Episode 196: New News, Same Terrible Song of College Sports
Amira Rose Davis is joined by Shireen Ahmed and Jessica Luther to talk about the reoccurring awful issues in college sports: sexual harassment and racism. They discuss some of Jessica's reporting about LSU and Les Miles, Creighton basketball coach Greg McDermott's racist locker room speech and the ways wealthy alumni at the University of Texas and Ole Miss keep sexist and racist traditions alive. We also hear from Black UT alumni via Courtney Cox and the podcast Sounding Off.
Then Amira, Shireen and Jessica preview this week's interview with legendary bobsledder Kaillie Humphries, burn all that should be burned from this last week in sports and highlight torchbearers including boxing world champion Claressa Shields and new media company Togethxr from Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel, Sue Bird and Alex Morgan. They also share what's good in their lives (Spoiler alert: WandaVision) and what they are watching.
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
Listen to SOUNDING OFF by friend of the show Courtney Cox wherever you get your podcasts. The episode featured this week is from their two part roundtable on The Eyes of Texas.
LSU athletic director wanted to fire Les Miles in 2013 for misconduct. The school didn't act. https://usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2021/03/05/les-miles-lsu-coach-should-have-been-fired-2013-former-ad-said/4594793001/
“UT needs rich donors”: Emails show wealthy alumni supporting “Eyes of Texas” threatened to pull donations https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/01/ut-eyes-of-texas-donors-emails
Texas Lifts Its Mask Mandate Just In Time To Host Some Basketball Tournaments: https://defector.com/texas-lifts-its-mask-mandate-just-in-time-to-host-some-basketball-tournaments
$48.3 million Penn State football building expansion gets green light from PSU trustees: https://www.pennlive.com/news/2021/02/483-million-penn-state-football-building-expansion-gets-green-light-from-psu-trustees
US Soccer Annual General Meeting shows DEI has long way to go: https://www.starsandstripesfc.com/2021/2/27/22305191/us-soccer-annual-general-meeting-racist-comments-has-long-way-to-go
Transcript
Amira: Welcome to Burn It All Down. I’m Amira, and today I'm joining up with Jessica and Shireen to dive into the news that was this week in college sports, most of which – all of which – has us particularly ragey this week. We will also preview this week's interview episode, burn some things and shoutout some torchbearers. Let’s waste no time and dive right into it. I did wanna say to y’all: this is March 2021, which feels impossible since it was just March 2020 and we’re still trying to wrap our heads around March 2020. So, we're officially a year into the pandemic, not necessarily a place we thought we’d be a year out when things started shutting down in March. I think a lot of people's Instagram and Facebook memories this week are the reminders of the kind of last things that we were doing when the world shut down.
So, I know that this year has been relentless and we've chronicled the difficulties and the losses and all of those things, but I also want to say, okay, we're here a year later. If you’re looking back at this past year, is there anything that has emerged to you as not necessarily silver linings, but we talked about capturing those says of light. What over this past year not only got you through it but what do you look back on and say this was a clusterfuck but this thing I’m gonna remember fondly?
Shireen: Clusterfuck yes. I started a master’s program at Ryerson University and I love my cohort, I love my classmates. I'm obsessed with them. I didn't know them in the end of August but now I can't imagine my life without them. Also, can’t wait to see Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias in concert because that's what the universe took away from me in this pandemic. Yes folks, I still have the life-sized cardboard cutout of Enrique that I got on my 40th birthday. Love you, Erendira. I’m just saying, I'm ready for those men to dance on a stage for me and me dance in the audience. I will be vaccinated, hopefully so will my country – which, I don't know how the rollouts are going. God, this went down a rabbit hole. Anyways, I’m ready. Vamos!
Amira: [laughs] Jess?
Jessica: It's interesting, Shireen, that you say that, because the very first thing we cancelled was we were supposed to go to Toronto to see Pearl Jam, and we thought, oh, in the summer or something! But of course here we are. Who knows when that will happen. I was thinking back on this…Of course I launched a book in the middle of all of this, and that was amazing. I actually get a lot of travel anxiety, so one of the silver linings for me was that I did it all from my house. I mean, it would of course have been amazing to see people in person, but not having to travel to a bunch of places was actually nice for me. Then just on a personal level, there was a phase that my family went through where we played a ton of board games, and I think we're just out of patience and our nerves are frayed at this point so maybe we’ll get back there, but those weekends were so slow and fun and I don’t know that we would’ve had that time otherwise.
Amira: Yeah, I think that generally my digital groups, like variety of them from digital Peloton groups which include an Instagram group that I have people from all parts of my life who do Peloton, childhood friends and college friends and high school friends and current colleagues, and that's lovely. Black Girl Magic in Peloton, but also people that I’ve met through Peloton who I’m now friends with and do accountability stuff with. But not just that, I mean, my writing groups have literally gotten me through this year in terms of trying to write, and to have people on five days a week I have between my two writing groups and they're predominantly Black women, and just getting on and seeing everybody's beautiful face and being inspired by their brilliance has been really a necessary consistent thing that has developed.
So, these digital communities have given a lot, and of course that includes BIAD and moving to Zoom allows us to see each other when we record as well. So, that is what I'm thinking of and what I'm gonna bring with me to this next chapter. Look – Shireen’s holding up my bedazzled name from our ‘So you think you know your co-hosts’ game that just dropped on Patreon. So, Patreon supporters, go over and watch our shenanigans! [Shireen laughs]
Alright y'all, college sports was showing their whole entire ass this week, and what's wild is it's not even March Madness! Like, we’re just on the brink of one of the most exploitative, terrible features of college sports, and that's not even what we're talking about this week! The stories that we dive into today I thought were important to talk about together because they are interconnected, and if we have these conversations together we can understand just have exploitative and abusive and enabling these kind of racist and sexist systems are, and how this harm continues not just to exist but flourish within college sports. So, what we’re gonna do today is we’re gonna talk about LSU, we're gonna talk about Creighton's basketball coach’s comments about the plantation, we're gonna talk about the University of Texas and beyond, and linking these things together and moving through these stories to kind of wrestle with and sit with what they tell us again and again about college sports. So, new stories but the same old sad-ass song.
To kick us off, Jessica, you have done tremendous reporting along with Nancy Armour and Kenny Jacoby with USA Today on LSU and their many violations of Title IX, among other things. There's updates this week that we have, particularly around Les Miles. I was wondering if you could give us those updates and talk about where things stand now?
Jessica: Yeah, so, it was a busy week for LSU news. I think the three of us, Kenny, Nancy and I, I think we put out 7 or 8 pieces. Newspaper writing is so intense. But it was just incredibly busy. So, there were two separate reports that came out. The first was actually from 2013, so, eight years ago LSU hired an outside law firm to look into reports that their then head football coach, Les Miles, that he had texted female students, took some of them to his condo alone, made them feel uncomfortable and on a least one occasion kissed a student and suggested they go to a hotel after telling her he could “help her career.” Miles had denied kissing this student and says he was only mentoring these young women, but the law firm found his behavior inappropriate.
LSU issued a letter of reprimand, required him to sign forms stating that he had read and understood the school’s policies. He was also ordered not to hire student employees to babysit for him and to cease being alone with female students altogether. Still, he was not fired for another three years after he had a poor start to the football season. He was hired by Kansas as their new head coach a few years ago. We knew about this report months ago but after Kenny requested it the school denied the request. So, USA Today had to sue. Turns out, and we know this now that we have the report because USA Today won, that the school had promised Miles they they would fight the release of the report in court if it ever came to it. Kansas of course is now under fire for whether or not they’re going to in some way discipline Les Miles, possibly fire him. Last night they told us that he is now on administrative leave.
So, that report was on Thursday, and on Friday morning LSU released a 148-page report from a different outside law firm, this one called Husch Blackwell, that looked into how the school overall has handled reports of sexual assault and violence over the last six years or so, though it also includes the Miles stuff. And they found that there was “serious institutional failure” – the Title IX department was way understaffed, I think they had two people, and without the resources it needed to do its job. The preventative education was found to be confusing, so in many cases ineffective. Husch Blackwell also noted that there have been five different reviews – I just want everyone to sit with this one – there have been FIVE different reviews of LSU’s Title IX policy in the last five years before Husch Blackwell’s and LSU never did anything with any of that information.
The only two individual people disciplined were both in athletics, both because of how they handled cases involving football players: executive deputy athletic director Verge Ausberry and Miriam Segar, a senior associate athletic director. Ausberry was suspended for 30 days without pay while Segar was suspended for 21 days without pay. They both have to do training on the proper handling of sexual and physical violence complaints. There's more to say here – it was a 148 page report – but I do think that gives a pretty good overall recap from these two different reports that we saw this week around LSU.
Amira: My goodness. I’m not surprised but it's just…When you sit with it, it's astonishing and disturbing. Shireen?
Shireen: I just have a question, actually. So, in this process – and I'm so grateful that you are literally the world expert on this – is this no system in place, or are they creating a system of reporting for this? Because sometimes we see…My very limited knowledge of working with survivors of systems of toxicity and violence, it's often the ones at the helm of whatever, that hold the most power, when they're abusive there's no way to report them. What does this look like in the college football world?
Jessica: Yeah, it’s really difficult. So, it's interesting – yesterday the lawyer from Husch Blackwell, Scott Schneider, when he did his presentation to the board of supervisors, which is where we all first learned about all of the stuff from the report. When it comes to athletics, he mentioned Baylor multiple times and he said the lesson from Baylor was that you can't have athletics being involved at all in any of these cases, right? That you need…There has to be independence. So, one of the hard things is to get the athletic department to give Title IX all of the independence to do these investigations and to take seriously whatever the outcome of that is. I just think it's really difficult to untangle all of these threads, because we know in our reporting we kept saying over and over again that when Les Miles was at LSU he was the highest paid employee in the state, so certainly the highest paid employee at the university.
So, even if you have all these policies in place, whether or not they function properly is often skewed by the power differentials that are involved, and that’s a real difficult thing to work out. So, trying to get all of the stuff to go through Title IX like it's supposed to, the problem at LSU actually in the last few years…Miriam Seger and Verge Ausberry definitely didn’t do that, that's why they got punished – they kept stuff in house. But a lot of the stuff they did hand over at some point finally to Title IX, and then Title IX just didn’t have the ability. Whether or not they were competent enough is not really even in question here. Part of the point is we can’t even tell if they were competent because they were so overworked and overwhelmed and over-burdened that no one can succeed in this system as it was set up there.
Amira: Precisely. Wasn’t it like they had a coordinator and then there’s a staff of two or three–
Jessica: Right. For 30,000 students, something like that.
Amira: Exactly. That is wild. So that’s low compared to peer institutions, but even when you look at Title IX offices across the nation you're talking about a staff of three, maybe five. We talked about this before around Title IX, and it's intentionally vague. We know that with administrative changes, like we've seen, there’s a million other things thrown at it the last minute. They’re called to enforce a lot of different things. It’s hard to not only have the bandwidth but it’s that…Jessica, one of the things that you've taught me and the world, for those that read your work, is a lot of this is about enabling, and enabling comes in many forms. It’s not just individuals making choices to not engage or look the other way, but it's also when systems are set up in a way to be ineffective and then enabling is not correcting or reforming or trying to figure out these systems. So, the vagueness, that gray area under Title IX that we chip away at in many different ways but never address, is one of the things in the toolkit that schools are given, they’re faulty tools. It's like giving sand toys to somebody and expecting them to build a house with it.
The other thing I wanted to say is I just wanted to thank you and Dan for the reporting you did on Baylor and the way that you in that case really set a standard. Obviously I know you talk about this and Baylor is referred back to a lot, but what we’ve seen over and over and over again is that it's too many institutions, right? And of course in Unsportsmanlike Conduct you talked about the playbook and the need to write a new playbook for dealing with this. But I also think it, Jess, needs to be said how much lifting you and Dan did with that initial reporting that has changed the way we even can report and talk about and consider these stories, and we’re just at the tip of the iceberg but it feels like we don’t reckon enough or wrestle enough with the fact that it took the two of you being and carrying a really heavy load to even get this conversation to where it is now and how exhausting that must be, and I just wanted to take time to say that.
Jessica: That you. It’s so interesting because Dan and I were of course just talking about this yesterday, and I tweeted a little bit about this but we just had no idea what we were…We knew what we were doing, we were competent. But we didn’t understand that five years later I’d be listening to this thing and they’d be talking about Baylor and, I mean, it’s a nice feeling to see all those dots connected. I just wanted to go back to your point about how the system itself it set up to allow all this slippage that we see all the time, and I just will reiterate that there have been five reviews in the last five years of these policies and found them wanting in the exact ways that Husch Blackwell has found them wanting, so the fact that nothing was done when this was brought to their attention…The system was functioning in a way that was okay for the last five years, and so we should pause and think about why this moment it was not okay.
Amira: Shireen.
Shireen: Yeah, I have another question just about this thing, and since you reported on Baylor with Dan. I was wondering, and maybe I’m being too optimistic/glass half full – have you seen a shift at all? Is the dial moving at all, Jessica?
Jessica: I think it’s moving. I think this is a really hard thing to evaluate. The efficacy of these kinds of changes…People don't like when you ask that question to them because it’s just really hard to put your finger on things that go well. And I say this all the time as a journalist: people don't come to me when they’re like, “Hey, I had a great experience with Title IX.” [Shireen laughs] Like, they have no reason to reach out and tell you that. So, what I hear all the time tend to be negative stories, so it's hard for me to say. The fact that I don't know a ton of what's going on at Baylor could mean that things are smoother there when it comes to this process – I’m never gonna say anything is perfect at all, I wouldn’t even come close to that. But it could mean that they’ve learned to shut it down again in a way that we hadn't anticipated, and I just don’t know at this point how to tell. But it does feel…I mean, I don’t know how you guys see it. It feels different to me. I do think it’s possible.
I don't know what LSU will look like in six months or a year or five years, but if they do the one thing that they said yesterday they’re gonna do which is immediately create a much bigger staff to handle this, that will matter in some real way. That probably will not fix all the issues, but it will fix some fundamental things. So, hopefully that is better. The thing I always say about this is we want it to be right right now, because we know when it’s not right people are being harmed and it’s really hard to hold that. It's gonna be a slow process and we know that means that people will be harmed as we get it right, and I just think…Yeah, I like to think it’s getting better. I have to think it's getting better, or else why do any of this? But I also am not naive, and it’s slow.
Amira: So, one of the things that jumped out to me about the Les Miles report was a piece in it that talked about how he was really hands-on in the hiring of student workers, and particularly in the pursuit of the certain “look,” right? Attractive, blonde, fit, obviously white. Basically the report talked about how Les Miles made supervisors feel that student workers that did not fit this “look” should be pressured to be terminated and receive fewer hours. It got me thinking about this look which pops up many many times, whether we’re talking about hostess programs, we’ve seen things in conversations around that at Vanderbilt and many other places where that’s seen as a recruitment tool, right?
Or we’ve seen this conversation about the look in terms of policing the sidelines of football and basketball games – Shireen burned stuff at Northwestern cheerleading, and this is one of the oft-mentioned things for cheerleaders of color on dance teams, which is that the look of who gets to represent the school in those official capacities is really curated. So, the optics around sports and the preoccupation with this look rests on a majority Black labor force in terms of athletic labor, a majority attractive white/blonde cheerleading dance team recruitment hostess program, and then the study body and the alumni and the fans. This is the lay of the land. The racial disparities in terms of who has control, who’s working and who has the power absolutely contributes to this idea of plantation politics when it comes to college sports, and particularly college basketball and football, men’s basketball.
So, one of the other things that happened this week is that Greg McDermott, who’s the coach of the Creighton men's basketball team, had a postgame speech in which he said to his team the following: “We have to stick together. We need both feet in. I need everyone to stay on the plantation. I can’t let anyone leave the plantation.” So, it almost felt like he was saying the quiet part out loud. What has happened since is that he’s been suspended. He put out a statement offering to tender his resignation; that did not accept that, they just suspended him. He talked about the pain and hurt he caused. This comes on the heels of course, you know, Pat Chambers, our men's basketball coach here at Penn State, resigned after it came out that he referred to wanting to “loosen a noose” around a player’s neck. A fencing coach was fired at St. John’s after derogatory remarks about Black people. Obviously in January we talked about the football coach at Tennessee. Chattanooga, who was smearing Stacey Abrams in the state of Georgia.
So, it’s part and parcel of a kind of reckoning that is rooted out some of the ways that plantation politics persist. But this was particularly stark because it said it! It said it right there. [laughter] It said the word “plantation.” What’s wild to me is this…Regina Bradley, who’s an academic and author, had this great quote about plantations because of everybody doing the gymnastics to be like, “Well, what about…It wasn't racist!” Like, rushing to the defense of McDermott. Regina was like, okay, lemme get this straight – white people wanna live in subdivisions named after plantations, wanna get married at plantations, wanna go to plantation-themed balls, but don’t wanna reckon with the fact that literally the idea of a plantation is predicated on enslavement and the ghosts of slaves and things like that?
That's kind of how I felt about this, is that the fact that these are the analogies that coaches reach to tells you exactly what you need to know about how they even see the system, consciously or unconsciously. I don’t know if y’all caught these remarks and had reactions to them?
Jessica: Yeah, I think this is interesting because I had heard that…It’s not even a defense I guess, but I heard that he was probably supposed to say “reservation” – which is also its own messed up imperialist whatever. But he didn’t, right? And the point is he’s looking at a bunch of Black men and the word that comes out of his mouth was plantation. I’m with you, Amira, that the idea that anyone’s arguing that there's not racist – not even undertones – overtones to saying that to a bunch of young Black men in a system that Taylor Branch very famously however many years ago in The Atlantic said “had a whiff of the plantation.” That's exactly it, and I don’t really even have a smart thing to say. It just seems so obvious, and the fact that this is a debate at all is ridiculous. I’m glad that Creighton at least did something in response to this.
Amira: Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, just about the apology that we always hear. I’m so frustrated with this because the automatic result is, “Well, that’s not who I am.” It’s like, bruh, you literally said it. It is exactly who you are. I don’t know how to process that when I see those words come out, “Well, this isn’t who I am…This is what I’ve done…These words don’t reflect me.” They came from your mouth! How does that work? I don’t…
Amira: And also, I’m sick of it, like, I don’t actually care if it’s you or not. [Jessica laughs] I don’t need to know you. It’s telling me enough about what’s happening around, and also the “This is not me, I don’t have a racist bone in my body” – like, we’ve confirmed racism is not a bone disease. [Shireen laughing] It’s not gonna be in your body in that way.
Shireen: Sorry, I don’t mean to laugh but that is so good.
Amira: IT’S NOT, RIGHT!? Like, everybody always wants to be like, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” Okay, cool. But also I think one of the things that really drove home these remarks is not just the viral video of that strength and conditioning coach making his Black players hold the chair squat on the wall while holding a weight as he literally ran on top of them–
Jessica: While they were singing.
Amira: While they were singing. It was so… [Jessica groans] Ugh. But also, of course, good ol’ Texas – the University of Texas provided a stirring example of said plantation politics. On the ongoing battle over The Eyes of Texas and the controversy there. If you recall, and we’ve talked about this on the show before, Black players and Black students there and Black alumni talked about not wanting the racist song to be A) in existence anymore, but particularly not requiring student athletes to be on the field for it and to sing it and to engage in that way. One of the things that came out this week was a bunch of emails from donors voicing their feelings about said song. Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, I thought it was funny…So, pretty early on Monday morning Dan texted me innocuously and it just said, “Did you see this?” And I was like, huh, wonder what. He sent me this piece by Kate McGee at The Texas Tribune that was all about these emails, Amira, and I just…It’s not that I’m surprised by it, but everyone I think should be upset that this is how there’s still people functioning at this point. So, they were all kicked off because when UT played Oklahoma, which is a huge rivalry game every year, all of the players for the Longhorns left the field before The Eyes of Texas except for a while dude named Sam Ehlinger who was the quarterback. So, there are all these images of just him alone on the field while I guess the band played The Eyes of Texas and so alumni were really mad about this, “Poor Sam Ehlinger out there on his own” and blah blah blah.
So, The Texas Tribune, Kate McGee, she put in a records request for all the emails that the president got, I guess that said “The Eyes of Texas” after this. I just want to quote three of them. I think they’re a good representation of what people were saying. So, “UT needs rich donors who love The Eyes of Texas more than they need one crop of irresponsible and uninformed students or faculty who won't do what they are paid to do.” I just wanna point out here that the students aren’t paid. “It's time for you to put the foot down and make it perfectly clear that the heritage of Texas will not be lost. It is sad that it is offending the blacks. As I said before the blacks are free and it's time for them to move on to another state where everything is in their favor.”
Amira: What fucking state would that be!? [Shireen laughs] I’m sorry.
Jessica: And then someone named Larry Wilkinson wrote, “Less than 6% of our current student body is black. The tail cannot be allowed to wag the dog….. and the dog must instead stand up for what is right. Nothing forces those students to attend UT Austin. Encourage them to select an alternate school ….NOW!” Maybe Mr. Wilkinson should consider why only 6% of the population at UT is Black when 12% of Texas’s population is Black. This might all be related, Mr. Wilkinson. The part that really got me though in the piece was that a mother concerned about her son’s mental health wrote to the school for help, and according to the Tribune it “appeared to go unintentionally unanswered.” When a student affairs employee asked if the president’s office wanted to respond directly, the president’s office declined. But the communications director wrote, “If you think we can help that student, then please proceed. I’m afraid The Eyes of Texas issue is requiring a lot of bandwidth right now.” It’s just that moment where you’re like, what is this university for? What are we doing here?
So, it was just…It’s not surprising with everything we know about the University of Texas and racism and this country and racism and college football and racism. But there is something very stark seeing it laid out that way. I would just add: because I’m a student at UT I get all the emails, and we got an email at 4:57pm on Friday. So, this came out Monday morning, early when Dan texted me. Friday at 4:57pm we got a letter from the president of the university condemning racism and saying that he actually disagrees with The Texas Tribune’s characterization here, that these were just a handful of the emails among all of these of support. The Tribune was really clear there were about 300 emails, 75 of them sort of fit this mold of being really angry and wanting to pull money from the school for this.
So, on Tuesday apparently we're about to get…They created a committee, so when the football players said we don't want to walk out onto the field under this racist song tomorrow, you need to end it; the president’s compromise was to create a committee of course, this is such a university bureaucratic bullshit way to handle anything. They were gonna look into The Eyes of Texas and that report is supposed to come out on Tuesday. I’ll just say, it galls me that we’re still acting like having what he called a “fierce, nuanced conversation” about this, about something that is just racist, is worth anything at all. I just...It's so wild. It goes back to what Amira was saying, like, why are we arguing about whether or not telling a bunch of Black men to stay on a plantation is racist? It’s just racist, and we should act accordingly. But these emails make clear that this tension between the donors and the money – who are racist and clearly willing to say so directly to the president – that tension with literally just doing the right thing.
Amira: Absolutely, and I think that an important point to make is that the downplaying of how many it is really doesn’t matter because it’s like, what do you give weight to? And in this case one of the things we know is that schools are absolutely concerned with their donor base and absolutely policing the actions of Black students, motivated by the fear of that donor base. So whether it's 75 letters or 1 letter, if you’re then enacting the concerns of that that's what matters. And in this case we know, right Shireen, that players have now talked about being pressured to remain on the field for the song.
Shireen: Yeah, I think it comes back to the culture that Jessica and Amira, you guys were both talking about, is that the systems of racism are so deeply embedded in the football program, and like a stunning example of this. I just am going to also mention a Texas Tribune piece that Amira threw to me, and we’ll have it in the show notes, but it’s words from the Black players and particularly this one from a junior linebacker, DeMarvion Overshown. I couldn’t stop thinking about this sentence, like I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. The instruction to them, who were told to stay on the field, was, “They said y'all don't have to sing it. But y’all have to stay on the field. Y’all have to go over there and at least show fans appreciation for coming out and watching you guys play.” He further went on to say, “It was really eye opening. These are some high-power people that come to see you play and they can keep you from getting a job in the state of Texas.”
This is basically coercion and this is basically threatening a young Black man that I’m going to derail the career that you haven't even started if you don’t do this. It’s like the collision of mental angst, stress, fear…I can’t imagine. And now this young athlete is supposed to go play? And supposed to go perform? The layers of terrible, horrific…I can’t with this. And getting back to those words, university is supposed to be a place of enlightenment, it’s supposed to be a place of growth and dare I say safety. This whole thing is a mess, and I’m so grateful to these players for speaking out because, again, identifying himself will also lead to a multitude of…Perhaps being isolated, or there could be repercussions. So I do also wanna shout out the athletes that spoke up publicly, because that takes an incredible amount of courage.
Amira: Yeah, so in some ways this story is about Texas. Jessica, if people want to dive deeper into this, about UT, where might they look?
Jessica: We had Frank Guridy on the show in episode 194 where we talked a bunch about Texas and I just cannot more highly recommend his new book The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics, which comes out on March 23rd, which is so soon, Frank – from the University of Texas Press. There should be more on this. I mean, I’m working on my dissertation about all this. There’s of course a sad, deep dark history…Not even deep. A dark history here. It’s shallow, it's on the surface. And so what we’re seeing today…I mean, when I was reading The Texas Tribune article on Monday I think I texted Dan, “This will be the epilogue of my dissertation” because I’m writing about the mid 1970s but these are the exact same things that we're seeing in 2021 and we should just be deeply concerned about, as Shireen said: universities are about growth, and we’re just in the same fucking space, we just have a different way to talk about it now.
Amira: Absolutely. While that story and that example was from the University of Texas, it’s also a story much bigger than that. Similar dynamics are at play at universities across the country where an aging wealthy donor base is trying to assert their own vision of universities and have a direct line of access to the people in power, and a lot of this is particularly centering around athletics as either the site of controversy or the place where the optics are kind of most fiercely contested. I think that sports are an essential part of the conversation about the relationship between donor power and university influence. This immediately made me think of debates that we’re seeing at Texas A&M around statues and monuments on campus and the very active Black student athlete organizations and very real fear of upsetting the donors there.
It also made me think about Ole Miss because that is literally to me the mountaintop of a lot of this conversation and I just wanted to remind everybody or refer people to if they haven’t been familiar with this story: Ashton Pittman had a great three part series in the Mississippi Free Press three years ago or so that looked at many things in Mississippi but also told the story in particular using emails from the journalism dean to a bunch of donors who were very concerned, right, about the Ole Miss that they now see. And I just wanna talk about one of those.
In September of 2018 Will Norton, the dean of the journalism school, got an email from a prominent donor, Blake Tartt, a graduate of Ole Miss, who had been in town to watch a football game where a lot of donors had come back to and had seen and somebody else had taken a picture of a Black UM student downtown in square, put it on Facebook and said they’re allowing prostitutes on the square, like, “this is terrible” et cetera. The same person had documentedly interacted with women students who were also dressed like they were going out and said nothing, said hi, took this picture and it circulated. It also prompted a lot of emails. One such email from Tartt said he emailed the dean to talk about how far he felt that Ole Miss’s culture had fallen. He said, “You did not see the square, the fights and the real African hookers. Mark my words if it does not stop we will have a shooting on The Square. That is serious. I know how hard it must be. The Ole Muss Culture has been ruined (sic). It will never be fixed. Just like Houston it will never be the same.”
He went on to respond to him and say once a shooting happens they all will wish they’d never stopped playing Dixie and made up a stupid story about Colonel Reb. “Even the gangbangers and 62-7 beating by Alabama is bottom. The LANDSHARK is a disgrace to Ole Miss…I had to watch the blind side to make me feel good about Ole Miss when I got home. I am really sick today because of all of this. I have work to do. I can take it any longer.” To me this obviously was one of the first things I thought about, right? One of the things to me that the email revealed and what he’s saying very very loudly is “we’re losing the culture here,” and the fact that he points out stuff like “Dixie” which is same kind of battle you’re seeing over The Eyes of Texas.
The point that he’s talking about, the rethinking of mascots and statues like we’re seeing at TAMU and across the country, as he is saying this in this email and the very presence of Black students is also read as threat here. That to me is one of the things that you’re seeing at institutions across this country and as the emails evidence, as the kind of concern about the optics and reputation and heritage of these schools, so much of that centers and is propelled by sports. This is why I think it’s important to think about these conversations together, because it's about optics. The donors are coming back through these football programs and to these games, and they're looking for the curation of an old south nostalgia with the playing of these songs, even if the schools are integrated. They’re fine with integration as long as it produces Black players that will win for them, right? But that’s it. Which is why the spirit squads and the dance teams still need to be lily white, right?
I do research on that, I have an article on Black Perspectives about Black cheerleaders, and one of the things that they did, the Black women who were cheerleaders when they protested for inclusion, they said you want our boys to play for you but you don’t want us to cheer. They figured out that line in the sand and what it represented. So, when I think about the look that Les Miles is trying to promote and when I think about the power that people are cultivating and I think about these systems and I think about the enabling and I think about how everything is kind of moving along as usual. To me it’s literally the curation and sustaining a system that is predicated on a majority Black labor force, but also on the spectacle, also on the racial politics, the plantation politics of these sports that now people are saying the quiet part out loud and people’s ears are perking up, but it’s been going on for a while.
I just wanted to end this discussion by giving some space to the voices of Black alumni from Texas, because one of the things that is missing in these conversations is understanding that Black alumni exist but why they don’t have the political power: A) because these schools were segregated and so therefore they don’t have as long a history of Black alumni groups, but also a lot of the philosophy of philanthropy at these schools is predicated on finding alumni who had wonderful experiences at these institutions and then wanna give, and a lot of Black students coming through PWIs are about the people and networks they gained there, not the institution itself.
But our friend of the show Courtney Cox, UT alum, over on The Sound of Victory, on their podcast Sounding Off together with Perry Johnson, hosted a roundtable of Black alumni a few months ago talking about The Eyes of Texas. I wanted to toss it now to Courtney to introduce a clip and a play a little bit of the conversation they had.
Courtney: Hi, y’all. I’m Dr. Courtney Cox. I study sports for a living. I’m also a longtime listener and big fan of Burn It All Down and, you know, occasional guest. And if the “y’all” didn’t give it away, I’m also from Texas, a designation that feels more and more like a confession these days. Given the recent actions of state politicians when it comes to basic utilities or rich donors when it comes to a certain school song, I can admit we’re really raggedy right now. As a two time graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and a former employee of Longhorn Network, I’ve heard The Eyes of Texas more times than I can count. And that’s why when UT football players joined together in protest of this song along with several other key demands to make the campus more equitable for everyone, I was really intrigued. So much so that I created a two part roundtable on Sounding Off, the podcast I host with music scholar Perry B. Johnson, featuring six Black UT alum.
I felt like their voices were missing from the conversation and wanted to have them weigh in on what the song means to them and how the university should respond. Fast forward a few months and a school song to the tune of I’ve Been Working on the Railroad is still getting heavy rotation – most recently after a slew of nasty, bothered, racist emails came to the forefront thanks to Texas Tribune articles by Kate McGee and tweets by several UT players. For this reason I’m grateful to Burn It All Down for allowing me to share a portion of the podcast. If you wanna hear more you can find both episodes of Sounding Off wherever you get your podcasts or at thesoundofvictory.org/soundingoff. The next voices you’ll hear are Warnessa Hightower, Andrew Lilly, and TJ Finley.
Andrew: I know we talk about two Americas right now, and I feel like this situation has highlighted two UTs at the very least, because I know listening to Clarence Hill down here in Dallas on ESPN radio, he’s mentioned that this song has…I don’t wanna say been boycotted, but the Black community as a whole or generally speaking hasn’t really taken part in singing this song since the 80s, you know? And Nia can probably speak to this better than I can because she was there before us, but I just know this has been a situation for decades now, and it's almost like to me it's been the worst-kept secret because it’s like, look, as a whole all the Black community does not sing this song. I’ve been to many many many weddings of Longhorns and classmates of color. You know, we don’t sing that at our weddings for the most part – or at least I haven't taken part in that – whereas you talk to white alums, “Oh yeah, we sang it at our weddings and my grandfather played it at his funeral and I played it at my retirement ceremony.” I’m like…Okay, we clearly live in two different worlds here.
Warnessa: Once I joined the board of directors of my chapter I was at one point membership chair for my Texas chapter, and as membership chair you’re kind of the host for the event, and they played The Eyes of Texas, and I think this was the first time I ever hosted the event. They played The Eyes of Texas, I sat down, I handed someone else the mic and I said I refuse to sing this song. A couple of my other board of directors were like, “Warnessa, you're being disrespectful!” and I said, “This song is racist.” I just said that out loud, number one because at the end of an event libations are flowing [laughs] so, slip of the tongue. Then I went to explain and they were like, “Oh my gosh,” and so then I remember there was another event, I was still membership chair, and I didn't sing the song and someone questioned it. I remember one of my counterparts said, “She has an issue with it. Warnessa, I'm glad you stand up for your issue.” I just remember her saying that, and she's supportive, she's an ally, but she really was like, “I’m glad you stand up for your issue.” That’s YOUR issue with the song.
So, again, at the time I believe I was the only Black person on the board of directors, and so it was just so interesting that I was so isolated in that. But then fast forward when all this George Floyd stuff came about and we were talking about putting out a statement about Black Lives Matter, and I actually got an email from one of my other board of directors, and he said, “Once you told me about the song I refused to sing it, and I’ve taught my daughter that.” This is an older white man. I just thought it was interesting because in retrospect I never remembered him not singing the song too. I just remember I was kind of in this bubble of me sitting down, me sometimes screaming out "This song is racist!” [laughs] in the middle of folks singing it, because we all know who Warnessa is. It was at that point to where I was detached from the other Texas Exes, and I felt very isolated and very alone, but to the point where I didn't even notice that I had an ally right there not singing it with me too. So, that kind of shows the emotion that goes on with the song and the fight that you have even once you leave campus, when you decide to go to these events, how polarizing it can be and how the tradition…The tradition doesn't erase the hurt.
Courtney: Just to kind of think about what Andrew is saying with two UTs, right, this idea of this woman saying to Warnessa, “That's cute, that's YOUR issue.” Is there a way that this also kind of reveals both tensions located at, like, this idea of it not being a UT issue, we all need to grapple with this as a university. It’s like a disgruntled Texas Ex or these football players or…There’s a way that it also seems like there’s trying to be a segmentation of “just the Black people have a problem with this song” that is both inaccurate but also speaks to this kind of idea of, well, Black UT does this, we’re over here so they can get their issue there, but we’re gonna do this over here. Does it feel like that's also kind of been a thing both past and present for y’all?
TJ: It’s like a perfect microcosm of the double consciousness of a Black Longhorn, like, you are on the same campus as all these other people and all these other mostly white people, you're on the same campus as them, you share the same experiences as them – to a certain extent. You share the same traditions as them, to a certain extent. You root for the same teams as them. It’s a stark reminder of who you are on the campus. It's a reminder of like, “You are something other, you are viewed as something other, your experience is something other,” because most of the Longhorns went through their whole college time and either didn’t know about the song or maybe knew about the song but it just didn’t affect their experience, it didn’t affect the way that they experience a football game, or it doesn't affect the way they experience these Confederate statues as they walk around campus.
So, you have these stark reminders that are all over, and this is not specific or special to the University of Texas. This is at every PWI. There’s this reminder of like, “You are the minority here, and this experience wasn’t exactly created for someone like you.” It doesn’t mean you can't enjoy it, but it just means that you’re gonna have these reminders of I am other here and I’m viewed as other here, at least by certain people. So, the song is just like a perfect example of like, when that happens you immediately go back into your body, like, I’m a Black person who goes to a school where 3% of us are Black, maybe 4% of us are Black on a good year, and that's it. We're in our own bubble so to speak, and when the song is playing it brings you back to that sort of place.
Amira: This week Jessica interviews bobsledding legend Kaillie Humphries about her career, training and competing in the time of COVID, and the fallout from her reporting emotional and mental abuse by her head coach when she was on Team Canada.
Kaillie Humphries: At the end of the day, we should all feel empowered to be safe and to feel confident in the environments that we're in, and we all have that power to choose that. And for me it was walking away from a career that I had built up, not knowing what the future was gonna hold, but now looking towards building up a new career.
Amira: Alright y’all, it's time for everybody’s favorite segment: the burn pile. I will kick it off today, staying on the theme of ridiculousness in college sports, and I'm going to stay right here at home this week. This week the Penn State board of trustees voted to approve the $48.3 million football building expansion to improve and renovate the Lasch football building here at Penn State. This building, for folks who don't know, is the off the field headquarters, so this is their meeting rooms, offices for coaches, staff, training and conditioning facilities and other workrooms and study rooms for students. So, they have made an argument that they need to start these renovations now in order to keep up with the arms race in college football. Again, as Jessica and many others have pointed out, the way that a lot of football programs try to diminish their returns and their revenue is by pouring it into their facilities. So, this is why you see Alabama with, like, very fancy spas; LSU has game seats...I can’t. Just look at the pictures, it's wild.
So, this renovation project would redo the lobby, it would create a hydro pool, all of this stuff. It's ridiculous in any year, but this year in particular when athletics has had to furlough people because of COVID, this year when Penn State employees across the university have been furloughed, when department budgets have been sliced…We just lost a whole bunch of resources in the library. Maintenance projects have been deferred and moved down the line. In this year where universities are trying to desperately hold it together, when student fees and tuition are in flux, when people are losing their jobs, when other athletics teams at Penn State have been told to wait until they have all the needed dollars in hand from donors. In this year the board of trustees have approved this, which requires borrowing money from the university.
So, it’s not even that they have it in hand, but they are asking for this and now have the approval to borrow this money from the university on the promise that they will attract donors, like we were talking about, to make it back and then move some of that money from athletics over to university operations. I can’t tell you how frustrated this makes me. It was a 27-6 vote, so it wasn't even close. I’m very disappointed, and I know it's not the only place it’s happening but it was a smack in the face to see $48.3 million approved with such enthusiasm in a year where so many others the university are suffering and pinching pennies to survive. But you know, a hydro pool, new lobby…Priorities. Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: Alright Jess, what are you burning this week?
Jessica: Man, Amira, I just think we gotta figure out a different system here, like, maybe our higher ed shouldn’t be based on a bunch of rich old people donating their money all the time. Okay, so, I’m also gonna carry a theme here. So, this past week Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that this upcoming Wednesday, March 11th, all statewide COVID-19 restrictions will end, including the mask mandate and limits on occupancy in all kinds of businesses. That means that starting on Wednesday if the owner of an arena wants to pack it full of unmasked people the government of Texas will not stop him. As a Texan who cares about other Texans and just people everywhere, this scares me. Yes, things are getting better on the COVID front generally, but there’s a long way to go still until we’re anywhere near okay, and that is without knowing what could happen with variants.
Texas is not doing great getting their population vaccinated – at the point when he made this announcement we were like 49th out of 50 states as far as vaccination went. It's so dispiriting that the governor, mere weeks after massive governmental failure in terms of our infrastructure and the response to it, has decided to abandon the little bit that we were doing with regards to the pandemic. I know that there are some states that have never had a mask mandate or occupancy limits, and I’m just deeply sorry to everyone who’s experienced this kind of governmental abdication of responsibility.
But the reason I’m burning this here is because Texas is, of course, about to host some major sporting events. The women’s March Madness tournament, which announced back in February that it would welcome fans to San Antonio and the areas around it, including a couple games here in Austin. The Alamo Dome will be capped at 17% of its capacity; I hope this remains in effect, I hope it stays at 17%. The men’s NIT tournament will take place in Dallas, the WNIT regional will be in Fort Worth. According to Maitreyi Anantharaman at defector.com, “The NCAA is still free to institute its own mask mandates at tournament facilities, and said in February that it will, but there’s no telling how cooperative surrounding people and businesses might be.” That’s exactly it, right? This is a community.
I’m worried for the students and the staff that are traveling to Texas now, I’m worried for the fans who are gonna attend this, I’m worried for the communities where this will be taking place, and I’m angry that such basic precautions – that have been working in recent weeks! – were stripped away by an asshole governor who cares so little for his fellow Texans well-being. I’m just so tired of being tired of what the GOP is doing in this state and I just want to burn it. Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: Alright Shireen, bring us home.
Shireen: So, the burn pile pile hat trick, clearly in the USA. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the world is not a disaster, I just wanna stay that…Okay, so, you may or may not have heard the absolute dumpster fire that happened during the USSF annual national council meeting. So, contextually what this meeting was about was actually voting around whether athletes should be able to kneel or not, protest an anthem. As you know, they give space to people to use words. One of the people who used words was Seth Jahn. Seth Jahn is a former 7-a-side para team member, also a former vet. Now, what he decided to say, out of all the words he could’ve possibly used in the world, was to refute any evidence that slavery affected people. So, just bear with me here. He tried to debunk slavery. He tried to say that it wasn’t as bad – and I'm paraphrasing “bad” because I can't even make sense of what he did say. This is all happening live.
So, I do actually wanna thank Steph Yang and Meg Linehan for the questions and the other tenacious soccer reporters who were on the call watching this in real time, and Paul Tenorio as well, of The Athletic, who got in there and was like, “What’s happening?!” Nobody took this man's mic away. This is the first thing I wanna say. Nobody muted him. We live in a Zoom age – you can mute the fuck out of people! But he kept talking, and what he said was so wildly egregious. To refute anti-Indigeneity and genocide, to refute slavery and go off in a nonsensical manner was just horrible, and to be honest traumatic for so many people. USSF is “home” – I’m gonna use that term loosely – to the US women’s national team, who have done incredible amounts of work on their own squad and otherwise and been stalwarts for pay equity in other ways. In response, some of the players took to social media immediately, including US team captain Becky Sauerbrunn, to literally be like “this is not okay.”
Very soon after, Seth was “released” from the council, but only after USSF president Cindy Parlow Cone, vice president Bill Taylor, and CEO William Wilson really didn’t do great with their words in explaining why he was allowed to use his for so long. I do wanna say this: I was extremely hopeful when Cindy Parlow Cone came on as president, but what she ended up saying about him was that diversity is actually not just about listening to what we agree with, it has to include things we may not agree with. No, Cindy. No no no no. That's not actually what diversity is. That's not what it is at all.
So, there’s so many things that I need to burn here, so think of a domino burn, think of that. I want these things to explode simultaneously or maybe one after the other, and then maybe all stay in the incinerator because USSF: you are constantly fucking this up. Racists do not need to be given a platform, they should not be part of your council in the first place, and I’m sorry – it didn't take a very deep dive into Seth’s social media to see what an absolute racist twatwaffle the man is. It's really not that hard. So anyways, I wanna take all of this and I want to torch it. Burn.
All: Burn.
Amira: After all that burning it’s time to shout out some torchbearers of the week. I'll go first with a very special shoutout to our very own Jessica Luther, Nancy Armour and Kenny Jacoby, who are recipients of the AP Sports Editors Award for Investigative Journalism. Congratulations on that recognition of the hard work that you did with USA Today on the LSU reporting. So, that is where I’d like to start.
Shireen: Yay!
Amira: Alright Shireen, what is our Day of the Week? [laughs]
Shireen: I love this so much. In honor of Marta’s birthday, the state of Rio de Janeiro has officially declared February 19th as women’s football day! So, February 19th, y’all! It is still Aquarius season, might I say, also. Awesome.
Amira: Jessica, who is our official of the week?
Jessica: So, the NFL hired Maia Chaka as an official, making her the first-ever Black woman to hold that position in the league. In a statement, Chaka wrote, “I am honored to be selected as an NFL official. But this moment is bigger than a personal accomplishment. It is an accomplishment for all women, my community, and my culture.”
Amira: Shireen, who’s our baby of the week?
Shireen: Oh, I love this one! So, our last week’s episode, as you might’ve heard, I did the interview with Jocelyne and Monique Lamoureux. So, Monique did have her baby. Congratulations to the family. She had told us that she knew it was a boy, and they would support the baby in whatever the baby decided to do. So, the name is Sonny Germaine Morando, and we wish you all the best of health and happiness.
Amira: And Jessica, who’s our champ of the week?
Jessica: Claressa Shields, who we interviewed on episode 141, became the first boxer ever, of all the boxers everywhere, to become undisputed champion in two divisions in the four-belt era after she defeated Marie-Eve Dicaire on Friday night. Shields will soon begin training for her MMA debut, so watch out.
Amira: And a drumroll, please!
[drumroll]
Our torchbearers of the week go to Sue Bird, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel, and Alex Morgan, for their formation and announcement of their digital platform called Togethxr. These Olympic gold medalists have come togehter to feature original content and merchandise celebrating diverse female athletes and aiming to change the conversation. They were appalled, much like we were, that only 4% of sports media coverage is dedicated to women’s sports, and they got sick of waiting around for other people to solve it, and decided to get together to do it, much like we decided to do with Burn It All Down. So, of course we had to recognize them as torchbearers. I have to point out that their first original documentary series is dropping soon on the platform. It features Chantel “Chicanita” Navarro, who’s a California teen and boxing prodigy. It’s called Phenom, so be on the lookout for that. We are so inspired by these four torchbearers. Awesome spread in the New York Times where they all looked fantastic, please check it out. So Chloe, Sue, Simone, Alex, you are our torchbearers of the week.
Alright. What's good in your world? Shireen.
Shireen: So, I had a lot of fun doing ‘Do you know your co-hosts?’ – I love that! I do also wanna say that I have two baby twin nieces, Ayra and Ayzal, and they’re beautiful. and I meet them digitally. I’m gonna go do a porch…Like, I don’t get to meet them meet them, but I’m going to go see them through the porch window, and that’s okay, because they need to be safe. I love them and I FaceTime with them all the time, and they're sleeping a lot but that’s okay. They’re like a week old.
I also just wanna shout out the CBC Sports U event that happened last week. It was a lot of fun. It’s actually unprecedented in Canadian sports media to have people from so many different platforms, like across digital platforms, different networks. Canadian media has suffered a lot of hits lately in terms of shutting down radio stations and layoffs, so it was really heartening to have this type of community here. It was this beautiful smorgasbord of melanated people, which we don’t always see in…Well, we never see, sometimes, in Canadian sports media. So I loved, loved, loved that, and I got to share space with Renee Hess of Black Girl Hockey Club, who I love; Fitriya Mohamed, and Kayla Alexander of the Canadian national basketball team and the Minnesota Lynx – you may have heard of them! So, love that.
Also, this is gonna be frivolous like most of my what's good: I am on a campaign to make myself a Salvadoreña because I wanna be from El Salvador. You’re asking why? Because I wanna be an honorary member. Okay, here’s the thing: I miss street parties, I miss people! So I was doing some research on this – meaning watching Gente de Zona videos with Marc Anthony – so, I need to get myself to a party. My best friend who's from Mexico City is like, no, you can’t, that doesn’t work that way. So, I found my El Salvadorian peeps and they're like, of course you can! So, I just wanna tell everybody: if you're El Salvadorian, shout me out!
Amira: Oh!? [laughter] Jessica?
Jessica: Thank you for letting me go first Amira, so I get to say: WandaVision’s finale. So good.
Amira: Ugh. I should not have let–
Jessica: Haha!
Amira: Unforced errors.
Jessica: [laughs] I’ll let Amira say the most about that. I definitely cried real hard, Amira, at the end. But it was really fun to watch Wanda become the Scarlet Witch, I gotta say. I think the series is really well done. I’ll just say that my son was the Scarlet Witch for Halloween like five years ago, like way before it was cool to be the Scarlet Witch. Later today Aaron and I are going down to the giant indy racetrack here in town, it’s called Circuit of the Americas, COTA. They’re trying to vaccinate 10,000 people in one weekend, and we’re volunteering to help do that. So, we’re really excited to be outside for five hours, to have a good reason to be outside for five hours. I heard from friends who did this last week when they did their first trial run, I guess, at getting this mass vaccination up and running, that it's just really fun to talk to hundred of people [laughs] after being in the pandemic and alone for most of that. So, I'm really looking forward to that.
Then I do want to give a shoutout to my dear husband Aaron, who loves me so much that he will spend hours of his time – he was so busy with work this week – but he took time to figure out all the different streaming services that have the tennis channel. We’re probably gonna switch to Google Fiber soon, they’ve put it in our neighborhood. Our AT&T is going up to like $100 a month for something we barely watch, like, we really only use it to watch sports. So the big thing is that whatever we have has to have the tennis channel for me, and he has just spent so many hours trying to figure this out, and I just love him and that was what was good for me this week.
Amira: That’s amazing. Yeah, WandaVision was so good. It was so, so good. I’m very excited for phase four of the MCU. I’m a little upset because COVID disrupted the schedule, you know, so without COVID we would’ve had WandaVision and then Dr. Strange coming out in May.
Jessica: When’s it coming out?
Amira: Next year.
Jessica: Oh. [sighs] Okay.
Amira: But never fear, y'all, because we get not one, not two, but four phase four movies! So, Black Widow will drop and then Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and then we're getting The Eternals and then Spider Man: No Way Home. I am very excited about that, and it was fun to watch WandaVision with Samari who finally caught up and sobbed. We watched it all again and both of us as soon as we started watching the finale again we were like, “Why are we watching it again!?” and then sobbing. [laughs]
Jessica: There’s an amazing video that Michael posted on Facebook of him walking into the room after the two of them have just finished watching the finale of WandaVision and they are just a mess. [laughs]
Amira: “A mess” is a good word for that.
Shireen: Okay, so Jessica and I were talking and she told me to watch, but the way that y’all are crying I’m like, do I have the emotional bandwidth to watch this?
Jessica: It ends…You’ll cry at the end, but it’s a good ending.
Shireen: I cry in everything, so, okay.
Jessica: Oh, you’ll cry.
Amira: I mean, I say go for it.
Shireen: Okay.
Amira: So, yeah, that is definitely what's good. Also, you know, Peloton does artist series rides; there was a Meg thee Stallion ride that we finally were blessed with, that…I don’t know, it was just so…My colleague Janelle said, “I’ve been buoyant ever since that,” and I feel the same. My to-do list isn’t any smaller, I’m still just as stressed, but somehow it’s like ricocheting off me. Part of this is we know Mercury came out of retrograde, but also now it’s entering into gemini which is I think contributing to the light and airy feeling I am.
Last night my family had a wonderful family movie night to watch the premiere on Disney+ of Raya and the Last Dragon, and we so enjoyed that. It was fun, and I encourage everybody to watch that. I mean, it is premiere access right now, which is really annoying, but like I try to say, I would spend that at a movie theater if we were going there. So, instead we all hung out and we had some bubble tea and we watched Raya, and it’s always fun to watch a kickass heroine flourish, and we enjoyed the movie a lot.
The biggest what's good for me is as soon as we're done with this I’m hitting the road with Mari and going on a writing retreat for the week to go and try to do the final push of this book, and I had a major breakthrough with the organization for one of my chapters, so I'm feeing a little bit inspired right now and I’m hoping to sustain that energy moving forward. So, that’s what’s good with me.
So, what are we watching this week? Well, I just wanna draw attention again to Athletes Unlimited. They are playing volleyball now. They will be going into week 3 and the games are on FS1 and FS2. There’s also a wonderful documentary that's being produced by HighlightHER and our friend Ari Chambers with Black softball players. They have a new episode about Black hair and softball, and these drop throughout the season. So, check out the games as well as the content coming out from that documentary. If we didn't turn you off enough from college sports, we are rolling into March Madness. The selection shows will be on Sunday the 14th and Monday the 15th respectively for the men's and women’s tournaments, and that will commence in the next week or so. We’re in the postseason play now for basketball so the SEC and Big Ten, etc, etc, are all underway. Check that out if you want to.
That's it for this week on Burn It All Down. Check out our podcast wherever you get podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn, etc. We appreciate your reviews and your feedback, so please subscribe, rate, share. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram @burnitalldownpod and on Twitter @burnitdownpod. You can email us, check out or website, burnitalldownpod.com – you’ll find previous episodes, transcripts, and link to our Patreon. Right now on our Patreon page you have bloopers, you have our ‘So you think you know your co-hosts?’ content, and then for Patreon subscribers at the $10 level or more we just sent out a registration for our next fireside chat. Our fireside chat will be happening on Friday, March 19th, 7pm. Please come out if you are a patron at $10 or more. Check out that post and register, formal invitations to follow. We had such a fun time at the first one, we hope you check it out. Burn on, not out, and we’ll see you next week, flamethrowers.