Episode 128: WNBA Wrap Up, Prof. Wang on NBA/China + The Braves Continued Use of the Tomahawk Chop
This week Amira, Lindsay, Brenda and Jess chat about the WNBA Finals [5:08] and wrap-up the season before talking about the Braves continued use of the Tomahawk Chop [44:50] and highlighting some Native athletes you should now. Plus Brenda interviews Professor Wang on the NBA/China situation [24:02]. As always we will throw some stuff on the Burn Pile [101] and shout out some Bad Ass Women [1:16:44].
Links
Gofundme to support roller derby Team Indigenous Rising: https://www.gofundme.com/f/nzw37-team-indigenous-rising-fundraiser
Two British footballers’ wives are feuding. It’s the perfect Brexit palate cleanser: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/10/9/20906753/rebekah-vardy-coleen-rooney-instagram-feud
A British Person Explains the WAG Wars: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/style/coleen-rooney-rebekah-vardy-wags.html
Braves Announce Plan To Only Use The Tomahawk Chop When A Native American Isn't Pitching: https://deadspin.com/braves-announce-plan-to-only-use-the-tomahawk-chop-when-1838920963
Braves Fans Perform First-Inning Tomahawk Chop, Watch Their Team Immediately Melt Down Like Chernobyl: https://deadspin.com/braves-fans-perform-first-inning-tomahawk-chop-watch-t-1838925053
With Elena Delle Donne’s back worse than we knew, ‘Playoff Emma’ leads the Mystics to first WNBA title: https://theathletic.com/1285332/2019/10/11/with-elena-delle-donnes-back-worse-than-we-knew-playoff-emma-leads-the-mystics-to-a-title/
‘We all match’: What holds the Mystics together and how it led to their first WNBA championship: https://theathletic.com/1286619/2019/10/11/we-all-match-what-holds-the-mystics-together-and-how-it-led-to-their-first-wnba-championship/
Elena Delle Donne’s WNBA Finals run cements her as one of the best ever: https://www.sbnation.com/wnba/2019/10/11/20909445/elena-delle-donne-wnba-finals-washington-mystics-injuries-back-nose-knees
The NBA Is Happy To Play China's Game: https://deadspin.com/the-nba-is-happy-to-play-chinas-game-1838842840
Adam Silver Issues Statement Meant To Appease Everybody; China Doesn't Buy It: https://deadspin.com/adam-silver-issues-statement-meant-to-appease-everybody-1838874673
Steve Kerr Reminds Us Who The NBA's Unifying Powers Really Serve: https://deadspin.com/steve-kerr-reminds-us-who-the-nbas-unifying-powers-real-1838981265
The Athletic Outrages White Men Everywhere By Censoring Their Opinions On China: https://deadspin.com/the-athletic-outrages-white-men-everywhere-by-censoring-1838884936
Internal Memo: ESPN Forbids Discussion Of Chinese Politics When Discussing Daryl Morey's Tweet About Chinese Politics: https://deadspin.com/internal-memo-espn-forbids-discussion-of-chinese-polit-1838881032
Panicked First Take Host Initiates Commercial Break As Stephen A. Smith Brings Up Israel-Palestine Conflict: https://deadspin.com/panicked-first-take-host-initiates-commercial-break-as-1838886887
NBA Fans Supporting Hong Kong Protests Are Getting Kicked Out Of Games And Their Signs Confiscated: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/skbaer/hong-kong-nba-fans-signs-protests
Their university stood by while the men’s swim team threw slurs, the women’s team says. Now they’re suing: https://www.thelily.com/princess-thigh-gap-their-university-stood-by-while-the-mens-swim-team-threw-slurs-the-womens-team-says-now-theyre-suing/?fbclid=IwAR1t6r9lW9Nf7JIZMZFB13gw8g1hrf2-t6Rg_jwApEjYgu9wxZU_YW5McrY
Mary Hardin-Baylor to vacate 2016 Division III title over violation: https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/27814866/mary-hardin-baylor-vacate-2016-division-iii-title-violation
University of Illinois Told Our Partners They Must Share Sexual Misconduct Tips With Campus Authorities. Here’s How We’re Protecting Our Sources: https://www.propublica.org/article/university-of-illinois-told-our-partners-they-must-share-sexual-misconduct-tips-with-campus-authorities-heres-how-were-protecting-our-sources
Art Briles Already In Trouble In First Season As Head Coach At Texas High School: https://deadspin.com/art-briles-already-in-trouble-in-first-season-as-head-c-1838894860
FIFA Must Pressure Iran to Let Women Attend Soccer Matches: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/opinion/iran-women-soccer.html
Teen becomes first female hockey player to play with Sydney Academy Wildcats: https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/teen-becomes-first-female-hockey-player-to-play-with-sydney-academy-wildcats-1.4631008
COCO GAUFF DISMISSES PETKOVIC IN STRAIGHTS TO REACH FIRST WTA FINAL: https://www.tennis.com/pro-game/2019/10/coco-gauff-linz-wta-andrea-petkovic-austria/85435/
With brother watching from above, Knight wins first LPGA title in home state: https://www.golfchannel.com/news/brother-watching-above-cheyenne-knight-wins-first-lpga-title-home-state
Simone Biles Breaks a Record at World Championships as the U.S. Wins Another Team Title: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/sports/simone-biles-gymnastics.html
Transcript
Amira: Welcome to Burn It All Down. It may not be the feminist sports podcast you want, but it's definitely the sports podcast you need. I'm Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of History and African-American Studies at Penn State, and as you flamethrowers can probably tell, I'm really sick. But I'm also sick of stupid things in sports, which is really great because I have my wonderful friends here and we have a whole podcast about burning that stuff down. So I'm joined by Jessica Luther, freelancer reporter in Austin, Texas, Brenda Elsey, associate professor of History at Hofstra University, and Lindsay Gibbs, sports reporter and writer in Washington, D.C.
Today we are going to talk WNBA. We're going to wrap up the season, discuss the finals, and look at what's next for women's ball. Then Brenda's going to interview Dr. Wang, a professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. They'll talk Hong Kong protests, China, and the NBA. And then we're going to talk about the Braves, their cowardice, the ongoing Tomahawk Chop, and highlight some Indigenous athletes you should know. But first, Jess.
Jessica: Yeah.
Amira: Do you want to talk about some messy, messy entertaining happenings in the world of football.
Jessica: Absolutely, if by football we mean soccer, and in this case, we mean the WAGs of soccer, the women and girlfriends. There was this amazing, so, okay. How do we even start here? Coleen Rooney, Wayne Rooney's wife, she did this amazing thing this week which has been months in the making where she thought that someone was selling stories about her life to The Sun, which is one of these tabloid-y presses in the UK. She suspected that it was Rebekah Vardy, the wife of Jamie Vardy. So what she did is she muted everyone from her Instagram Stories except Rebekah Vardy and then she posted fake stories in Instagram Stories and they ended up in The Sun. And so then she did the big reveal of her entire thing on social media all at once with a statement and so therefore she is now, everyone is calling her, brilliantly, WAGatha Christie for her investigative skills and it has just been-
Amira: I love it.
Jessica: ... the most amazing part of it is it's just sort of fun and frivolous in a space that's dealing with Brexit and a political atmosphere around the world that feels very intense, to have this thing happening, but also just the pure drama of how this has unfolded. And Vardy is saying that other people had access to her account, so you can't just blame her. She apparently hired forensic technology people to see who possibly could have had access. But the fact that Rooney thought it was her to begin with, I feel like it's pretty damning. So there's some good stuff this week. There was a bunch of brilliant write-ups to explain to Americans what was happening. They're all wonderful.
Lindsay: And I read every single one of them.
Jessica: Me, too.
Lindsay: Because first of all, I needed the explanation.
Amira: It was so good.
Lindsay: And secondly, this is the stuff I live for. Honestly, I love sports. I love slash hate, but I'm obsessed with social media. And I'm a Real Housewives connoisseur and this was like the ultimate Real Housewives thing, so this really was all my interests in one.
Amira: My favorite thing about the statement was it was paragraphs long and she set it up like somebody's been doing this and da da da da and for months and whatever, and then the last sentence was, "It's... Rebekah Vardy's account." And it was just the most, I loved it. It was hilarious. Bren?
Brenda: Well, I got the feeling that Coleen was like, "I've been in this game way longer than you." I feel like she was like, "If you think you're the first person that's tried to do this to me, you are very ill-informed." And so there was something nice about just the maturity, the waiting, the patience! There was a gross pleasure in seeing her just get at this woman who clearly was gunning for her for whatever crazy, greedy, and whatever reason. So I kind of just thought that was funny. I felt like you could see the soap opera unfold and you could see Coleen saying like, "I have accumulated an immense amount of knowledge about how to run this WAG game."
Jessica: Yeah. Which is a real thing! There's a real skill there. Yeah.
Brenda: There is.
Amira: We were treated to absolutely amazing WNBA finals. The games were close, they were intense, there was great ball played. And so of course, I want to toss it over to Lindsay, our resident WNBA expert, to break down the finals and wrap up this season.
Lindsay: Oh, man, it was a great season. I am so tired. So the WNBA finals went to a deciding game five. No team won two games in a row the entire time. It was Mystics win, Sun win, Mystics win, Sun win. They both won a game on the opposing team's court, which is a big deal because they're both really great home teams, and it was a game that was tied, really, going into the fourth quarter. So it was such a tight game, but the Washington Mystics ended up just going on a surge in the last five minutes and with the crowd behind them and their experience really ended up, I think, winning by nine or 10 points.
I was there at the Entertainment and Sports Arena to see Elena Delle Donne get her first title, to see head coach Mike Tebow get his first title. He's the winningest coach in WNBA history and had never gotten a WNBA championship before, so that was just incredibly special. Elena Delle Donne, who fought through, we found after the game, we thought she only had one herniated disc in her back, which already sounded bad enough, but turns out she had three herniated discs in her back. So she was fighting through that in the finals. She always plays these finals whenever she gets to them, so it'd just been kind of a string of bad luck for her, but she was able to fight through it. And this team has just been so close all year long and to see them really put it all out on the line for this championship was really special.
A few things that stood out for me, as someone who's followed the Washington Mystics for so long, I've covered them for four years now, but there are a couple of things that made this really poetic. First of all, this was Coach Tebow winning his first, like I said, against the Sun, who is the organization that he coached with at the beginning of his career for, I believe it was 11 years. So that was really special to see. It was just very poetic, kind of, to see him get his first championship by defeating the Connecticut Sun, but also, there was only one player remaining on the team who was there his very first season in Washington in 2013, and that was Emma Meesseman. And Emma Meesseman was a second-round draft pick for him.
She was 19 years old and out of Belgium and he hadn't seen much tape on her. There wasn't much tape on her. But he had heard good things and so he decided to take a flyer of a second round draft pick and she's been with the organization ever since and she ends up getting finals MVP. So I thought the fact that she's the only player who'd been there his entire time in Washington and it's his, really, belief in her that throughout the years has really paid off, and then to see her get the finals MVP, I thought, was also just really special.
Yeah, I'm really curious to see what you all think, because I think when you're at the games and you're so immersed in it, it's hard to know how this is all reading to people through the television and you're kind of consuming media on it. So before we get to the big picture stuff, I just want to know, did this final series seem as thrilling to everyone else as it did to those of us who were there? Because each game came like-
Amira: Oh, close.
Lindsay: Each game was close in the fourth quarter. Yeah.
Amira: Yeah, for me, I found it really thrilling. The basketball was just phenomenal and I don't know how you could ask for a better final series. Each game's coming down to the wire. Really the last game was the only game that, going into the last two minutes, I could breathe. And so I found out it to absolutely be a thrilling series. Jess?
Jessica: Honestly, I thought the Mystics would win this and I didn't think it would be that tight, based on regular season play and everything that I've heard Lindsay talk about, and so credit to the Sun, because I really thought that maybe we'd see three and out since last year's finals were not that exciting in the end. Credit to all these players, but especially the Sun. They really showed up. I didn't get to watch as much of the finals as I wanted to for lots of different reasons, but it was absolutely thrilling. I watched game four from beginning to end, and like Amira said, I couldn't breathe at the end of the match.
Lindsay: Game four was so intense. Oh my gosh.
Jessica: It was so, so intense, and you really didn't know until the very end how this was going to... I loved it and I'm sad now that this is the end of the season, but I feel like we were lucky in the final series that we got.
Lindsay: Absolutely. So now we're kind of looking at what's next for the WNBA and we've got the Collective Bargaining Agreement is going to be the big off-season story. The players have been working on it all year long, the Players Association and the new commissioner, Cathy Engelbert. I talked to Elena Delle Donne about this a couple of weeks ago. You know what, I shouldn't even say time, because time doesn't mean anything to me, I think.
It was during this final series at one point when I was doing press. It was early in the final series and I asked her how things were going and she seemed really optimistic about it at that time and I also talked with Layshia Clarendon, friend of the show, and she is on the Sun. Unfortunately she was injured and didn't play for really the last two to three months of the season, which, we just want to see her getting better and she is. I think she would've made a big difference for the Sun, a healthy Layshia Clarendon, but she echoed what Elena said, that there's reason for optimism when it comes to getting this Collective Bargaining Agreement done in a timely fashion. But that's certainly a story that we are going to be watching and following closely here at Burn It All Down.
Brenda: Lindsay, can I ask, is there a timeframe on this that they have to finish it by?
Lindsay: The current one expires at the end of October, but really it's just by, I mean, it would be ideal if they got this done before free agency, which is in, you know. It would be ideal if they got it done before this one expired. That would be ideal. But really, the big thing is just before next season is the big…But it's hard to go into free agency, which starts in January, without a CBA, because you don't know what your salary cap situation is and everything. I think that sooner rather than later would be ideal. I still need to kind of look into what would happen if you go into free agency without a deal, but I think the players right now, the goal is to get it done around the time that this expires, but we're not talking like, lockouts and things like that until next season, next May.
So that's something we're going to be following, but another thing to look at is, what is next season in the W going to look like? Hopefully we're going to have Breanna Stewart back and healthy and Sue Bird back and healthy, which means the Seattle Storm are going to be really good and title contenders again. Hopefully we'll have Diana Taurasi back and healthy, which will mean the Phoenix Mercury will be contenders again. The Washington Mystics are in good shape to keep pretty much all of their players together if they want to, which it really sounds like they do. The Connecticut Sun have a great future, but they have a lot of players who are up for new contracts right now and we'll have to see if all of those players, Jonquel Jones and Rachel Banham, Courtney Williams, just player after player, is kind of up for a new contract at the same time and we'll have to see how many of them can get paid versus how many of them might have to go elsewhere in order to get their full max contract that they're due.
Amira: Yeah. So one of the things about watching the finals is that you had the best of the WNBA, which was the personalities of the players, the actual play. I loved seeing the pictures of the reporters together who've been covering this beat for years. I found that so lovely. And then juxtaposed with the things about the League that frustrate us. I think I scrolled, when I was out, I forget what game it was, looking for, it might've been game four, when it was like 80 seconds left and within one point, and I couldn't find a score update. And then I saw the picture where Penn State Women's Soccer ran into the Sun in an airport and I loved the picture, because I was like, "Oh, what a fun mashup." Then I was like, "Why the hell are they in the airport together? They should not be chilling in Dallas." So I think all of the infuriating things that we've talked about before, but Lindsay, I wanted to know if you could talk to us in particular to us about the celebration and what the constraints on that and what that looked like.
Lindsay: Yeah. It was the fact that the Mystics had the possibility of winning it in four. They were up 2-1 going into game four. That was in Connecticut. They ended up losing. It was very, very tight. They were very down after that game. And then only have one day off, which was a travel day, and then game five in D.C. But it actually turned out to be incredibly special that the Mystics got to win it in their new arena, in front of their fans. The environment was absolutely wonderful. And the celebration that night was just really incredible to kind of be a part of. I know that's not what you're talking about, but I want to take a second to just kind of talk about the intimate feel that the celebration had.
I mean, I've never been there when an NBA team has won, but I imagine that they're not letting fans on the court as part of, you know, after the trophy ceremony. But really, as things were winding down, the ropes kind of came down and since it was a smaller area, you had season ticket holders, long-time fans who were hugging and taking selfies with the players and it just had this intimate family vibe that I don't think you could get anywhere else, and that was just so special to me. One of the things, I followed Emma Meesseman's mother around a little bit just to see a mother in the back of a pack, filming her daughter getting a WNBA MVP on her iPhone! There was just something so normal about it, but it was like, "But her daughter's getting the finals MVP trophy!” But she's doing what any mother would do at any trophy ceremony across the world, no matter how big or small. It was just really precious, but at the same time, she had paint everywhere, photos. It didn't feel less than, you know what I mean? It felt just super special.
Amira: Yeah. Natasha Cloud rapping to Meek Mill…
Lindsay: I mean, Natasha Cloud doing everything…
Amira: ... is an entire Philadelphia mood. It's just the most Philly shit I've ever seen!
Lindsay: Oh my gosh. The Sun's slogan this year was burn it down, which, they did not ask us for permission! But that's okay! So that was on all of their merch, and I actually, this was before game four at shootaround, I was wearing a Burn It All Down t-shirt-
Amira: Oh, no.
Lindsay: .. and Natasha goes, “Linz!!! What's on your shirt?!” She thought it was the Sun slogan!
Amira: That's hilarious.
Lindsay: So she almost kicked me out of shootaround. Yeah, but I had to be like, "No no no, Tash, it's the podcast. It's the podcast." She goes, "Oh, right, right, right. Right, right. Okay, okay. You're fine. You're fine." And it was really funny. But Natasha Cloud is just the absolute best.
But anyways, I think what Amira was referring to, I just wanted to provide some color there, but, is the fact that the Mystics can't do a big parade right now because Emma Meesseman and her Belgian teammate who was also a member of the Mystics, she didn't really play much, but Kim Mestdagh, they both are already back in Belgium where they're going to spend a week or two before heading to their overseas teams. Kim will be in France playing and Emma will be in Russia, and there are a lot of other people who are leaving over the next few days. Myisha Hines-Allen will be in South Korea. Natasha Cloud's going to be in China, although she's not leaving for a couple of weeks. Shatori Walker-Kimbrough's leaving. So you've got about seven Mystics players who are leaving in the next couple of weeks to go abroad.
So what ended up happening was, less than like 15 hours after the Mystics won there was a rally at the Entertainment Sports Arena for any fans that could come, but obviously, this was super short notice and it was 2:00 on a Friday afternoon. There were about 1,000, 1,500 people. It was still a really cool event, but I'm sure there could've been more. And then that's it. The celebration is being postponed really until the spring. Now, I have been told that there will be some really special events around town. I expect that we can see some Mystics players maybe at a Nats game, which it seems like the Nats are going to continue playing, and we'll see some Mystics players at Wizards pre-season games and maybe some Caps. I think you're going to see them around town doing some special things, the players who are still here, but it's not exactly the same. Let me hear what you guys think and then I have something else to add about how much focus is being put on this. But Amira, how much did that stick out to you, that this celebration is having to be interrupted?
Amira: It stuck out in the sense that I love seeing the pride and the love that a lot of Washington fans had for the Mystics. I was so mad last year when they were moved from their regular arena to play in George Mason or wherever they had to play and I saw just so many images and videos of a packed arena, of people down outside streaming the game at the harbor, at the National Harbor. And so I was really imagining a moment for D.C. to have to come out and recognize the Mystics and for there to be a parade and for them to have the treatment of champions. And I really loved what you said about the intimacy and the accessibility of the celebration, how special that was, and then I also think there's something about having a legible parade that the images go out and you realize how much it means to people. And so that was kind of shocking.
I know Antonio Reali did a bit, so it was going viral, but I think that there is something to say about, say, the reality is, they're right back in their international markets because of the labor situation, because of the pay situation in the WNBA. This is their reality and that has, in part, even impacted the ability to celebrate the culmination of a amazing season and I think that that is, in many ways, encapsulates the love and the amazingness of the WNBA at the same time all the frustrations and the lack of resources. I think it's actually a kind of, for me, accurate picture of the frustration of the league.
Lindsay: Yes. I agree and I also, though, at the same time, got frustrated with how many people were talking about. And I think I'm going to hit on this a little bit more in the Burn Pile, but I ended up writing about it. I didn't want to write about this yesterday, but my editors wanted a piece on this, and I understood why. It's a big deal, their celebration. But a part of me wanted to do just a piece on how Natasha Cloud's leadership helped the team. Do you know what I mean? Just still be able to focus on the game, and I think that there's, all the players, as I'm sure it's frustrating, it felt like we were raining on their celebration a little bit by bringing up how muted it was.
Amira: Right.
Lindsay: Does that make sense?
Amira: No, totally.
Lindsay: It's like we're here at this super special rally and everyone is so happy, everyone is still a little drunk from the day before, and all this reporters are in their faces being like, "So, how disappointed are you that you don't get a parade?" And there was something sad to me, also, about that, because it's like even the happy moments have to be about the bigger picture, and I get why. It is important for us to keep calling this out, but I think a part of me, also the players were like, "Yeah, it's a little bit sad, but this is what it is and we're making the most of it." Like, "We're still having fun. We are not sitting here being depressed in the corner because we're not getting our parade right now. We're celebrating."
And so I think I just want to end on that moment, that I think that despite it all, we need to keep talking about the bigger picture and keep fighting, but the Mystics got a phenomenal celebration. They earned this, every second of it, and it was great to see them truly enjoying and savoring the moment in a really special way. And I think whether the parade's now or in May, this is a celebration they will never forget.
Amira: Next up, Brenda interviews Professor Wang.
Brenda: Today I'm joined by Professor Zheng Wang, who is a historian of modern China at the University of Michigan. She specializes in the history of Chinese feminism and has authored two books, including Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories and Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, both with University of California Press.
This week I wanted to talk with her in light of the ongoing series of mishaps between the NBA, especially the Houston Rockets, over the China and Hong Kong sort of international relations bungling. Thank you so much for being with us, Professor Wang.
Prof. Wang: Thank you, Brenda, for inviting me to this program.
Brenda: So for a lot of our listeners, it came out of the blue, this tweet, and they weren't necessarily paying attention to what's been going on in Hong Kong and in China. Could you give us a little bit of a sense of the history of these protests and why they're happening?
Prof. Wang: Yeah. So, the Hong Kong people started their protest since June 9th. So in a sense, they have been in protest demonstrations for the past four months and sometimes the gatherings, demonstrations, are joined by millions. Two million or more than two million, you know. So the Hong Kong's population is seven million. So basically you can-
Brenda: Wow.
Prof. Wang: Yeah. It's a large scale. And also, after first few demonstrations, then they encounter the police suppression and they constantly encounter tear gas and even early October, October the 1st actually, the police also shot a real gun, real bullet. And also a lot of young people were already injured because of the police brutality, detained, and also murders occurred. So it's a bloody scene there.
So why the Hong Kong people express such strong determination and courage in this fight? It started with, if we don't spend too much time going way back, we just say this time, the protest started with the Hong Kong's, the municipal city's leading body's decision to pass a legislature, or they initiated a legislation, to extradite anybody who was supposed to be committing any crime, then these people could be extradited to mainland China. That means that mainland China will have the legal authority over Hong Kong citizens. So that's a violation against original agreement between, actually not just between Hong Kong, but between actually the British. I'm not sure if the American general public or your audience knows the history.
Hong Kong was given to the British or leased to the British in the 19th century as a consequence of China, at the time that's the Chinese Empire, Qing dynasty. The Qing dynasty lost the Opium War, the war on opium basically. The British Empire insist on their rights to sell opium in China and Chinese Empire started to ban all opium trade. Then it resulted in the war. The British sent their fleet to bombard China and China lost that war. It's called the Opium War. And then forced to sign a bunch of agreements. One of the agreement is to let the British have this piece of land - at the time, it's a small fishing village - leased to them for 100 years. And then 1997 was the time for them to return back to China. So the British and Chinese government signed the agreement prior to 1997 that the Chinese government would, actually, that was kind of agreed by both sides. That the Chinese government will keep political system, all the systems in Hong Kong, but Hong Kong will be returned to China as part of China, but Hong Kong would be able to keep their system. It's called one country, two systems.
In the agreement, it was specified that Hong Kong people would be able to elect their own Hong Kong city's executive bodies, leading body. So in a sense, they will have a democratic election procedure as their political system and they can maintain their legal system there. Right?
Brenda: Right.
Prof. Wang: So that's the agreement. 1997, Hong Kong was returned to China, meaning that the British withdrew their governor, that's Imperial system is totally out of Hong Kong. Okay?
Brenda: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Prof. Wang: And China. The problem is that then over the past now 22 years by now, right, the mainland China, or rather the CCP, let me just say CCP, the Chinese Communist Party. We all know that China is a one party country, so it's a party of state. So the CCP kind of encroached upon the Hong Kong system. So they have not…previously, Hong Kong people already have protest quite a few times, how they demanded a free election, democratic election. But still, the CCP did not allow that. So the Hong Kong's top leader are always appointed by the CCP. So that was already a struggle there.
Now this time, they also want to, for Hong Kong people, [inaudible 00:31:10] they want to remove this Hong Kong's legal autonomy. So they were scared because previous to that, the CCP already had, quite a few occasions, kidnapped some people from Hong Kong back to mainland and trial the sentence in the mainland. So now, if this piece of legislation passed, then Hong Kong people feared that they will totally lose their legal autonomy. Anybody can be legally arrested, detained and sent to mainland China for whatever punishment the CCP liked. So instead of gaining their political democratic election, they are now facing the prospect of losing even legal autonomy. So this time they started to fight.
After, I think, over two months of continuous protests and confrontation with the local police, the Hong Kong's city authority agreed to drop the suggestions, the proposals of extraditing Hong Kong people to mainland. But that was already too late, because by then, police brutality already happened. And a lot of people already were arrested and disappeared. And also, Hong Kong people also discovered that the mainland police, sometimes thugs, were dispatched to Hong Kong and put on Hong Kong police uniforms and even disguised as protestors, creating more violence and turmoil. So the Hong Kong people demanded to set up an independent committee to investigate violence instigated by the thugs and they also believe the thugs' violence against protestors was manipulated by the Hong Kong government. So basically they believe that the Hong Kong police was behind all this violence.
Brenda: So when you-
Prof. Wang: They wanted to have an independent investigation, so they raised and created demands. They're talking about five demands. First demand is to withdraw the proposed legislation and they want the Hong Kong's top executive official to step down and they want an independent investigation, and they also want to have their free democratic election.
Brenda: When you heard about this tweet from Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, it was basically an image and then it just read, "Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong." What was your initial reaction to it?
Prof.Wang: First of all, I'm not a sports person! Right? Not follow him.
Brenda: Yeah.
Prof. Wang: Also, I'm sure, for 1.4 billion Chinese who are behind firewalls, I hope that this is common knowledge for Americans, that 1.4 billion Chinese do not have free access to the internet.
Brenda: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Prof. Wang: Like access to Google, Facebook or tweets. It's illegal to having the access, but of course, some Chinese, they would purchase VPNs to, they call it, climb over the firewalls. But in general, if not for CCP, the government, to deliberately stoke up something, the general Chinese would not have access to the NBA, whoever tweeted.
Brenda: Yeah. So you think that in general, this looks more like the Chinese state's attempt to mobilize nationalism-
Prof. Wang: Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, you put it exactly, very accurately. Yes.
Brenda: Okay. Okay. And do you-
Prof. Wang: But this didn't work well. Didn't work very well. This time.
Brenda: It didn't?
Prof. Wang: This time it didn't work.
Brenda: Why do you think it didn't work so well?
Professor Wang: Because the whole purpose is to try to suppress anybody in the US or in the world mentioning of the Hong Kong. Because of the firewalls, most people in China, the great majority of Chinese people, do not know what's going on in Hong Kong. They only knew the government narratives. The government narrative was saying that Hong Kong wanted to be independent, to want to separate from China, but that was not true. That's a lie, because these Hong Kong people protestors never said. They had very concrete demands. They just wanted to investigate perpetrators of either police brutality or those thugs and they wanted city authorities to step down because of all these mistakes in proposing that legislation, caused all these turmoils in the city. So very concrete demands that express their discontent or even anger against the Hong Kong government. It's nowhere they said they want to secede from mainland China.
But the narratives produced in China to the one billion Chinese population was that they are separatists. As a result, they did not want anybody to pass the real information to China and also they want to suppress anybody who dare to mention Hong Kong to the people in China. The ironic thing is that for months of this massive demonstrations, the US public generally did not pay any attention.
Brenda: Right.
Prof. Wang: They didn't know! They didn't care! Until this time an NBA manager sent a tweet. If the CCP didn't pick this as a opportunity to attack NBA or so-called Americans want to encourage the separatist Hong Kong peoples, if they didn't want to make fuss, nobody would know it. People in China would not know that. But then because of this fuss and because of the NBA, everybody knows NBA, both in China and in the United States, right?
Brenda: Right.
Prof. Wang: Everybody know the NBA, right? Even if your Congresspeople say something, American general public would not know. They didn't pay attention to them. But because of NBA, now even the American general public, or especially people in the sports, they started to pay attention to this. And that's why you also ask me to, you want to do this episode.
Brenda: Yeah. But it's been so fascinating to watch it all unfold and I guess just one last question for you. Going forward, Professor Wang, do you think the Chinese state will continue to use the NBA in this way or sports in this way, or do you think they'll stay away from it in the future?
Prof. Wang: Actually, this is not first time that Chinese government forced NBA companies, US companies or European companies to apologize. Okay? So this is not first, it is not singular case. There are numerous cases before that. Because all these companies doing business, the whole world, we're talking about global capitalism. All right? So the NBA issue actually is just the tip of an iceberg of the entangled power relations in the global capitalist economy. Okay? And it's also a good case that illustrates the depth and the scope of the Chinese state's global power. Their money power is huge. And that is why they were able to make all these companies before, they can always accuse this company, foreign company, that company and all those companies. The line is always, "Oh, you hurt Chinese feelings," so then those companies have to apologize. Everybody apologizes. You know why? Just like the NBA, because they want the huge market.
Brenda: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right.
Prof. Wang: Okay? So I was reading all those tweets by American general public then who were talking about… Some expressed their outrage that we American companies sell our morals, our values just for the sake of profits. But it’s a capitalist world, right?
Brenda: Right.
Prof. Wang: In a sense, I think for Americans, now you are in the dilemma situation. You have your values, value for freedom, speech, constitutional rights, fighting for democracy, alright, that's your values, but you're also living in the capitalist world. It's legitimate for companies to pursue profits. So it creates a dilemma, but I'm glad to see that this issue really called attention to American general public of the power of the Chinese state. That is something, I think, that US general public should pay attention to.
Brenda: Okay. Recently, Professor Wang, there was a game that took place in China after all of this.
Prof. Wang: Yes. Yes. Things kind of happening simultaneously. The government is stoking up this nationalism and then, all of a sudden, they realize it backfired because before, in the United States, nobody knows anything about Hong Kong, didn't pay attention to that, but now because of this controversy, then a lot of people paid attention to that. Even some American people, they went to the sports game in the United States so to join the protest while in China, also interestingly, even though the government official media is kind of condemning the US, the NBA teams and force them to apologize, the first NBA game this season in Shanghai, the arena was packed. The ticket, it was sold from 1,000 to 2,000 US dollars apiece.
Brenda: Whoa.
Prof. Wang: So tons of people, they just didn't care. At first we're thinking that oh, maybe some Chinese people will go there to protest, but interestingly, yes, some Chinese were totally stimulated by this nationalist rhetoric circulating in the official media. They did prepare some Chinese flags and they wanted to go to the event, circulating the Chinese flags and to shout some slogans. Ironically, they were stopped by the Chinese police.
Brenda: Wow. Wow.
Prof. Wang: Yes. Because when the government realized that it backfired in the United States, they quickly want to control this, to contain it. No more spread of this.
Brenda: Wow.
Prof. Wang: Yeah, so it's an interesting situation, but what I'm interested to see, what's the ramifications of this event.
Brenda: Well, thank you once again, Professor Wang, for being with us today.
Prof. Wang: You're very welcome.
Amira: So Jess, do you want to start off our next segment?
Jessica: Yeah. We are deep into the baseball postseason now. Let me recap that just real fast. In the National League Championship Series, NLCS, as of this recording - this is Sunday, y'all will hear this on Tuesday - the Washington Nationals, probably inspired by the Mystics, are up to 2-0 on the St. Louis Cardinals. In the American League Championship or the ALCS last night, Saturday night, the New York Yankees took the first game over the Houston Astros seven to nothing. Whichever of these teams wins in each League Series, they're going to go on to the World Series, which starts on October 22nd, and each team got to their League Championship by beating another team in a Division Series game.
In the American League, the Yankees took down the Minnesota Twins in three straight games and Houston took five games to put away the Tampa Bay Rays. On the National League side, both games went to five, with Washington beating the LA Dodgers in the tenth when Howie Kendrick hit a tie-breaking grand slam after the Nationals had clawed their way back from a three run deficit.
And then there was the other NLDS Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Atlanta Major League Baseball team and this is what we want to talk about today. Ryan Helsley is a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and days before the fifth game of the NLDS between Atlanta and St. Louis, Helsley, a member of the Cherokee Nation, criticized the Atlanta team's use of the so-called Tomahawk Chop during games. He said, quote, "I think it's a misrepresentation of the Cherokee people or Native Americans in general. It just depicts them in this kind of caveman-type people way, who aren't intellectual. They are a lot more than that. It's not me being offended by the whole mascot thing. It's not. It's about the misconception of us, the Native Americans, and it devalues us and how we're perceived in that way or used as mascots. The Redskins and stuff like that." End quote. He was, of course, at the end there, referring to the Washington NFL team, which we've talked about repeatedly on this program.
For anyone who doesn't know, the Atlanta team is the Atlanta Braves, referencing Native and Indigenous peoples, and the Tomahawk Chop is this terrible crowd chant thing adopted from Florida State University, which is my alma mater, where everyone in the crowd bends their arm at the elbow, you kind of turn your palm to the side and then you make this downward, upward chop motion and you do a fake war chant singy songy thing to go with it. And so going into game five, the Atlanta team said that if Helsley were to take the mound, that's important, if he were to take the mound during game five, the team would not play the backup thumping drum music that accompanies the chant while he was pitching. The team also did not distribute the red foam tomahawks for the game that they normally put out on the seats beforehand so that the fans all have, I guess, some kind of offensive toy to taunt the other team with. In the end, Helsley didn't play.
The Atlanta team, let's just be really clear, they really like the Chop. Their postseason slogan was #ChopOn. They paint a tomahawk on the field. Despite the team kind of, however you want to define it, trying to reduce the use of it in game five, the crowd wasn't having it. They started doing the Tomahawk Chop and singing that song that goes with it almost immediately after the game started and then they all had to sit in the crowd and watch as St. Louis rolled over them 13-1. This is all so gross because it's like that slow fade-out of Chief Wahoo by the Cleveland baseball team. Atlanta's decision shows that they get that this is offensive imagery, but they're only willing to do it to a point. They don't really care. They care the very littlest bit that they possibly can. And then you look at the fans reaction. They immediately started doing the Chop and the song and the whole thing. This is so clearly why this Native mascotry has to go altogether. I don't even know what there is to say at this point, when the teams themselves acknowledge, in some sense, in some way, that, yeah, this is bad, but we don't care.
Amira: People have been telling them that this is offensive and wrong for years.
Jessica: Yeah.
Amira: It's the only-
Jessica: Native people!
Amira: Right.
Jessica: For decades! Yeah.
Amira: The only reason they responded to this is because Ryan used his platform to talk about it and it trended, so they were compelled. You see their profiles in fucking courage. Like, "Oh, we're not going to play the drum…” It's the most infuriating thing because when they pretend to sort of care for a minute in time, because then they have to lay out all the ways it's embedded in their sporting culture and it's disgusting.
Brenda: I'm just like, "Way to do the least." I mean-
Jessica: Yeah. The littlest.
Brenda: No toys this week. No toys for you all, so you got to keep your racist toys at bay for one week. I don't know. I'm like Amira, I just can't even with it. But also, I guess, what I saw, just reporting on the week's happenings, is, so evidently, and I'm not following men's baseball very much, I'm sorry. Evidently they lost that game by a lot-
Jessica: By a lot.
Brenda: Right?
Jessica: Yeah. 13 to 1, yeah.
Brenda: Right. And the one thing I did see, and it was just so stomach-turning, were all the people like, "Oh, it's karma for giving in to political correctness. We really needed that Chop." And it's like, wow. Just wow. I mean, the ignorance. The mental gymnastics that you do to somehow justify this pointless, racist practice is stunning. I was disappointed to see, I thought what Helsley did was really cool and I was really excited by it, and their reaction, the organization's reaction sucked and then all the fans who were like, "Look at what you get for respecting people. You're just going to lose. You and your political correctness human rights arguments are going down!” You know the Dodgers blew it too. Crenshaw could be a verb, like, "I Crenshawed this morning." So what about that? What about that? The Dodgers, they don't have any racist practices that they're giving up. It's so dumb. Anyway. People will do anything to hang on to their gross racist stuff under tradition.
Amira: Totally. Jessica?
Jessica: Yeah. The last thing I'll mention about this, and I think this is the point, is the way that this stuff plays out in real time. A local TV station, after Atlanta lost, I don't know where this was. I'm sorry. I couldn't tell from the sourcing. But across the pictures of the St. Louis Cardinals players winning, and I'm sorry to even say this out loud, but the words on the chyron at the bottom said, "Braves scalped." I don't even know what to do with this. I mean, if you don't know, you should look this up, but the US government used to pay people to murder Native and Indigenous people in this country and they would give people money for each Native or Indigenous person they killed. You know, turn in their scalps and the government would give you money for that.
There are deeply violent historical practices that go into words like this and it's just such a violent erasure and the fact that sports teams are just actively participating in this all the time and acting like it's some kind of inconvenience to them to not do this is so disgusting. It's one of those things where you feel like we're in 2019 and here we are still with someone writing that on the chyron on a news station. It's so gross. I don't even really know what to say about it, but it just shows how much this still matters.
Amira: Yeah. Indeed. That's a really good segue. You'll hear this on Tuesday, but tomorrow on Monday, speaking of people who murder Indigenous people, it's, in many parts of the nation, Columbus Day, but more and more across the US, you have various cities and jurisdictions changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day, especially if they still have the day off to recognize the effects and legacies of settler colonialism and to stop celebrating somebody who raped and pillaged and took things that wasn't his. And so in efforts of acknowledging Indigenous Peoples Day and having a conversation that doesn't always render Native peoples as mascots or as victims of settlement colonialism, I really wanted to highlight current or recent Indigenous athletes who we should just be aware of, that is just a reminder they are here. They're not just historical. People are real live human beings and here's some people who are doing great things in sports.
I'll start by highlighting Rosalie Fish. Rosalie is a cross country runner in Washington and you might have remembered she made news because she ran with red handprints over her mouth with fingers extending up to her cheekbones and on her leg she painted the letters MMIW, which stands for missing and murdered indigenous women. She's a member of the Cowlitz Indian tribe and she was really passionate about raising awareness for this issue. If folks don't know, there's a huge, huge problem of thousands of Indigenous woman who are missing or murdered. The cases are reported but they are under-investigated and it's a epidemic. So Rosalie ran to where, she raised awareness about this. She said it was as natural as running. I do like to think of Native communities, the women are especially strong in the way they voice themselves. I do see a little bit of hope and I think that the movement is getting more attention than it has in the past. And she was inspired to do her part. So I want to highlight and shout-out Rosalie Fish, cross country athlete from Washington state in the Cowlitz tribe. Brenda?
Brenda: Yeah. When we were talking about doing this segment, I was searching around and it doesn't take long, but for some reason it wasn't on my radar to find the North American Indigenous Games and I see that next summer, July 2020, Halifax - so, hey, Shireen! - will be hosting it and an estimated 5,000 Indigenous athletes between 13 and 19 will compete. I was pretty jazzed about that, and in the process, there's an article that we'll link to the show notes that highlights some of the athletes that they expect to, I don't know, either make a big splash or have an interesting story or what have you.
One of them that I really liked reading about was Kimaura Schindler. She is a lacrosse player from Ontario, from the nation of Cayuga. It was really interesting to read her story because she is the daughter of a very famous lacrosse player for the all-Indigenous Iroquois Nationals. And then also her uncle is, and anyway, it was just this really cool story, to see her sort of picking up the lacrosse stick. Whatever you want to say. And to see slowly, little by little, I mean, it's amazing to me, teaching university at a place that's really into lacrosse and with students who are really into lacrosse and just how shocked they are about its Indigenous history and how important and different it was to the Indigenous people. And it's kind of just amazing that this is written out and it's become this sort of white middle-class bro sport. It's really nice to see more and more of these teams. I hope it gets a lot of publicity. I don't know, that was my sort of exciting find. I should also say that women, she's not a brand-new or a pioneer in terms of girls and women in lacrosse. Her great-grandmother and grandmother are also played. So it's not as though there's no tradition there.
Amira: Right. Lindsay.
Lindsay: Yeah. So I just want to give a shout-out to Ashton Locklear, the US gymnast. She has retired as of this May. She's only 21 years old, though, and she is a member of the Lumbee tribe. She was born in Lumberton, North Carolina. We think gymnastics has been such a lily white sport in the United States for so long that I think it's so important to shout-out not just the Simone Biles and the Gabby Douglas, but the other sorts of diversity that we're seeing grow within the sport.
Ashton was a US champion on uneven bars multiple times. She was a alternate for the 2016 team in Rio, so she almost made it, but she did travel just in case anyone got injured, and for five years, was one of the best uneven bars gymnasts on the planet. Unfortunately injuries stopped her career too soon, but she accomplished so much and especially always being incredibly proud of being Native American and of the Lumbee tribe and posting about it a lot, doing a lot of visits, and just really embracing that part of herself. She also came forward last year as a survivor, as a Nassar survivor. She has just done so much and I loved watching her on uneven bars and I'm sad that injuries stopped that, but, yeah. Just a thank you, Ashton.
Amira: Great. Jess?
Jessica: Yeah. I would love to add on to what Brenda said about the North American Indigenous Games and do the thing I always do. We actually had an interview way back on episode 12 that Shireen did with a woman named Tracie Leost back in 2017. She participated back then in the North American Indigenous Games. So if you're interested in this topic, go check out episode 12 of Burn It All Down.
I also wanted to mention Shoni Schimmel, who was a basketball player. She played for Louisville. She had played a few seasons in the WNBA as late as 2018, but there's a documentary about her called Off the Rez, so if you're interested, again, in this topic, you should go check out that documentary. And then the last thing that I want to mention is that starting soon, October 22nd through to 26th, there's going to be 400 Native American athletes representing 75 tribes from 11 regions all across the US and Canada, they're going to gather in Las Vegas and they're going to compete in the 44th, 44th annual Indian National Finals Rodeo, which sounds amazing. The way that I found out about this, there is this great Twitter account. It's the letters N-D-N, ndnsports. They also have website, N-D-N, the letters again, sports.com, that just has a ton of information about Native and Indigenous athletes. So there's so much out there and there's so many people participating in all kinds of sports and it's just up to us to find them and recognize them and talk about them and all those things.
Amira: Certainly. And I did want to foreshadow a interview that we'll have on the podcast in coming weeks when Shireen sits down with a Indigenous roller derby member of a team and I wanted to raise this now because they are actually in the process of fundraising for both their Roller Derby World Cup appearances as well as their awareness campaigns for missing and murdered Indigenous women. This in particular, we'll link it in the show notes, is a funding campaign for team Indigenous Rising. They're a team of Turtle Island and Hawaii First Nations, Pacific Islanders and Indigenous peoples linked globally through the sport of roller derby and they field a team and they will be next competing in mid-November in Canada. Look out for that interview. Shireen will have it coming to you, but in the meantime, check out the show notes for more information on this particular team and how you can help their cause.
All right. It's time for everybody's favorite time of the show? Week? Yeah. That's what it's time for. It's time to burn some things. Bren, let's start with you. What are you burning these week?
Brenda: I am burning the swim program at Niagara University in upstate New York. This comes from, I guess it's more than a week old and I feel like we've had some burns on Niagara before, about other stuff. I'm not sure if they're a repeat offender, but in this case, basically there is a federal lawsuit that has been filed by three members of Niagara University and one of the plaintiffs is unidentified, an unnamed Jane Doe, but the others have come forward and explained why they came out. Nastassja Posso is one of the women who has been most vocal.
Basically they filed a Title IX because of repeated and persistent sexual harassment from the men's team. The men's team was fully fused with the women's team, so everything they did together. All the pool time, all the bussing, all of the meets. And basically they were so afraid of what the boys would say that they waited until the very last minute at all times to come out of the locker room to line up. The men's team called them whales, water buffalos, just a litany of violent and harmful things. They would make orgasm noises. They would point and laugh at them. This is in meets, at practices. They filed a Title IX. The Title IX office apparently did nothing for a couple of months and so they decided to take it to federal court. What their lawyer found is that it's also a Title IX violation on the part of Niagara because of the structure of the women's program being simply an appendage of the men's. Same coach, one coach. And they had complained to the coach for years. For years. This person, as soon as she was a freshman, had done this.
It's just really sad because you read for her, you're reading about how her love of swimming is just completely ruined, and I just want to say their coach's name out loud. Ben Nigro, you're a terrible person for this. I don't know you, but I want to burn the fact that a bunch of women came to you for years saying they were being sexually harassed and ridiculed by their teammates and the answer from Nigro was, "Grow thicker skin," and "Boys will be boys."
Amira: What an ass.
Brenda: Yeah. So I want to burn the fact that nothing came of their Title IX complaint, that their coach didn't care, that they used the women's team simply to give the men's team all the resources they want. So burn.
Group: Burn.
Amira: Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah. I just kind of want to piggyback on our WNBA segment and say there were so many people who were sharing my tweet yesterday, on Friday, excuse me, about the WNBA celebration being interrupted. There were so many people who were speaking up on this. Tony Reali, who I love, had a viral segment about how little the WNBA athletes are played and there were so many big voices in media speaking out against this, but if only half of them gave half the attention to the WNBA as they do to the WNBA pay gap during outrageous moments like this, we might be on our way to actually fixing something.
I am sick of media organizations and big voices in media only focusing on the WNBA when it's stuff like this, which deserves to be covered, but so does Elena Delle Donne's legacy. So does Emma Meesseman's winning MVP from the bench. So does bad stuff such as the dysfunction from the Sparks and what we're seeing in that organization. So does the future of Connecticut, whether or not they're going to be able to keep this team together. So does Eric Thibault, associate head coach. Is he going to stay with the program? Is he going to get a head coaching job elsewhere? So do so many of these stories that we would be covering 24/7 if this was a men's sport.
So I just want to put pressure, and people ask me a lot about this, and I say, "Yes. My whole career has been covering the issues. Issues are big to cover. But if you have the platform to, at least do it one to one. Do one issue story and one story that's focused on on the court. And then you can be part of the solution of moving things forward." So I'd just like to burn all the people who showed up to whine about the Mystics not getting a parade, but who didn't give one ounce of coverage to the finals themselves. Burn.
Group: Burn.
Amira: Jessica?
Jessica: Yeah. My burn this week is a bit tangential to sports, so I'll start with a quick NCAA burn. Mary Hardin-Baylor, a Division III school located in Texas and not to be confused with Baylor University, was forced by the NCAA to vacate their 2016 football championship because the coach loaned his 2006 Subaru to a player for an eight month period so the player could get around little Belton, Texas. So cool rules, NCAA.
On to my main burn, this week, ProPublica, an amazing investigative journalism outlet, reported that the University of Illinois was putting pressure on local journalists to turn over their sources around campus sexual assault. ProPublica, in order to support and bolster good local journalism, they often team up with a lot of local reporters in different places. This includes Rachel Otwell, who works for NPR Illinois. Otwell, with ProPublica and NPR's support, has reported pieces about the way the University of Illinois has aided professors who have violated their policies, including their sexual misconduct policy, in order to keep these professors' records clean and them on staff.
Well, since the University of Illinois owns the license to operate NPR Illinois, that makes the staff of NPR Illinois, including reporters, University employees, and the University of Illinois has decided that they count as mandatory reporters or quote, "responsible employees," which means that under University of Illinois policy, they are required to quote, "report in detail all incidents of sexual violence, sexual harassment or other sexual misconduct to the Title IX coordinator." So if an NPR Illinois reporter, while working on a story about campus sexual assault or misconduct, uncovers an incident of sexual harassment or violence, or if a source brings them a story, or if a victim reaches out trying to figure out if they should work with a reporter on a story, the University of Illinois expects that reporter to turn that information over to them.
Mandatory reporting, it's a mixed bag. It sounds good on its face because the point is to force University and faculty staff to overcome sort of the default setting, I guess, of ignoring or minimizing reports or worst case, actually covering up reports of gender violence. It's supposed to make campuses more hospitable places for those who've been harmed because they're going to trust that the university is taking this stuff seriously, but then you have to believe that just because something is reported up-chain that it's going to be taken seriously. Mandatory reporting means that survivors often report without realizing that it's automatically going to be forwarded or they report and then they want to stop the process but they can't, so it's really messy, even if the intent behind it is good. One way to mitigate these problems is to give exemptions to people on campus whose role on the campus is compromised if they are forced to turn over all reports to Title IX, like, say, a reporter, but the University of Illinois refuses to give NPR Illinois reporters that exemption. So it's hard to read this as anything but the University of Illinois attempting to stifle reporting on sexual harassment, violence and misconduct on their campus.
Luckily, because NPR Illinois is working with ProPublica, any information handed over will first be vetted by ProPublica employees who don't work for the university. The point of the post was to reassure possible future sources, but NPR Illinois is not the only NPR station in the country with a relationship like this to the university. I actually had a moment of panic where I was like, "Am I a university employee? Would I be in trouble if I was reporting on the University of Texas?" And I'm not, to be clear. This is an abuse of rules meant to help survivors that is being used instead to intimidate them and the reporters who would work on these stories and I hate it. You can imagine, then, what this means if you add in big money college sports and the pressure to shut down these reports might even be stronger. I hate all of this and I want to burn it. Burn.
Group: Burn.
Amira: Okay, so as many of you might be aware, this week in the mail, a Penn State football player received a really racist note complaining about his hair and his tattoos. And it would be very easy to burn Dave Petersen, because he's a violent racist and '66 Penn State grad who takes it upon himself to write letters that says we are Penn State proud, that spends most of the time complaining about how there's no more quote-unquote clean-cut guys and saying, quote, "You need to remember you represent all Penn Staters and we would welcome the reappearance of dress codes." He called Jonathan's shoulder-length dreadlocks disgusting and he said, "Be clean-cut here. No doubt when you get to the NFL, you can be disgusting with tattoos and awful hair and immature antics in the end zone. This went viral when Tony Shelton tagged the letter and said this is racist, essentially. A lot of the players on the team spoke up and it got retweeted.
Now, it would be really easy to burn this letter in and of itself and make no bones about it, Dave Petersen is a awful, awful man. He's also somebody who writes letters to newspapers when they celebrate Muslim holidays, saying that, "The Tribune has no awareness or regard for families of 9/11. Islam anywhere is radical. It's an insult to all Americans," et cetera, et cetera. He's somebody who writes many letters about the NBA and the NFL and how awful people look and it's all racialized. It's all coded. This is the same person, when somebody reached out to see if this letter really did come from him, he said, "Yeah, and I really wasn't being racially insensitive. I just miss our clean-cut guys and I don't want our players to look like Miami or Florida State." So, yes, he's a racist and I just generally don't want to spend my time on him.
What I do want to focus on is the way that this highlights not just how these players are exploited, but how Black athletes here, and it's not just athletes and that's my second point, are policed. They're part of “we are” if they fit in a box. And the entire letter dripped of this understanding that you should be lucky to be at Penn State. You should be lucky to be here. You represent the “we are”, but we like you if you're scoring touchdowns and raising money for our school and all of that, but not if you're too Black. And it reminds me of a long history here of clinging to the mythology and the myth-making that Black students and Black athletes have brought to this school for decades.
I want to tell a quick story, as I wrap up my burn, of a man named Jesse Arnelle, who played at Penn State in the '50s. He was a all-American in both football and basketball, lead Penn State basketball to their only final four appearance. You know they love Jesse Arnelle. And in 1968, the first time they would award the Penn State Alumni Award, they decided to give it to a Black man, to Jesse Arnelle. They brought Jesse Arnelle in in 1968 to give him this award and Jesse Arnelle got up there and he said, "I can't take your award." He said, quote, "Rather than embroider further the sweet smell of success, which is obviously the theme of tonight's occasion, I've decided to go about it a different way. I will forgo the pleasure of polite banality and I won't give in to once very heavy nostalgia."
And he goes on to read the university for filth for doing absolutely nothing about the achievement gap, about recruiting and retaining Black students, about raising the number of Black faculty on campus, things that Black students in '68 were pushing for, things that they're pushing for now. He refused to take this award, saying, "No doubt I love Penn State University, but freedom is dearer to me." And he said, "In the words of Martin King, let freedom ring from the top of Mount Nittany. Let freedom ring from the bell in Old Main. Let freedom ring from the chairs of every Dean and Department head of every faculty, from the office of the President, from the meeting rooms of the Board of Trustees, from the Governor’s oak desk in Harrisburg, and when the day dawns on freedom at Penn State and all its commonwealth campuses, then I will come back and we will sing together free at last, free at last." And I return to this story because Jesse could not come back and do that today because the issues are still here.
The way that Jonathan was policed and the way that these boys are policed is the same way that non-athlete Black students at Penn State are policed, is the same way that Black faculty are policed. I've received hate mail that are mad that I'm at Penn State with tattoos and my broken English, according to this guy, and et cetera. It's a bigger issue than just this. And I've talked to my students on the team and no doubt they just use this as more fuel for their fire. But make no bones about it, you are not part of what I consider my Penn State. They are. My colleagues who do dope research, the students who are protesting anti-blackness here are. We are actually Penn State and it's really tiring and a lot of labor to fight a institution from the inside out, but that's what we're doing every day here in Happy Valley and I just want to burn, I don't even know what. There's so much here to burn. I'm really tired. I just want to burn it down.
Group: Burn.
Amira: After all that burning, it's time to recognize some badass women of the week. Iranian women, for the first time since 1979, attended a live football match in Tehran. While there is a long way to go in their struggle to attend soccer games, we are thrilled that this one barrier has been broken.
We also want to shout-out Belle Jacobs, the first woman player in the history to join the Sydney Academy Wildcats. They've had a hockey team for 100 years. Also a hockey player is Kim St-Pierre, who will be inducted into the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame later this month. She was part of that Vancouver 2010 team that won gold for Canada. Also, friend of the show Moya Dodd, who's been inducted into the Football South Australia Hall of Fame, congrats, that's amazing.
Turning to tennis, Coco Gauff, again. She is still 15 years old. Not only did she make her first ever WTA final at the Linz Tournament wrapping up this weekend, but she's, again, still 15 years old. 15 and 213 days to be specific. She's the youngest woman to reach a final since 2004 and just now, like 20 minutes ago, she defeated Jelena Ostapenko in the final as we record this this morning. She defeated her 6-3, 1-6, 6-2 to claim her first ever WTA title. She's the youngest to do it since 15 year old Jennifer Capriati in '91 and she's younger than both Serena and Venus were when they won their first titles. They both won their first titles at 17. So Coco, I know you're not even getting tired of breaking barriers. I see a lot more barriers that you're going to break in your future, but congrats. That's amazing. Congrats on your first title.
Okay. Cheyenne Knight won her first ever LPGA event at the Volunteers of America Classics. Of course I want to give a huge shout-out to the Washington Mystics, who won their first ever WNBA championship. Emma Meesseman, who took home the finals MVP, as Lindsay said, from off the bench, which is phenomenal. I also wanted to take this moment to shout out the Connecticut Sun. You gave us a amazing final. It was a joy to watch Courtney Williams celebrate with her dad. The team all around just had a amazing. That was totally badass.
And then I want to wrap up with gymnastics and I have a lot to mention here. First, the US women's gymnastics teams are world champs again. That includes Simone Biles, Jade Carey, Kara Eaker, Suni Lee, Grace McCallum, and MyKayla Skinner. Russia got second and Italy got third. We also have individual champs to shout-out. In the individual all-arounds, Simone Biles got gold, Tan Jiaxin got silver, and Angelina Melnikova got bronze. On vault, Simone got gold, Jade Carey got silver, and Ellie Downie from the UK got bronze. In bars, Nina Derwael took gold, Becky Downie, who is the older sister of Ellie Downie, got silver on the bars, a great night for the Downie sisters, and Suni Lee from the US took bronze. And on beam, Biles got gold, Liu Tingting got silver, and Li Shijia, both from China, got bronze. The floor is still to be decided.
And that brings us to our Badass Woman of the Week. Can I get a drumroll please?
No surprise here. Simone Biles won a record 21 world championship medal, her 15th world championship gold, and then she got 22 medals and 16 golds when she won the all-around, and then that became the 23rd and her 17th gold when she won gold on beam, which made her the most decorated world championship gymnast ever in history, male, female, doesn't matter. Most likely we're going to see her add to that on the floor later today. I can't state this enough. She is 22 years old. She has more world championship medals than she has years on this earth. She is absolutely phenomenal. The margin of victory is huge. There's nobody even close to her in the all-around. She makes it look effortless. When reporters after asked her about winning this, she said, "I don't really know how to feel about it. I don't really know what it means. I just go out there, I do my job, and then I think about dinner." She's absolutely phenomenal. She's breaking barriers on our show. I think this is a record number of Badass Woman of the Week that we've given her, but how can you not? Salute, salute, Simone Biles, you are our Badass Woman of the Week.
All right, friends. It's time for What's Good in Your Worlds. Bren, what's good with you?
Brenda: Well, Halloween is really, really good with me. I go a little bit bonkers for Halloween. I'm a big fan, and so I have three costumes and I think-
Jessica: Wow.
Brenda: You know you hit like eight different events and basically if I don't have enough Halloween events, I just throw a bunch of parties, but in this case I'm lucky. And I'm totally parasitical with children's parties, too. I dress up for them. So I'm really excited. Japanese rugby. The Japanese rugby team made the quarterfinals. I'm still on my whole rugby kick during this World Cup and they beat Scotland to go to the quarterfinals for the first time and they did this really, I don't know why rugby's tugging my heartstrings so much, but anyway, they did this whole kind of thank you bow to their crowd and it was just really cute and genuine.
And then finally, it's Football People weeks, which is a small grant program that Fare has for events that fight homophobia, racism, and gender violence in grassroots football. So there was an LGBTQ league in Mexico City this weekend where they were distributing HIV tests and condoms and they were also playing football and I just love it so much.
Amira: That's wonderful. Linds?
Lindsay: Yeah. So obviously, I loved the WNBA season, loved every second of it, and I'm honestly a little happy it's over because for the first time in a while, I'm focused on my future. As a lot of you know, the ThinkProgress layoffs, ThinkProgress was closed right at the end of the WNBA regular season, so because I was already working, doing some freelance work for The Athletic on the Mystics, I just kind of dove into that. I use the word full-time loosely, because it was on a full-time contract, but I just decided to make the most out of that and immerse myself in that for the last month, so now that that's over, I'm starting to kind of look forward and I'm solidifying my plans for the future. Stay tuned for some announcements, but I'm just excited to have some time to get my life together a little bit. My cousin's getting married next weekend and it's a Gatsby themed wedding, so I've got to go find something to wear. I don't know if it's Gatsby. I got to just dress like it's the 20s, I don't know, but I got to figure out something to wear.
Brenda: Lithium. Get yourself some lithium.
Lindsay: Okay, perfect. Thank you. So anyways, but it's going to be in the mountains in a brewery. It's supposed to be gorgeous, so I'm excited for that and, yeah. I'm excited about the future, so stay tuned.
Amira: Awesome. So I'm really sick. I've been sick for like a week. I'm so tired. There's so much going on. It's one of those weeks that is a little harder to be like, this is wonderful, something. So mine's very small. I love young adult fiction. I should have a book group with Samari and Aiden. But right now I've discovered the Three Dark Crowns series, the Queen of Fennbirn series by Kendare Blake. It is so dark and so satisfying. It's about a island where three triplets are born. It's a matriarchal society. Men don't matter. And these triplets are born and they each have a different power and they're raised separately until they're 16 and then they have to kill each other, and the last Queen standing becomes Queen. It's wild and I'm totally into it, so I'm just laying bed, drinking a lot of tea, having way too much NyQuil and reading about this dark and twisted island of badass women and murderous queens and I love it. So that's what's good with me. Jess?
Jessica: Yeah. Schitt's Creek season five is on Netflix. Aaron and I are almost done with it. I just love that show. It makes me deeply happy. And I wanted to mention Eliud Kipchoge. He is a marathoner from Kenya and he participated in an event yesterday that was created to help him run a marathon under 2 hours. He wore special shoes, he had 41 pacers who helped him run, and it wasn't an open marathon course, so this will not count as a world record in marathoning for all of those reasons, but I don't give a shit, because this man ran a marathon, 26.2 miles, which is so far.
The first time Aaron ever ran a marathon, we drove the course ahead of time and we just kept driving. We just drove forever and Aaron was like, "I'm never doing that again. That was really mentally terrifying, to see how long it actually is." So Kipchoge ran the first marathon under 2 hours in 1 hour, 59 minutes and 40 seconds, and I just want to put this in perspective. That is a per minute mile, it's four minutes and 33 seconds. That was the average pace that he ran for 26.2 miles, so that means that these pacers that are running alongside of him are elite 5k and 10k runners. They are running at the top of their game in order to match him and to get him over the line in under two hours. It is an incredible human feat and you should go watch the videos. He crosses the line, he is so happy, he is so joyous. He doesn't collapse. He is thrown up into the arms, he hugs his wife, he's thrown up into the air. There are shots from Kenya of huge crowds in the street watching and just cheering and they are so excited for him. It is just really amazing that a human being can do this and that he did it with such joy at the end instead of collapsing on the ground is so amazing.
And the final thing I want to say is that today my family is going to the Austin City Limits music festival. It's the last day of the two weekend festival and we're only going today because I said the only time I would ever go back is to see Robyn, the Swedish queen of pop, and so tonight at eight o'clock I will be at Zilker Park dancing my ass off to Robyn and I am so excited about that.
Amira: That's it for this week on Burn It All Down. You can listen and subscribe to Burn It All Down on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, wherever you get your podcasts. Please, please rate the show wherever you listen. The ratings really do help us reach new listeners who don't yet know that we exist but would benefit from our podcast in their lives. We're on Facebook and Instagram at BurnItAllDownPod and on Twitter, @BurnItDownPod. You can check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com, for information about the show, links, transcripts for each episode. You can also email us directly from the site. We love to hear from you.
A big shout-out to our Patreons. You keep us in the game. We adore you. Check out our Patreon to donate, get exclusive Behind the Burn videos, get monthly drawing opportunities, raffle opportunities for merchandise. Oh, and definitely check out our Teespring merchandise. The seasons are changing. Even Jessica in Texas had a 40 degree swing or something crazy-
Jessica: I am wearing my Burn It All Down hoodie right now as we record.
Amira: Look at that. And just last week, it was not even ever touching the 70s. So as the seasons are changing, this is a great time to go to Teespring and right now, you can use the promotional code FALLFLAMES, that's fall flames, to get a discount on your order. Stock up on long-sleeve Burn It All Down shirts, hoodies, or anything else to get you through this fall weather. Thank you for putting up with me as I'm sick and barely have a voice. Many thanks to my co-hosts Jessica, Lindsay, Brenda. Shout-out to Shireen. We miss you. That's all for us this week. As Brenda says, burn on, not out, and we'll see you around, flamethrowers.