act fine to date. The record up to that point was held by Penn State, which was fined $2.4 million around Jerry Sandusky's abuse of young boys. A lawyer who represents many of Nassar's victims called the $4.5 million fine "incredibly insufficient" which makes sense given the schools $2.9 billion endowment. Still, it's the record, but what I want to burn today is that the DOE found extensive issues around protecting students, many of whom were athletes. Much of this was an athletic department failure. This was true at Penn State as well, and yet in August of 2018, a year ago, the NCAA, the group that defines itself as quote, "a member led organization dedicated to the wellbeing and lifelong success of college athletes" found that MSU did not violate its bylaws in any way.
When the NCAA tried to punish Penn State it was a disaster and penalties were overturned because guess what? They had to go outside at around their own rules to do it, because those rules do not exist for the NCAA. Penn State was 2012 and here we are, and nothing has changed. Their inaction reveals their priorities. It's not impossible to write rules to hold schools, athletic departments, teams and coaches responsible and accountable when systemic failure leads to student athletes being harmed. The NCAA though most often cares only about specific students, namely those who make them the billions that they earn each year, and now they have ceded the moral ground to Betsy DeVos who's tenure at the head of the DOE has mainly been about protecting the legal liability of colleges at the expense of their students. And in case you're wondering, the NCAA has yet to release anything about Baylor and my advice on that is don't hold your breath. Burn all of this.
Amira: After all that burning, it's time to shout out some amazing women this week. First cheers in solidarity to the Jamaican women's national soccer team who announced, as Brenda mentioned before, that the JFF has not paid them contractually obligated money since January and so they are going on strike, including sitting out of potentially a crucial Olympic qualifying tournament at the end of this month. Shouts to Caster Semenya who's been effectively banned from her gold medal winning Olympic sport by racist and sexist targeting policies. She's joined the Gauteng-based women's football club, JVW, and she will start playing with the team in 2020. Also want to recognize Finland's women's national football team who just reached an agreement with their FA and will be paid equally in win and draw bonuses to their men's team. Jonquel Jones who's a forward for the WNBA's Connecticut Sun, she is Bahamian and she's using her platform to raise money for those who are hit hard by the destructive effects of Hurricane Dorian this last week. We've included a link on the show notes to her fundraising episode. It will be on our website
And the Afghanistan women's national football team who was awarded an industry award for the best women's football initiative for their bravery and resilience in the face of horrible, horrible, sexualized violence against some of their players. Man City's women's side played Man United's women's side and broke the women's league super record of attendance with 31,000 and that's just incredible. We see that attendance records falling around the globe constantly, so this is really exciting. Elena Delle Donne became the first WNBA planner to join the 50 40 90 club. So it means she ended the regular season with the shooting percentage at or above 50% for field goals, 40% for three pointers and 90% for free throws.
Lindsay: Hers is three free throws all year long.
Amira: Which is incredible. Her 97.4 free throw percentage is a record for a player with at least a hundred attempts. It's phenomenal. Diede de Groot of the Netherlands won her second straight US Open crown in wheelchair tennis and her seventh Grand Slam overall, and Brittany Donaldson who has been hired by the Toronto Raptors as a new assistant coach. Yes. I know. This role makes it a 10th woman to be an assistant coach in the NBA. She's been with the organization since 2017 and been a data analyst for the reigning NBA Champs. You wrote this…
Shireen: I did. I did.
Amira: The Raptors. All right, a drum roll please. This week our badass woman of the week is Bianca Andreescu, the 19 year old phenomenon defeated the GOAT Serena Williams in straight sets to win her first Grand Slam and the first from Canada actually, she was phenomenal. She began the year ranked 152. She's beaten every single top 10 players she's faced. She looks to be a force in tennis for many tournaments to come, which really benefits all of us because that means we get to watch our parents who are hilarious. We need more courtside shots of them in our lives. As so as Shireen said of her fellow country woman, she the north. Congrats Bianca. You are our badass woman of the week.
So that brings us to our final segment, which is usually when we tell you all the good things happening in our lives today. Short and sweet. Shireen, what's good?
Shireen: This is.
Amira: Yes, thank you. Nashville is wonderful and so is having difficult conversations. Thank you all for coming out this morning and speaking with us about the way sports can be both an incubator for toxicity as well as the space to push back on that. Special thanks to Andrew, the YWCA, Vanderbilt, all of our patrons, our flamethrowers, Amber. Burn It All Down lives on SoundCloud, but also can be found on iTunes, Stitcher, Google play, TuneIn, wherever you get your podcasts, Spotify, and yeah we love your reviews, your feedback there, subscribe, rate.
You can also find us on Facebook at Burn It All Down or on Twitter @burnitalldownpod, Instagram same thing. You can shoot us the email, burnitalldownpod@gmail.com and of course our website, burn it all down pod where you'll find previous episodes, transcriptions to our episodes, show notes. You'll also find the link to our Patreon and to our merch shop. We just had our youngest flame thrower, baby Mazer in her little onesie. It's the cutest.
Lindsay: It's so cute!
Amira: So there's a lot of good stuff there. So again, on behalf of Shireen Ahmed, Lindsay Gibbs, Jessica Luther, Brenda Elsey, and me, Amira Rose Davis and a special thanks to our fabulous Nashville audience. As we like to say here on Burn It All Down, keep burning on, not out. Thank you.