Episode 173: Latinx Heritage Month

On this week’s show, Amira, Brenda, Shireen, and Jessica take a deep dive (with historial context!!!) into Latinx Heritage month, explain the terminology, expand on the FARE report about Black and Latinx folks in US Soccer and then the crew highlights some amazing Latinx athletes, traditions, and sports. [04:23]. Then you’ll hear a preview of this week’s interview with Sami Jo Small, which will drop on Thursday [29:0].

And, as always, the Burn Pile [29:45], the Torchbearers segment (formerly BAWOTW) staring lineup is Black athletes WBNA, Lebron james and Penn State athletes who continue to fight against anti-Blackness [39:35], and what is good in our worlds [43:55].

This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist.

Links

Fare report on representation of Women, Black and Latinx individuals in US Soccer: https://www.farenet.org/news/us-soccer-organisations-marginalise-women-black-and-latinx-individuals-from-leadership-structures-says-new-report-from-fare

Giro Rosa: Anna van der Breggen secures third title as Evita Muzic wins final stage: https://www.bbc.com/sport/cycling/54221388/

Michael Jordan, Denny Hamlin form new NASCAR team, hire Bubba Wallace as driver: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nascar/2020/09/21/michael-jordan-denny-hamlin-bubba-wallace-new-nascar-team/5861091002

Sierra Leone women's footballers welcome life-changing equal pay: https://www.bbc.com/sport/africa/54194133/

Transcript

Shireen: Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome: Flammenwerfer, lance-flammes, flamethrowers. It’s Shireen here, and welcome to Burn It All Down. I’m joined by some of the best co-hosts to grace the airwaves: Brenda, Amira, and Jessica. Lindsay’s out this week and we miss her. But on this week’s show we are gonna take a deep dive into Latinx History Month – what it means, what it is, and why it’s so important to understand the beautiful intersections–

Amira: Even in the discussions of baseball, right, this idea that “there’s no Black players in baseball,” well, no – there’s Black players all over the place! Dominicans are literally half of baseball.

Shireen: –and of course, we’ll burn what’s been terrible this week in sports and highlight the torchbearers who are lighting the way during this dark time.

Brenda: In a surprise inclusion: Michael Jordan.

Shireen: A reminder that we are now coming to you twice a week because interviews will be standalone and drop on Thursdays. Our amazing guests need more space. For this week’s interview, I will be chatting with Canadian goaltender extraordinaire Sami Jo Small about her new book, The Role I Played, women’s hockey in Canada, and where and how we skate forward in hockey in a pandemic. To start off, I would like to ask my amazing co-hosts: gimme one thing in this pandemic that you are hearing your kids say that you do not love? Amira, I’mma start with you. 

Amira: Yeah…[laughs] Let me count the ways. Basically whatever she’s parroting from TikTok this week, which is right now, like, “Everybody makes mistakes!” – which I don’t get, I don’t find funny. Or it’s like, “it’s the _____ for me!” which is annoying because like so much of TikTok it’s just a parrot of Black culture, remixed and whatever. Then she’s walking around like, “It’s the so-and-so for me!” with her little finger pointing. And also she’s saying, “Rawr!” like, just roaring at things. It makes no sense, but she finds it very funny. So that’s teenage annoyance. With the boys it’s just like both of them, the babies are doing this where they go, “I’m gonna take that as a yes.” So, if they’re like, “Can I have a cookie?” and you’re like, “One second,” – “I’m gonna take that as a yes!” …It’s driving me off the wall.

Shireen: [laughing] Jess?

Jessica: Well, bro, the word that I cannot stand that has made it into my kid’s vocabulary is bro. Bro. I’ll say, the only good thing about ‘bro’ is there’s this fantastic Geico commercial of all things where they make fun of the word and they have things like “brofessor” and “brotato chip” and “Teddy Broosevelt.” [laughter] And that is the only good thing about that word, bro.

Shireen: I’m gonna go next. My third guy, Sallahuddin, has started calling me dawg all the time. And that’s…I get it. Fine. But I’m also a brown mom. You don’t call your mom a dog! That just does not happen. I know it’s d-a-w-g, we’ve had this conversation many times, but it's not dawg, it’s dog! I’m like, listen…And then I start yelling at him in Urdu, like, [speaking Urdu] Like, I start yelling. You can’t call me a dog, no. We’re not friends, I’m your mother. Just because I’m young and hot you get confused. I’m not your friend. Brenda?

Brenda: [laughs] “I can’t with you.” “I can't with you.” I get told this because my teenage daughter believes that my politics are somehow conservative compared to her. She tries to find these little gaps, you know, like, I mistakenly called one baseball player Puerto Rican who was actually Dominican. She’s like, “That’s racist! I can't with you.” It’s like…You came out of me. You can with me forever. [Shireen laughing] You can with me, and you will. It’s not new, it just drives me…Bleugh. Grr. I can't with it.

Shireen: Brenda, can you get us started on this extremely important conversation? 

Brenda: Sure. So, from September 15th to October 15th is Latinx Heritage Month, and a lot of times there’s questions and debates and conversations which I think are really generative about the tension between ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latinx.’ So, in the 60s this celebration or recognition, whatever, commemoration, was called ‘Hispanic Heritage Week.’ Then it was expanded to a month, in part because in mid-September you have the independence celebrations of a lot of different countries in Latin America. I guess it’s worth just talking about why ‘Latinx,’ why we’re using that term. ‘Hispanic’ then, historically, was defined as a race, linked to the language and country of Spain, and it was defined culturally as Catholic, white, and always Spanish-speaking, as in Castilian Spanish-speaking, or Castellano. The term identified people from Latin America, Mexico, and Cuba who saw themselves as descendants basically of colonizers, or new waves of immigrants from Spain.

‘Hispanic’ then has been used in opposition to Indigenous and African identities, even though it’s those very groups that were and are the majority inhabitants of Latin America. So, ‘Latinx’ is meant to be more inclusive and to imply diaspora. It isn’t a racial category, but instead one that implies descent from a geographical region. So, Latinx people may speak Mayan, Quechua, Creole, Portuguese…And they’re in different diasporic waves. So this is a pretty hotly debated topic; in fact, a minority of people that would fit in the definition use it. Like, a very small minority. Instead they usually opt for what they consider more precise terms like Haitian-American. So, Latin America is obviously not Latin, and these terms aren’t perfect, because all of it is an attempt to categorize human experience. But that’s kind of the background on why the Latin in Latinx and the shift from Hispanic.

Shireen: Amira?

Amira: Yeah, and then just to address the ‘x’ part of Latinx, which is a term that has been increasingly popular over the last few years. It’s just a way to push back on the definitive masculine that Spanish defaults to. This has been, like what Brenda was saying, again, there’s a smaller subset of speakers who use this word, and I think that it has come under fire as it’s increased its popularity, but it has been around for a long time. You can go back to the late 70s where you saw radical feminists who would cross out the ‘o’ with an ‘x’ to try to make it more expansive. I work in partnership with a department here that’s Latino/a studies, so there's been way that people have tried to manipulate and move past the definitive masculine, but one of the things that even going ‘Latino/a’ does is still reinforce the binary. So, Latinx is a term that is more encompassing, that also is a way to identify folks who are non-binary, who are trans within the community, to open up space for queer Latinx people.

Now one of the things that has come up in opposition to it is charges of linguistic imperialism, this idea that this is an academic gringo notion that has been made up to force on western ideology, and that line of argumentation completely erases queer Latinx people who use this language to discuss themselves and to find visibility of themselves. So, just to kind of exemplify that point, I just wanted to share with you the words of a young designer, Ramiro Gonzalez, who discusses why this term is so important to him.

Ramiro Gonzalez: Knowing that there’s words to describe us rather than to erase us is very powerful.

Shireen: Thank you both so much. God, I love having sports historians on this podcast. I just wanted to draw attention…You may have seen that Dr. Brenda Elsey and Dr. Jermaine Scott co-authored a Fare report, which was hugely impactful and powerful and very necessary, and friend of the show Dr. Scott is someone who we adore and respect. Dr. Elsey, to have you do this, I have a couple of questions if we may.

Brenda: You may!

Shireen: One of the things that was most powerful is the Latinx and Black representation in soccer in the United States, and I have a quote and I wanted to read it because something specifically struck me, and I meant to ask you about it. It was, “The last available figures show that Black and Latinx players comprise 58% of the players in the MLS yet there is a broad and notable absence of Black and Latinx people. There are two Black Head Coaches and one Black General Manager, but it is rare to find any significant Black presence beyond assistant coach level. And whilst there is one Latinx co-owner of a club, two General Managers, and four Head Coaches, there is a lack of individuals from within the community in other positions.” Was there followup from MLS clubs on how to do better? Like, any mea culpa at all? Because these findings are really important.

Brenda: First off, we did this report independently from Fare; that meant that we didn’t actually get any collaboration, nor ask for it, from MLS, from NWSL or US Soccer. The player data we did take from the report from TIDES Institute, because simply there was no way to try and guess how players identified. Whereas when you get to head coaches and owners you have much more information that you’re able to read quotes from them and press releases and bios and things like that. We used the press, especially the press in Latin America. Since doing the report actually, Chris Armas was fired from the Red Bulls, meaning that even the statistic that was there about the number of Latino coaches – in this case, because there are no women – went from 15% to 11% [laughs] when Chris Armas left. So that was very upsetting and disappointing for a lot of people that thought he was fantastic.

The other Latino coaches are Luchi Gonzalez of FC Dallas, Tab Ramos from the Houston Dynamo, and Freddie Juarez at Real Salt Lake. Robin Fraser, we categorized as Black, at the Colorado Rapids – he’s one of two Black head coaches, and he actually is from Jamaica, and so in a sense there's crossover. The other thing about the Black head coaches is the second one…The only other one; you might know because he’s head coach of the Montreal Impact, which is Thierry Henry, one of the best players to ever play, period. And it was very notable that that seemed to be the bar, that if you were a Black coach…Because the other Black coach of Montreal was Patrick Vieira, so I’ll just leave it there for football fans to be like, okay, if that's the standard that someone has to meet to be a Black head coach…It was pretty strikingly high.

Final part of your question: have I seen reaction? No. Now, that doesn't mean there's not going to be. This type of report was to support the efforts of SCORE, which is related also to Black Players For Change in MLS and the Black Players Association forming in NWSL. These are new organizations formed by players, former players, coaches, who are very concerned and inspired by Black Lives Matter. So hopefully in those negotiations this is helpful to them.

Shireen: Amira?

Amira: Yeah, I think that one of the interesting things that was complicated when you were assembling this report is that you run into the limits, right, or complications of how processes of radicalization work. So in the context of the United States, Latino has become this amorphous term that at once people take it as a racialized category, right? It doesn’t actually address the way that it is in operation within larger Latin America. So one of the things I wanted to note that you can speak to that illustrates this issue is what it looks like to have American-born Latinx coaches or people within the pipeline, and then how you wrestled with counting people who were completely from Argentina? And then by taking a plane ride coming over would count as Latino in the US but not necessarily have been racialized in the same way.

Brenda: Absolutely. That was one of the central motivators and most difficult questions that we had. So, generally the reporting data for US Soccer counts people who have developed their soccer careers abroad as Latino – in this case, because they’re all men – and they basically have already had all of their professional careers as players and coaching experience in Latin America, especially South America – so, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay. We wanted to get at what the US system, what the US structure looked like, and that made it very difficult to actually understand the issue of representaiton when you’re counting these people who obviously once they get to the United States may probably experience discrimination because it’s xenophobic, and I certainly didn’t want to strip anybody of their identity and deny that reality, but at the same time someone like Guillermo Schelotto, some of the coaches for LA Galaxy, who had grown up and been professional players and coaches in Argentina, are defined as white in Argentina. They didn’t experience any discrimination growing up on the basis of a different racial identity, they were not…If they were racialized, it was as white. That’s why when we try to parse out the data it’s really difficult because the category of Black and the category of Latinx are not the same categories, as we set out in the beginning, but they’re often treated like that in the data. So that meant that MLS was saying that they had a majority of quote-unquote ‘players of color’ so they get an A+ if you look at it like that. What we said is, basically you graduated from high school in the United States, we counted them as Latinx. So even though, yes, Tab Ramos is very famously Uruguayan, he came at 11. So even though, yes, his family would’ve been identified as white in Uruguay we counted him as Latino because he would’ve come up in US Soccer as a Latino.

Shireen: Jess?

Jessica: Yeah, so, in her interview in the report – I thought this was really interesting – Mónica González, friend of the show, former Mexican women’s national team player; she said, “In Mexico and other parts of the world, there’s not as much disparity as here in the United States.” I was wondering if you could speak to why is the US uniquely bad at this? Is it simply pay for play?

Brenda: So, pay for play is a real problem, but we also don’t wanna sort of romanticize the academy system that exists in other places and often exploits young players and exports 800 young Brazilians to places all over the world, leagues all over the world. But at the same time it is definitely true that pay to play has the effect of excluding so many of people coming out of Latinx communities and Black communities in the United States. How it does it is like this: basically, you have to be in a very costly academy to be part of a very competitive club team. There aren’t really very competitive school teams when it comes to soccer until you get to college of course, right? Part of it also is that the US Soccer academies have really had a hard time sustaining. So there was this idea that the Federation would provide kind of training that wasn’t part of this costly system. So the club fees that you pay, and we all do this, like, whenever your kids play soccer, righ? You’re paying, I don’t know, $500 maybe, when it begins for the season, or something like that. Then as you transfer you pay new fees.

As your child might get better or show promise you pay within the same system often many times – and Shireen probably knows about this as well from her children’s long soccer careers. So that means you’re paying thousands of dollars. Then you have travel, then you have camp, and to get seen by certain universities you have to be at very expensive camps that can cost, let’s say 4 and $5,000 a pop. In other countries the academy system means that the clubs create a structure where a young kid can go and be recruited. They can actually live and dorm in those clubs, and then the competition is not ever paid for. There’s never tournament fees or anything like that by parents. It’s a very different system. Oh, and just really quick on Mónica’s point: it also has to do, I think…People say pay to play, it’s just the structure. I think there’s more discrimination at work there in terms of where clubs have decided to put academies, and this idea of the white family and the white soccer mom as kind of leading the way in US Soccer. So I think pay to play is something we need to interrogate, but also not treat it like just a thing that happens without decisions.

Shireen: Amira.

Amira: Yeah, I think that one of the things I love so much about the Fare report and this discussion that Brenda’s having is it points to how complicated it can be to think about categorization and representation, and another thing that limits the visibility of Latinx people in sport is the continued erasure of Afro-Latinx people in multiple ways. When I say multiple ways I mean from overlooking Latinos like Carmelo Anthony, who just are perceived or racialized as Black, right? To then trying to erase the Black part of Afro-Latinx people like Clemente, which Brenda will touch on later. I mean, I wrote an article two weeks ago where I talked about Black players, led by Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates, refusing to play after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.

Somebody said to me, well, you said the Black players led this, but then you said Clemente led it. And I was like, yeah? Yeah. [laughs] What about that? You know, you can see this cropping up in many places, but even in discussions of baseball, right, this idea that there’s no Black players in baseball. It’s like, well no, there’s Black players all over the place. Dominicans are literally half of baseball. But if you’re trying to be specific and say there’s no Black Americans, that’s a different discussion. But sometimes without the nuance it allows for a flattening of discussions and erasure of people who exist. So in an effort to do that I just wanna give you a heads up that in the next few weeks you’ll see we’re gonna have a roundtable here at Burn It All Down centering Afro-Latinas in sport, just to say, hi, we’re here! We’re existing. And show the kind of broad representation that actually exists if you kind of consider it and look for it. 

Shireen: That’s excellent. Thank you all so much. We’re gonna continue with a quick roundtable lifting up some amazing Latinx people, projects, traditions. Brenda, I’m gonna start with you.

Brenda: So, Roberto Clemente, born 1934, the great right fielder from Carolina, Puerto Rico. I know he’s famous, I know I’m not lifting up anybody that nobody knows. Amira has written about him, lots of wonderful people are inspired by him. I just don’t think you can get enough of him. He started playing for the Crabbers in Puerto Rico, was recruited by the Dodgers, ended up in 1954 being picked up by the Pirates. It took a long time for him to hit his stride. It took a few years but he went on to win four national league batting titles, MVP in 1966, and 12 Golden Gloves. But it’s really at the age of 37 in the 1977 World Series – and if you haven't seen it it’s worth, if you’re a baseball nerd, going to check it out – in which his average was .414, and throughout his career he was subjected to racism in the States and often within Puerto Rico.

Roberto Clemente: I am Puerto Rican, I’m Black, and I am between the walls. So anything that I do first, it would be reflected on me because I’m Black, and second, it would be reflected on me because I am Puerto Rican.

Brenda: He was passed up for awards, Sports Illustrated covers. When he gets his 3000th hit they put Joe Namath on the cover. He’s referred to as “hot-headed,” “selfish,” and “mentally weak.” To my mind, the grace with which he used all of this and took it into becoming a vocal supporter of civil rights, putting his feet on the streets, as Amira referenced, you know, leading the team in labor, withholding labor, you know, all of that standing up to owners, is just a real model. 

Roberto Clemente: If I'm good enough to play here, I have to be good enough to be treated like rest of the players. So I don't wanna be put in a bathroom because I came here and I'm from Puerto Rico. I wanna be right there in front of everybody.

Brenda: And of course he dies tragically on New Year’s Eve, 1972, as he’s leaving Puerto Rico to go deliver earthquake aid to Nicaragua. So, an example of solidarity, transnational solidarity. A really amazingly vocal person to say I am Black, I am Puerto Rican, I am both of those things and you just must accept it. 

Shireen: Jess?

Jessica: Yeah, so, we have such a whitewashed idea of who is a cowboy. So I wanted to draw attention to the fact that there is a long history of Latinx cowboys and cowgirls stretching back to the introduction of the horse to the Americas by the colonizing Spaniards in the 15th and 16th centuries. A huge part of what we think of in cowboy culture, the rodeo, which is of course a huge deal here in Texas where I live. The rodeo is in fact related to an older Mexican tradition, charrería. Since the 1920s the charrería and rodeo have been related but distinct entities with different rules. According to the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas, the rodeo is an individual sport, whereas the charrería is a team sport, and unlike the rodeo cowboy, the charro does not compete for prize money but instead for honor. For more on this, specifically how Mexican and Mexican American women participate in the rodeo, we chatted with Paulina Rodriguez, PhD candidate at Penn State, who is writing about the history of Latinas in sport. 

Paulina: The Mexican rodeo or charrería has served as a site for the negotiation of Mexican identity, predominantly understood through the image of the charro, or the Mexican cowboy. It has been known to define Lo Mexicano, an expression of what it means to be Mexican. Mexican women often get left out of these conversations. Adelitas, or Mexican women revolutionaries, in my opinion, also belong in these conversations. Mexican women have also contributed to the sport of charrería both in Mexico and in the United States. First sanctioned in the 1980s by the Federación Mexicana de Charrería, escaramuza is the only event in the charreada exclusively for women.

Additionally, as the sport has grown in the United States in places like Catlett, Virginia, women have been instrumental in promoting the sport of charrería. Last year I attended a charreada in celebration of the ten year anniversary of escaramuza Amazonas Del Dorado in Catlett, Virginia, and it was this sort of passing of the guards from the mothers to the daughters as a way to continue this sport. And so you see how in the United States you have generational promotion of Mexican identity and connection to what it means to be Mexican in the United States.

Jessica: Also, we’ll link to the Texas State Historical Association’s page about this, and to a great Latino USA segment from March 2018 about La Fiesta de los Vaqueros in Tucson.

Shireen: I’m going to amplify Dania Cabello who is a friend of the show, a sports liberation education and Oakland street styler. 

Dania Cabello: We come from tribes that survived northern migration, where exile meant arrival, to a land where aliens have replaced people. From COINTELPRO to Operación Cóndor, we are warriors of unclassified wars, living in a town where murder is the way…Welcome to the Bay.

Shireen: Dania Cabello is an accomplished Oakland-born artist, athlete, entrepreneur and educator. She uses her tools as a pedagogue, baller, and medicine-maker to explore questions of freedom with and through the body. She has played professionally with FC Santos where her favorite footballer Pelé once played, and Marta of course. She played University of California, and then later went on to play with the Bay Area Breeze. A film documenting the work she’s done is called Futbolistas 4 Life, it’s by Jun Stinson and won several awards and shows her work with undocumented families and communities – two youth in particular – using soccer as a connector and as a means of expression, and resistance against systems of injustice. I had the honor and privilege to meet her in 2014, and she is formidable and is a force of life. 

Amira: Yeah, and I wanna just highlight and shout out the Zorros football club, who is based in Mexico City but actually has a bigger global presence. They are a club that emerged in 2013, borne out of a local team that wanted to create a space for queer people playing football in Mexico. If you’ve listened to the podcast for a while you know that Brenda has burned this multiple times, most recently in episode 114. She discussed the prevalence of the p-chant in Mexico and the corresponding b-chant in Brazil, and the ways in which these homophobic slurs are really ingrained in the kind of chanting culture within these football stadiums. This group formed to basically say, “We can be queer and also play. We can play at a high level and we can play in a community, we can form community and do this together.”

One of the things that I really like about them is that they sponsor youth organizations and clubs. They also have done HIV testing and been leaders on doing that and merging those kind of awarenesses with playing the sport. The other thing is that one of the complications that’s happened in the last few years is some of the tournaments that they would come to or participate in, like the World Out Games in Miami, a lot of people couldn’t get to because of this administration’s visa crackdown and immigration crackdown.

So you see there this complication, right, between immigration, between community formation, between you trying to unite as a diaspora, particularly when carving out a communal space for queer Latinx people in sport who want to say, hey, we’re here and we’re playing, we’re bucking these traditions of machismo, we’re bucking these homophobic notions of how and who can play sport and how they have to be. They are still forming community in the height of rampant policing of borders and of bodies and I just wanna shout out the Zorros and the work that they’re doing. 

Shireen: Here’s a quick preview of my interview with Sami Jo Small.

Sami Jo Small: So many of the life lessons that we learn through sport will reflect in our lives later. I always say to people, “Sport is not life,” but it certainly can teach us a lot about it. For myself as a goaltender, having been placed in various different situations, I think made me just have to focus on the present.

Shireen: Up next, everyone’s favorite segment: the burn pile. I’m gonna go first, and a trigger warning for everybody listening. I had actually not come across this story, and when I got it it was sadly too late. There is a wrestler named Navid Afkari, in Iran, and he and his brother Vahid were both held by the state. They were arrested in September 2018 on dozens of charges that included – and I’m quoting from a Human Rights Watch article – charges against him included, “participation in illegal demonstrations,” because freedom of expression and speech is not actually permissible in Iran. They were accused of “insulting Iran’s supreme leader, robbery,” and just so you understand, any type of vandalism that emerges from any type of demonstration, according to their constitution, can be classified under 'robbery' whether or not they've actually stolen anything, so it’s classified under that; “Enmity against God,” and murder.

So what ended up happening was, under severe torture, Navid and his brother confessed. This is a cruel act, and I’m reading from the Human Rights Watch article again, it’s “in defiance of an international outcry for a fair retrial, and utter disregard for the most fundamental human rights that we know.” This is really upsetting for a variety of reasons. The IOC had said that they were worried about his safety…I mean, good for you, IOC, to get really in there. It was also reported that FIFA made a statement. I have no idea what they have to do with anything but we all know from my previous burns on the show that FIFA is pretty close to the state of Iran for really bizarre and inappropriate and inexcusable reasons, despite the fact that they continue to ban women from stadiums but yet hold huge events there, and the same goes for FIVB. This is a huge disaster.

Not only were the lives of two men taken but they didn’t have a right to defend themselves – and they’re athletes, they’re part of a global community in sports. This is incredibly upsetting, and I want to burn everything from the lack of transparency, the lack of expression, the lack of freedom of mobility and to move and proper citizenry. I want to burn the inaction of global federations, I wanna burn all of it down. Burn.

All: Burn.

Shireen: Brenda, what are you torching? 

Brenda: I would like to introduce a new type of burn that I’m calling the back burner. [laughs] Which is, sometimes we miss…You know, when something happens right away. We didn’t miss this, but we were on our hiatus – in which we actually worked a ton here at Burn It All Down! But way back, seems like forever, in mid-August, the San Diego Padres player Fernando Tatís Jr swung on a 3-0 count and hit a grand slam. His team was already up 10-3 and evidently this is an unwritten rule in baseball; it is a source of great outrage for some people because it’s a pile on. The idea is a 3-0 pitch, the pitcher would’ve for sure on the fourth pitch thrown a strike, and that there’s some sort of non-fair play there, which I don’t understand at all. But there were a lot of insecure middle-aged baseball bros – Jessica! [laughs] – that were very upset at Tatís, and I just want to say…I mean, it’s no secret. He is definitely one of the only reasons, I think, it’s worth watching MLB, for me. But unwritten rules are still understood in a language. He is Dominican, he was raised by a professional baseball player. How can you think this young man was told how to hold back? When on earth…?

And his coach made his apologize! He had to apologize! He said, “Oh, I’m young, I didn’t know this, I can grow from this.” I was almost in tears. There is absolutely no reason he has to apologize for trying to do his job and for not understanding some incredibly archaic idea. Unwritten rules like this are often used to police men of color when they and their excellence have challenged something. He is a brilliant player. It’s the same thing we saw with Rickey Henderson when he wasn’t supposed to steal a base, or Alex Rodriguez who, like, stepped on the mound once and might as well have just cancelled baseball forever. So, I wanna burn unwritten rules. If they’re so goddamn important to you, write them down! And in the future, stay away from Tatís or I’m gonna find you. Burn.

All: Burn.

Shireen: Amira.

Amira: Yeah. This will be a quick burn, like…A quick burn! I don’t know what you call the opposite of a slow burn. But there was an article in Inside Higher Ed this week written by two Ohio State professors who argued, “America needs football,” going on to say that, “essentializing college football might help get us through these [uncharacteristically] difficult times.” They go, “To be clear, we are not suggesting that athletes put their lives or their health at risk for the sake of entertainment: [players, coaches and fans] should strictly adhere to safety guidelines,” and we “hated writing this piece” but we just believe “college football represents an America where competition is sanctioned, community is encouraged and disagreement is emotionally regulated. If nothing else, it gives us a reason to cheer.” [laughs] WHAT? Like, it’s not…It’s so…You’ve heard me the last few weeks burn the mess that is college football right now, and that is only increasing. But to have two people associated with the Big Ten institution get on and take the time to write something that basically says not only do we not pay you for your labor, but we also want your labor to save the rest of the country! Because we’re essentializing it in a way to make everybody “cheer.” We’re doing it with “emotionally regulated disagreement” – which is also a thinly-veiled attempt to say that people are emotionally unhinged in their disagreement, which, I don’t know, why would you be emotional about people who are disagreeing with your very existence? This whole thing reeks of just…It’s just so disgusting. Just to be clear, college football is not gonna save America. It’s not gonna save democracy. Guess what? We're in a failed state that's already all over! Anyway, that’s probably morbid, we don’t need that. But my point is, college football is not gonna be the thing that does it, and it’s certainly not gonna be on the back of unpaid laborers who are risking their health to fucking entertain you so you have a reason to cheer. Self care is right around you! Do what everybody else does – take a bath, Netflix and chill, go for a run, smoke some weed – do anything else but put that labor on college football players to save not only your entertainment but the fucking failed nation state. Burn.

All: Burn.

Shireen: Jess?

Jessica: Representative Jim Jordan, a not infrequent guest to our burn pile because of the multiple reports from wrestlers who say that when Jordan was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State he knew a team doctor was abusing athletes and did nothing to stop it. So, that Jim Jordan chaired a hearing this week in congress titled, “Diversity in America: The Representation of People of Color in the Media.” One of the witnesses he requested was none other than Jason Whitlock. Let’s hear two of the questions that Jordan asked Whitlock so you can get a taste of how dumb the whole thing was.

Jim Jordan: Do we have a functioning first amendment when 62% of Americans feel like they can’t express themselves freely? Do you have free speech rights when only one side is allowed to talk? Which is exactly what the cancel culture mob is doing today. 

Jessica: I’ll just say, it’s deeply sad and always infuriating that this representative doesn’t understand the first amendment, and finds no irony in saying people are silenced when he’s literally talking in congress. If you wanna know what Whitlock said, well, you’ll have to go listen for yourself, sorry. But if you have Silicon Valley, Big Tech, Marxism, anarchists, New York liberalism, North Californian radicalism and groupthink, cancel culture algorithms, LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick on your bingo card: DRINK!

Look, I was not going to talk about Whitlock this week. See, he wrote a column earlier in the week to argue that pushback against Maria Taylor – which we mentioned in our Torchbearers segment last week when we were cheering Maria on – was not in fact sexist, and he did this by being sexist and drawing Katie Nolan into this just to insult her. It was weird and it was bad and it’s his normal schtick. He has one note and he plays it over and over and over again. I didn’t really wanna give him any more oxygen to do that. But then he was invited to give testimony by none other than Jim Jordan and to congress. It’s like, FUCK! No matter how I feel about this dude, this bro and his partner in garbage, Clay Travis, they have the ears of the people who create policy in this country and this sucks and I hate it. Burn.

All: Burn.

Amira: Burn! Fucking hate them.

Shireen: After all that burning we're gonna amplify the torchbearers, but just wanted to say a congratulations to Team Burn It All Down that participated in the Womxn Run the Vote this past week. The event supports Black Voters Matter and has raised over $260,000. [Brenda cheering] We ran, we sweat, we table tennis’d, we danced, we walked our dogs, we contributed to this amazing collaboration with Oiselle. Please don’t forget to listen to the kickass interview that Amira did last week with Lauren Fleshman and Alison Désir. It was incredibly informative and important, and I suggest you listen to it again. Jessica, can you get us started with our marshmallow roasters?

Jessica: So, Dutch cyclist Anna van der Breggen has secured her third Giro Rosa title, which is fantastic. 

Shireen: Brenda, who are our sun-saluters of the week?

Brenda: In a surprise inclusion: Michael Jordan, who became the first Black majority owner of a full-time race team in NASCAR's top series since Wendell Scott in the 1970s.

Shireen: Our trailblazers of the week are the Sierra Leone women's international football team who are now getting equal pay with the men's team – the first for that region, and it’s very exciting to see. Amira, tell us who the firemaster/torchbearer of the week is.

Amira: Yeah, I want to highlight and uplift the WNBA, LeBron James, the Black women athletes here at Penn State…Everybody who has continued to uplift and speak out about Breonna Taylor, especially this week. This is Jasmine Thomas giving a statement on behalf of the WNBA in reaction to the verdict –

Jasmine Thomas: Our hearts are with Ms Tamika Palmer. It has been 195 days since her daughter, Breonna Taylor, was killed. 195 days and still today no one was charged for her death. We strongly support the sentiment expressed by the family of Breonna Taylor: the result is outrageous and offensive.

Amira: I particularly want to uplift them because one of the things that we saw in between all the trash takes, in between the TNT crew who were completely out of their depth and out of their range, who had a platform to talk and spew inaccuracies about the case or try to somehow disparage Breonna or fault her in her own death. To have voices and to have the WNBA as leaders to dedicate their season to her and Say Her Name, to uplift and continue to center Black women who are under siege by the state in the same way, was really important; was really important in a week where Black women received the message, like so many Black people have, that our lives do not matter. When the only charge handed down is not for the bullets that went in and took Breonna’s body but to her neighbor’s drywall, the message is that that property, that crusty ass drywall is worth more than this woman.

That is literally the message that was sent, and to have people still open their mouths to try to implicate her in her own death when nobody else is apparently accountable for it and to take up space and oxygen after 194 days of her being a meme, of her being convenient, of her being an easy way for people to score political points. It’s…It’s heartbreaking. It’s frustrating. It’s not surprising, and maybe that hurts the most. Amid all of the bullshit I just want to shout out again and again and again from the rooftops that when the WNBA says, “We say her name and we’re not going to stop,” it’s important. When the NBA and LeBron follow suit, it's important. When I can go and see here in the middle of central PA the Black women athletes from Penn State grabbing a mic at a thing that they helped organize to say, “This is enough. This can’t go on,” it is important. They are our torchbearers, and we should continue to follow their lead.

Shireen: Can you tell me what’s good, Brenda?

Brenda: What was good for me this week started out last Sunday with Bad Bunny, who rolled through New York City and gave a concert in support of healthcare workers and also in support of the Latinx communities that had been particularly affected by COVID. It was so great to see all the people run outside and start to dance and it was a great way to kick off Latinx Heritage Month. The other thing that was wonderful for me, and I have to couch this in saying this show does not support the racist past actions of Luis Suarez, was Leo Messi’s heartfelt goodbye to him that he posted on Instagram. It’s more words than I’ve ever heard or read Leo Messi writing, and it was an opportunity for him to also take a political dig at the club, to talk about players having feelings and not just being traded as any part of a business. It’s great to see him start to get more vocal as time goes on.

Shireen: Amira.

Amira: My brother has been suffering from COVID and it was not great for a while there, but I talked to him yesterday for the first time because he had the breath to be able to talk on the phone, and he’s doing much better and joking and talking shit about everything. We just felt like we had him back, and so that is really really my ultimate what’s good. Yeah, I think that’s my biggest thing. I would say I really like gift-giving, so I surprised my co-hosts and I get such joy out of waiting, like, I’m tracking the packages constantly because it’s so much fun for me. So that was fun this week. And the relay was a lot of fun. I had so much fun doing it as a collaborative team effort and then having my own private competition with Brenda, because me and her are competitive, and so we kept that aside, and that was a lot of fun and really motivating. On whole it was a shitty week, but there was moments of light within it.

Shireen: I had a great week in the sense of my love for Schitt’s Creek, which swept the Emmys, and I think that was a lot of fun to be up here. They lit the CN Tower up in gold and, yeah, there’s a lot of criticism about lack of diversity in Schitt’s Creek but for me the show is what Canada is – the higher-ups are all white anyway, with, like, a sprinkling. It’s a show that really just brought me joy. It just brought me a lot of happiness at the time I watched it. I was really really late to the party and I was so glad I did. It was lovely and I use Moira vocabulary as a self-care piece, like, YouTube videos. The other thing is, y’all can’t see but I’m decorated in stuff that Amira has sent me – I have a table tennis paddle with the Burn It All Down logo, and I’m a very good gift-giver, I’m very good. Amira has literally raised the bar to a level that makes me a little uncomfortable, but that’s okay! I can be competitive about this. I shrieked when I opened the package because I was like, “OH MY GOD.” I was very excited. The timing was excellent because I can use that and convert it to running, because y’all know how I feel about that.

So I was just very excited, and I was very motivated by the Womxn Run the Vote this week. It actually had me get out there, and I’m really glad it did. It was a tough week academically. I just wanted to say I got my first A of grad school. [clapping] I was very excited by that because it was a very tough week, so I was very grateful for that and the energy around that. I rely heavily on my co-hosts for love and support and my lady army of racialized academics, and they keep me lifted and I love that. Jess, what’s good?

Jessica: Obviously my flamethrower apron is what’s good. I got it last night after I was done cooking, so today I’m gonna find something to do. I did wanna mention, because I do this whenever I read a really good one, I read a romance novel that I deeply love this week. I read it in one whole day because I liked it so much. It’s called Office Hours by Katrina Jackson, and it’s just deeply sweet, very lovely, and it’s also incredibly hot. So Office Hours, Katrina Jackson, that was great. And the French Open is now! It started today, Sunday. So I actually didn’t realize that [laughs] until this morning when I saw someone tweeting about it. So, I’m really excited. Apparently it's deeply cold there? Serena Williams had an Instagram post today about the clothes that she’s wearing. So it’ll be interesting to see how that goes at this time of year, but I’m excited for Grand Slam tennis again. 

Shireen: And for what to watch: the ongoing WNBA playoffs, incredible basketball. The NBA: the Lakers have won the western conference final last night and may see Miami or the Celtics depending on whether Miami finishes out tonight. Reminder, we are recording Sunday morning. Also wanted to draw your attention to the Athletes Unlimited softball end of series on ESPN and the French Open. Also, don’t forget about women’s football: the FA Barclays and NWSL. That’s it for this episode of Burn It All Down. This episode was produced by the audio genius and fan of subpar sports teams, Martin Kessler; and Shelby Weldon, social media manager extraordinaire who does our website and social media. You can listen and subscribe to Burn It All Down on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, Google Play, Stitcher, and anyplace, really, where you get your podcasts. We’re also on Facebook and Instagram @burnitalldownpod. We are on Twitter @burnitdownpod.

Check our website, burnitalldownpod.com, for previous episodes, transcripts and links to the show notes. From there you can email us directly or go shopping at our Teespring store with links to our Patreon. From now til the end of the month if you join our Patreon or upgrade your Patreon you will get a special designated sticker, which we also made just to sticker you with our love and appreciation and your support for the pod. There is a merch code so you’ll wanna go check that out as well. Also new on our Patreon is fireside chats to talk to subscribers, so you can join your co-hosts and find out even more fascinating stories about us and the show that we love so much. Once again, a huge thank you to our patrons for your support. It means the world and keeps us doing the work we love and burning what needs to be burned. On behalf of all of us to you: burn on, and not out.