Episode 167: Labour Rights in Sports and Dr. Janice Forsyth on Indigenous Sports
This week, Brenda, Amira, Jessica, and Lindsay recap the professional sports bubbles as teams return for the summer [2:19]. Then, it's time to discuss the realities of the return to sports and enclosed bubbles [6:07]. After that, Shireen interviews Dr. Janice Forsyth about Indigenous Sports and her book "Reclaiming Tom Longboat: Indigenous Self-Determination in Canadian Sport" [34:16].
Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile [54:40], the Bad Ass Woman of the Week segment, starring Kara Lawson [1:04:09], and what is good in our worlds [1:07:07].
Links
Penn State basketball coach, Delco native Pat Chambers referenced a ‘noose’ around a Black player’s neck: https://www.inquirer.com/college-sports/penn-state/penn-state-basketball-noose-rasir-bolton-pat-chambers-20200706.html
Olympian still to receive response from British Gymnastics over complaint: https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/olympian-still-receive-response-british-104613498.html
There is a culture of fear permeating through the whole of gymnastics and it has to stop: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gymnastics/2020/07/08/culture-fear-permeating-whole-gymnastics-has-stop/
WNBA Announces A 2020 Season Dedicated To Social Justice: https://www.wnba.com/news/wnba-announces-a-2020-season-dedicated-to-social-justice/
Atlanta Hawks & College Park Skyhawks Announce Hiring Tori Miller: https://cpskyhawks.gleague.nba.com/news/atlanta-hawks-college-park-skyhawks-announce-basketball-operations-hires-and-promotions/
Sparks' Chiney Ogwumike Named Co-Host of National ESPN Radio Show: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2899232
The top-flight football club paying men and women the same: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jul/06/equal-budgets-lesotho-powerful-message-world-football
Transcript
Lindsay: Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s episode of Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast that, you know, we hope you both want and need these days. As the pandemic rolls on, we are here for you. We’re here for each other, taking things day by day. My name is Lindsay Gibbs, I am the founder of the Power Plays newsletter about sexism in sports, and joining me today are three of my fabulous co-hosts: Dr. Brenda Elsey, the associate professor of history at Hofstra University; Dr. Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of history and African American studies at Penn State University; and soon-to-be-Dr. Jessica Luther, the freelance sports reporter and author in Austin, Texas, and her book Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back – is that the full title, Jess?
Jessica: You got it.
Lindsay: Okay. [laughs] That book is out this fall, so we’re gonna be talking a lot more about that coming up. Always wanna thank our patrons for making this show possible – patreon.com/burnitalldown is where you can go, and for as little as…Often less than a cup of coffee these days, you support our show and help make this independent ad-free podcast possible. Today we’re going to be diving into a big conversation about labor rights in sports as we attempt to restart sports in the middle of a pandemic. We’re gonna be looking at the college level, the pro level, and of course looking at the systemic racism that still festers within. Then we’ve got an interview from Shireen who talked with Dr. Janice Forsyth, a Cree academic and sports sociologist, on sports and Indigeneity, the history of colonialism in sport, and her book Reclaiming Tom Longboat: Indigenous Self-Determination and Canadian Sport. I cannot wait to listen to that.
First off, as I mentioned, we’re talking about sports in the pandemic. This week we had both the NBA and the WNBA go to their, I’d say, popped bubbles in Florida. Joel Embiid departed for his plane – the Philadelphia center – in a full hazmat suit. Just like, hey! I mean, I didn’t know they made hazmat suits for a seven foot however tall he is. It’s amazing. I was with him, that’s how I’d want to be traveling on a plane or anywhere these days, but it got me thinking a lot about packing for these kind of lockdown experiences. They’re not really supposed to go off-site, they’re supposed to stay in their hotel. I talked with Reshanda Grey who’s a WNBA player with the Los Angeles Sparks and she said that she brought her bedazzler to the bubble, the IMG Academy in Bradenton, and it got me thinking: what is the one thing that you would bring if you were a WNBA player headed to IMG? Besides the basics – your clothes, your make up and accessories – what would you have to have? Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, well first I just wanna give Embiid obviously major props for planning ahead, however he got that suit.
Lindsay: Yes. [laughs]
Jessica: But also, my answer is super easy: I would take my Kindle. That’s how I fall asleep every night, reading romance novels on my Kindle. It is one of my most prized possessions in the entire world and I don’t know what I would do without it. Everyone in my family understands that I need to know where it is at all times. So, definitely that.
Lindsay: That’s awesome. Amira?
Amira: Yeah, I dunno if you count phones as essential, but my phone. I listen to Audible on it, I can read on it, I can do Peloton classes on it, it connects me to other people which would be by far the most essential thing being in the Wubble or bubble of any sort. So I barely have it out of my hands, I’m the worst kind of millennial in that way. I’ll be on-brand and say my phone.
Lindsay: I totally get you there. I was honestly thinking, like, I wish I had something fun like a bedazzler that I could bring, but all my hobbies are on my stupid damn phone. But I did think I would be the crazy candle lady, I think, I would have to have some candles to soothe me after a long stressful day, so I would bring a big candle supply. What about you, Bren?
Brenda: I assumed I could have books and phone as essential. Non-essential things, two things: I would keep the Forza Football app so if somebody, like…If we were minimizing that somehow, and that’s ridiculous because it just lets me see football games that no one’s attending now all over the world, and it’s super fun. The other thing is, even before that I would take my watch. And I don’t need my watch, because I have a phone.
Amira: Your Apple Watch, or like a regular watch?
Brenda: I have an analog watch.
Amira: What do you do with a regular watch? [laughter]
Brenda: I love it. I look at it and I love it. It makes me feel good and it helps me not be that annoying millennial that can’t get off my phone because I pretend I’m looking at the time. [laughter]
Amira: I don’t get it.
Lindsay: It doesn’t count your steps or anything? [laughs]
Amira: It doesn’t do anything!? [laughs]
Brenda: No! It doesn’t, it just tells the time and makes me feel reassured. Somehow I have this belief that it’s like those…Remember when you get dizzy or travel sick and they have those pressure points on your wrist?
Amira: Yeah.
Brenda: I have this crazy theory that somehow that’s the permanent thing my watch does.
Lindsay: Okay, alright. [laughter] So, I think it’s safe to say we’d be pretty boring packers. No bedazzling the bunk amongst us. Alright, so we’ve been talking for a couple of months now, maybe a few months time, question mark, about the potential return of sports amidst this coronavirus pandemic. But today hypotheticals have become realities. On the collegiate side, universities are making defining decisions about when and if sports are returning this year in the middle of being used as political pawns by the Trump administration. In the pros, athletes have already entered their not at all enclosed bubbles to put their health and safety on the line for a paycheck to be able to support themselves. Today we’re gonna dive into whether there’s really any way for sports to return in a pandemic, that actually respects the labor rights of athletes. It’s something we're gonna be wrestling with. I wanna start on the collegiate level; I know there’s a lot of administrative stuff going on both within universities and the federal government level. Brenda, can you get us caught up there?
Brenda: This week there was an order issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, that will affect at least…Well, over a million international students across the United States. Essentially it says that international students on F1 visas have to leave the US if their colleges and universities are not meeting face to face. So, if they’re being conducted solely online then their F1 visas will not be valid and they’ll have to leave the country. Many of these are athletes, by the way. But the majority of F1 visa holders are from India and China. There’s a direct sort of messaging that’s going on here, and I think there’s things that link up with sports. I’m curious to listen to what other people have to say, but on the one hand it’s a blatant attempt of the Trump administration to force us back, right? It’s asking educators who care very much about our students, very much about our students, to say, well, if you do this you’re actually going to be hurting them in other ways.
There are F1 visa holders that have no actually been in their particular country of origin since they were young children and have no idea how they’re gonna be there; many of their family members are not there. So it’s a horrible thing to put students in that position, but essentially what they’re doing is putting university faculty and administration in that position. I just wanna start by saying this horrible, it’s unconscionable, and it’s also purposefully telling colleges, “This is another way that we’re gonna put the screws into you to go back, even if you think it’s unsafe for your students, even if you think it’s unsafe for yourself.”
Lindsay: Yeah. Not ideal for sure. Jess, what is…We’ve have some schools make solid decisions here. What did the Ivy League decide?
Jessica: Yeah, we’ve seen multiple conferences – big ones, like Pac-12 and Big Ten – move to just conference play for football. Football’s the guiding sport for everybody. The Ivy League was the first D1 league to put all sports on hold until at least January 2021, including football, the sacred sport. Ivy League’s not a huge D1 football…Like, the D1 part of it doesn’t come into play for football. But still, they did say in their statement, “With the information available to us today regarding the continued spread of the virus, we simply do not believe we can create and maintain an environment for intercollegiate athletic competition that meets our requirements for safety and acceptable levels of risk, consistent with the policies that each of our schools is adopting as part of its reopening plans this fall.”
Going off what Brenda just said: yes, exactly. If I was in charge – which, no one will ever put me in charge – but if I was in charge this is how all of college sports would be handled in the fall. I just wanna say, if they move football to the spring that’s a whole other discussion about the wear and tear on these young men’s bodies for whether or not they can play in spring and fall. There’s a lot going on here, but I do think at this point no sports in the fall makes a lot of sense and is really the safest option.
Lindsay: Yeah, it’s hard to agree with that. Of course I’m thinking of sports like basketball which is inside and we’ll discuss that a little more when we get to the pro side. But it’s tough to see because there’s so many student athletes who – well, I hate using that term, that's the NCAA’s term – but there’s so many athletes in college who, this is such an important part of who they are and of their identities and of their life goals. It’s hard to see all of this interrupted in this way, but also it’s just safety. Amira, I know you have thoughts.
Amira: Yeah, one of the things that’s happening is as campuses themselves are moving to phased reopening is they’re slowly bringing back fall sport athletes and obviously we’ve been reporting on the “voluntary” workouts that’s been happening around the country in terms of football; those have been highly publicized because unfortunately COVID breakouts have been happening and some of those workouts have now since been shut down. But also, here, our women’s soccer and women’s volleyball teams came back. I had a Zoom meeting with some of the athletes and they’re in quarantine, right? They had restrictions on traveling, restrictions on when they can lift. What’s illogical about this is that happens through the summer and then just poof in August when all the students come back it’s like, “Nevermind, you’re good now!” Which just shows you that a lot of plans for the fall, whether it’s athletics or just general college operations, are just grasping at straws – and with good reason.
I think it’s important to understand the economic…This is a really really really really…Nobody knows how to handle this. Every school, whether they’re a private school with an endowment that they refuse to touch or a state school with funds or they’re like me in a college town where the entire economy runs off of this school, it’s easy to see why they’re grasping desperately at straws to try to remain open. So, the Big Ten moving to conference only for instance – that’s just a stepping stone. It’s one of many stepping stones that will happen before they inevitably realize that there’s no way they can do this. The hope is that they remember that before August when everybody comes pouring back in instead of waiting til October and realizing they have to shut down because they’ve had a spike. That’s essentially where I view us being. My hope is that the powers that be make these hard calls beforehand.
I think, just to end, I burned this before when I was talking about Mike Gundy, but particularly when people are looking at football and thinking about the detriment that it’s gonna have on college towns like this, because businesses run not just on the students but particularly on the football program that's coming in or other fall sports programs, that’s what happens when you build an entire system on the exploitation of predominantly Black and brown athletes, but all college athletes, to fund your institution and the economy of your town? This is what happens when you build a house of cards on that. So it’s frustrating in general and I just am kind of at a loss for words about what to do.
Lindsay: Amira, I have a question for you quickly, before we move on. How do athletes that you’re talking to feel about this? Because one of the things as I’m talking to athletes on the elite levels of women’s basketball is that they’re hoping beyond hope, some of these top athletes, that there is a way to play this fall, right? They don’t want to see anything changed. So I’m just kind of curious about how the athletes that you’ve been talking to feel.
Amira: Yeah, I mean, it’s a feeling of hell yeah we wanna play, but also it’s not safe, and just being extremely frustrated about that. I liken it to the same way that my 13 year old desperately wants to go to school and have drama club but knows that she can’t, and that’s really upsetting. When I talked to them this week, especially the athletes who are rising seniors who are looking at a mountain of uncertainty, because this was their last year and they’re transitioning, but what are they transitioning to? I think that’s one of the hardest parts, the unknown about will they have an extra year of eligibility if it gets cancelled? Does that create a bottleneck for the team? Does that mean that their professional career is on hold? Does that mean that they don’t go to the draft in January? What does it look like playing overseas, is that safe? So those are the kinds of things that they’re ruminating on, and nobody really has the answers, which makes it just kind of uncertain and frustrating. So yes, there’s deep desire to play but there’s also desire to be healthy, and I think those desires are in conflict.
Lindsay: Yeah, it’s an infuriating situation. Bren, how are faculty dealing with all of this?
Brenda: [laughs] Fearing for their lives, their jobs…
Amira: Terribly.
Brenda: No, I mean, this is really laid bare, just to speak to what Amira was saying. It’s really laid bare the ways in which we should really be taking this moment to think about restructuring education, period. You know, whether you’re at a state school that has had funding cuts cuts cuts cuts cuts, and you’re relying on a football program for your town and your school – that is unnecessary. Penn State has a wealth of amazing faculty including Amira, but in research there’s no reason that the state shouldn’t see that system as being something worth investing in versus relying upon athletics that very few students may participate in. We should really be thinking about that, because when they’re throwing students and faculty and then you’re getting pressure from the federal government and it’s to what, maintain the status quo of a system that is incredibly exploitative, that’s also economically ridiculous, and pitting faculty against an athletics program that has been done for years, needs to be completely restructured. I think it’s unfortunate that there’s all these pressures to maintain a status quo of a system that this pandemic has laid bare as being not only exploitative and racist but also counter to the very mission of the university.
Lindsay: And Jess, how is the NCAA handling all of this? You know, they love control and protocol, so I’m sure they’re all over COVID, right?
Jessica: Yeah, of course not. And this is what sucks. As Brenda and Amira just laid out really well, things have to change and just the system in general, and then we have this overarching organization that’s in theory, in theory, is supposed to help guide all of this. Basically the NCAA this week put out the most weak statement they could, something about how they are supporting all of their members and all the hard decisions they’re making – that was literally it. The thing that struck me about that is that is the same kind of statement that the NCAA puts out whenever there’s a public outcry about issues around gendered violence in collegiate athletics. It’s the same sort of “we are letting every institution handle it on their own, good luck to you all.” It just is another moment where we see how the system is really built not to do anything but make money for these schools and especially for the NCAA. They don’t care, right? It just is another moment where we see that they just don’t have it in them to care at all about what’s actually happening to these student athletes.
Lindsay: That sums up the NCAA. I want to talk a little bit…I’ve been really enmeshed this past week and before that, really, about what’s going on in the National Women’s Soccer League and in the WNBA. I think it’s a little bit different than what’s going on on the collegiate level because there are livelihoods at stake and it’s…I dunno. I have a lot of really complicated feelings, so I wanted to give a brief overview and then kind of ask my co-hosts if they can help me figure out how I feel. So, first of all, I wanted to say the NWSL is about two and a half weeks into its Challenge Cup in Utah. We’ve talked about how the Orlando Pride didn’t go to the tournament; they had positive COVID tests beforehand and realized that there was no way they could quarantine in time to not bring the coronavirus into the Utah campus where this is being held. So they just didn’t come, that was a team out of the way.
But we’re two and a half weeks in and, as everyone I talked to on the NWSL level told me: do not jinx us when you tell this story. There hasn’t been a positive COVID test yet, they have extreme protocols in place for the players, like, basically in the dorms, the teams completely stick together, there’s no intermingling between teams at all, to the point where their schedules are coordinated so that they won’t pass each other in the halls on the way to the practice field, in the cafeteria. It’s all really really structured. The testing protocols, they found a lab in Utah that they’re made sure going above and beyond to ensure – of course that’s what they say, you know there’s a possibility that this is wrong, but – that it’s not impacting the tests of the rest of the population in Utah. Utah’s doing okay on testing and they’re caught up as far as reports have said in terms of testing.
So it seems like the NWSL has done a lot of things right. It’s just an extreme restriction on, you know, the rights of the athletes. It helps that it’s a small group, it helps that it’s only a month-long tournament, right? So you’re not having to isolate in this way for three months or something like that. So there are a few things working in its favor. Most of all I think the fact that they’re in Utah, they’re not in Florida. So the WNBA and NBA and of course Major League Soccer are all playing in Florida; this week we saw WNBA players move into their campus on IMG and what got a lot of attention was, first of all, some players would share photos of a mouse trap in the laundry room, there was one laundry room that was really decrepit, there was bugs, but…I don’t know. For me it’s like, there’s bugs in Florida. That’s just the reality.
But I certainly understand that there was problems with some of the housing; the WNBA worked really hard, and IMG, to immediately take care of the problems and as far as I know those are all taken care of. To me what’s more concerning is when you look at how the WNBA is doing things, there’s not even really the semblance of a bubble. Already the players were only quarantined completely for a few days, they’re supposed to keep their six feet of distance but you see players talking to all these players on the other teams already, there are other people on the IMG campus right now that are walking around without masks, like, there are other events going on. I reached out to the WNBA trying to figure out how they’re keeping everyone separate and safe, but the WNBA has not been transparent about its protocols; the NWSL has been extremely transparent about its protocols. The WNBA hasn’t at all.
The teams are gonna start scrimmaging against each other as quickly as next week. It’s just to me, like, everything I hear, every single thing I heard about the NWSL’s protocols made me feel better and every single thing I heard about the WNBA’s protocols made me feel worse. The MLS tournament being held is more similar to what the WNBA is doing; they’re at Disney World and they’ve had positive test. They just had a game cancelled this morning because of positive tests. It seems that COVID is actually being spread within the bubble now because, of course, when we say “bubble” it’s not really a bubble, you know? It looks like the gestation time of the illness, the players who are diagnosed, it seems like the way that they contracted it was outside, before they got to Orlando. So I’m just so anxious and so worried.
At the same time, I talked to these WNBA players, I was on a press call with Nneka Ogwumike last night and she’s the president of the players association, she was so so proud of what the league is doing. These players are not dumb, so I feel like there must be something I’m missing on the protocol side that is making them feel safer about this. They’re so proud that they are getting paid their full salaries even though it is a shortened season, that they fought for that. A lot of them, they don't know where their next paycheck is coming from if not from this summer, because who knows what overseas is gonna look like, right? And that’s where these players usually make the bulk of their money. So I have this conflict of really wanting to support these players and how hard they’ve worked and how hard the players association has worked to get to this point, and yet I don’t really trust that they’re all gonna be safe.
I think something that sums up the difference between the risks the men are taking versus the risks the women are taking is actually on the PGA and LPGA side of things. So, if you don't have a guaranteed salary in those organizations – you have to play in order to win. So the PGA has it that if the player enters a tournament and gets tested and is diagnosed with COVID they still get $75,000, so they don’t get nothing. LPGA players who start back will get $5,000 if they’re diagnosed with COVID on site, like, in the tournament, and $2,500 if they test positive at home. Honestly, even though it’s such little money, most of the LPGA players really need that money. Desperately.
So this is all to say I am so conflicted. I keep wondering, is there any way to do this ethically even on the professional level with regard to player safety, and also from a resource allocation perspective – all the reporting in Florida says that the MLS and NBA, and I’m trying to figure out about the WNBA, are taking tests away from the general population, which I think is probably the most bothersome thing about any of this. Jess, how do you feel?
Jessica: Yeah, I don’t support sports coming back. I understand everything you just said about the money in it and athletes wanting to play. I think it’s a really bad look, it really puts forward an idea that we are doing okay when we are not doing okay. It’s while a lot of this is happening in Florida…I think one thing that’s interesting is that when we look at the MLB it’s the one professional league that has a team up in Canada – the NHL hasn’t come back, right? – so they’ve had the Blue Jays hanging out in Toronto, and it came out this week that because Canada has a federal quarantine act that if any of them break the bubble they could face a huge fine, like, $750,000. Also, they could go to jail.
Lindsay: Oh my god!
Jessica: So the idea that Canada as a country sees this that severely, like, the issue is that much of a crisis, compared to what’s happening in Florida and even Utah…I dunno. I don’t know how you look at this and say this is ethically okay. I certainly don't feel like it is.
Amira: Just to be clear, I do not support the carceral state being used to enforce any of this. [laughs] Which is awful…
Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. That’s such a horrible idea.
Amira: It’s like…It’s so…
Jessica: Don’t put people in jail right now too, because COVID.
Amira: Right! Oh my goodness. Yeah, no, I just think that is not a surprise that people want to play because, like, I wanna go to work. People wanna not be living under quarantine and under COVID. I think that that is not surprising to me. But I think the danger that Jess laid out is that not only does this give a false sense – especially how it’s covered – of things going back to normal, but it looks fun. To me that literally looks like summer camp. Nneka bought Chipotle for everybody and my daughter on IG had just sung this whole song about how much she wanted Chipotle so I had sent it to Nneka and Samari literally said, “See? They have Chipotle! Take me to the Wubble.” It’s like, that’s not actually where you wanna be though. Like, it’s not. I think that that’s a real danger, and we talked about this before, is using sports to lead on this kind of unity – “we’re all back, we’re all together.” Walt Disney World is opening, Florida cases are surging. It’s just not the time, and it’s frustrating, because I so want it to be as well. But it’s just, no. It’s not. No. No.
Lindsay: Of course, over all of this, part of this conversation that we’ve touched on a few times is the racism that permeates this system, and we’ve seen a couple of examples this past week of exactly how little the people in charge do care about their Black athletes. For me that makes it especially hard to believe that there’s any good faith measure in these protocols. Amira, I know you’re close to one of these stories.
Amira: Yeah, I mean, I think that it’s a tale as old as time in terms of the disproportionate managerial or leadership who has the power. I talked about this when we talked about Gundy, and we talked about athletes speaking up. Of course this week there was a story on The Undefeated by Jessie Washington about Rasir Bolton who transferred from Penn State and who's coming forward now to talk about why, and one of the things he was talking about was a comment that was made to him in the days after Pat Chambers, head basketball coach here, had pushed another Black student athlete; he made a comment saying he wanted to “loosen the noose” around Rasir’s neck. What followed was almost worse for him and his family in terms of not taking the comment seriously, in terms of forwarding him to a sports psychologist here who said he was going to help learn how to “deal” with Chambers’ personality. His parents got involved and came here; Chambers said, “Oh, they're so articulate,” just layers and layers of bullshit.
He ultimately transferred, but this story came out now because he saw that Chambers was slated to speak on Zoom for a conference of basketball coaches about how to have tougher conversations in this moment, and that was the final straw because he should not be on the panel as an expert. Your proximity to Black athletes does not actually make you an expert on Blackness or navigating this moment and talking about white supremacy – it’s actually the opposite, quite frankly. I think one of the things I wanna highlight about that is everything in this case reveals to you the system that we're operating with. First of all, it’s hard to transfer. One of the reasons this story had to come out is because, again, if you’re an athlete and you're transferring, you need to have all of these exemptions that you apply for if you don’t want to sit out for a year. Which is to say that he had to on record say that this is what I experienced and get Penn State to sign off on it before, if you wanted to play and not miss a year. If Chambers wanted to leave tomorrow to the next school there’s no penalty. There’s no delay. So you see how it’s stacked already against college athletes.
What’s more is the idea that the university was like, great, the problem here is getting this young man to adjust to this coaching style instead of sitting their coach down and saying you absolutely cannot use that language and this is inappropriate. Then his bullshit answer even this week was, “I’m from the north, I didn’t know the context of that statement.” Which, hello! We’re in Pennsylvania, but lemme tell you how many times I see the stars and bars here! You understand that Confederate insignia and conversations about noosing…Do we have to talk about all the people who were lynched in Pennsylvania? Because we can do that. In fact, we had an event here just last year about Pennsylvania lynching victims, so, no, don’t buy it. These are the systems that are still warring, in the middle of COVID, in the middle of a rising awareness of white supremacy and Black Lives Matter, in this these systems are still warring and churning, and they’re systems that habitually disadvantage and marginalize athletes, particularly Black and brown athletes, as we continue to see. This was just another reminder of that same person on the panel telling you how to navigate this moment is, you know, probably has skeletons, ghosts, ghouls in their closet as well.
Lindsay: And Jess, we’ve seen some of this at the pro level too. What’s happened with the Atlanta Dream?
Jessica: Yeah, what a week, right? So on Monday this past week the WNBA announced that the summer season’s gonna be dedicated to social justice; it will honor the Black Lives Matter movement and specifically Say Her Name which focuses on Black women who have been harmed or killed by police violence and police brutality. The very next day on Tuesday Kelly Loeffler, the co-owner of the Dream, a Republican senator from Georgia and an inside trader who should be investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee, she wrote an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution where she wrote, “The truth is, we need less—not more politics in sports. In a time when polarizing politics is as divisive as ever, sports has the power to be a unifying antidote. I adamantly oppose” – then she goes to be divisive, I love it – “the Black Lives Matter political movement, which has advocated for the defunding of police, called for the removal of Jesus from churches” – huh? – “and the disruption of the nuclear family structure, harbored anti-Semitic views, and promoted violence and destruction across the country.”
So, we’ve already discussed multiple times, the false notion of unity in sports, we did it a couple of episodes ago when we talked about what athlete activism will look like when sports returns. Loeffler clearly doesn’t even know what Black Lives Matter is. A lot of the players and the WNBPA immediately called for Loeffler to sell the team, get out of the league, go away. She the doubled down on Wednesday on Fox News, and so did a bunch of players, right? Everyone has decided what side they are on here, and I feel okay speaking for all of Burn It All Down when I say that we agree that she’s gotta go. She’s been on our burn pile multiple times, I believe. She just needs to go. What I don’t know – and this is a frustration with all of this – is how this works. I’m not sure anyone really knows at this point. People keep pointing to what happened with Sterling and the NBA as an example. How can the exit happen? What are the mechanisms to get rid of her as an owner? Who exactly can make that happen? It’s bad. She’s bad for the WNBA, for all of us, really. She just functions as another example of the power dynamics in the ownership model in professional sports, and even as Amira talked about with collegiate sports, right? The way these systems are set up. It’s so difficult to hold those at the top accountable for their actions and actually work against them when they deserve to be held accountable for these things.
Lindsay: And now, Shireen’s interview with Dr. Janice Forsyth.
Shireen: Hello flamethrowers, Shireen here. I am so excited to have our next guest on the show today: Dr. Janice Forsyth. Dr. Janice Forsyth is a Canadian associate professor of sociology and the director of the Indigenous studies program at Western University in London, Ontario. She is also the author of the recently published Reclaiming Tom Longboat: Indigenous Self-Determination and Canadian Sport. In addition to these wonderful things, brilliant researcher, she’s also a connoisseur of hard tacos. Hello, Dr. Forsyth.
Janice: Hi, Shireen.
Shireen: How are you and how have you b…Is that even a question we ask normally during these pandemic times?
Janice: It’s a tough one to answer, yeah. I don’t know how to answer it anymore, I think I just say, “My sanity is intact and my health appears to be good, so everything is fine.”
Shireen: That’s a great answer, actually. Let’s talk…There’s so many things I wanna ask you, but first let’s talk about your book. Congratulations on your launch. Can you talk a little bit about the history and how you came across Tom Longboat and what historical figure represents in Canadian media?
Janice: Sure. I think I need to preface it by saying the book really isn’t about Tom Longboat, although Tom Longboat’s story is tangential to the history of the Tom Longboat Awards, which is what the book is about. But you can’t talk about the Tom Longboat Awards…But I’ve always been fascinated with Tom Longboat’s story, I think as many Canadians have also been. He’s someone who achieved worldwide fame, who was really a superstar back in the early 1900s. For people who don’t know, he was a runner, a distance runner; Onandaga from the Six Nations in Ontario, in southern Ontario, and competed between 1906 and about 1912, and won nearly every major race that you could win at the time. He had ticker tape parades, media would follow him, they would write about everything about his life, and so it’s kind of like the early version of the paparazzi. I was really interested in how an Indigenous athlete navigated that complicate terrain, myself being an Indigenous athlete. My membership and my family is from Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba, about two hours north of Winnipeg, and also Peguis. So growing up, in my own experience being an Indigenous athlete in sport, I of course became very interested in what Tom Longboat’s experiences might’ve been like.
Shireen: That’s amazing. I think, for me, I only learned about Tom Longboat as an athlete, an Indigenous athlete, the first time I met you. I went back and started to Google a whole bunch of things because I had met you at that conference in Austin, Texas. I was so wowed because there’s so much we don’t know, particularly like you said he navigated this country. Canada specifically has a very brutal colonial history, and his timing and being in relation to all this stuff about Indigenous communities and First Nations that we were not taught – including residential schools and, you know, decimation of communities and forced relocation, etc, etc. So all these things played in, and what that legacy is. Do you see a rise in Indigenous young athletes coming up and learning their histories and sharing those?
Janice: Oh, absolutely. I think that is fundamentally gonna change the landscape of sport, and hopefully we can talk a little bit about that but it really is good to see young people learning about not only the history of colonialism in Canada but also how their family and their communities and even themselves responded to those systemic pressures to assimilate and to get rid of their cultures, and even histories of genocide. So there’s this real brutal history, as you say, of colonialism that people have to understand and navigate, and this is a really difficult and emotional journey for Indigenous people to do, and especially the youth. But at the same time I think that needs to be balanced out and understood alongside all the ways that Indigenous people have navigated that terrain and made really difficult decisions and very trying circumstances, because that for me shows the determination and the will to live.
Shireen: So as a Cree woman, as an academic, as an athlete, my question is: when people say in that rhetoric that I despise so much of “stick to sports,” how can Indigenous athletes respond to this? The whole idea and existence has, like you said, been one of survival. We’ve seen stories of incredible Indigenous women runners running or athletes who have painted hands across their mouths to represent Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls across Turtle Island. So this idea of “stick to sports” – how would you respond to that?
Janice: Yeah, you know, it’s taken me a long time to get the vocabulary and the words to express how complicated sport is. For me there aren’t enough public discussions about how complicated it is. I think people, even in Indigenous communities, tend to think about the positives of sport, which makes it really difficult to talk about how complex of a space sport is. When something negative comes up, for instance right now, we see a lot of discussions about individual experiences with racism and sometimes systemic issues with racism in sport. People think of it as a one off, right, or that it’s limited to a certain sport, and it’s really difficult for people to make broader connections to, for instance, in the Indigenous context, how sport is connected to Indigenous assimilation in Canada. It’s because they don’t know the history of how sport is part of the broader colonial mandate, policy imperative, to move Indigenous people from the land, to change their cultural practices and to make them good workers and good citizens for the growing capitalist state.
Sport is very much a part of that. For me I think it’s really important that we talk more about this complicated side of sport just like we’re doing right now so that people have the language to express what they’re feeling and to be able to explain their thoughts better. There’s this quote by an academic; she wrote her PhD many years ago when I was doing my PhD – I’m just showing how bad my memory is – I read this PhD and the author is Bomberry, and I believe she’s from Six Nations. She wasn’t writing about sports, she was writing about self-determination in Six Nations. One of the examples she was using about self-determination and how challenging it is for people to talk about self-determination and express what it means to them; she used a sporting example and she talked about how her body expressed what her mind could not. Basically she took out her frustrations on the sporting field, and so everything that she was feeling was influencing the way she did sport.
That for me really resonated with me at the time because I didn’t know how to express what I was feeling either, I didn’t know how to talk about it because there aren’t a lot of public discussions about this, whereas if you move over to the education sector for instance, or maybe even the health sector where there’s these ongoing long conversations in media and in the public and in academia about how complex education is. You would never hear people saying, oh, well you just have to get your kids to school, the Indigenous kids, just put them in school and everything will be fine because school is really good. I think we’ve deconstructed that narrative enough to know that people would never say that – education is a form of socialization into a way of thinking, right?
Shireen: Right.
Janice: Right, and so we have to create new ways of understanding our history, new ways of understanding everything, in order to make our lives more equitable through education, and the same is with sport. Then what I find oftentimes when they are talking it gets taken up by media in a very simplistic way so that it reinforces the dominant narrative, and then nothing gets changed because the speaker has a hard time explaining it and the listener has a hard time understanding what the speaker is trying to say.
Shireen: Yeah, I think there’s a cyclical problem here, particularly of when there is a lack of Indigenous storytelling within sports media. The mainstream industry, and I harp about this all the time, is honestly almost 90% white cishet able-bodied men and the lens with which they tell those stories is very very narrow. I think there’s a really important and interwoven way that sports can be part of storytelling…We had Tracie Léost on the show a couple of years ago when the Indigenous Games were actually in Toronto and she had spoken about her journey as a Métis woman, a very young woman, running so long just because that’s the way that she felt she could best express her feelings and sort of coming to terms with the history and the present crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and lack of attention to it. So very much sport can be a way…
It’s also really interesting to hear you because on the one hand it is part of socialization, part of the practice of colonization, but then you hear stories of Indigenous sports folks, whether it be hockey teams or lacrosse teams or just really important pieces of Indigenous folks…My next question I’ll sort of piggyback off of that, is: do you think that having Indigenous athletes interconnected into mainstream sports is important, or to have their own space like the North American Indigenous Games – which were to be held in Halifax on Mi’kmaq land but are postponed until next year. Do you think both are important or do you think having your own space is more of a priority?
Janice: I’m a proponent of both. I think it’s really important for Indigenous people to have access to spaces that are Indigenous led, because those spaces are in many ways safe because Indigenous led sporting spaces are led by people who generally understand what makes Indigenous sport unique and different from the mainstream. It’s usually not been strictly performance, right? There are many other values that are expressed through Indigenous sport. Usually it’s about youth development or community development or family or community. There’s something much bigger than the self that is attached to Indigenous sport…And also about cultural identity. Whereas in mainstream sport it’s mostly about performance, performance-oriented goals and also national identity.
I think it’s important to have Indigenous people on those stages, both stages including the mainstream stage, what I call the dominant sports system or the mainstream system. You know, as long as they can express their feelings about being Indigenous in that system and given latitude to celebrate their own cultural identities in a way that is important to them. So I see value in both, and I think it’s really important to have both there so that people can choose where they wanna go, because right now in Indigenous sport systems, we don’t have high-profile platforms like generally the major international games that you see in the mainstream system. There are no Pan-American Games or international federations or Olympic Games, right, for Indigenous people in Canada. The highest level in the Indigenous sports system is the North American Indigenous Games. It’s a really wonderful space because you can see Olympians and athletes who are competing in international mainstream sport competing alongside kids who maybe are trying out sport for the first time and it’s a truly unique space.
Shireen: Amazing. On that note, the North American Indigenous Games have been postponed. Do you think that was the right call in light of this global pandemic?
Janice: Oh absolutely, yeah. I mean, you have to keep people safe, I think, especially when it comes to Indigenous communities. One of the things that we’re learning right now is that Indigenous communities are struggling differently than many people because of overcrowded conditions in communities and maybe not being able to access the same sort of health resources that are available in urban centers. It would’ve been a really bad idea, I think to host the NAIG. I don’t even know if they could’ve anyway – there’s all sorts of administrative reasons why they could’ve hosted the NAIG, insurance being one of them.
Shireen: Right.
Janice: What I do worry about though, and there’s not a lot of talk about it, is without the NAIG this really gives communities something to look for, it gives youth something to look for. It’s a real event in a community and in the youth’s perspective, whereas it’s important of course in mainstream society, like, for our kids to go to the Canada Games, but I’m not sure it defines them and I’m not sure it’s a life-changing game-changer like we talk about with the North American Indigenous Games as being like a suicide preventer. We don’t hear that same sort of discussion happening about the Canada Games – if the kids don’t go to the Canada Games it’s not like the suicide rates go up. So there is a concern about what sort of impact this will have on our kids in the community and postponing the Games was a good idea, but I do get concerned about what will happen to these kids through the winter when we know that the suicide rates go up.
Shireen: If there’s something that our listeners can do to help support Indigenous athletes, what would it be? Is it just to start learning, is it to start donating, to understand the stories? Where would we start?
Janice: Listening to people’s stories from reliable sources is a really good thing. Thinking about it from their own perspective is a really good thing. Acknowledging that there is such a thing as colonialism, as systemic oppression, as racism, as discrimination, and then thinking about how that privileges where we sit. That includes myself, right? How does my own position, how is it privileged, and how does my privilege influence other people who don’t have the same access to resources. Then, just speaking out about it. It doesn’t have to be running out into the street and carrying banners, it doesn’t have to be going out and joining protests and it doesn’t have to be getting all excited about things. It can be something really simple, such as if you hear someone make a statement that is just inaccurate you can just correct them. Right now you can say but no, actually, there is a history of oppression, and it’s widespread and it’s through the Indian Act,” so it’s historic, and Indigenous people are working really hard to try to make life better for themselves, and the government and corporations need to sit up and listen so maybe we can support that.
Shireen: Yeah, definitely. We’re seeing a lot of this conversation about Native mascotry right now and revisiting the idea of the Edmonton CFL team renaming themselves whereas previously they didn’t care, they didn’t wanna hear the cries and resistance from Indigenous and First Nations communities that were saying don’t use our cultural symbols as your mascots. We see that happening now but I’m trying not to be too cynical, but of course sports has never led me to be extremely positive – or rather, federations or organizations and teams and front offices, they’re not the source of my joy in sport, for sure. But do you see…Is there a frustration, perhaps? Like, you see the conversations happening now only when the corporations kick in and the sponsors of the teams are saying we don’t want this, and now suddenly they seem to be paying attention? Whether it's the Washington NFL team with the racial slur as a team name? Do you feel that way as somebody who has an expertise in this?
Janice: Yeah, I think one of the frustrations that I have right now is, if we tie it back to my book for instance, we really don’t know anything about Tom Longboat and what he thought about his experiences. We think we do, but we actually don’t. He didn’t leave any journals, he didn’t leave any diaries, he didn’t leave any letters – none that we know of – that the histories are based on. What we know about Tom Longboat is gleaned from analysis of media, so we don’t really know how Tom Longboat felt. But we can know what people who are living today think about their experiences in sport.
So I’m really glad that the entry point for these discussions is racism, but one of my frustrations right now is it seems to be stuck on what I’m calling these superficial discussions about racism and sport where it’s about you getting athletes coming forward, talking about their experiences, and a lot of it is about individual experiences with racism and there are very few in-depth discussions, insightful discussions, about how those experiences are tied to broader systemic issues.
I think the mascot issues is a good case in point because corporations are part and parcel of this problem of ongoing colonization in sport where Indigenous people don’t have the power, right, the authority, the self-determination to make these changes without there being blowback of immense proportion, both from the corporations and, I mean, you’ve got everybody engaged in the conversation and it’s like, if you can’t see how the mascot issue is such a problem, imagine trying to change government structures that are so embedded and they’ve been there for such a long time that it’s just really difficult. For me I would love for this conversation with athletes on racism in sport to include a broader discussion with researchers and administrators about what is going on systemically and how can we change it. So, how does Indigenous sport link to health, link to education, link to justice, link to youth development? And how can we do our job of making sport play a better role in supporting broader community development for Indigenous people?
Shireen: Thank you so much for being on Burn It All Down. How can our listeners find your work?
Janice: Well like most academics I really don’t have this full-fledged place where you can find me and all of the stuff that I do, but I do have a personal website, janiceforsyth.ca, and there you can find a list of publications, some of my media and some of the work that I do. I’m trying to build up that website because I think it’s really important to have an online presence nowadays, but for now that’s about it.
Shireen: Awesome, thank you so much for being on the show, Dr. Forsyth. You’re welcome anytime.
Janice: Thanks so much, Shireen.
Shireen: Take care.
Lindsay: But now we have lots of little burns to get to, although I should say shorter burns but not smaller in significance. Let’s go to the burn pile. Bren, can you get us started?
Brenda: Sure. In Romania the president of Club FCSB, Gigi Becali, has been fined around $15,000 and suspended for four months. This is not the first time that Becali has been sanctioned for his gender discrimination. Becali recently publicly stated that “women should not play football” in response to the federation making it a requirement for all top clubs to have a women’s team. It’s important to note that this comes amidst major challenges to gender equality in the region; Romanian legislature has sent a bill to the country’s president to stop accreditation of gender studies at universities, neighboring Hungary did something pretty much the same a couple of years ago; in Poland the president Duda who’s seeking a second term described LGBT rights as “more dangerous than communism.”
This is Becali’s second or third chance. He’s not a powerless person, he was a member of European parliament between 2009-2012 and member of Romanian parliament until 2013. He has remarked for example, Becali, that “women have no more value after they give birth to children.” This led to 26 women reporting him to the discriminatory council in Romania. So, he’s still in football after four months, and I wanna burn the fact that repeat offenders like this…You just can’t seem to get rid of them. It’s so easy to get rid of people who are challenging sexism, but so hard to get rid of the sexists. So I want to burn his statements, I want to burn that he had such a soft punishment. At the same time it is somewhat amazing to me that he’s punished at all given the history of this. So I do want to throw in a little celebration that he is likely not sorry nor convinced, but at least he is annoyed and shamed by people in global football working against this discrimination. Burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Amira?
Amira: The Red Sox, and their continued…Both the MLB and the Red Sox continually not dealing with a decades-long lawsuit about racism and sexual abuse. In particular, this has been ramped up given that the MLB eventually joined in saying “Black Lives Matter” as well as individual teams, and yet while they’re saying that and the Red Sox are publicly disavowing racism at Fenway and beyond, they still have yet to deal, both them and the league, with the fallout from a former club house manager, Donald ‘Fitzy’ Fitzpatrick, who pled guilty to criminal charges of sexual battery back in 2002. He used Red Sox memorabilia to lure young Black clubhouse workers into a secluded area of the spring training facility and abused them. Beyond that this is also evidence that he’s done so in other ballparks in Fenway and across the league. Out of the 21 people on the lawsuit, 15 are Black men who have come forward to talk about this abuse over the last decade.
Charles Crawford, who’s 45 now, talked about being abused as a 16 year old in 1991. He said seeing this statement “was another slap in the face for me. Now would be a good time for the Red Sox to show everyone they mean what they say.” He is joined by a number of other men, Black men, who have come forward and said that this is important to talk about and to be addressed, that has gone way to often unaddressed. One such person said it’s especially important because he wants “to encourage all Black men who are victims of child sexual abuse to overcome the shame or embarrassment they may feel so they can acknowledge what was done to them and get the counseling they likely need.” He said, “I think a lot of black men have been molested and for cultural reasons they just don't come forward to deal with it, and if you don't deal with it, you're looking at a lot of emotional problems.”
And what we have here is a league and an organization that is very easy to say that’s in the past, it’s time to move on, that’s prior ownership. Yet have done nothing to make right, particularly for these 15 Black men and 6 other men who have yet to get a settlement or any sort of even redress besides an empty-worded apology for the abuse that they experienced at the hands of an abuser. It’s disgusting, and I would like to burn it down.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Jess.
Jessica: Yeah, so we’ve talked a lot over the years here on Burn It All Down about the abuse, sexual and physical, within USA Gymnastics and NCAA gymnastics. We’ve also discussed abuse in all kinds of sports all over the world; I don’t think it’s a reach to say that in many ways abuse is at the heart of sports. One thing that we see happens when a survivor or a group of survivors comes forward it’s common for others to follow. This week in the wake of the new Netflix documentary about abuse in USA Gymnastics, Athlete A, a group of British gymnasts have begun to speak out about the abuse they’ve suffered in the sport. Catherine Lyons, a former junior and British champion, she’s now 19; she told ITV she was hit, struck with a stick, shouted at and locked in a cupboard by her coach. She also says she was starved for a week and struggled to eat normally after that.
Lisa Mason, Commonwealth Games gold medalist and Olympian for Britain in 2000, said, “My coach put me on the bars until my hands ripped and bled.” “I would also have Astroturf put under the bars, so I would burn my feet if I didn’t keep them up. But everyone else is going through it so you think it’s normal.” She also says she was locked in rooms and told not to eat. Nathalie Moutia, a retired British rhythmic gymnast who is now 40, told the Telegraph about the long term impact of the abuse she suffered. “I very recently had an official diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress relating to my experiences, so it’s a little bit heightened in me. Thirty years ago we didn’t have safeguarding. To think it’s still going on, I feel really angry about it.” She says she remembers girls being slapped in the face by coaches. Her coaches were emotionally abusive, constantly fat-shaming her, and she was forced on the pill at a young age to counteract puberty. She reported the abuse five years ago to British Gymnastics, and she has yet to hear from them.
Former British Olympic gymnast and current UCLA gymnastics assistant coach Jennifer Pinches wrote a piece for the Telegraph this week in which she said, “In the past week, I have read a lot of people saying that they reported a coach who is still coaching now. I know for a fact there are current coaches and gymnasts who were afraid to post our message of support, because they do not want to impact their career. Obviously there is still a culture of fear.” Finally, Mark Staniforth at PA Media reported that a gymnast who represented Team GB at the 2016 Olympics but has since retired, “submitted a wide-ranging complaint towards the end of last year.” The complaint, Staniforth writes, includes reports of bullying and threatening behavior by coaches.
It’s been more than eight months now since the complaint was officially filed and British Gymnastics has yet to respond. British Gymnastics, for their part, has said they will be opening an investigation into all of this, but if USA Gymnastics has taught us anything over the last few years it’s to expect avoidance, slowness, and perhaps even purposeful obstruction. All of this really drove home for me again how destructive sports can be wherever they exist. At the same time, it’s always powerful to see people who have long felt silenced by the power structures in place to finally feel like they can speak up. I truly hope there are changes soon because there are young children who are in this system right now, but for now let’s burn all this abuse and British Gymnastics’ disinterest in it up until this point. Burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Whew. After our conversation, I just have to burn what’s happening in the United States. I wanna burn our leadership, I wanna burn our failed handling of the pandemic, because it did not have to be this way. Sports returning did not have to be so anxiety-inducing. These colleges should not be having to make these decisions, pro athletes shouldn’t have to be making these decisions. There was a way for everyone to sacrifice for a little bit of the time, for the government to take care of everyone with financial support and resources during that time, and the for everyone to start moving back towards a more mobile life, slowly. Our government has failed us on the local level, on the state level, and especially on the federal level. The consequences are…The deaths are of course the most important thing, but up and down there’s just devastating story after devastating story about ways their mishandling has impacted all of us and changed lives forever for the worse. So, just wanna throw our leadership onto the burn pile. Burn.
Alright, after all that burning it is time to lift up some badass women of the week. First wanna give a shoutout to the WNBA social justice council – this was announced this week, Jessica mentioned it a bit earlier, but the games will honor the the Black Lives Matter movement and specifically the #SayHerName campaign. Social Justice Council, which will “be a driving force of necessary and continuing conversations about race, voting rights, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and gun control amongst other important societal issues” inside the bubble and outside the bubble. So, the players attached to the council are Layshia Clarendon, Sydney Colson, Breanna Stewart, Tierra Ruffin-Pratt, A’ja Wilson and Satou Sabally. So, good job, everyone.
The Atlanta Hawks, an NBA G League affiliate, the College Park Skyhawks, announced Tori Miller as their new General Manager, making her the first woman to hold the title of General Manager in the history of the NBA G League.
Cheers to the LA Sparks’ Chiney Ogwumike who will co-host a new daily national radio show for ESPN alongside Mike Golic Jr. She opted out of playing this WNBA season, clearly making sure her voice is still heard. She is the first Black woman and first WNBA player to co-host a national daily ESPN Radio show. Getting more Black voices, getting more female voices, and especially getting more Black female voices on sports radio is a huge, huge win.
Shoutout to former Chicago Sky assistant coach Bridget Pettis who left the team, citing “increasing health concerns for players and social unrest around the country.” She’s now going to focus on her nonprofit, Project Roots AZ, which aims to educate the community on growing their own food through various educational programs and also supports the homeless.
Kick4Life FC in Lesotho became the world’s first top flight club to fund men’s and women’s teams equally. That is incredible.
Can I get a drumroll please?
[drumroll]
Our badass woman of the week is Kara Lawson, Tennessee and WNBA star, who was just named the head coach of the Duke women’s basketball program. As, look, a die-hard Tar Heel fan it’s pretty hard for me to give Duke any kudos, but hiring Kara Lawson is an absolute brilliant choice that’s gonna revitalize that program – and this means that 3 out of the 4 openings for head coach in women’s college basketball this offseason were filled by Black women who used to play in the WNBA: Nikki McCray, Kara Lawson, and Niele Ivey. That is a trend that we need to continue. Kudos.
Okay, friends, what is good? Bren?
Brenda: [pained laughing] I put “I don’t know.” [laughter] But I do know a couple things, I’m sorry. I am feeling the drain of the pandemic right now, and I am luckier than most, but I will say it’s been a really rainy week in New York, off and on, and alternately incredibly hot. So lots of indoor time, which is hard with kids, but one thing is that finally my youngest has discovered LEGOs. I have kept the oldest’s LEGOs for many years, occupying a tremendous amount of space and intermittently injuring my feet when they end up on the floor, just in the hopes that she would take up her sister’s old passions, and she finally did. We’ve got all the specs laid out and lots more foot injuries to come but it’s super fun. I love it and I find it really super relaxing to look for two hours for one annoying piece, and so satisfying when I find it. So that’s been super fun and good in my world.
Lindsay: I love that. Jess?
Jessica: So, as I was prepping this this week I really felt like Shireen, so just bear with me! My family went up to Dallas, [Lindsay giggling] we rented an Airbnb for a few days, and this house had a pool, a massage chair – we are now talking about buying one – and a soaker tub, which, I love soaking in a tub and we don’t have one that I fit in here, so that was lovely. Last night Aaron and I actually watched two movies that I really liked on Hulu: one was called Plus One, Maya Erskine was the woman in it and she's fabulous, people might know her from PEN15; and then Palm Springs with Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti – I just loved this movie so much, I can’t believe how much I like Andy Samberg, it’s a real mindfuck for me. [Amira laughing]
I read an amazing romance novel this week so if that’s your thing, Queen Move by Kennedy Ryan, it is so so good, I loved every word in there. Then my dog went to get heartworm treatment on Thursday, Ralph did. They basically gave him a shot of arsenic, and Thursday was hard. We cried a lot but he seems to be doing fine now and I was really worried about how it would go, so it’s actually been really good overall so far. Then I won’t be here next week because a week from today is my 17th wedding anniversary with Aaron, so that makes me very happy.
Lindsay: Oh my gosh! That’s amazing. Congratulations?
Jessica: Thanks!
Lindsay: Amira, I saw your notes in the doc and have been dying to figure out the meaning behind all of them. What’s good for you? [laughter]
Amira: Yeah, so my what’s good all stems from…I have autoimmune issues and it’s really hard to manage in the middle of COVID because I can’t do things with the regularity that I normally would including blood draws or supplements at the hospital, things like that. So my what’s good is all the kinds of wellness things that I’ve been doing at home. One, I discovered acupressure mats which are amazing. You can get them many places, I got it from Time Bee Well which is an independent smaller shop. It’s a mat that has spiky lotus things that hit all your pressure points like if you were going to acupressure/acupuncture usually engage. I have mine sort of like a neck pillow as well, so you can stand on it for your feet, you can lay on your back, I opened up my hips yesterday so I did ten minutes on each side. I would say the first time I laid on it, you’re supposed to do 20-40 minutes, and it relaxed me so much that I fell asleep – and you know I don’t sleep, so that is really a testament to that.
There’s also a new Pakistani cafe that has come to town and they A) season their food, which I really appreciate, but also they make this wonderful herbal tea, Daybreak Tea, with turmeric and ginger and licorice and all the things I need in my life. That tea, I’ve been drinking like two cups a day from them, honestly. That has been intensely healing. Then of course, I know you’re sick of hearing about my Peloton, but you won’t get me to stop talking about it! Pelothon is starting tomorrow, it’s four weeks. They’ve divided the instructors up to six teams and you choose and you rep your team and you wear colors, it’s like, you know me, it’s perfect. Inject it all into my veins. It’s all supporting $1 million donations from the company into nonprofit partners, particularly dealing with hunger around the world. So, in New York, in the UK, in Berlin where they also work, and then Daily Bread food bank as well.
This comes on the heels of another $100 million commitment to racial justice organizations and internal things that they’re working on too, so I’m really excited to get competitive for a good cause. I have my team colors decked out and I’m ready to rock n’ roll tomorrow. All these things have been enormously healing in multiple ways and I’m just really thankful for the ability to focus on wellness at home even during this time.
Lindsay: Amira, you make it so hard to mock Peloton, as much as I want to [laughter] but all this serious wellness stuff! All I wanna do is really keep mocking you about this! [laughter]
Brenda: I’m about to bite my tongue off. [laughter]
Lindsay: Brenda and I don’t have tongues anymore because we’re really trying.
Amira: You can still mock this whole week when you see me being like, “NO LIMIT LEGION!” or “LEGENDS OF FUN” – I’m on Team Unstoppable.
Lindsay: It’s a cult. It really feels like a cult.
Amira: It’s the best cult I’ve ever been a part of. [laughter]
Lindsay: …As opposed to all the other cults. We’re geminis, it can happen. For me – and this it tough, because I realize this goes against a lot of what we’ve decided on our segment today, but it’s women athletes. I’ve been on a lot of Zoom press conferences, you know, talking to a lot of players, and part of the reason I want them to be safe is they are such amazing people. It’s been invigorating for me to be hearing from them, to be talking with them this week, and being entertained by them. If you’re not following Myisha Hines-Allen on all social media…She is a power forward for the Washington Mystics and a TikTok superstar. Her TikToks with the entire team but especially her two roommates, Emma Meesseman and Ariel Atkins, are AMAZING. They’re so good. And the fact it’s only been a few days, like, honestly, let’s just quarantine the three of them, make them safe and have them entertain us with TikToks all summer, I would be happy. So that’s been helping me through.
Thank you all so much for listening to Burn It All Down. You can find us anywhere that you get podcasts. We’re asked a lot how people can help us; maybe you’ve already signed up for the Patreon, maybe you can’t afford to support anything else right now because we’re in the middle of a pandemic and we totally understand that. What can really help us though is telling maybe, let’s say, three people in your life about the Burn It All Down podcast – maybe some people who don’t really seem like the type that would like us. I think what we’ve found is that once people give us a chance they’re hooked, so try to think outside the box of people who you’d normally recommend Burn It All Down to. Also, go to iTunes and give us a five star review and tell people why this podcast means something to you. Our passionate fans are the most amazing, they’re why we do this every week, and we cannot thank you enough. The hope is that we can keep growing so that we can keep making this podcast. Thank you all. I’m Lindsay, and on behalf of all my co-hosts I’ll use Brenda’s line: burn on, not out.