Episode 138: The Best Of Burn It All Down 2019, part 1

This week’s show is part 1 of 2 where we recap the best of 2019 in sports and the best of Burn It All Down.

After the gang talks about their favorite sports moments from this year, [15:28] we play three of our favorite segments from 2019

1) from episode 113 in July, when Shireen, Amira, Brenda, and Jessica discussed their complicated feelings about the intersection of women’s soccer, colonialism, race, and racism at the Women’s World Cup; [33:16]

2) from episode 123 in September, when we all appeared live at AMEND Together’s SHIFT Conference in Nashville, Tennessee and talked about the ways in which sports culture supports gendered violence and toxic masculinity; [52:07] and

3) from episode 124 in September, when Lindsay, Shireen, and Amira talked about body image issues for women in sports. [1:10:08]

Transcript

Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. We are so happy you’re here. This week is the first of two episodes where we will focus on the best of 2019 from the sports world, and specifically the best of Burn It All Down. I’m Jessica Luther, and I’m joined today by the whole crew: professors Amira Rose Davis and Brenda Elsey, fellow writers and journalists Lindsay Gibbs and Shireen Ahmed. Before we get into the meat of the episode, I want to take a moment to thank all of our patrons. You make this independent commercial-free feminist podcast possible. Your donations allow us to afford quick high-quality editing, to purchase ads to help spread the word, to provide transcripts for each episode, and to have wonderful graphics to go along with the podcast. A special shoutout to Shelby Weldon for making those graphics, as well as doing transcripts for our show.

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On today’s episode you will here from each of us about our favorite 2019 sports memories, before we replay some of our favorite discussion segments from this year. Those include a discussion on colonialism and race at the Women’s World Cup, a segment from our live show in Nashville, when we talked about the ways in which sports culture supports gendered violence and toxic masculinity, and finally our chat on body image issues in sports and beyond. Let’s get going.

First, you’re gonna hear from each of the co-hosts about our favorite 2019 sports memories and/or stories. The order will be alphabetical. Amira, Brenda, Jessica, Lindsay, and last but never least, Shireen. Here’s Amira to get us started.

Amira: 2019 was another one of those years that felt like it simultaneously flew by but also like a million years long. So as I was thinking about my favorite sporting moments, I actually had to be reminded that the Patriots won the Super Bowl this year. It sounds really annoying to say, I legitimately forgot. So I guess that was a good moment, although I didn’t see much of it because I was so stressed and curled up in a ball. I couldn’t look. So I would have to say, my favorite sporting moments were of course the Women’s World Cup, what a wonderful, wild ride that was. Particularly that USA-France game was a highlight for me.

I have to say watching tennis together as a group in Nashville was really fun, watching Serena play, even if she didn’t win, just being together in the room and watching a sport that we all love and getting invested in it and watching everybody’s superstitions and pacing and just…It’s fun to watch sports with other people that you love and who love sports like you do, so that was a really good moment.

But I have to say, kind of the biggest moment that jumps out to me over the past year has to be the Penn State-Arizona women’s soccer match in the round of 32, fighting for a spot in the sweet sixteen. It was a wild, wild match and just watching it gave me all sorts of anxiety. Arizona started fast and gave a quick 1-0 lead with a kind of wonky goal and then also crossed the ball and it ended up being this perfect arced shot, so they were up 2-0 and it felt like doomsday, and then somehow we finally fought back in it, a beautiful pass by Sam and then Ellie finished up, and then another goal! So it was even and we could finally breathe, and then Arizona scored again, it was one of these rollercoaster matches. Then with three minutes to play Sam tied it up and we won in overtime.

It was one of those matches where you just see all of the heart, all of the grit, all of the nerves and the stress and all of the team coming together. It reminds me of everything I love about sports and it was even better to see two girls, Sam and Ellie, who I just absolutely adore, to watch Ellie’s composure and leadership on the team, Sam’s goal heroics, was phenomenal. It made it all that much more meaningful. I would have to say that is definitely my top sporting moment of 2019.

Brenda: My favorite sports moment of 2019 will probably not surprise anyone, it is the June 19th Women’s World Cup match between Argentina and Scotland. I was actually in the stadium and had been in Paris at the tournament the week prior. I had covered this Argentine team during the 2018 Copa America and went to their training grounds and have know a lot of the players for a long time, and that morning I had brought my three daughters to their hotel to meet with my friend and friend of the show Gaby Garton, who’s a suplente arquera, the second goalkeeper for Argentina.

We had made these shirts for the captain Estefanía Banini, because they didn’t sell those shirts, we sort of cut and pasted our own versions, and she came down and was really excited and signed it and my daughters were thrilled, and so was I. So we hung out with them for a while and that evening we went to the match and it was where Paris Saint Germain played and so we’re in the stadium and I had also gotten to see Jessica Luther, our co-host, and so it had generally just been a great trip and a great day. They were losing 3-0 I think into the 70th minute and then Argentina scored three goals to tie the game.

It didn’t mean that they were gonna go on and it didn’t mean that they, I don’t know, proved that they could pound Scotland or anything, but they way that they had managed the tournament was to eke out these real moral victories, very defensive wins, and it was just so wonderful to see them open up in those last 20 minutes and they were just completely joyful. And knowing that they had their itineraries given to them on a napkin the night before, knowing the state of women’s football in Argentina, and the struggle for professionalization that had gone on at that very same time, it was just super meaningful and I was so excited. Scotland fans were incredibly gracious, by the way, because I was screaming my head off and they didn’t even hardly give me side eye. So that was my favorite.

Jessica: I think it’s easy to say that the best sporting experience I had this year in 2019 was going to France over the summer. I started that trip off by seeing the semi-finals and finals of the French Open, I got to watch Federer play Nadal on clay. I went to Federer’s press conference afterwards and was then, I guess, technically in the same room as him! I got to watch Nadal win a title on clay, in the place where he is king. I saw Ash Barty win her first title, I got to have dinner with Courtney Ngyuen and Ben Rothenberg after one of those nights when I was there.

And of course I went to the first two weeks of the World Cup, I saw something like nine matches including the opener, I went to five different cities, I rode the train, Shireen drove us to Reims and I saw the USA-Thailand 13-0. I just had an amazing experience, I ate too many sandwiches at those stadiums though, the ham and cheese sandwiches on the baguettes…I’m not really that sad about it. I got to sit next to Katelyn Best at one game, Meg Linehan another, I saw Stephanie Yang, Anne M. Peterson, I saw Nancy Armour for the first time in person, it was just a really cool experience that I’ll never forget and probably will never get to top.

But I also got to see Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys play in San Antonio for the Fed Cup, that was really exciting. I got to see Sloane play twice at the Fed Cup when it was here in Texas. And then the other thing I really wanted to mention, one of my favorite spectating, I guess you could call it that, was when Sarah Thomas swam the English Channel over and over and over again and set a record. It was amazing and I love endurance sports, thank you Sarah Thomas for such a cool thing to be able to see from afar.

Lindsay: Hi all, it’s Lindsay. Okay, so for my favorite sports moment of the year, gonna be really obvious here and go with the Washington Mystics winning the WNBA Championship in 5 games against the Connecticut Sun. I was really lucky that I got to cover the entire playoff series, and actually the entire Mystics playoff run for The Athletic, and that means in the semi-finals I got to travel to Las Vegas to watch the Mystics win the semi-finals in game four and engage in lots of trash-talking against the Aces after Liz Cambage said, of the Mystics’ front court, mainly, LaToya Sanders, she said something along the lines of, “They have undersized forwards guarding me. Get in the weight room or get out of the post.” So then the Mystics proceeded to win that in four games, and Natasha Cloud did pushups on the ground, and there was a lot of flexing! It was so much fun.

And then the finals was absolutely everything. I was just going back and reading through some of my articles to make sure I remembered it correctly, and it was even more dramatic than I recalled. You had the first game, the Mystics barely eking out a win at home with sophomore player Ariel Atkins really carrying the load. Then you had in the next game Elena Delle Donne go out with back spasms and really…The Mystics lost that game, so that means they went to Connecticut 1 and 1 agains the Sun, losing the home court advantage, and with Elena Delle Donne’s health questionable. And then Ariel Atkins got back spasms too! So you had two of your starters dealing with back pain, they both played in game three but it was a rough game, though the Mystics were able to eke out a win; game four they lost, but that meant they got to win it all in game five against the DC crowd.

It was, to see Emma Meesseman emerge as a superstar in the league, to see this team come together, to see Mike Thibault get his first WNBA Championship, to see a legend like Elena Delle Donne get hers…Really just all the players up and down the roster that I got a chance to know and cover, it was a really great thing to be a part of and it’s something I will remember forever.

Shireen: 2019 was amazing for me, in addition to having some career highlights, I got to go to the Women’s Word Cup in France, I was in Paris and Reims with Jessica of this mighty podcast, and it was incredible. I got to write for SB Nation about some of the matches that I saw during the Women’s World Cup, for Stephanie Yang. But one of the most exciting moments for me in sports this year was being in a hotel room on my laptop at 5am as Jessica lay soundly beside me sleeping, and I was trying to muffle my screams of excitement because yes, the Toronto Raptors won the 2019 NBA Championship. I was so excited, it didn’t matter that I was in the dark, in this tiny hotel room trying to be quiet because one of my best friends is trying to sleep.

I was so excited about this, I mean, it was the moment I had partaken in, we went through the finals, we went through a season with all the naysayers, “Your team’s old,” it’s this, it’s that. It was such a magical moment, and that moment continued when CBC Radio invited me to live cover the parade that happened shortly afterwards. That was the first time that anything of that kind had been done in Canadian sports broadcasting, so to be part of that team with Devin Heroux and Matt Galloway was really, really wonderful and it was an honor for me to do that. We were on air about, oh my goodness, about more than four hours because the parade was delayed, but it was just incredible to actually be a part of that moment and that history. So I love the Raptors so much, everybody knows this, it doesn’t take away from my adoration of Tim Duncan whatsoever so Timmy, if you’re listening, you know you’re still my number one.

But the reality is that was a really powerful moment for me and I’m so grateful to be able to have shared that with Burn It All Down, I know I talk about it a lot but as somebody who just really got swept up in the excitement and in the joy and in the love…What ended up happening is because of that, and I’ll just add that quickly, that whole entire NBA Championship there was a story done in the Toronto Star by Sahar Fatima and Evelyn Kwong that highlighted the different community groups around Toronto that supported the Raptors and one of them was the Hijabi Ballers, it’s a group of Black and Brown young Muslim women who play basketball and love the Raptors. They were featured in this article, I was interviewed as well, and what happened as a result of that is people at the Raptors were paying attention, MLSE was paying attention, and the franchise then in September released a hijab with the Raptors logo on it, a Nike Pro Sport Hijab with the Raptors logo. That was just a continuation of this glorious year and so many people in Toronto and specifically me as a Muslim woman, and identifiably Muslim woman in sport, it meant a lot. So thank you very much, keep it going!

Jessica: The first segment we want to revisit before this year ends comes from episode 113, which we posted on July 2nd. In it Shireen, Brenda, Amira and Jessica discussed their complicated feelings about the intersection of women’s soccer, colonialism, race, and racism at the Women’s World Cup.

Brenda: As much as we've loved the Women's World Cup, there has been some troubling, there have been some troubling sorts of themes for us. One thing we wanted to delve into with a lot of care and gravity is the issue of colonialism and race in this Women's World Cup. Amira, do you want to get the conversation started?

Amira: Certainly. We've been talking about this in bits and pieces over the last few weeks as we've done our preview show, and as we've just kind of kept updated with the Cup as it's gone on, but we really thought it was important to kind of bring these pieces together and have the conversation itself. I've talked in the past about the way commentators seemingly use ideas about “pace and power” when they're talking about African teams in particular. We've talked about the idea that cards, the matches are refereed, but it’s different what looks physical when a black player does it, it looks different. Brenda last week had a terrific burn where she talked about the way in which hailing, say, France for it's diverse team, or as the last African team standing, actually obfuscates the way that teams from the global South are not represented in the quarter finals or the semis. Indeed, we're here facing a quarter finals and of course then the semis that were just European dominated as well as the United States. 

I think the last part of that, too, is even as, say, me and Jermaine jest on Twitter about diaspora power and we look for like the two or three black women on each squad, I jokingly made like the all-diaspora squad pulling the 5 women from the US, pairing with basically half of France's roster, and then the 2 or 3 women from the Netherlands, Switzerland, et cetera, to make an all-diaspora squad. We wanted to have a very real conversation about what it means to search for representation in this way, and how identifying women of color and people of color on these teams also can helps us lose sight of the fact that colonization is setting the entire terms for this discussion. 

The black women participating on teams in France, right, come from colonial spaces. They come from Martinique, like Renard. If you read her very powerful essay in the Player's Tribune where she talks about football at the end of the world, she talks about growing up on Martinique and trying to make it to France. Martinique is an overseas department, which is the fancy way of saying a colony. It's the same way Bermuda is the overseas department of Britain, right. What does colonization look like now, in how it's influenced the development of the game, and how it's influenced the women who play the game and find themselves moving from the colonies to the métropole, or just existing in places around the globe, like Janogy who plays for Sweden who's dad's from Mali. What does it look like to trace the diaspora like this but trace it with a very real explicit conversation about how it was, in many ways, shaped by empire, and by colonization, and often by blood.

That is the terms of the discussion that we kind of wanted to have. Brenda, I actually want to toss it back to you so that we can further unpack the eloquent burn that you made last week. Here we are again, with a semifinals that's European dominated, and France just made their exit. Certainly people are still looking for diaspora power wherever they can get it. Can we expand upon that conversation a little bit more? What does it mean, yet again, for the global south to be on the periphery of the finals in the semis?

Brenda: Bums me out. Makes me so upset. You just hate to see it come down to money, right? You hate to see it come down to power and it's something that I predicted, that we all predicted, would happen, that we'd find the lineups looking like this. I do think it's upsetting and I think it's important, obviously diversity, but I think it's very important to understand the difference between diversity in terms of, this happens in the US, for example. If you want to make a minority hire, frequently, people fill those spots with internationals who happen to be white. Right? Which doesn't sort of further diversify in the way that it's intended to. These things work in a lot of interesting ways that international versus homegrown diversity and what that means in terms of colonialism. I go back to it where if the federations are going to tout the diversity of their teams based upon the diasporic history, give them all passports. Give them all, you know what I'm saying? Give every postcolonial place passports then. If you're going to claim it as this real thing that you really care about and has a real connection with the métropole, you know, before you do stuff like that, then you have to kind of like come to some terms with what your past is. The bloody, bloody, terrible violent history of colonialism cannot just skip ahead to yay, yay, they play football for us now.

Amira: Right. 

Brenda: I just find it so jarring.

Amira: Especially because FIFA's thing for this World Cup is living diversity. I don't know if you've seen these really rather cringy videos, especially when Germany was playing Sweden. It makes me laugh. I'm sorry. It makes me laugh. There's a video that they put out right before kickoff of Germany and Sweden where they have two representatives from the team and both in Swedish and German, they're saying these words about how we respect everybody on the pitch. We're not for discrimination, all the language we're used to. Then it's like we are living diversity. It's like, with Šašić off the German team, it's completely white. On the Swedish side, you have Janogy, whose dad is from Mali, and then that's it. It just feels, it's just a very strange feeling. 

It's interesting, France I think, is really interesting. I study this historically in terms of the way that France uses sports in their kind of postcolonial moment. One of the things you see over the course of the 1950s and '60s, when you have a massive upheaval of independent African nation states, Latin American, people getting independence in the Caribbean. This is a time in which independent countries are popping up. It's also in the middle of the Cold War in both the United States and the Soviet Union, are glancing at places in Latin America and continental Africa and the Caribbean, to try to exert their power to try to get these newly formed countries to kind of go their way.

You also have former colonies trying to figure out what their relationship is going to be with these colonial spaces, and France is really interesting because they decide they're going to try to be friends and they're going to foster a relationship particularly through athletics where they host friendship games and they have these joint matches in West Africa in Senegal and they're going to foster these kind of pipelines from Martinique in reunion to France. 

Shireen, I would love if you would talk a little bit about your relationship to the French team, but also how you see diversity and colonization playing out on that team in particular.

Shireen: Thanks, Amira. This is something that's like particular to football that I've carried and studied and thought about, particularly with regards to France, because the whole idea that diversity and what does it mean. When we talk about post-colonial stuff, we're talking about racialized diversity. Looking at that Germany Sweden match, where oh, this is a testament adversity, what happens is people conflate racialized diversity with other types of diversity in terms of gender or in terms of sexual orientation. What ends up happening is that you get massive heaps of white feminism coming in here where those two things, gender or sexual orientation, will overtake the idea of racialized diversity. I mean how often have we seen that issues of women, quote unquote, overtake and speak over issues of racialized women. It happens to me and I know it happens to Amira and it happens in spaces, it's happened on this podcast previously. 

I think that it's really important to keep that in mind. When we were talking about diversity, it's become sort of this word that is it's open-ended. For me, being a racialized woman, it means something completely different than it would to somebody else. In terms of France, and in terms of when we look at what football is historically. When we look at ... Jessica and I, when we were in Paris, we went to the Institut du monde arabe and they had this beautiful, beautiful exhibit on football in the Arab world. Now, yes, I had issues with the fact that there was very little and I was griping the whole time, but then I saw a Zizou video, so I was like, okay. 

The idea that football has, in fact, particularly in relation to France, been a way to resist, to disrupt. You look at FLN in Algeria and how Rachid Mekhloufi left in the '60s. He left the French National Team overnight to go play with Algeria. The letters are actually there in the exhibit and it's fascinating. We don't see this level of discussion in women's football. We don't talk about the issues of racialized or diasporic issues because we're still so hellbent on oh well, they're women, must even get attention for the women's games. We're not even at a point yet to talk about that in France. This is something, this is why there's very little discussion of hijab on the pitch in France, even though France is hosting the Women's World Cup. This is going to forever be the bane of my existence.

Now, when we talk about diversity, et cetera, we talk and Amira has this beautiful setup that she's done. Sara Gama, Italy. We can talk about Lineth Beerensteyn of the Netherlands and Shanice van de Sanden. That's it. It's almost like having these two figures here say, oh, we've got our diversity. It doesn't actually work like that. When the USA becomes one of the rosters with more women that are from racialized communities, then it becomes an issue for me. USA cannot be the bar.

Brenda: Yeah. I think that's saying a lot at this point. Jess?

Jessica: Oh, I'm just listening. This is one of my favorite things is like when you guys are going on, I just get caught off guard.

Brenda: I'm sorry. You wrote this great piece this week on France, so I didn't want to forget it.

Shireen: Oh, you did. Yeah. 

Jessica: Yeah, thank you. That piece is interesting because it was originally, I was going to try to write something about the diversity of the French team. It's actually difficult to talk about because France, the French have such a different way that they talk about race. They actually, I was told they use the ethnicity instead of race. They way that colonialism comes into that conversation, but it was too hard to do because they just don't talk about the women's team in general. It was one of those things where there's not enough a conversation about the women's team that they don't even have a real conversation around issues of diversity and certainly not one of colonialism with the team. 

I did want to say, I don't have much to add. That was all so good and brilliant. When I was there, and Shireen and Brenda can both attest to this, it was something to go to these matches and watch ... I'm sure that this comes across on the TV, but like I really just felt it in person, and Amira brought this up at the very beginning, that it did feel ... It's interesting. I don't know. I don't have the right language, I feel. When you're watching these almost all white teams play against teams predominantly of color, if not completely of color, I kept saying someone needs to write about the difference in the reffing between the two teams and how they do penalties and how, but in a real smart way, in a way that takes into account that the teams with less resources play differently a lot of the time, and that they often are frustrated and they're working against things that end up coming out in what penalties are given, right, and what that must be like to be down on the pitch and to experience that. 

I'll say, when I went to the Netherlands verse Cameroon, it's just so ... I'm sorry. I should have looked her name up. Number 7 for Cameroon. She ended up scoring the only goal and she was one of their superstars. 

Shireen: Ajara Nchout? Is that who you're talking about? Ajara Nchout?

Jessica: Yeah, I think so. There was a whole thing, I didn't really see it. Maybe people saw it on television. She pushed, like a Dutch player tried to give her water at some point and she liked flipped the water bottle up into the air out of the woman's hand. This was early in the match. Then the dutch fans, and there were so many of them because we were in Valenciennes, we're only a hundred miles away from the Netherlands. They're also just famously incredibly supportive of their women's team. They booed her so hard for the rest of the match. Then they would cheer when she would go down, which that was the one that really got me. That they wanted her to be injured almost. You just felt it in the stadium. It was such a white crowd cheering on a very predominantly white team against an all black team. It felt so uncomfortable. 

We could talk forever about what happened with England and Cameroon. I just kept thinking like the last time those women were in that stadium, that was what they experienced. I'm not here to defend the behavior that she had with the water bottle, or whatever, but it was so excessive. It made me feel bad. I don't have, again, good language for it, but just thinking about how all those things are working themselves out on the pitch. I'm sorry. I'm rambling at this point. I just kept thinking about what it must be like to play in that dynamic and it just felt really bad at that game. 

Shireen: I think one of the things, just to touch on what Jess is saying here about wanting someone to write about it intelligently, I really don't know. Maybe definitely someone from Burn It All Down, but I think the idea that the fairness, we take for granted, privilege on the pitch is very important. Racialized privilege on the pitch is a real thing. I've played soccer for over 30 years. I know this. I've felt it. I've been discriminated against. The first time I was racially abused was on the pitch and the call did not go in my favor, let's just put it that way. The idea that people don't recognize that is very problematic to me. We've seen journalists say well, my assessment and analysis of England versus Cameroon wasn't based on race, but they're all white people saying this, which is the bane of my existence, and something that Amira burned last week is a coded ... It's not even coded. The language used.

This idea, it's very rich and it's very important but I really don't know a lot of spaces where it could exist. One quick thing, because I know we have to wrap up, was just the idea that Nadeshiko, Japan, being the only racialized team left, and the pressure on them to have to account for the diversity piece of the puzzle. They can't just be footballers from a nation that loves football, they would have accounted for that. There in is another conversation about in addition to being footballers, in addition to wanting to win the World Cup, you're also having to represent an ethnicity, a community, a culture, on the world stage so football can make itself feel better and say look how diverse we are when we know that's not the case.

Amira: Certainly, and just to wrap up, I think what's really important when we talk about this is also not to lose sight of settler colonialism. Also, when we're looking at these teams, particularly from Canada, United States, Australia, is to understand the absence of indigenous people on the team as another indictment of a different form, but just as insidious form of colonization, and rendering those groups invisible is continuing the work of settler colonization in a way that I think we also, it would be very interesting to pair that in a longer, bigger, of course, more in-depth conversation that we're always striving to have. It never seems like there's enough time to truly unpack all of this, but I hope that that was a space where we could at least start getting some of these things out there together and in a little bit more depth.

Jessica: Next up is our discussion from episode 123 in September, when we appeared at Amend Together’s SHIFT Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. We feel so fortunate that we were able to record two live shows this year, first in New York City and this one in Nashville. We feel confident that we’ll get this opportunity again in 2020 and we are thrilled. Stay tuned. In Nashville all of us were there, and we talked about the ways in which sports culture supports gendered violence and toxic masculinity.

Amira: 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.

Jessica: Finally in episode 124, Lindsay, Shireen and Amira got together and talked about body image issues for women in sports. It got personal and I think really shows the strength of this podcast, and my co-hosts. They take relevant topics in sport, they say brilliant things about them, but they also tie them into the everyday and have them register for all of us. This is a heavy and sometimes raw discussion, but it’s also very smart and very lovely.

Lindsay: We're going to kick off today in earnest by talking about body image. Amira, I know this is a topic you've been wanting to address on the show for quite some time. Can you get us started?

Amira: Sure. So this past week, up in Alaska, a young swimmer, Breckynn Willis, Anchorage, Dimond High School, had her win disqualified. She was disqualified because an official rule that her swimsuit violated the sports so-called “modesty rules.” He contended that they could see her butt cheeks touching, it's what they call a swimmer's wedgie, and they disqualified her for “immodesty.”

Now, here's the thing, she didn't pick the swimsuit. This was a team-issued swimsuit. Her school filed the complaint, and ultimately won and had her title restored, thank goodness. But they were like, this was unnecessary. They alleged that their swimmer was targeted based solely on how a standard school-issued uniform fit the shape of her body.

And it turns out that this is not the first time where this particular young woman has been targeted. Actually, last year, there was a parent who took a picture of her butt to say that this was inappropriate. She, literally a grown person, took a picture of a child about how this swimsuit was fitting her.

And I think it's really... You might have heard this news, but one of the things that I've seen missing from this discussion is that this is a woman of color in a predominantly white sport like swimming. And it immediately made me relate to a conversation that I had wanted to have a few weeks ago about Taylor Townsend, and kind of revisiting that moment where the USTA pulled her funding and alleged that she was ‘too fat’ and she needed to lose weight to continue being funded despite being the junior number one at the time.

And I think that it is a combination of not only sexism but racism about body shapes. And we can talk about body shapes generally, but I think there's a specific thread of concern. And we've seen this with Serena and her catsuits around the nature of black women and girls' bodies that feels very violent to me.

And, in fact, as this story was breaking, I was talking to my husband and he got really mad. And he was like, "I didn't realize until just now how much pain I had been carrying around, how much it still really makes me angry about how our daughter was treated when she used to do ballet when she was little", because she was thicker, and because of how leotards fit her, and because she couldn't put her hair up in the little straight hair bun that they wanted.

And it wasn't necessarily the institution, it wasn't the dance teachers, it was comments from other parents who would say, "Oh, I just love how her leotard fits her" or "Look at her thighs. They're just so cute and curvy” in this way that was really uncomfortable when you're talking about a three-year-old girl who happens to be the only black girl in this ballet room.

And so, immediately when I saw this story it connected to Taylor, it connected to Serena, it connected to my own child, and I really wanted to have a conversation about bodies in sports. And I think that especially with the body issue coming out, this is a great opportunity to talk about what bodies we deem athletic, and what bodies we try to discipline and penalize. Yeah, that's where I would really like to kind of kick off.

Lindsay: Yeah. So much here to unpack. Shireen?

Shireen: Yeah. I want to echo what Amira is saying. And I think one of the things that I first saw, this type of misogynoir, sort of, being unleashed on Serena Williams. I mean, I think I wrote about this for Rewire, just sort of what she's faced, the type of criticism she's faced, and particularly around body…we see this type of body shaming. It's very much rooted also in the way Caster Semenya is treated, because people can't accept without what she looks like, she is a woman. So it's this very heteronormative, sort of, very Eurocentric, very compartmentalized and ideas that aren't open and what that means. And I think that's really dangerous for sport and it's unjust to women. And I hate it.

I mean, I saw this story about the swimmer. And just to add context to it, it's in Alaska, is actually where it happened. And I think that... The part about the parent infuriated me, because I feel like parents definitely contribute to this type of toxic culture in sport.

I've had a daughter who is often in non-white spaces and she's a goalkeeper, so she stands back so to speak, but she also doesn't conform to what soccer players look like, and she still is one of the only hijab wearing players wherever she goes. And people look at her differently. I mean, on a basketball court it's actually not that bad because everyone's tall anyway, but as far as what she looks like, and what her body looks like, it doesn't conform to the blonde ponytails and the petite…And that's not my daughter, I mean, she's fit.

And also, in a way, this type of body shaming reminds me, although it wouldn't be at least with racism, what happened to Lindsey Horan. And she talked about it, and I know we talked about it on the podcast about her being shamed even though she passed and literally excelled at the fitness test when she was at Paris Saint-Germain, in France, playing there. The coach literally body-shamed her to lose weight.

And I think that's really dangerous. I just think it's unhelpful. And it's really very dangerous for the athlete as well. And I hate all of it.

Lindsay: Yeah. It's really hard for me to talk about this. This is really a touchy subject, even though I recognize that it's even more layered for so many people. But just growing up, I've been fat my entire life, and the experience... I was a swimmer. I would spend all summers on swim team. I did year round swimming for a little bit. But in the pool I would feel very fast and powerful, but the second I would get out of the pool, and we're talking starting when I was six, seven, eight, very, very young, I didn't feel comfortable walking around just in my swimsuit like all my friends were doing because I was twice their size. So I would get my towel, I would always make sure I had clothes on. And parents would comment if I lost any amount of weight.

I grew up a little bit taller because I was a kid, and I was just growing, and the parents would all take me aside, and be like, "Oh, you look so good! You look so much better! Congratulations!” And it was just this awareness growing up that my body was being examined in a different way than all of my peers bodies because of the weight and the size. I was tall for my age. I'd been about the height I am now, which is about 5’8’’. I've been this tall since fifth grade.

So, any time this conversation takes place I just have kind of PTSD flashbacks to feeling like, just knowing that even though in the pool my body was doing what it was supposed to be doing, and I was obviously in good shape because I was swimming all the time and I was doing all this stuff that outside of the body I was... I mean, parents would ask me to stand in the back in photos, in team photos in my swimsuit. I was just hyper aware that my body wasn't actually supposed to be doing what it was doing.

Shireen: Yeah. I have some of those flashbacks that gave me a heightened insecurity. I grew up in a predominantly, predominantly white space. And as far as the swimming goes, I am South Asian. And because of that, the genetics around my follicle growth are great. So I have very hairy arms and legs. So the thing about the swimsuit, Linds, I completely understand, because I was taunted and gawked at for a different reason because I had a lot of hair on my arms and legs. And as a 10-year-old, my mother was like...

I remember, this is something that was really hard for me. I was in grade six, and I took one of my father's razors and I shaved my arms and my legs. And I remember showing my dad, and I remember his face, and he was really upset with me and I saw all the hair going down the drain. And I remember thinking, "Wow, this is going to be amazing for me." And I went to my mom and she was not upset, but just said, "I wish you would have told me." I said, "Well, I have expressed that this really upsets me, and I don't want to go to swimming parties."

I also swam competitively. And although I was relatively the same body shape as everybody else on the team, I completely stood out. So, it's like, we're never going to win. There's so many obstacles for so many people. I was really gawked at, and I hated... I know that moment, I hated getting out of the pool. And then, when you get out of the pool, and you have very hairy arms and legs it glistens, it's just drawing attention. And I just remember saying to my coach, "Can you have my towel right by the lane for me?" And then she was like, "Okay." But it didn't matter because I just wrapped it around my swimsuit, but my arms and legs were still visible, so it really didn't matter.

And I remember this one girl from a swimming meet, and this is in the Halifax, Nova Scotia, late '80s, and I remember her looking at me, and I remember her going, "I know there's treatment for that." Or "You can bleach that." She said something like that. And I was 11. And it's always that type of thing. And I see women that are body positive, and don't care about hair removal. This is something I actually still carry with me to this day. I'm very, very scheduled with my aesthetician about hair removal because it still to this day bothers me.

Lindsay: Amira.

Amira: Yeah. You know, I was thinking how bodies also change and transform. So I was an athlete my entire life, and I was always really small. I was very bony, stick thin, and kind of just had a certain style, a kind of disregard for my body. I loved just throwing on a sports bra and some shorts. That was kind of my aesthetic.

And then I had kids, and I have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, PCOS, and it really worsened after I had my first kid, and I just kept gaining weight. I was still active. I still was playing flag football, I was still playing soccer, I was still running. And one of the things that I noticed is I started to receive subtle messages about what my body, like you were saying, Lindsay, should or should not be doing.

And so, I would notice it showing up on a field to play, and suddenly there's a presumption that I'm not athletic. And because it's to me likened to when you realize that you have white privilege, and you realize that you are right-handed when you sit down at a left-handed desk, when you have to finally consider something. That to me was really transformative, and it's been about a decade of being more of a size than I ever was growing up.

And I found, especially, when it comes to spaces where you work out and athletics, this kind of presumption of... I work out at Orangetheory, and I'll go in and actually I find them to be more size inclusive than many places I've been. But there's still some times where I'll go to a new studio, and it'll be like, "Oh, is it your first class?" And I'm like, "No, I actually go four days a week for a year now." You know what I mean? This is not new.

And I think that the same way that we see these kind of cases pop up or we see Serena Williams' body being kind of drawn in like a cartoon, or her catsuit being banned, or her curves being analyzed. I think that that is magnifying what happens daily that both Shireen and Lindsay so eloquently attested to on a very kind of personal anecdotes.

But thinking about this happening from Alaska to Florida, from Maine to Arizona, kids…specifically young girls on a daily basis. And when we think about girls exiting sports at enormous levels around puberty, I really think about this then. And when we talk about how do we keep girls in the game? Well, I think right around puberty when bodies are changing is also the time where these messages are colliding about what your body's supposed to do or not. And there's a way in which sports become... Because it's so physical, because it's so much about your body, it's not a space that you really want to occupy when you feel like you’re under a microscope, and really just considering that and the messages subtle or not so subtle that we share about bodies and it's just, it's really awful.

Lindsay: Yeah. It's one thing for me that I always... Being up close and personal these past few years with WNBA players, some of them are bigger and taller, and their bodies are gawked at in this way. I did a profile of Liz Cambage last year, and in it we went out to eat dinner, so I was just walking around DC with Liz Cambage. I mean, she's 6’8” and she was wearing a halter top and these jeans. I mean, she's one of the most beautiful people I've seen in person in my life.

But it was just to me, what was remarkable, I feel weird in any space. I struggle so much with confidence just walking around the street, and when people look at me like that it makes me very uncomfortable. But for her, she knew that every single person was looking at her and she never apologized for this space she was taking up. She owned it and she looked comfortable the entire time. And I was in awe of it.

I've wanted to for a while have an open body image conversation with some of the bigs in the WNBA, because it's so... Stefanie Dolson, who does some plus size modeling, is very fashionable, and once again unapologetic about this space that she takes up and actually uses that space that she takes up to help her in her career.

And it's just fascinating to me as someone who's always wanted to make themselves smaller, how these women are able to embrace their size and use their size. It is just so empowering to me, it is. And I know they must struggle with insecurities at some times too, because who doesn't? But it really has impacted me.

Shireen: Two things there, the idea of plus size, and I know that in the United States and North America, plus size is like a size 10 or 12, which I think is so out of whack. And secondly, Liz Cambage, I think she's a goddess. And I go to her Instagram and just fawn because also I love that flex Linds, of, "I was walking around with Liz Cambage!” because I mean, that's phenomenal. I actually agree with you and think she's one of the most beautiful people on the face of the earth. So, if we can pick up that and the way she owns herself and her body. I just love it and that's what I want my daughter to see.

Lindsay: And then you think sports has that power, right? Sports can empower people in this way, but in these other sports, right, people try and suck that power out of it because they try and over sexualize or body-shame in swimming and in tennis and in these more coded feminine and white sports. And that's just devastating because there is... I've seen sports work for people in helping them embrace their bodies, and so it makes me so sad that in other sports people are shamed for their bodies.

Amira: Right. And I think that that's part of it because as you were saying that I was thinking of all the tall girls who don't play basketball, and their entire life were told, "Oh, you must be a basketball player." And I think it comes down to the fact that sports really magnifies a lot of these issues. But we know that misogyny's a thing that carries this kind of scrutiny constantly on women's bodies because they've been made into objects. And we've had before conversation and we certainly can have a conversation about how that works for kind of masculine presenting bodies as well.

But I just thank you guys for having this discussion because I think that it's something that we see a lot and don't necessarily name because, as Lindsay said, it's hard to talk about it. It feels very raw. And I think the body issue is that celebration, but I also recognize that it's a journey. And so wherever you are on your journey with you in your body, I wish you well and I wish you peace.

Jessica: That’s it for this week’s episode, thank you for joining us. There’s so much more content than what we provided today. This is the 138th consecutive week that we’ve published and episode, so there’s plenty more where this all came from. We encourage you to look back at our catalogue and see what from Burn It All Down you’ve missed. You can find Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you want to subscribe to Burn It All Down you can do so on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, Stitcher, Google Play and TuneIn. For more information about the show, links and transcripts for each episode, or to email us, check out our website: burnitalldownpod.com. If you’d like to purchase Burn It All Down merchandise we have some for you at Teespring. Treat yourself to a BIAD mug, pillow, hoodie, buy gear for your whole family including babies and kids. Between now and the end of the year use the code HOLIDAYS and get 10% off.

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That’s it for Burn It All Down. From Amira Rose Davis, Shireen Ahmed, Brenda Elsey, and Lindsay Gibbs, I’m Jessica Luther. Next week we’ll be back with our favorite interviews from this year. Until then, it’s been an amazing 2019. Keep on burning on, not out.