Episode 184: The Problems with SI’s Sportsperson of the Year Award
Sports Illustrated recently announced the winners of its annual Sportsperson of the Year Award. This year, the magazine went with the framing of “The Activist Athlete.” On this week’s episode, Lindsay, Shireen, Amira, Brenda, and Jessica dive into the issues with the award -- and the frustration with Breanna Stewart’s selection. [5:11] Also, Tulsi Gabbard makes it onto this week’s Burn Pile [30:52]. Plus, you’ll hear this week’s Torchbearers, [44:13], and what is good in our worlds. [46:44].
This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is a member of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Links
Vickie Johnson Is Introduced By Dallas Wings, Becoming WNBA’s Only Active Black Female Head Coach: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brendonkleen/2020/12/09/vickie-johnson-introduced-as-next--dallas-wings-head-coach-becoming-only-active-black-female-head-coach-in-wnba
Tennessee high school athletes no longer need to seek permission to exercise their religious freedom: https://www.wkrn.com/news/tennessee-high-school-athletes-no-longer-need-to-seek-permission-to-exercise-their-religious-freedom
Mara Gómez on becoming Argentina's first trans footballer: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/dec/11/mara-gomez-argentina-trans-football/
PSG and Istanbul Basaksehir in powerful show of solidarity as Champions League game concludes: https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/football/champions-league-paris-saint-germain-istanbul-basaksehir-resumed-spt-intl
Transcript
Lindsay: Hello hello hello everyone, and welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast that we really hope by now you really both want and need. I’m Lindsay, I’ll be the director of events today, and I am joined by the entire Burn It All Down crew: Brenda, Shireen, Amira and Jessica. First of all, shoutout to our patrons! Patreon.com/burnitalldown is where to go to support us, and we also have a Teespring store where you can buy Burn It All Down merch, which makes a great holiday gift. Today we’re gonna be talking about Sports Illustrated’s selections for Sportsperson of the Year and why those selections and, well, the entire list itself, is pretty problematic.
Amira: This is about the strength of the collective, and there’s a way in which you declaw social movements by trying to whittle it down to the individual.
Lindsay: And of course we’ll have our burn pile, we’ll have our torchbearers of the week, and we’ll end on a what’s good.
Shireen: Those are my favorite Jess Christmas cookies, the fa-la-la-la-llamas.
Lindsay: Then this week’s interview, which will be out on Thursday, is a conversation between Amira and the Penn State women’s soccer coaches. It is the holiday, the wintery season, so I wanted to start…I’m trying to get into the holiday mood, having a little bit of a hard time. But I thought we’d go around and say what our favorite songs are this time of the year. Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, I’m basic in this. It’s Mariah, All I Want For Christmas. When I play my first holiday playlist of the year it is the top song on it that I’ve curated, it's the first one I listen to every single time that I bring up this kind of music. It’s just a perfect pop song.
Lindsay: It’s a perfect song. Shireen?
Shireen: I don’t celebrate Christmas but I love it. My favorite song as a child was Rudolph – apparently I used to sing it all year round, my mother told me this. There’s no audio otherwise that would have been fabulous, but I have completely in the last 3 decades become absorbed wholly with The Little Drummer Boy and the particular fixation of mine is the latest version by For King and Country. There’s glockenspiel and different kinds of drums, it is just a different level of intensity and passion.
Jessica: I love that you’re either like 0 or 100. [laughter]
Lindsay: Is she ever zero? [laughs] I love it. I love it. Bren?
Brenda: Talk about basic. My favorite is Feliz Navidad [Shireen laughs] by the very famous Boriqua musician José Feliciano. I think it really gets right to the point and repeats that point over and over. [laughter]
Amira: Over and over and over. [laughter]
Brenda: So I’m good with it, and it’s one of the few times you’ll see people taking a stab at Spanish they might not normally.
Shireen: That was the first Spanish I learned, actually. It was Feliz Navidad.
Lindsay: I love it, and look, I guess if we’re all calling ourselves basic I of course have to join that as well, but for me the song that just makes me cry every time, that I just love to get emotional and listen to, is Silent Night. It’s just beautiful, it’s just beautiful.
Shireen: I can sing that in German if you want me to. [laughter]
Lindsay: Well this is really good to know.
Brenda: With your glockenspiel?
Shireen: I can’t play it! But I learned it in German when I was a kid. They taught us a bunch of Christmas carols in different languages and Stille Nacht was the one that we learned in German.
Lindsay: I’m not even like…Of course you know the song in German. Amira?
Amira: Mariah’s album is classic. TLC’s Sleigh Ride, NSYNC’s Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays – I’m very into holiday pop. So, Ariana’s Santa Baby, This Christmas, all that. Then it’s like the only time of year that I like gospel at all. So like The Preacher’s Wife soundtrack, Go Tell It On The Mountain, all of it slaps. I’m here for all of it. Oh! Sorry, this is also really important. In the Peloton holiday classes I’ve been doing they’ve also played this EDM remix of Dreidel, which is the dopest song you have ever heard. I’ve been running to that song all week.
Lindsay: All right. This week it was time for Sports Illustrated to name their Sportsperson of the Year, and it went with the framing of “The Activist Athlete.” For those unfamiliar, Sports Illustrated names – typically one athlete, sometimes it’s multiple and they group them together like this – to kind of celebrate and do a big feature on at the end of the year. It’s very rarely women, as we might guess. [laughs] But this year there were two women included on this list. I’m gonna just read the Sports Illustrated framing of this, which is, “From a third-time winner who helped drive record election turnout to a newbie who spent the fall fighting a pandemic, this year's honorees—LeBron James, Breanna Stewart, Patrick Mahomes, Naomi Osaka and Laurent Duvernay-Tardif—were champions on the field, champions for others off it.” In our corner of the world the honoree that got the most attention was Breanna Stewart. Of course a big part of that award was for her activism in the WNBA. The WNBA’s activism was about Black women this year and it was led predominantly by all the Black women in the league. So, there was understandably a lot of frustration and a lot of, I would say, backlash and outrage that Breanna Stewart was the person getting the attention for this. So we’re gonna dive into Breanna Stewart, this list, and everything we’re kind of thinking about related to this topic. Shireen, you wanna get us started?
Shireen: Yeah, thanks Linz. So, there’s personal impact here. I actually – although I was never always a Storm fan, it wasn’t my go-to team – had a lot of respect for Stewie from back in the UConn days. But also her coming forward as a survivor, for her to come out that way in a Players’ Tribune piece was very moving. She also opposed and protested the proposed Muslim ban many years ago, and that included multiple intersections of race and gender. But this particular selection was unacceptable to me. As far as her contributions to Black Lives Matter…It’s not a competition, and it shouldn’t be. We know all the work matters, but the actual blueprints for all of this work were created by Black women. Full stop.
Lindsay: Amira?
Amira: Yeah, and I think that friend of the show Layshia Clarendon’s tweet was really on point here. They tweeted, “@SInow messed up by not SOLEY acknowledging the WNBA as the SPORTS ACTIVIST OF THE YEAR! Period. It should have been our whole league (including Stewie) to win this award. The W led this entire sports movement! Disgusted at the constant erasure of black women, queer & trans folks.” So I think absolutely points were made, facts were stated. It’s the erasure of many things and honestly a missed opportunity.
Lindsay: Absolutely. And I think as that tweet says, it’s not saying that Stewie doesn’t deserve to be recognized but it’s saying that’s missing the point. Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, and so it’s not just who was recognized, but they also tend to get famous people to do the profiles of them that they actually put into the magazine, and so the person who wrote about Stewie for Sports Illustrated this year was Megan Rapinoe. This is such a bummer that Megan Rapinoe was participating in what is essentially whitewashing of the athlete activism this year, and I think it’s important…I wanna put this in context. Rapinoe was SI’s Sportsperson of the Year last year and she gave a speech while accepting that award and she called out Sports Illustrated itself and noted that how we tell stories and who tells those stories matters.
Megan Rapinoe: And while we don’t get to choose what it is that we witness, we are the gatekeepers of those stories, and we do get to decide how we bear witness to the world around us and to the truth that we see.
Jessica: She went on to say that they should focus more on women and rightly criticized SI’s lack of diversity on the writing staff, saying, “Is it true that so few writers of color deserve to be featured in this publication? No.” Then a year later she’s asked to profile someone for Sportsperson of the Year. She was there in the wubble alongside Sue Bird, alongside all of these Black women, these Black non-binary people, doing this work. And then she agreed to do it. I just think knowing all of that it just sucks, like, we know she knows better, and then to see her make these choices and participate in this, that’s the particular bummer for me. I just wanna show the framework that she used to justify the inclusion of Stewie as an “athlete activist” for this year. She wrote, “Racism is not a Black person’s problem. This is a problem that white people created and that we’re going to have to face ourselves. You can’t put the burden of progress and change on the oppressed solely. They’re already doing everything they can to make the world better, so that’s why it matters when you see white athletes like Stewie standing up and saying, hey, we need to do better.” That shift back onto white people…This is not the moment or the year for that kind of thing.
Lindsay: What frustrates me so much is I think she’s missing the point of exactly the words she’s saying, like, it’s crucial for white people to be allies in this movement. It’s crucial for white people to be that, but white people do not get to be the face of this movement. [laughs] That is not what this is about. There is a huge difference between solidarity, and allyship, and taking the credit, which is what it feels like Stewie is doing. I think that’s the most frustrating thing. Of course a lot of the outrage is directed at Sports Illustrated, as it should be, but these are honorifics that the people know about ahead of time, that the agents are involved in the stories. So Wasserman, the agency that Stewie’s a part of, knew about this. There is a world where Stewie could have turned this down, absolutely. Where Stewie could have taken a stand here. I understand that women are ignored so often by Sports Illustrated. We’ve only had four women ever get this honorific outright, and only one of them has been a Black woman, and that was Serena in 2015. So it’s very rare for women to get this accomplishment and Stewie has certainly had many years where on the court her accolades have been completely ignored by Sports Illustrated. [laughs] And completely overlooked.
But the way Sports Illustrated was framing this – which, we’ll get to that in a second – this is complicity. They were complicit in Sports Illustrated going forward with a list like this. They cooperated and Breanna Stewart really hasn’t spoken out much against it. She did just give a quote – of course she’s playing overseas right now – and she did give a quote saying, “I have to give credit to the entire WNBA and to the majority of Black women that represent our league, and just to continue the fight with them. As honored as I am, it's not about these things. It's about making real, and actual, change.” I believe that, I believe that Stewie is sincere in her activism and has done a lot of great things, but that’s why it’s just so frustrating. Just don’t accept this! This is a solo award right now. Just don’t do it! Bren?
Brenda: Well, you know, I went back and looked at some of the winners and the awards started 66 years ago, so there’s quite a pattern that you can see here. Between the tension of…Is it an award about the athleticism or the activism? This was the first time that I found that they actually framed it in this way, so that’s partly why it’s such an important mess up job, right? That they explicitly did that. In the past there was even people that weren’t athletes that were awarded, like Billie Jean King, the first woman in 1972. She shared it with John Wooden. Shoulder shrug, right? 🤷♀️ Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner, won it for cracking down on gambling. …Okay? [Lindsay laughs] Brett Favre won in 2007, and the quote is, “For his perseverance and his passion.” [coughs]
Amira: And you can’t forget that in 2015 the big drama about awarding it to Serena was that the readers’ poll for SI wanted American Pharaoh, THE HORSE–
Brenda: Yes!
Amira: –who won the first triple crown since 1978 to win, and a lot of the blowback that year was people under Serena’s picture saying, “You have no guts, you didn’t name a horse American Pharaoh as your sportsperson–” PERSON, “–of the year.”
Brenda: I mean, it’s precisely that. You know, you have Billie Jean King and of course we think that should be an obvious both on and off, but also then you have Chris Evert, shoulder shrug again, in 1976. So, just saying, this is not the first time that they’ve shown both their bias and also the tension between what the award even is.
Lindsay: Yeah, and that’s a huge deal this year because obviously on the court Stewie had this remarkable comeback and she won the championship and was WNBA finals MVP and was a contender for the MVP award. So, they tried to combine this in a weird way, right? [laughs] To be like, she did all this and she was an activist. But it ends up just kind of missing the point. Before we get into framing I wanna point out kind of some other problems with the way this list was composed. Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, after our first discussion in Slack it came up – I think Jessica dropped it in there. I started to dig around a little more and what was happening and who was writing for whom and who the other winners were, and I couldn’t help but notice that the person who had penned the piece for Naomi Osaka was Martina Navratilova. Yes, the same Martina Navratilova who is a very public transphobe. So I’m sitting back here and thinking, does Sports Illustrated actually think about this through? Is this a good look, to have this very public TERF come in here and write a piece that is supposed to be honoring a young Black Japanese athlete who is very clear about her beliefs? I just…This made me uncomfortable. I think to pair her up with Navratilova was a huge miss. I mean, Naomi Osaka has been strong and vulnerable and very public about her commitment to fighting injustice, and again I get back to this: who oversees this? This was literally the worst rollout of this kind of thing, which could have been done with a little bit of thought. Just a little bit? It could have been done and executed in a far more impactful manner.
Lindsay: Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, I just think the entire framework for the person of the year, this year in particular, we should be questioning that. If they wanted to focus on winners, which is the excuse used, right, for having Stewie on there, then they shouldn’t have shoehorned in ‘athlete activist’ as the angle, and if they wanted athlete activists then they should’ve just done it! [laughs] And been brave about it, and actually shown us what athlete activists look like this year. That entire framework is so, as Brenda talked about, it’s shitty.
Lindsay: Shireen.
Shireen: I also, in my little dive into this thing, which just ended up making me more mad, was the response from co-editor Stephen Cannella. What he said was, “This year's Sportsperson honor is about recognizing athletes who reached the pinnacles of their sports in 2020 and also used their platforms in a variety of ways to take action, create awareness and build unity. Breanna Stewart was the top player for the WNBA champion Seattle Storm and was named Finals MVP. She did all that less than a year after suffering a career-threatening injury. With those achievements, along with her unabashed advocacy for equality for everyone, Breanna Stewart represents a Sportsperson's standard of excellence on and off the court.” In no way is this a diss to Stewie, but I’m confused again. What are you celebrating? I also found Cannella’s response to be…The technical term is “meh.”
Lindsay: Amira, I know you have some thoughts about this.
Amira: Yeah, I think the thing that irritated me the most about it…I kind of shrugged my shoulders at the initial kind of outcry, just because I’m over these lists. But the response was insulting because it was illogical. It was just like…Your justification is listing their on the court accolades, so clearly that’s just your measure. Like Jess said, there’s no need to shoehorn in an activist angle. There was just no need to do it. So then you’re left with trying to make this justification by saying “…and she also helps off the court!” Okay? [laughs] You didn’t need a justification by centering her activism, you led it by centering her on-court excellence. So it’s just I think insulting to intelligence, in general, and I think it’s one of those things that…Just put your list out there and shut the hell up. Your doubling down and making justifications is actually what’s annoying.
Lindsay: Jess.
Jessica: One of the things that gets me about this entire thing and sort of even recognizing their on-court stuff, which is great, fine. I mean, we just did a whole episode on why I feel weird about sports and COVID at all. The thing is, I had to remember that LeBron won the NBA Championship. [laughs] That the Lakers actually won the title, because the things that I’m gonna remember from 2020 are not the championships, honestly. It’s people not getting COVID when they’re in the bubbles, it’s Karl-Anthony Towns losing his mom to COVID but then showing up to protest George Floyd’s death. It’s the athletes who sat out to focus on organizing – Natasha Cloud, Renee Montgomery, Maya Moore, for fuck’s sake! It’s the Atlanta Dream going up against their owner, it's the Milwaukee Bucks and the wildcat strike, and yes, it’s Osaka’s masks and her answer to Tom Rinaldi after she won, but the winning is just tangential to even that memory, right? So it makes no sense to me that this is what they chose to honor after this spectacular year where a ton of unprecedented and important things happened.
Lindsay: Talk about shoehorning this all together, just really quickly, if you look at a theme it looks like the theme for activism is specifically around George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement that we saw this summer, but then they put in the COVID doctor who left Kansas City, the lineman, to go fight COVID on the front lines, who was already a doctor. That part of the award wasn’t at all for his on-field accomplishments. [laughs] So it’s just a mess. It’s a confusing mess. Bren?
Brenda: I just think we also have to keep in mind the conditions of production. Sports Illustrated has fired quite a few of their best writers. They have fought unionization, they basically treat them like crap, and this is what you get, you know? A lot of people that scurry around trying to create clickbait. So, I think that's really important to think about, that it used to be, according to a lot of people, a pretty good gig, and over the last few years they’ve done everything they can to degrade the working conditions of the writers that are there.
Lindsay: Absolutely, and who do they think their audience is too, with this list, is something I keep thinking about. It’s like they tried to make it not too Black, or not too focused on one thing by including white athletes, by having white people be writing the intros and by including Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, who is phenomenal, absolutely, but to me it just shows some cowardice. Shireen?
Shireen: I just wanna say I predominantly read Sports Illustrated only when Jessica publishes there. And also Brenda and I wrote there a long time ago for the Women’s World Cup. That was a long time ago. But I mean, just to say who their audience is, I don’t know but does it even matter at this point?
Lindsay: Bren?
Brenda: I also go back to the question of individualization. So, you have a social movement and you have activism and you say that this is something that you’re gonna celebrate and award, but at the end of the day what we usually see is the tendency to isolate an individual, and that that really does have everything to do with sponsorships, with the capitalist imperative of branding, with cooptation of those social movements – “How can we make them profitable?” What you do is you isolate individuals that you think…And I think part of the Breanna Stewart thing is looking at a young athlete that you plan to market for the next X amount of years. You can say that that’s cynical, but I mean that’s precisely in the business plans of these people. We see cooptation of social movements throughout the 20th century and sports has just gotten better and better and better at it. So I think there’s a real question, like, is there any other way for them from their business plan sort of perspective and the way that they work with agents and the way that they work with Wasserman to not do this? And I just think there might not be.
Lindsay: Amira?
Amira: Yeah, Bren, I think that’s a really important point and, look, I’ll be real: I am so burned out with these lists, and even the discussion around them, and let me tell you why. There’s two things happening here that I feel very uncomfortable with. One is that point that Brenda just made about the need to find an individual face to commodify around these things, and this is outside of sports – we just saw this in a thing that MSNBC put up thinking about who was gonna be the Time Person of the Year. In that they had listed a few individuals and then they had a picture of George Floyd and under it said, “Social justice/racial justice movements.” The fact that the need to still find an image, right? Even a posthumous image, to contain multitudes. Because the energy here is collective action and that’s what we see, and so Layshia’s tweet that I read earlier in the show was almost the most on point thing, because this was about the strength of the collective and there’s a way in which you declaw social movements by trying to whittle it down to the individual.
This is what happens with civil rights historiography, all of this stuff, when it becomes Martin Luther King, when it becomes just Rosa Parks. We lose sight of actually the groundswell of feet on the ground and people together, coming together. Which goes into the other thing that makes me really uncomfortable about it – it’s part of a revisionist framework live in action of what this year has been in the first place. It’s Gwen Berry getting an end of the year Toyota Humanitarian of the Year award, right, months removed from still being on probation for saying the same thing that corporations can now say and collect bread off of those statements. It is a process to me also running and retreating into these end of the year things trying to sum up a year that was anything but normal. It’s a search for normalcy in a year that doesn’t exist. How are we making lists and naming people who excelled in sports when sports was anything but normal? How can we even wrap our heads around it? That to me is why they feel so insufficient.
The people that were applauded are tremendous athletes. They won championships, like Jess pointed to, that I barely even remember. The things that Jess just named is what I can remember. All I can think about now, even what we’re talking about, is Keyontae Johnson falling face first on a court this weekend. And because of the age we’re living in we don’t know if it’s a heart condition, we’re immediately thinking about myocarditis…I still haven’t learned how to say this stupid heart condition. That’s what I’m thinking about. This year is not normal. These end of the year lists are generally kind of like, oh, somebody got the end of year list award. But in this year especially with this kind of surface level engagement, this kind of shoehorning attempt to gesture to athletic activism, to capture the energy and the collective action that we saw over the course of the year just strikes me as completely superficial. That’s why I’m frustrated. It’s inarticulate but my deep feeling is that no list could ever capture the energy and the heart and the resiliency we’ve seen from people this year, in and out of sports, all of it. We don’t have a word for that, and so we can’t put it on a list, but that’s my sportsperson or people or whatever of the year.
Lindsay: In this week’s interview, which will be out in full on Thursday, Amira talks with Penn State women’s soccer coaches Erica Walsh Dambach and Ann Cook, about the joys of coaching, their friendship, and coaching through this – I think it’s safe to say relentless – year of 2020.
Erica Dambach: It’s what makes you so proud when you do lift that trophy, is you kind of look at the story of each of these students and you go, “Let me tell you about her story.” Not let me tell you about her playing time, let me tell you about her ability, let me tell you about her journey, because every one of them makes you so proud because all of them come with these ups and downs through the four years as they grow and come to learn who they are.
Ann Cook: The winning is lovely, but part of why Erica and I work well together, and Tim and Kara and our whole staff, is that we’re driven by the relationships that we build. So for me the letter that comes after graduation or whatever is kind of what I move for.
Lindsay: Alright friends, it’s time to get straight to the burn pile. I’m gonna start with Tulsi Gabbard, who introduced a bill that would ban trans women and girls from women’s sports. Note that Tulsi Gabbard, who is the Democratic representative from Hawaii and a former 2020 presidential candidate, did this on her way out of the US House of Representatives. She did not run for reelection and she is leaving the House, so this is her final act. She named this the “Protect Women’s Sports Act.” She co-wrote it with Republican Oklahoma representative Mullin, and it’s very similar to a bill that Republican Georgia senator Kelly Loeffler – who is a burn pile mainstay – introduced, called the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.” Gabbard said about this bill that it will “make sure that Title IX’s original intent is protected, which was based on the general biological distinction between men and women athletes based on sex.” That was not at all what Title IX was about! [laughs] I’m infuriated. I feel like a broken record bringing up these bills every single time they’re presented, but I think it’s so important that we don’t get numb to this bigotry and that we don’t allow people to keep using women’s sports to justify their bigotry. I wanna send love out to all of our trans listeners. This bullshit will not be tolerated and we will keep fighting bullshit like this. Tulsi, I’m not gonna miss you and I’m glad I got to throw you on the burn pile, I must say. Burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Jessica?
Jessica: So, mine is also a basic burn pile today. I feel like all I need to do is read what happened and we can shout “burn!” and move on. It’s the kind of straight up misogyny we see all the time in sport, but just as Linz said around transphobia, because of that ubiquity, the way things are normalized, because they’re common, I just feel like we have to keep telling these stories over and over. So here’s what happened. A semi-final between Galway and Cork, two teams in the Ladies Gaelic Football Association in Ireland, was moved from Limerick to Parnell Park because the men’s hurling team needed the stadium for a training session. Here’s what Anna Kenney at The Irish Times wrote about this: “The Limerick county board justified the move by saying that it had been made clear in advance to the LGFA that the Limerick hurlers would get priority over the ladies football semi-final were they to require the use of the pitch. And the LFGA issued a statement stating that they fully understood Limerick’s wish to use their own venue for training.
The statement also said that the LGFA was grateful to the Dublin county board for making Parnell Park available.” But then they get to Parnell Park and it’s fucking frozen! The pitch is frozen! So the semi-final had to be moved again, and then because of the last minute change they no longer got TV coverage. One of the teams, Galway, said the venue shift meant they only arrived 30 minutes before the match started and had almost no time to warm up. In her piece Kenney quotes a young athlete, Sophie Turley, who is a 17 year old who plays minor football for Louth, talking about how normal this all is for girls and women in Ireland: “From under 12s to minor…” I wish I could do an Irish accent! Darn, okay, quote–
Shireen: I can help.
Jessica: No. No!
Lindsay: [laughs] I was about to say, Shireen…!
Amira: I was about to say, Shireen is gonna try to jump in! [Lindsay laughing]
Jessica: No. Sorry. Quote, “From under 12s to minor, it’s been the same. We might not know where we’re training until the night before. Our coaches will be phoning everywhere looking for a venue. I’m pretty sure that’s never the case for the boys.” Of course not. That’s why I wanna burn this whole thing. Burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Burn burn burn burn. Bren?
Brenda: This week the LA Times published a harrowing story by Patrick Hruby about women’s volleyball player Hayley Hodson. She’s suing the NCAA and it’s because of what happened to her while at Stanford University – that place with a real spotty record of athletics program. The incident that occurred in 2015 involved a Stanford practice where Hodson had to perform a “courage drill,” and that drill basically means that players are standing about 10 feet from the net and a coach on a chair basically tries to…I don’t know the good volleyball terms, but whatever they are, to hit the ball at them kind of purposefully extra-hard and at their head. They’re supposed to practice dodging that. But she didn’t dodge it, and she got a pretty severe concussion and had all of the symptoms. This was on a Tuesday and she was cleared for practice and full play on Sunday. She was further injured throughout the next year or two, suffered major bouts of depression, vision problems, headaches – everything that you can imagine, every sort of symptom, every sign, and yet she kept being cleared again and again. So, Hodson’s suing the NCAA and what she’s asking for, this huge ask, is for college coaches and athletic trainers “to properly treat brain injuries and to monitor and discipline those who fail to do so.” That’s a quote from the piece. I wanna burn that it takes a lawsuit for that to happen. How is that not already happening, you know? Stanford, oh my god. Look at that endowment and tell me they can’t invest in training the people who are full time employed at their university to know how to treat brain injuries. Tell me they don’t have access to that highest level of neuro-medicine, because they do. So I just want to burn that this woman – who, power to her and total respect – has to go through a lawsuit for everybody to have the basics. So I wanna burn that.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Shireen?
Shireen: Yes. I’m real mad this week, and that doesn’t differ from most other weeks. Let me just begin this burn with a tweet. Please not the intense sarcasm in my voice. Beitar Jerusalem FC: “His royal highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Nahyan and Moshe Hogeg make history and become equal partners in FC Beitar. This is the first fruit of the Abraham Accord’s peace agreement. Thank you, president Trump, for your vision of peace in the Middle East that has made this possible.” If you’ll excuse me a moment I’ll try not to gag and vomit all over my computer. I’m very pissed off. Beitar Jerusalem is arguably the most racist club, anti-Arab – “death to Arabs” is part of their team chant, and half of the club was purchased by his royal whatever, emir of the Emirates, and that Khaleeji-ass money, which…Don’t come at me with saying that Khaleeji money is pure and good and this is good. All of this is garbage. Emiratis don’t get to speak for Palestinian oppressed people whose land is occupied and live under brutal humanitarian conditions. There’s not a single Palestinian who’s ever played for Beitar Jerusalem, they don’t appreciate anybody else, hardly any Muslims or Arabs at all, and the response to Beitar Jerusalem FC being 50% sold to Emirati Arabs has been predictably terrible. There’s been a slew of online slurs and abuse and virulent racism, directed not just at the owners but just general people who aren’t supporters or ultras of the club. I think this is something that we can point to that adds to the sport watching. This whole thing is about money and power and control. I hate it, I’m so angry at this. This has no place…And guess what the fuck UEFA is doing about this? Guess what the fuck UEFA has ever done about this? Nothing! So I wanna take that racist-ass anti-Arab anti-Indigenous and -Palestine Khaleeji money and shove all of that fuckery, all of that racism, on the burn pile where it belongs. Burn.
All: Burn.
Shireen: I wanted to say that with an Irish accent but it didn’t work, the burn.
Lindsay: [laughs] Amira?
Amira: Yes, I wanna talk about something that we see happening in Florida, and I wanna tell you that it’s in Florida because as soon as I say the names of the high schools you’re gonna cringe. But just know, yes, it’s completely common. So, I wanna take you to American Heritage, which is a private school in Broward County and has campuses in both Delray and in Plantation, Florida. It has been in the news for a while for a number of things, but this week what we have our eye on is the fact that they cancelled a game between American Heritage Delray and American Heritage Plantation, which was a big game, and they canceled it because two girls on the girls basketball team wore Black Lives Matter shirts in warmups. I’ll say that again: they wore Black Lives Matter shirts in warmups! So the game was canceled. One of the reasons we know about this story is because both of these young women, Jordana Codio and Khadee Hession, have been participants in the Indiana Fever’s Erica Wheeler’s basketball camps. The WNBA players are the ones that have really helped raise the profile of the story.
Khristina Williams, founder of Girls Talk Sports TV, had a really important thread on this on Twitter. I encourage you to check it out. But WNBA players have really swooped in to say this is wrong, we can’t let institutional racism thrive like this, and we’re role models; talking about Black Lives Matter and being their full selves, this is awful to see this this happening to these girls. But I wanna take a minute here to also step back to tell you about American Heritage, because this has been an ongoing discussion about private schools in Florida, particularly American Heritage, really flaccid attempt at saying something that amounts to “Black lives matter.” This is also a high school, if you remember two years ago, that Dwayne Wade and Gabrielle Union got involved in because their kid’s basketball friend was expelled for reportedly cussing back at a teacher after the adult cussed at him, and it became a civil rights case. This is the same place where over the summer American Heritage put out a statement on Black Lives Matter without saying Black Lives Matter. They just said, “We think everybody is cool and we celebrate diversity.”
Over 800 Black students and alumni posted a letter to American Heritage saying the fact that you can't even say Black lives matter shows how much work has to be done. One commenter said, “It’s entirely spineless to let checkbooks of racist families influence the school so drastically that AHS feels compelled to not even take a mild stance in defense of the Black community. Do better.” This is a place where 24% of Plantation, Florida, and 31% of Delray Beach is Black, and yet the Black population of American Heritage student body is only around 10%. So it is at this private school where the threat of two girls playing basketball wearing a shirt that says Black Lives Matter is tantamount to something that requires them to fully cancel a basketball game. This is clearly a fight that is nowhere near over and it’s clearly a long history of Black students and alumni and families connected to the American Heritage school system that have been fighting for years.
I just wanna toss AHS on the burn pile because it’s very clear that they do not value Black lives, they do not value the Black lives of their student athletes, of their student body, of the communities that they serve and surround – and take basketball talent from! – while completely ignoring concerns of the Black people within their school. So raise up the young women involved, raise up the WNBA players who are coming to their defense, and as far as AHS goes, we can burn them down.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Alright, after that burning let’s look at the positive side, the torchbearers of the week. Jess, who is our new coach of the week?
Jessica: Vickie Johnson, who was just named as head coach for the Dallas Wings, making her the only Black woman to currently be a head coach in the WNBA – wow – and only the fourth former player to get a second shot at being head coach.
Lindsay: Shireen, who is our Teen of the Week?
Shireen: Big ups to Najah Aqeel, the ninth grader at Valor Collegate Academies in Nashville. I don’t know if y’all remember but she had actually been excluded from competition due to her hijab, which I had previously put on the burn pile. But she has been the catalyst for policy change, this young queen stood up, and this week Tennessee administrators voted by unanimous decision and to approve of wearing religious headwear during play.
Lindsay: Incredible. The Pioneer of the Week is Mara Gomez, after a long battle with the AFA, the Argentine Football Association, Mara became the first trans woman to play in the Argentine professional women's football league. Bren, who are our Protesters of the Week?
Brenda: The players for Paris St-Germain and Istanbul Basaksehir, who walked off the pitch during a Champions League game after official Sebastian Coltescu racially abused Istanbul assistant coach Pierre Webo.
Lindsay: Incredible. And now, my favorite part of every episode – can I get a drumroll, please?
[drumroll]
Amira, who are our torchbearers of the week?
Amira: Yes, all of the athletes who spoke up for the right to protest and pushed the US Olympic and Paralympic Committees to overturn their decision to discipline athletes if they protest at the Olympic Games. I especially wanna give a big shoutout to our friends of the show Gwen Berry and Tianna Bartoletta. Tianna especially was very involved in the athlete-led group that has been working all summer to push back on the US Olympic Committee on this front. It’s really important to note this is just the beginning, they’re hoping that they've used the USOC and Paralympic Committee’s influence to push at the IOC and overturn Rule 50 once and for all, but for now let’s celebrate this win. Congratulations – this is a win for athletes, for workers, for activists. We see you, and you are our torchbearers of the week.
Lindsay: Alright, so, friends, what is good? I have myself first on this list. [laughs] So I guess I will go. I will say, I am super close to actually being moved. One more week of really busy busy things, and lots of moving and painting and also Medicaid stuff for my mom. But I think at the end of next week I will be in my new condo and have the Medicaid application and goodness, friends, am I looking forward to that moment. We’re getting very close. I did a very important thing this week, which is I picked out a paint color. [Jessica laughs] That was very difficult, because there are SO MANY shades of white. Did you know how many shades of white there are? I had no idea. It’s really actually a problem. [Shireen laughs] I’m kind of upset by it. But I’m not gonna say what color I picked yet, because I’m gonna see if I like it or not, then we’ll see. But I’m excited. I’m getting closer. If I can only find a sectional this week…The sectional saga continues. Alright. [laughs] Bren?
Brenda: Not grading is so good. [laughs]
Lindsay: Yay!
Brenda: Any other teachers out there, you will know the experience. It’s something like you’re in some sad hole for a couple of weeks straight and you look up and you look around and you realize that you don’t have a clean dish left. [laughs] You don’t have a t-shirt that works, you’ve just been doing nothing, and when you’re not grading you’re procrastinating from grading – which involves not doing anything productive either because then you would feel really guilty because you should be grading. So, it's a terrible terrible cloud over one’s head. Then right after you get grade complaints before you’re even done, so there’s that. That’s awesome. Then you get sad because you get nice letters from students that are like, “I just wanna tell you you changed my life,” and you’re like, “Me too!” You know? It’s a wild ride. So, I’m really happy to close out this semester. It has not been the easiest one.
Lindsay: Congratulations! Shireen?
Shireen: I am really excited about more information about Ms Marvel, Kamala Khan, and the movie, and how Iman Vellani – who’s actually from Toronto, a South Asian woman – will be playing Ms Marvel. But even watching the tweet about the concept of how she was created and who they have on board is really important and really lovely. I don’t do comic-y things, like, I just never saw myself represented in them in any way, but it’s not even just about that. It’s about who they have on the creative teams, and when we talk about representation we know it doesn’t just mean who’s in the front, it’s who’s around it. So to know that Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, who's a Pakistani filmmaker, is part of this team, it just means a lot.
Also, it’s the season of claymation Christmas movies and I go back to The Little Drummer Boy from 1968 every year. It’s available on YouTube. I cry every single time. Now, because I was also procrastinating from my term papers and finals, went down a rabbit hole and found out the little drummer boy’s name is Aaron – not to be confused with the biblical or Abrahamic Aaron that we know of, but that was his name, and this entire little drummer boy story was actually from the conception of the song, which was written in 1941 by a woman. So that’s fascinating, and anyways the little claymation of him with the drum, the little boy and the drum…! How are you guys even not crying right now? All he had was his drum! I dunno, it was very good. It was very good.
Lindsay: Wow, that’s a lot. That was so much. Amira.
Amira: I have a dumpster in front of my house, it’s a bright green dumpster and I have it for two weeks–
Lindsay: Like, a literal dumpster? [laughing]
Brenda: They’re the best.
Amira: It’s literally a dumpster.
Lindsay: Okay! [laughs]
Amira: It’s siting in my driveway, I have it for two weeks, and I’m just de-cluttering. I’m clearing out all this stuff – old toys, the ones that are broken and can’t go to Goodwill. We have bikes, so many old bikes, and I have no child who fits these bikes anymore, right? All of this stuff, and I think that being in the house for so long, we have just accumulated more clutter. Of course the holiday season’s above us and in my family we have Jackson’s birthday in December, my husband's birthday in December, Samari’s birthday in January, so there’s just a lot of boxes coming in and things, and so part of my kind of getting out of 2020 is just decluttering. If you know me you know domestic life is not my strength at all, but I can do big projects. So my big project right now is decluttering everything over the next week, and I never thought I would be happy about this dumpster, but I am really. Maybe this is like what 30-something is, but I am very excited about decluttering, and it’s helping me get festive.
I’m also really happy because Samari is really into the holidays and so all the angst is really dialed down and the festivity is really dialed up. So she has holiday plans and a movie night calendar for all of the things, and she’s cuddling with me and we’re watching things together, and she’s doing the Peloton holiday workouts with me, which are really fun. We’re having such a great time doing it. I’m just…It’s making me feel very festive and it’s really fun to cuddle with your 13 year old because you don’t always get to do that. So that’s my what’s good right now.
Lindsay: Amazing. Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, so Aaron and I are watching this ABC show, it’s on Hulu, it’s called Speechless. It’s a 30 minute comedy. The oldest son – there’s three kids in the family – and the oldest son has cerebral palsy and Minnie Driver’s the mom and it’s so so funny and it’s so smart in the way that it takes on disability and being in a family with someone who’s disabled. It’s so good and just refreshing just based on sort of our cultural understanding of disability, so I just can’t recommend Speechless enough, it is wonderful. Then this time of year for me is always a favorite because it’s my cookie-making time of year! So, I started yesterday, I made my first batch of sugar cookies. Today I’m going to decorate them.
I did actually go out to a store yesterday, which is pretty rare for me at this point, because to do this special icing that I need for the sugar cookies I use something called meringue powder and I had to go find that – it’s hard to find this time of year because of sugar cookie decorating. But because I went to a place that has it I also had to buy new cookie cutters, because it’s like a rule. So, I’ll have nice little Santa cookies here. I’m just very excited. I think this is very fun. Last night I made the llama cookies, the sugar cookies, because those are my fa-la-la-la-llamas, [Lindsay gasps] and I just find this to be very very fun.
Lindsay: Your fa-la-la-la-llamas!
Jessica: Yeah, so of course I’ll be posting pictures about this on Instagram.
Shireen: Those are my favorite Jess Christmas cookies, the fa-la-la-la-llamas.
Lindsay: Alright friends, that is all – wait! Wait! We’re watching things.
Shireen: Oh, also, Happy Hanukkah to everybody!
Lindsay: YES! Happy Hanukkah! Good call. I’m watching…My goal when I finish this move is to watch lots of Hallmark Christmas movies, so I’m putting that on here. But we’ve also got the Champs League and the big news if you’re listening to this on Tuesday: Stanford women’s basketball, Tuesday night on ESPN2. Top-ranked Stanford women’s basketball team will take on Pacific if Stanford takes the victory. That would make Tara VanDerveer college basketball’s all-time wins leader, passing Pat Summitt’s record. Pretty big deal! I’ll be watching. Thank you to everyone, we appreciate your support on our Patreon, patreon.com/burnitalldown. Once again, a shoutout for our Teespring store which Amira has stocked with so much amazing merch that makes the perfect holiday gifts – for yourself as well! I think I’m gonna buy a few things for myself. Follow us on Twitter @burnitdownpod. We’re on Facebook, we’re on all of the things. We’re almost done for 2020, friends. We’re almost there.