Episode 194: Why, Texas, Why?
This week Brenda, Amira and Jessica are joined by special guest Frank Guridy, Associate Professor of History and African-American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. With an abundance of abiding ties to Texas, they discuss last week's devastating winter storm and unpack the layers that changed how different communities were impacted and survived. Then, they bask in the joy of the Australian Open and Naomi Osaka's 4th Grand Slam title. And as always, they burn the misogynist and racist happenings in sport of this week, shout out the Torchbearers shining light in spite of it all and share what's good in their lives, which includes last week's SNL hosted by Regé-Jean Page with musical guest Bad Bunny.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Links
The Texas Blackout Is the Story of a Disaster Foretold: https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/texas-blackout-preventable
Jerry Jones' Company Hits 'Jackpot' As Harsh Storms Send Natural Gas Prices Surging: https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-winter-storms-2021/2021/02/18/969074414/jerry-jones-company-hits-jackpot-as-harsh-storms
Momoko Nojo: How a 22-year-old woman helped bring down the Tokyo Olympics chief https://www.cbc.ca/sports/how-a-22-year-old-woman-helped-bring-down-the-tokyo-olympics-chief
Transcript
Brenda: Welcome to this week of Burn It All Down – it’s the feminist sports podcast you need. This week I’m joined by my wonderful co-hosts, Amira Rose Davis and Jessica Luther, as well as special guest and best friend of the show, flamethrower Dr. Frank Guridy, who is associate professor of history and African American and African diasporic studies at Columbia University, a big big tennis nerd, and author of the very very very soon hot off the presses University of Texas Press book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics. So, special welcome to the show this week. We are super excited. We are going to talk about Texas – why, Texas, why?
Jessica: It was like the hell of COVID but just condensed in a real terrible way, a life-threatening immediate way, and no one could tell you what was happening.
Brenda: We are also going to be covering a little bit of the Australian Open, which gave us a lot of joy; we will burn all the things in sports this week that have been racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive; we will celebrate people doing wonderful things, and we’ll talk about both what we’re watching and what’s good in our worlds. But before all that, I wanna ask my squad today: if you were or are a practicing Catholic and you had to give up something for Lent, what would it be? Amira?
Amira: First I want to log my complaint with management that you did not give me space at the top of the show to talk about Regé-Jean and Bad Bunny on SNL, because first of all [Brenda laughs] Jessica said it was like “the Amira and Brenda of SNL episodes,” and also it was a gem. Like, sea shanties with them? Gem! Talking about drivers licenses and breaking down the High School Musical love triangle drama? Gems, okay! So, that complaint has been lodged.
Brenda: I just thought we’d make people wait, Amira!
Amira: Wait for what?
Brenda: I just thought it’d be at the end of the show.
Amira: Okay.
Brenda: Wait for all of the fun we’re gonna have.
Amira: Okay, okay. Well, to answer your question, I don’t know if anybody saw the tweet that was like, “Can we just give up for Lent? Or do we have to be more specific?” That’s about where I am. So, that. [laughs]
Brenda: Uh huh. Fair enough, fair enough. Short but sweet. Jessica?
Jessica: This one was hard for me to think of, because I feel like it’s just been a year of giving things up without a choice in it. So, I brought Aaron into it and I was like, “What would I give up?” and he started listing things that just made me cringe at the idea of it! He was like, “You could give up coffee, you could give up wine.” [Brenda laughs] Then I screamed at him. And he said, “You could give up romance novels.”
Amira: [laughs] HOW DARE HE! HOW DARE HE!
Jessica: I was like, okay! This game is over now!
Brenda: Ejected. [laughs]
Jessica: Yes. So, I guess that…I don’t know. I don’t know if I could do it, but that would be the stuff that would really make me sacrifice.
Brenda: Aw. Frank?
Frank: I’m so excited to be here as a first time guest. This notion of Lent is pretty foreign to me. You know, I’m a Caribbean Latino, Black background, but I was raised in a Puerto Rican Pentecostal church, those sorts of religious traditions where people cite a lot of scripture, get touched by the spirit and that’s their performance of religiosity. Sometimes they fast. But in this case, if I was to really really try, I would love to give up Twitter for Lent. It’s that thing in our lives that we need, we use, but we really don’t like – at least I’ll speak for myself. That’s what I would say: Twitter.
Jessica: You can speak for all of us, Frank, on that front. [laughter]
Brenda: Although if any of you left Twitter I would be so sad, because that’s how I know what you’re thinking about all the time. So I would be happy for you, but I would be sad for me. That dovetails into mine, Frank, which is Facebook. I’ll just say, you know, I’m not gonna be shy about it – mostly that’s my family’s fault, not even my friends or colleagues! I don’t even care because my cousins will never listen to this. You’re horrible on Facebook. [laughter] You have horrible political views, your choices are questionable. I’m not even sure we’d be even marginal friends. But if I could have a Facebook that is just people’s accomplishments, like their book covers or even just their accomplishments like “I went outside today,” their pets and their family’s or baby’s or kids’ stuff, I would be happy and I would stay on. But all the rest of it I want off. So, thanks to everybody for playing. It seems we’re actually probably not giving up anything.
Frank: You know, we’ve been living a deprived life, those of us who are fortunate enough to survive since last year, you know? So, the notion of giving up more stuff, you know, is really hard for me to comprehend, you know. Although I know folks do it, and I applaud them. But I can’t. [laughs]
Brenda: I know, I know.
Last week Texas experienced a deep freeze that prompted a collapse of the power grid serving large parts of the state, leaving millions powerless and waterless. Millions were impacted, some died, and many, many suffered. I’m joined by three people who have lived, studied, and cared about Texas for a long time, and also have used sport as a way to understand the particulars of the place. Before getting into an analysis, I just wanna ask my co-hosts how they and their families are doing, and I’ll start with Jessica because you’re currently living there How are you and how are things around you?
Jessica: I was prepping for this and thinking, like, how do I even answer this question? I mean, we are fine. So, Aaron and I were fortunate for reasons that we don’t understand and we will probably never understand. We did not lose power except for one blip one night for about 3 minutes, and then we never lost water. We did have a frozen pipe situation but we figured that out with about 3 hours of panic involved. And it’s strange, because literally the neighbor across the street lost power. People four houses down lost power. We’ve heard all kinds of stories like someone on the other end of my neighborhood who I didn’t realize until days into this had lost power for days. She’s a new mother with a baby. So, we’re okay, is I guess the most important thing. I mean, we are super fortunate – I feel like I wanna say that over and over again, because there’s a guilt associated with this, even though I understand it's not in my control.
But at the same time it was a really stressful and intense week worrying every second that you were about to lose your ability to heat your house in freezing temperatures, the possibility that you wouldn’t have water, and did we have enough water to survive. We could not drive on the roads, so that was a huge thing at the beginning. We offered this room I’m actually sitting in whilst we’re recording, we offered this room to friends of ours who live maybe 2 miles away but they had lost power, and the roads were so treacherous that we didn’t know if they were gonna be willing to drive over – lucky they found a friend who had a vacant apartment, so there was a lot of that kind of worry.
Then of course there’s COVID. So, there was always this underlying fear of letting someone into your house. We’ve spent a year now sort of building up these walls and boundaries and all sorts of things in order to protect ourselves, especially in our house, that this is like our safe space. So, the idea of letting people in was always like, you can come over, we’ll all mask up, we’ll go in the room, we’ll close the door, no one will be in here. Like, we’ll be separated, just kind of having to think about that protocol was a lot too, and I’m very nervous about what we’re gonna see in COVID numbers in a couple of weeks and what that will mean for resources in this city, in a state that’s already taxed as it is. I mean, there was a children’s hospital here that lost power and there were stories about them using kitty litter in order for people to be able to use the bathroom. There’s all the stories about people dying, and just the suffering.
It feels weird because I don’t wanna tell my friend’s stories because it's their stories so it feels very personal to them, but I know people who, you know, 80 hours with two kids with 38 degree temperatures in their house. I just…I dunno. It was just incredibly stressful, and I will just say it was really hard to read the shit on social media. We just talked about giving up Twitter, and I think Twitter was a lifeline for people too – it certainly was for me. If you were watching my Twitter account, like, being able to get information and understand what was happening…The government collapsed, like, we were getting almost no information. We did not know when it would end. It was like the hell of COVID but just condensed in a real terrible way, a life-threatening immediate way, and no one could tell you what was happening. You could read the frustration in journalists’ tweets and reporting about how we knew nothing. But also just reading people saying like, we deserved this because of voting, which I have for years just…Everything about that is so disgusting. But in order to take in the little information I could get I also had to be on the platform where people were also saying those terrible things as I’m reading text messages from friends who are suffering greatly.
The last thing that I really wanna say is just a shoutout to the community and to mutual aid in this state. The government in lots of ways just let us down immensely, and it was really people looking out for other people. All I heard from friends were about how they were finding their neighbors and their friends and their family who were helping them, that were getting to them, that were figuring out…I do wanna give a special shoutout here in Austin to city council members who really came through. Talk about local government, Greg Casar and Natasha Harper-Madison. I counted on them to give us the information we needed, and at one point I saw someone tweet that her brother who was diabetic had one can of beans left in his apartment and she didn’t know what was gonna happen, and I immediately tagged Greg and Natasha and they responded within two minutes to tell them what they could do in order to get help.
I just was really thankful that there was someone that I could turn to because I didn’t know who else, like, where do we go for answers? And that feeling was real shitty for a long time. I will say, right now we’re recording on Sunday morning; I looked out the window this morning and there’s no more snow or ice on the ground, and that feeling of relief yesterday when we could really see that it was going away…It was a nice feeling.
Brenda: And Frank, you also have family in Texas. Are they doing alright?
Frank: Yeah, I have family and friends in Texas and, you know, most of them are doing fine. I lived there from 2004 to 2015 when I came back to New York, and so I have a lot of deep connections there. My in-laws are mostly in San Antonio, my friends are in various parts of the state. Their experiences – although there is a random aspect, like, you experienced this power outage and water outage depending upon the grid you were on – but their experiences pretty much correlated to the socio-economic status, right? So, in San Antonio, if you lived on the south side of the city you were more likely to not have power and water, as many of my family members are, than people on the north side, the more affluent side of town, right?
So, yeah. My in-laws were out power and water for a week. They were fortunate enough to stay somewhere, they were fortunate enough to have been vaccinated so there was no COVID anxiety, but you know, much of this last week has been just another stretch of this combination of anger, survival guilt, sadness, feeling infuriated at another injustice, right? I think that from afar that's the way we experienced it here, and also this is a region that’s not accustomed to winter in general, so a typical little ice storm shuts things down. It used to be a joke you, know – I’m a northeasterner originally and I used to laugh at seeing the city of Austin just stop whenever there would be a little ice storm.
So now you’ve got a situation like this of 9 degree temperatures and a serious storm coupled with the unpreparedness of the state and the power system just made it an absolute disaster and it was really hard to see that suffering from afar – and contribute to the amazing mutual aid effort, and that’s inspiring and that’s a part of Texas that people often overlook, the kind of real progressive mutual aid culture and politics that emanate from those movements in those communities. But nonetheless, it just felt like another injustice that we were witnessing, from afar in my case.
Brenda: Thanks, Frank. Amira?
Amira: Yeah, it’s been a long week. My sister was without power for a few days. My mom thankfully never lost power but lost water for a while. When it came back on it was brown which, you know, shouldn't be the color of water. I think the most stressful part is – and this is true when the hurricanes comes too – is not being able to find people. So, we went about two days without finding my great aunt and trying to figure out if she had heat, and we actually just got a text on the family group chat that she’s good. They have these old school gas heaters, thankfully. So, it's so frustrating. I’ve talked about this before, you know, when the last hurricane hit, but feeling like you can’t do anything is a really frustrating feeling for me, and being far away but watching this happen, and then being concerned with all of these kind of overlapping things.
So, I’m really thankful that everybody right now is okay. My sister’s area still doesn’t have power but she’s at a friend’s house, so that’s good, but as Jess said then you start worrying about COVID and all of these kind of overlapping and overlaying things. My dad got the hell out of Texas, got in his rig and drove when the storm started coming in, so he’s just kind of circling, waiting to be able to come home. But it’s hard when you see stories if people who weren’t as lucky. The story that has been haunting me is out of Sugar Land where a family trying to keep warm resulted in their house catching on fire and it resulted in the death of their three kids, 5, 8, and 11, as well as the 75 year old grandmother who was living with the family. There’s no words, really, for that and for the way that all of this was avoidable. It’s infuriating. It's absolutely infuriating.
Since we do like to look at slivers of joy, I would just echo what Jess said about mutual aid. I wanna give a shoutout to my good friends in Austin, actually: Las Ofrendas, who even while being taxed themselves have given out 1500 meals, and it’s just a testament to the strength and the resiliency of people. But I mean, I’m just burning with a rage that I can hardly articulate because the people shouldn’t need to continue to do the work of the state. Like, as we say so many times, it’s a failed fucking state. How many more examples do we need? I’m just beyond…
Brenda: Speaking of the failed state then, this is an incredibly wealthy state, and Frank, in your new book and in your work we see a lot of sports patriarchs like Lamar Hunt and this wealthy oil clique making the Sun Belt in the 1970s and 1980s. Do we see their footprints on the priorities of infrastructure, on these failures?
Frank: Absolutely. Not so much the historically powerful families like the Hunt family and Sid Richardson and the Murchisons and families like that, but the domination of the oil energy elite drives so much of Texas politics, economy and society, right? So in that sense absolutely, right? There’s a really good essay in the Texas Monthly by Jeffrey Ball on the intricacies of the failures of the state, in particular what went wrong with the power grids. But yes, this is a state and a region that is dominated by the energy elite. Their desire is for great profits, and that drives policy, and then with the Republican-dominated state legislature, right? This is essentially a one party state. Texas plays a decisive role in the reconstitution of Republican party politics in the 1960s and 70s and you can see this exemplified in the ascendency of George H. W. Bush and then his son afterwards, right? The Bush family remade themselves from a Connecticut elite New England family into an oil energy powerhouse that then dominates state politics and then national politics.
So, I mean, that’s the story here, this story of this combination of the energy elite in tandem with the dominant Republican party that’s in control through gerrymandering, right? This is not a society that if people had a right to vote that the Republicans would dominate the way they do, but because of gerrymandering over and over again we see their dominance in the policies we see with respect to everything, right? This combination of pro-business oil elite coupled with the kind of white grievance politics that really take shape in the aftermath of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s, and that explains the kind of political dynamic that we see to this day.
Jessica: And I would just add onto that, if you have not seen the maps of Texas’s gerrymandering it’s worth looking to see, like, just go look up Austin. The way that they have made sure that Austin does not have too much Democratic party representation on the federal level is immense. I mean, this is Tom DeLay’s home base, right? We are the home base of gerrymandering, and so Frank is just of course 100% right on how this works. But definitely go look at those – they’re entertaining in their sadness and how mad they will make you.
Amira: But this is just to underscore what Jess was saying earlier about what it feels like then to have people say, “Well maybe don’t vote red.” Again, Texas is not a red state. It's a gerrymandered and suppressed state, like most of the states in the south, and it’s particularly frustrating because of the size of Texas. I think Jessica, you made this point really importantly, that there’s more people who voted Democratic in the state of Texas than in whole ass fucking blue states that you conceptualize in your mind. The idea of a blue state and a red state in the first place is fucking stupid. But I think it’s really important to understand, especially within the infrastructure of Texas, especially like where my family is in southeast Texas, it’s completely…You know, one of the biggest priorities is how can we declaw and completely suppress this entire part of the state just because of how much political potency there is in that area, and it’s…[groans] Yes.
Brenda: This is not to put too much faith in the Democratic party.
Jessica: No. No.
Brenda: [laughs] So, let’s just be clear that when we’re talking too about suppression of vote we’re talking about the ability to change the shape of the way politicians respond to communities and the power of certain communities to hold them accountable.
Amira: Precisely.
Brenda: We’re certainly not suggesting that flipping blue to red or red to blue is the answer, but disenfranchising whole swaths of the population goes beyond that. So, that leads us into a perfect discussion about racial inequities in the state, because that’s what so much of this is about. I wanna ask all three of you but I’m gonna start with Frank: if there’s a way in which your research and your experience in Latinx and African American history in sport sheds – and it doesn’t need to be about sport, but I just know you’re coming from that place – sheds light on the plight of communities of color during crisis, and how does that help us understand what’s happening right now?
Frank: Yeah, I mean, the question that we’ve bandied about is sort of how Texas is representative or not of what’s going on in the United States. I mean, like the rest of the United States it’s a society steeped in settler colonialism, slavery, and Jim Crow segregation, and anti-Mexican violence and discrimination. That’s what makes it interesting insofar as that you’ve got a society that’s steeped in kind of what we associate with the south – slavery, plantation slavery, Jim Crow segregation, all that – along with the relationships between anglo and Mexican origin and Latinx peoples. That legacy stays with us to this day, right?
Yet it's interesting because then this goes to the discussion earlier about voting, you know. So much of the discussion from New York Times type journalists is trying to find out why some Latinx people voted for the Republican party, and they don’t have a real fundamental understanding of the way in which the colonial system in Texas has worked, right? It incorporates certain white-identifying Hispanics into a system of domination by the Anglo elites, right? So, you see that in the issue of sport, no doubt. Desegregation of sport is happening in Texas deep into the 1970s and 80s, right? I mean, Bissinger’s classic book Friday Night Lights shows this very clearly, and sport plays a key role in the reconstitution of a white elite around sports, right?
At the same time, sports plays a huge role in the survival of Black communities and Mexican origin communities in Texas, right? One of the things I saw when I was there is this vibrant Black sporting culture that existed in the Jim Crow era at the high school level and into the collegiate level with what we call now HBCUs, right? The Texas Southerns and the Prairie Views and other schools, the Bishops, et cetera. So, you have that history of survival and resilience around sport and around other Black institutions and Mexican American institutions as well. I think sometimes we lose sight of that part of the story of Texas, right?
I mean, when people talk about Beto’s candidacy a couple of years ago, what was striking less him but more the kind of Texas that you saw coming out around his candidacy. It was really interesting. It reminded me of when I was there with the Wendy Davis filibuster, the remarkable filibuster against yet another draconian abortion law by the Republican state legislature. One of the things having been at the capitol that day was to see the enormous energy, cross-racial energy gathered around this horrible law, and that’s the part of Texas that we need to see more of – or we who are on the outside need to pay more attention to, right? I think we get too caught up, understandably, in kind of looking at Texas as a backwards place, and in many ways it seems like that from afar. But there is this long history of community survival and resistance that's there and that emerged yet again out of this crisis, I would think.
Jessica: Yeah, that’s so true. I wanna speak a little bit about Austin, just because I know it the best and that’s what I’ve studied and of course where I live. I wrote a piece however many years ago whenever Charlie Strong was hired here about race and football in Austin. Charlie Strong was then only the 3rd Black head coach of the University of Texas. Now we’ve had, what, four? We’re up to four now? [laughs] That should tell you enough about what you need to know about racial inequality in this state. But I wrote about Anderson High, which was a Black high school on the east side of Austin. We call it the east side because there’s literally a highway, highway 35, through the middle of town. Back…I wanna say it’s 1928, Austin city council passed a law or rule or whatever saying that all people of color, mainly Black people, had to live on the east side of town, and if they did not they would not have services. There was a little pocket on the west side of town that held out, and they didn’t have roads until like the 1970s. They meant it when they said they would not provide services.
So we have this deeply segregated geography here, and we had this very famous Black high school, Anderson High, and then they shut it down in order to try to figure out how to desegregate everything. Then they reopened Anderson High near where I live, which tells you something about me and where I live, and then left everything behind except the name. They even got rid of the mascot and everything. But Anderson High had the best football team, definitely in the state at one point. I wrote about all of this because in 1942 there was one white high school and one Black high school in Austin and they both won the state championship, and I was just trying to tie Charlie into this long segregation within this city.
But I wanna tie this into what happened last week. There was a picture that went around…There were lots of pictures of downtowns lit up while everyone was blacked out in all kinds of cities here in Texas, but there was one that someone posted, a reporter here, and it was looking south at 35 towards downtown, and on the right is this bright downtown and on the left is the deep dark black of east Austin.
Austinites looked at that picture and were like, yeah, of course. There’s something we all understand about how this city is set up, specifically not to take care of that historically Black part of the city which is now being gentrified, so it’s this complicated space in and of itself. But I had a friend who lost power immediately, like as soon as they said they were gonna roll blackouts they lost power, and when I was texting with him he was like, “I knew it, because we live in a poor part of town.” Like, I had no doubt that were were the first ones to go, and he was right. So, I just think all of those things were in play, and they have such long historical roots, and you can physically see them. Especially you could physically see it this week with who had resources and who didn’t.
Amira: I mean, I think that the question of resources, like when I think about this and I think about the layering, I think about the groups that are already so marginalized within these places, right? I think of homeless and housing insecure people, I think of undocumented people. I think of people who are already living in areas that are struggling for energy and resource needs on any given Tuesday and the first to kind of feel the brunt of this when it is something on a large scale like we’re seeing this past week. I think what’s so interesting and what’s so great about all of the way you’re laying out the infrastructure of Texas is that what we’re able to do is then map on sports as another institution in Texas because it is – I think Frank’s book points to this too – if we think think about the sporting infrastructure and sports as an institution within the state, it can really help us understand and kind of tease out a lot of these systemic, really really foundational, ingrained systems of inequity.
The other thing with sports that has in my mind, and I talked about this after the last hurricane, is how quickly they’re often weaponized to do the work of trying to bring a community back, or at least rhetorically act like everything’s fine and harmonious and kumbaya again. So, I told this story of the football officials who were in the middle of COVID and also the hurricane has just blown the bleachers over and the school had no roof, but they were like, “Hell yeah we're gonna play, because that’s what’s gonna bring us back together.” So I’m wondering now as we’re sitting here; football season at least has passed, but I’m almost waiting for what is the sports thing that's gonna be marshaled to be the kind of recovery lap or the rhetorical community reifying thing that happens, knowing that what community they’re pulling together is still leaving the most marginalized on the outskirts, unless they perform athletically on the field.
Jessica: My friend, who’s a Statesman reporter, yesterday on Instagram I get on and he’s in Arlington for a baseball game.
Amira: Right.
Jessica: I was like, I’m sorry, you have a baby and you lost power for days? You’re in Arlington? And he was doing his job. They were playing baseball. Then the other thing was we’re doing basketball games this weekend. They announced that there would not be any fans in the stands because they didn’t wanna tax resources, and I was like…
Amira: THERE SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN FANS IN THE FIRST PLACE!
Jessica: Yeah! COVID is taxing resources! I just don’t understand any of it. But sports will go on. [laughs]
Frank: Yeah, and for that reason we saw how Major League Baseball had its postseason in Arlington and I think one of the college football games were in Arlington as well, if I remember right. I didn’t watch it.
Jessica: And we’re gonna have the women’s college March Madness here!
Frank: That’s right, San Antonio, just a few weeks from now. What a mess that’s looking like.
Jessica: Yes.
Frank: Absolutely. The other thing I was gonna say, on the one hand as a historian, you know, three historians on this podcast, you can anchor so much of what we’re seeing here in this longer history, but a lot of this is this more recent history too, of gentrification. One of the things you saw very, very palpably in Austin when I was there – and I admit I was a colonizer, I arrived from afar in 2004 – but the absolute remaking of that city, you know, which had been kind of a hippie/arts haven you know, an interesting music scene too, this city that looked like Portland and other cities across the country that are catered to a white affluent demographic from the coasts, right?
From the Californias, from the Brooklyns, moving to Austin and driving property prices skyrocketing, and then also just transforming the culture for the whitening east side in ways that it was already existing before. I mean, this goes to something Brenda said earlier about thinking about his as a red/blue thing is simplistic because so much of the inequities has really been re-inscribed by these folks who are moving from the coasts and remaking these cities into even more white and affluent-catered urban centers, suburban centers.
Jessica: That makes me think of Elon Musk showing up very recently and coming from California and saying he literally wanted to come here because it doesn’t have regulations, and there’s so much about that that hurts in so many ways, specifically this week. We saw what deregulation has done to people’s livelihoods, and to have someone like Elon Musk show up in Austin and then tell everyone to move here…I’m nervous for the future.
Brenda: Yeah, I mean, you look at these fantasies of these billionaire types doing this and creating these fantasy places with zero regulations, whether it’s the moon or Mars or offshore new countries, and then you think to yourself: this is what they’re imagining for real places with real people too, is just start from scratch somehow, and it’s offensive and violent and upsetting. I do remember – I just wanna say before we end this part, and I wanna thank all of you for what you’ve shared, your knowledge and your passion about this place – I did read Invisible Austin, which friend of the show and my former professor Javier Auyero and his students put together, and if people have a chance I personally think it’s a great background; maybe it needs a new edition. Okay, well this has been a heavy topic and I know that we wanna find rays of light. I don’t wanna miss the opportunity of having Frank with us, so just briefly I wanna let y’all enjoy a little bit of a talk on the Australian Open. [Jessica laughs] Who wants in? Because I feel like it could be any one of you. [laughs] Frank?
Frank: Well, the men’s finals are irrelevant so I won’t comment on it, you know? The men’s game is boring.
Jessica: It is so boring! [laughter]
Frank: The men’s game is boring. It is boring.
Amira: It is very boring! [laughs]
Frank: I’m not trying to pose as a pseudo-feminist or something – it’s boring! Even Rafa is boring to me now, you know? The notion of somebody winning 50 majors really doesn’t compel me. We saw Medvedev and some other folks ascend on the men's side, but those matches were irrelevant. The real star of this show was yet again Naomi Osaka, and of course Serena Williams, right? Osaka’s ascendency in the game is fabulous and wonderful. Howard Bryant said it so well in this video post he put yesterday, he said that Osaka has, quote,
Howard Bryant: She has embraced the championship altitude and has unapologetically accepted the challenge of being the game’s social conscience.
Frank: She is able to kind of blend those things together in ways that even Serena and Venus did not do, you know? I think that’s what makes her special, aside from her awesome talent which we saw yet again at this major. She’s won her fourth major, she’s gonna win more, and I’m not gonna give you the kind of Chris Evert “Oh, she’s so humble, wonderful” – this sort of thing that folks on TV like to say. I’m sure Amira can handle that.
Amira: We don’t need to do anything like Chris Evert. [laughs]
Jessica: We will never copy Chris Evert here, Frank.
Frank: You know, I don’t even listen to it. I just watch it without the sound because it’s astonishing how these announcers just announce these matches for 20 years, plus. I mean, talk about white privilege in sports media. It’s just astonishing to see white mediocrity perform every single time you see on ESPN or a televised tennis match. But that aside, Osaka’s amazing and Serena not winning the 24th is disappointing of course, but at the same time she doesn’t have to win any more majors, you know?
Jessica: No.
Amira: Exactly.
Frank: She’s the greatest ever already, and if she doesn’t, you know…If she does, wonderful. I would love to see her overtake Margaret Court. You’ve seen my texts over the years lamenting Margaret Court still being the #1 [Jessica laughs] player in terms of majors in tennis history, but Serena doesn’t have to prove anything anymore. She also has the right to just keep on too. So, that’s my feeling about Serena.
Jessica: Yeah, she lost in a semi-final. Can I just say this here?
Amira: Exactly. Please do!
Jessica: I cannot stand…I understand as a journalist asking the questions, but people obsessing over whether or not she is retiring – and if she does retire, good for her. I mean, whatever she wants to do, that is fine! But the idea that she should because she lost in the semi-finals? She was one of the top 4 players at this tournament! She is still a phenomenal tennis player. She’s is not Serena of 7 years ago, maybe that Serena could’ve beaten Osaka, I don't know. Osaka was fabulous in this tournament. Someone posted a great graphic on Twitter of four matches, one in each of the tournaments that she won, each of the grand slams where she was down huge in a match and came back to win and then eventually win the grand slam. She has tenaciousness, she can come from behind, she’s got the mental ability.
We saw her serve was fantastic against Serena! That was a real delight to watch. I mean, it failed her at certain points as everyone’s serve does when they’re in major matches, but man, I just…She's not the Serena of 7 years ago, but she’s still so good. You know what – if she wants to play and lose in the first round of every tournament then I’m okay with it too! I just don't understand…I mean, I get where the narrative is coming from, I just fucking hate it and I wish it would stop.
Amira: Well, it’s so frustrating. Me and Jess were screaming about this the other day. But it’s so frustrating because also we miss how her game has also transformed, like her feet which has always been the bane of my existence. She was moving better all of the AO! [laughs] So often what we see, and her conditioning, like, these are the things…The way that she’s like, okay, how do I have to reinvent my game to stay in the game? And that is magical to watch. I don’t give a damn about all of this posturing about “Serena’s farewell” like, fuck that!
Also, excuse me, I just have to underscore this: we move the goalposts so far, right? It’s like, you have to win 24 or else there’s no point of playing. Which is ridiculous. Just on its head, just the most ridiculous idea. Do you know how many people enter these slams and don’t win? Literally everybody but one person. Literally everybody but one person! So I would just say, the semi with Serena and Naomi was clearly the final, and I got up briefly at 3:30 in the morning to watch Naomi in a haze of sleep play, but it was such a joy to watch them play. It was so frustrating, of course, to hear the comments and the match calling and all that. It’s just bullshit. But them playing is magic, it’s literally the definition of catching rays of joy, and I’m so…How lucky we are, to see that.
Frank: Yeah, I just wanna jump in on that. To see the match, it was just a relief to see the match happen as opposed to what happened in 2018, a horrifying US Open, right? Watching them, it’s magical, the energy, even if it’s just a straight set win, and even as you saw Osaka take control of that match, you know, the energy that they bring, both of them…To see this up and coming young player playing this legend is just great theater, and it certainly distracted me this week from all the suffering we talked about earlier [laughs] that was going on in Texas this week.
Jessica: Yeah. That was funny, I was live-tweeting it and my friend Dan who lives here with me said that it made him feel better to see me doing the normal thing that I do. Yeah, I think there’s always something just so wonderful about…We know Naomi plays tennis because Serena played tennis, and there’s something about that legacy on court. Then to hear in her post match after she won…
Naomi Osaka: I feel like the biggest thing I want to achieve is…This is gonna sound really odd. Hopefully I play long enough to play a girl that said that I was once her favorite player or something. For me I think that’s the coolest thing that could ever happen to me. I think I have those feeling of watching my favorite players. Unfortunately I didn’t get to play Li Na, but yeah, I just think that that’s how this sport moves forward.
Jessica: That it’s not just about winning these matches but about expanding the game and what the game looks like and who’s able to play it, and Naomi has taken that on too because she sees it in Serena and connects all those things. It’s just such a lovely part of it. I just want to go back to Frank’s point that the men’s game is really boring to once again advocate for three set matches. I’m just so over five set matches and the glorification of them and I just think the women’s game is so far superior to the men’s game because the gotta play three sets and so they gotta get their shit together.
Amira: That’s so funny because part of when I watch this, like when I watch Serena and Naomi play, I was like, oh my gosh, I just need another set! Because so often I feel especially in the second set like the momentum could shift. [Brenda laughs]
Jessica: I know, but you say that for that match, but if all of them were like that–
Amira: I know, I know. All of them, I know.
Jessica: That’s the problem. It’s like – yes.
Amira: But those are the moments where I’m like, I need more!
Jessica: The Federer-Nadal at Wimbledon in 2008, glorious. I watch that thing from beginning to end, yes. [Amira laughs] But that’s not enough for all the Isner matches, it’s just not. [laughter]
Frank: Well said. Well said.
Amira: I just want more. I always want more of them.
Brenda: Oh sports, oh Texas, oh sports. Thanks to you all for delving into this with me today.
Amira: This Thursday on our interview show I’m gonna speak with my old friend, Benji Hart, who's a Chicago-based author, artist and educator whose work centers on Black radicalism, queer liberation and prison abolition. We’re gonna talk about the intersection of sports and police and militarism and we’re gonna talk about how we can think about concepts of abolition in the sporting world, and part of this is an effort to imagine and reimagine what radical futures and Black futures look like. So, here’s a little tease of my interview with Benji Hart, and I hope you check out the full thing on Thursday.
Benji Hart: I think your examples of the ways that these punitive measures in sports are unequal and that even when folks are engaging in what we could argue are non-carceral solutions to dealing with harm and violence there is still deep embedded racism, deep embedded misogyny, deep embedded homophobia and transphobia in terms of how those consequences are distributed, who has the power to distribute them, who gets punished for what. There’s still tons of harm and violence and racism happening there even though technically a police department isn’t involved or someone going to prison isn’t involved. There’s still, as you say, an investment in punishment that is still inherently racist, sexist, homophobic and all these other things.
Brenda: Now it’s that time in the show where we take everything that we haven’t already expressed our anger toward and throw it on a metaphorical burn pile. I’m gonna start today. It’s a searing and quick burn, which is there’s a wonderful tournament, SheBelieves Cup, and I’m sad that some of the teams couldn’t participate but happy that it meant the Argentine national women’s football team was invited. They aren’t convoked to very often, so it’s wonderful to see them get an opportunity to play at that level. I wanna burn the fact that there’s pretty clear retribution since the 2019 Women’s World Cup towards the players on the Argentine national team who complained about the conditions.
I wrote about it at the time for The Guardian and The Equalizer – their schedules were written on a napkin slipped under their hotel door. They had very little training. The conditioning and the physical therapists that were there were not qualified to be there. There’s a whole host of things that were awful about that. Their star, who used to play for the Washington Spirit, Estefanía Banini, was the captain and the most vocal, and immediately just 3 weeks following that tournament where she performed wonderfully, she was inexplicably dropped from the roster. She has not been called again. She is not at the SheBelieves Cup. It might be injury and it might not, but I wanna burn the fact that we can’t know because of the bullshit that surrounds this.
Hats off to the announcers of SheBelieves Cup for trying to learn about the Argentine national team but know it is not fully professionalized, know these women do not make a living in Argentina and a living wage playing football. Estefanía was recently named one of the players of the decade by a number of organizations in women’s football and it’s just a glaring absence and I’m super pissed and I wanna burn it. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: Amira.
Amira: I had too many things I wanted to burn this week, from Chrissie Evert talking about Serena and Naomi to Sean Hannity and his plane and tennis story, like there was so much. But then I saw Michelle Wie, Michelle Wie West now, issue a statement that was talking about comments that Rudy Giuliani had made, and I was like, what did he say? So, I dove deep into this story and knew I had to burn it. Rudy Giuliani went on Steve Bannon’s podcast – this is just gonna be a cast of the deplorables. Rudy Giuliani goes on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room to remember Rush Limbaugh who died.
They are talking about sharing stories remembering Rush, and the story that popped into Rudy Giuliani’s head that he really wanted to share was about one time they were golfing together with Roger Ailes and Marvin Shanken and they were paired with Michelle Wie. He told this “funny story” about how they spent a lot of this charity golf match trying to avoid the paparazzi before realizing they weren’t trying to take pictures of him and Rush, et cetera, but that Michelle Wie was really the target of that. He shares this story and he says, “On the green is Michelle Wie and she’s getting ready to putt. Now, she’s gorgeous, she’s 6 ft and she has a strange putting stance. She bends all the way over and her panties show.”
Jessica: Oh my god…
Amira: This was the funny anecdote that he wanted to share. I’m not even gonna touch on the fact that your friend or whatever dies and the anecdote that you wanna share is that you and Rush and Roger Ailes and everybody was golfing together and you objectified a professional golfer is the one story, the anecdote that really comes to your mind to remember says everything you need to know about these folks, right? That in and of itself is disgusting. But I do want to highlight Michelle’s response because I think that is absolutely what should be centered here. Michelle said, “What should be discussed is the elite skill level that women play at, not what we wear or look like. My putting stance six years ago was designed to improve my putting stats,” and guess what? She won a fucking U.S. Open that year! “It was NOT an invitation to look up my skirt! Nike makes skirts with SHORTS built in underneath for this exact reason….so that women can feel CONFIDENT and COMFORTABLE playing a game that we love.”
This whole thing is disgusting. Michelle obviously deserves better. Professional women athletes and women in general deserve better. We obviously know the bar is the basement with these men so why would we think that they would think even in this moment of death and remembrance that anything else would come to mind, because we obviously know that cobwebs exist there along with the hatred they harbor in their hearts and heir brains. So, I would like to burn that part of it down because bleugh. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: Jessica.
Jessica: Here’s the opening lede to a story from the Dallas Morning News this past week: “The Frisco-based natural gas producer owned by Dallas billionaire Jerry Jones is cashing in on a surge in prices for the fuel as a brutal freeze grips the central U.S., leaving millions without power.” The company is Comstock Resources Inc. On a Wednesday earnings call – so this is literally in the middle of the week as all these people are suffering – the president and chief financial officer of Comstock Resources, Roland Burns, said, “This week is like hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible prices. Frankly, we were able to sell at super premium prices for a material amount of production.”
We’ve already discussed at length what was happening in Texas as the president of Jones’ company gleefully swimming through his pile of gold coins. We’ve also talked a lot on Burn It All Down about ownership models and specifically ownership of pro teams in the United States – the kind of money you have to have to own a team is enormous, and these are the kind of business practices that lead to gaining that kind of wealth or, if you’ve inherited it, how your daddy got his money. It felt like no surprise at all that in the middle of one of the worst weeks that I can remember – which is saying a lot given all of the weeks of the last year! – that Jerry Jones popped up as a villain. If you Google “Jerry Jones” and “racism” or “sexism” his catalogue of bullshit unfurls right before your eyes. Check out what he said about the national anthem. It’s just a rolling pile of bullshit.
What went down with Comstock Resources Inc should be another reminder to fans that siding with owners over and above labor, the players, means you’re siding with people who rake in the dough as others suffer. That’s true of them when it comes to their actual NFL teams and it’s true when it comes to the business dealings that got them the money to own that team in the first place. So let’s burn metaphorically Roland Burns, Comstock Resources and Jerry Jones, and let's burn how ownership models in professional sports are structured in the US. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: Gonna keep burning that for a while. Burn. [laughs] Fuck. After all that burning let’s celebrate some of the people that wanna change all of those horrible things in sports. I’d like to begin with the firestarters of the week: the first ever South Sudan Women’s Football League launched! Congratulations to everyone that made that happen. Amira, who’s our spitfire of the week?
Amira: That goes to Draymond Green who absolutely read the NBA for filth for the way they treat players when it comes to trades and they gave teams all of the opportunities to humiliate and all the power to navigate trade markets for players and then players are in his terms “castrated” when you are saying that you want a different situation or this isn’t good for your mental health, you’re seen as the worst person in the world. Calling out this double standard absolutely earns him the spitfire of the week. Check out a little bit of what he has to say…
Draymond Green: As much as we put into this game to be great, to come out here and be in shape, to produce for fans every single night, and most importantly, to help your team win, do you think that doesn't affect someone mentally? But as players we’re told 'oh no, you can't say that, you can't say this,' but teams can? It goes along the same lines of when everyone wants to say 'ah man, that young guy can't figure it out,' but no one wants to say the organization can't figure it out.
Brenda: Jessica, firelord of the week?
Jessica: Naomi Osaka, the newest investor in the North Carolina Courage, who won her fourth grand slam tennis title this weekend when she defeated Jen Brady 6-4 6-3. Osaka has now won all the slam finals she has made it to: 4/4! According to Ben Rothenburg, only three tennis players have ever done that, winning their first four slam finals in the Open Era. The list is Monica Seles, Roger Federer, and now Naomi Osaka. That’s beautiful.
Brenda: Goodness. Amira, do we have some heartwarmers this week?
Amira: We do. We wanna send a hearty congratulations to Ali Krieger and Ashlyn Harris who expanded their family and brought home a little baby!
Brenda: Aww.
Amira: While we all know that transracial adoption, especially a very public one, is very complicated for many reasons, I also wanna hold space for the meanings of loss and the loss that the baby’s birth family is experiencing as well as all of the congratulations and heartwarming happiness for Ashlyn and Ali. I do want to say what really warmed my heart was that the public post announcing the baby’s arrival also came with a nod and a letter to the birth mother, and to me that is a huge step forward for adoption advocacy and critical engagement with the adoption industry complex. So, that aside, absolutely heartwarming. The baby already has their own fashion Instagram page, so congratulations to all of you.
Brenda: Can I get a drumroll please?
[drumroll]
The torchbearer of this week is Momoko Nojo, the young woman who was integral to the #DontBeSilent campaign that ousted the former head of the Tokyo Olympics Committee, More, who had made a series of sexist comments that are trash and garbage, and she was smart and inspiring. So, continue to follow what is probably going to be a whole lot of innovative work on her part.
In these very dark times, we do like to talk about what’s good in our world. Jessica?
Jessica: Yeah, well, you know, hard week. But today right now I’m thrilled the sun is out. We went on lots of walks yesterday because we could and we didn’t have to put on 24 lbs of clothing in order to do it. So that’s great. My friend Mobley who I’ve talked about a lot on the show – I was in a couple of his music videos, there’s one more to come that I am in – he held of on releasing his newest EP because of COVID. It was supposed to come out at SXSW last year and so he’s waited and waited and waited, and it dropped on Friday! It was like the worst timing ever. He lives here in Austin, he went through it all, like all of us did. The EP is wonderful and I’m just so excited for Mobley.
Then I wanted to mention, my family, the stuff that we watched this week to get through – again, fortunate that we were able to watch anything – [laughter] but the things we really turned to this week was a show that we watch on Hulu, it’s an ABC show about extreme mini golf called Holey Moley, and Rob Riggle and Joe Tessitore are the commentators, and it just makes me laugh endlessly. I just think Rob Riggle’s delivery is so funny. There’s just so many dumb, bad jokes. They have a hole called Uranus, it looks like the planet Uranus. They make every joke possible about that, and that was really lovely this week. Then on Friday night Aaron and I rented the movie Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar, which, again, I’m not gonna say there’s anything smart about what we watched but we liked it so much, we laughed so hard on Friday night that we actually then also watched it again on Saturday. So, that has definitely been good for us this week.
Brenda: None of you can see but Jessica’s face is simply beaming and a little red from telling Uranus jokes. [Jessica laughs] So, that is darling. I’m gonna start so that Amira gets to finish this off, because I kind of feel like we’ll have a little bit of a tag team situation here. First, I’m really happy that the club Colo-Colo, one of the most helpful during the pandemic to Chileans, the football club; they’ve been around since the beginning of professionalization in 1933 and they were close to relegation or being dropped from the first division and they just barely eked it out and they made a ton of people happy in Chile, so I loved seeing all of that celebration.
And I would like to say: Bad Bunny on Saturday Night Live! Bad Bunny anywhere! And particularly I love to see him bring out Rosalía, a very talented young Catalan singer who deserves a kind of central place in the boom in kind of emo trap music that he represents. So, I was really happy to see her front and center there and I appreciate that he’s always bringing people along whether it’s Afro-Panamanian Sech, you know, putting his face just in front of him, and it’s something that I love about Bad Bunny just in general. So, it made me very very happy and I feel like maybe it made Amira happy too.
Amira: It did. It made me very happy for a number of reasons, but also if you haven’t seen the performance please go watch it, it’s very very sensual at the end, [Brenda laughs] which has spawned the best memes of the reactions to it, like people pretending like what Bad Bunny’s girlfriend is thinking while she’s watching it. [laughs] It’s the funniest. It was really fun to watch. But also, just shoutout to his cameo in the sea shanty bit, [Brenda laughs] with Regé-Jean, where he’s the navigator and he says, “Well the ocean’s that way…” and you just have to watch and see what he pulls out as his map. It’s a gem. I loved it, it was wonderful.
Yeah, so my what’s good this week: Black History Month is almost over which means that a good portion of my talking things are also done as well. I had a wonderful time speaking virtually at Vanderbilt with our friend Andrew Maraniss and friends of the show from The Black Athlete pod Derrick White and Lou Moore as well as Andre Williams. We had a good time talking about Black athletic activism and pioneers. I have an upcoming event at SUNY Cortland which I’m looking forward to this week as well as keynoting our graduate students’ WGSS big conference here at Penn State this next weekend on disruptions and eruptions, along with Myisha Cherry. That’s gonna be fun.
I’m also really looking forward to…Well, I’m not looking forward to it, but I am getting my second dose of the vaccination this week, and all of the things that Brenda said before around vaccination and how terrible the rollout is and also still being anxious about it, but it is happening and it’s the second dose so I fully expect to be sick for about a day and I’m gonna take it easy, but I’m just really thankful that it's happening. Part of that has also allowed me to feel much better about booking a week away for a writing retreat in March, and so the one week that I don’t have all of the talking shenanigans for women’s history month I’m going to go drive down and sit in a beach and write and finish the book. So, I am looking forward to that.
Brenda: Well, despite the fact that we have conflicting feelings about watching sports at this time and at this juncture with the global pandemic, we do still find ourselves turning to certain games, and this is gonna drop on Tuesday so tomorrow you can watch Canada vs Brazil and US vs Argentina in women’s football at the SheBelieves Cup. Also, A&M vs South Carolina in women's basketball to struggle for the top of the SEC, and that’s taking place on Sunday, February 28th. So, those are some of the things that we are watching this week.
That’s it for us here at Burn It All Down this week. You can find Burn It All Down on any of the places that you find your podcasts. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram @burnitalldownpod, and on Twitter @burnitdownpod. You can email us at burnitalldownpod@gmail.com or check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You can find previous episodes, transcripts and links to our Patreon. As always, we need to thank our patrons for their generous support, and that's just the evergreen tweet. This episode was produced by the amazing Tressa Versteeg, and our socials are done by Shelby Weldon. We are so grateful for everyone listening and your support. On behalf of all of us: burn on, and not out.