Episode 198: The NCAA Is Still Laughably Sexist

Lindsay, Amira and Jess discuss the ridiculously unequal treatment of women athletes in the NCAA's March Madness basketball tournament. This episode also amplifies the voices of Asian-American athletes speaking out against the racist violence directed at members of the AAPI community in Atlanta and beyond. #StopAsianHate

If you'd like to help the AAPI community, please see the website of Red Canary Song (www.redcanarysong.net), which has links for directly supporting the victims in Atlanta and other Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders affected by anti-Asian racism.

This episode was produced by Ali Lemer. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Links

Donate to grassroots Asian & migrant sex worker collective Red Canary Song.

Welcome to March Misogyny: https://www.powerplays.news/welcome-to-march-misogyny

Arizona's Adia Barnes calls disparity in NCAA weight-training facilities 'not acceptable' https://www.espn.com/womens-college-basketball/story/_/id/31089316/ncaa-actively-working-improve-weight-training-facilities-women-tournament/

The NCAA had a roadmap for moms in the bubble, and it dropped the ball: https://theathletic.com/2461090/2021/03/19/jennings-the-ncaa-had-a-roadmap-for-moms-in-the-bubble-and-it-dropped-the-ball

Not NCAA Property: Players push for reform on social media: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/not-ncaa-property-players-push-for-reform-on-social-media-ncaa-property-espn-indianapolis-iowa-b1818775

Women’s Worth: How Female NCAA Athletes Will Profit in the New Era of NIL Rights https://globalsportmatters.com/business/2021/03/12/womens-worth-how-female-ncaa-athletes-will-profit-in-the-new-era-of-nil-rights

Katelyn Ohashi speaks out against coronavirus racism: https://www.espn.com/video/clip/_/id/28972328/

Transcript

Lindsay: Hi, flamethrowers. We here at Burn It All Down are heartbroken and outraged by the violent, racist attack last night in Atlanta, Georgia, at three Asian spas, which killed 8 people including 6 Asian women. Over the course of the pandemic racist, violent attacks on the Asian community have increased by some accounts as much as 1900%. Our Shireen did a hot take last week with Dr. Courtney Szto and Alex Wong on anti-Asian hate, and I hope you all take time to go listen to it right now. I learned so much from their conversation. Here’s a clip from Dr. Szto:

Courtney Szto: So, I think what we've seen with respect to anti-Asian racism is it comes in waves and that the violence is kind of sporadic and it revolves around something like SARS or Japanese internment or when Trump calls it the “China virus.” So, in a way this waves of violence gives us a little bit of insight or particular generations into what Black communities face on a daily basis. I think this is just kind of a peak that we’re seeing, a lot of different things coming together at the same time. On most days the racism that Asians face is about invisibility – invisibility in the media, we don’t get to see ourselves, and then every once in a while it peaks up into these more violent manifestations, and this is the time we find ourselves in right now.

Lindsay: We urge you all not only to go listen to this episode and to listen to the voices of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community, but also to donate money. There's so many places to highlight, but I particularly wanna highlight the work of Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant sex workers, which organizes transnationally. They're the only grassroots Chinese massage parlor worker coalition in the United States. We’ve talked about them on this show before. So, we’re gonna include a link to where you can donate to them, and also they have a collection of all of the GoFundMes set up by the families of the victims of the hate crime last week. So that’s also a great way to go directly support those families.

Alright, flamethrowers – it has been a week! But we’re so glad to be back here with you all for another episode of Burn It All Down where once again we just got a big ol’ burn pile throughout the show. Of course I’m Lindsay and I'm joined today by Jessica and Amira. Hi, Jessica and Amira!

Jessica: Hi, Linz. Hi, Amira.

Amira: Hey!

Lindsay: We will be discussing the NCAA, one of our favorite things to discuss, and of course this week talking about the inequities between the men’s and women’s tournament.

Jessica: The people reporting harm are the athletes themselves, they’re just female athletes, and so thinking about the clear hierarchies of who matters and how we can see that in something as basic as a weight room…

Lindsay: I just wanna note that we're recording this on Sunday morning, so before the women’s tournament games will be starting right as we finish. So, we won’t cover anything on here that happens during the first round but I think a lot of this stuff will still be applicable as you’re listening. But first, look, we are beyond the outrage here in the NCAA tournament. We are here in March. Do y'all have a favorite memory, a favorite March Madness memory? Jess.

Jessica: Yeah. Mine – I feel like everyone can predict this – it’s Arike Ogunbowaleeeeeeeee!

Lindsay: Yes! 

Jessica: I know there's recentism in when we think about these things, but really the two semi-final buzzer-beaters followed by the final buzzer-beater in a row just…I don't know. I was watching it again last night prepping for this, and your heart just leaps out of your chest every time she falls over! And she still hits it. It’s amazing. I was trying to think, for the men…I just don’t remember specifics a lot. I'm very much like a Cinderella bandwagon person. I like the buzzer-beaters, I don't really care who it is. So I couldn’t pinpoint…I know I watched a game once where a dude from some team scored like 8 points on his own in the last 16 seconds or something. I remember screaming my face off about a team I can’t even remember today. But yeah, I dunno. I don't have a specific one for the men, but Arike will always probably from here on out be my women’s March Madness memory. 

Lindsay: Yeah, that's fair. Amira? 

Amira: Yeah, I don't know if I have a favorite. I have painful memories, like I remember UMass losing to Georgetown…I don't know, I was 8 or 6 or something, and I just remember sobbing in the Mullins Center. 

Jessica: I love how dramatic all of your fandom stories are. [laughter]

Amira: I was very upset, like, it really broke me.

Jessica: I believe you! [laughs] 

Lindsay: Every time you tell a Samari story I’m like, oh, yes, [Amira laughs] okay, right. Amira's fandom. [laughter]

Amira: I don’t know if I have specifics. You know me, I love all of the highs and suffer through the lows, and it's not easy for me to get emotionally invested. Like, I didn’t give a damn about Oral Roberts except for the name being Oral Roberts, except for…I don't know if you saw the video, Lex’s teammate on A&M, Anna, her boyfriend plays for Oral Roberts and her watching them pull off the upset and she’s literally shaking the TV trying to kiss the TV and it’s the funniest clip. So, that got me very emotionally invested in Oral Roberts because I want more of the two of them winning and being happy together and their super attractive selves.

Lindsay: Yeah. It’s one of those things where I feel like I could watch each March tournaments over and over again and just forget it kind of immediately, right?

Jessica: Yes.

Lindsay: It's just this kind of, you know, it’s just so specific to this time and the games are one-offs, but I always…I mean, I’ve watched so much of it. But Arike of course, and then I think it was the year before that where Mississippi State upset UConn. At the end of that game I was…I think it was the Morgan William buzzer-beater, and my friends and I decided to go – back when we could go to things – we decided to have a fancy night where we all dressed up and went to a ballet at the Lincoln Center, like randomly, in DC. It happened to be though that night, and I had thought, well, UConn’s probably gonna blow them out so I’m not too worried about missing that, and then we’re at the bar watching, I mean, I am more dressed up than I've ever been in my whole life, it’s after the ballet, and I just told my friends, "I have to go!” I have to be home to watch the second half of this game! [laughter] So, I just left all of my friends and Uber’d home to watch that. But also for the men, anytime Carolina won at all has been a great experience for me personally. [laughs]

Jessica: Can I just add that Morgan William, one of my favorite things in the whole world is when they asked her afterwards what she saw when she let go of the basketball. She said she “saw opportunity.” 

Lindsay: Ohh!

Jessica: It was such…She was not only ice in her veins with that shot, but just perfection in the interview afterwards.

Lindsay: That’s one of those things that I would find so cheesy and ridiculous from anyone except someone in women’s sports in that moment! [laughs]

Jessica: Yes. She delivered it perfectly.

Lindsay: So, last week as we all got ready for the NCAA tournament for the first time now in two years, I know I was focused on how wide open this women’s tournament feels and just feeling really really pumped, you know, ignoring the COVID voice in my head, but just feeling excited to see these players get this chance on this stage. As someone who's followed Maryland really closely they’re looking so good, so I’ve been hyping them up to people, being like, “You’re overlooking them!” Then the story changes when the visuals are shared. It started by a Stanford athletic trainer and then the players themselves started sharing them as well of the women's “weight room” – and I’m doing some air quotes over the word room and the word weight.

So, we saw a photo of this tiny little weight rack [laughs] compared to what their male counterparts had, which was a huge room filled with weights that clearly had a lot of time and attention and resources put in to, and it was an example of how the women's tournament is not getting the same treatment as their male counterparts. I think the images struck a chord for a lot of reasons that we can get into, but of course they weren't the end of the story. The NCAA came out and said, well, it was a space issue. Then of course we see the videos of the fact that it was this tiny rack of weights in the middle of this big open space! So it was obviously not a space issue.

But the inequities ran deeper, as they always do, from the swag bags being completely so much less for the women to the testing being different, to the rules and regulations and care that the female athletes are being given. I just kind of wanna open up the floor to say what for you all stuck out to you the most? We talk about inequities so much on this show, but it's kind of rare to have a week where all the talking is done for us. [laughs] Like, through these visuals, where you can point to something so stark. So, it’s been interesting. Jess, what stuck out to you?

Jessica: Yeah, I mean, lots of things. It was kind of that feeling of like, it’s so blatant, how do you even talk about it? How do you describe something that’s so obvious? I will say, of course because I’ve been working on LSU and I’ve been thinking a lot about athletic departments’ responses to gendered violence, and one of the things I get asked all the time is how does this stuff happen? And when I look at this I think constantly of this spectrum that all these athletes are on, because of course in a lot of these cases, including at LSU, the people who are reporting harm are athletes themselves, they’re just female athletes, and so thinking about the clear hierarchies of who matters and how we can see that in something as basic as a weight room…But also, when we do these terrible reports about who gets valued, whose experience and worth matters in these departments, it’s really clear here.

I just wanna mention one thing in particular. They’re obviously playing these games in these “bubbles” – the one in Indianapolis for the men and the one in San Antonio for the women – and as everything was coming out, Geno Auriemma told reporters that the men’s team for COVID testing, that they're using daily PCR tests, whereas the women's team are using these daily antigen tests, which are not as good at detecting COVID as what the men are getting, but the men’s tests are just so much more expensive. I was talking to my friend Dan Solomon, who lives here and has been reporting on COVID stuff in Texas, and he immediately said to me that this is weird because it’s in San Antonio. I’m just gonna quote what Dan actually tweeted. “One additional piece of relevant context is that San Antonio, where the women's tournament is being held, is one of the few cities in the country that has a lab that is *specifically built* to process PCR covid tests cheaply and within hours, rather than days.

There's a very obvious equity issue in using expensive, high-quality rapid PCR tests for men, and cheap, lower-quality rapid antigen tests for women—but if they tried, they could at least attempt to split the difference by processing conventional PCR tests quickly in San Antonio.” They literally have one of the few labs in the country that does this exact work, and it just is so obvious that they didn’t put…The lack of thought and care and planning here is so chilling, and it matters when it comes to weight rooms but we're talking about a global pandemic and they didn’t even put the basic time in to figure out the best way to protect these women’s health when they’re playing in this so-called bubble in a state that has now…Everything’s 100% open, we have no masks – or you don’t have to have a mask on, I guess. That part of it just…This is their lives, and they couldn’t even take the time to care enough.

Lindsay: Whew. Amira? 

Amira: Yeah, I would say that I was not surprised about the subpar conditions and the afterthought of the tournament, because it’s been an afterthought. I was most surprised that Ali’s tweet went viral – Ali Kershner, who’s the Stanford performance coach, who put up the photos of the weight room initially, and the fact that the voices like Sedona and stuff like that piling up on it created a way that you could not turn away from it, right? That it went viral, that it started trending. I think that that to me is a little bit what is different, and then watching obviously the tournament officials scramble to try to justify things, but of course I have been talking to my cousin and getting food pictures and things like that, and everything was kind of underwhelming from the get go, right? Some of her teammates were unpacking the swag bags and were like, here’s a random umbrella, and here's a random water bottle. It’s like, social media exists, and a lot of them have connections and friends on the men's side.

Something as simple as disproportionate puzzle pieces in a puzzle, it's like even the details are aimed at reminding you that you don't matter. So, I was talking to Alexis who plays for Texas A&M, and one of the things that was really great was Texas A&M had provided them with their own kind of tournament swag box that shoes, multiple shoes, and gear and shirts about social justice, and all of these things, it was a deep container. So to go to the NCAA and to get to San Antonio and have not even a red carpet rolled out, just like, every detail...And when I say every detail I mean things like there was no kind of collective outdoor space available in San Antonio, so the most outdoor space they got was walking from the hotel to the COVID testing center that Jess, you talked about. Whereas if you look at the tournament planning in Indy there are outdoor spaces where people can get some air and safely congregate and things like that.

So, I think for me it's the kind of detailed things that NCAA officials just bet on people not paying attention to, and when you line them up next to each other one after another after another, the picture, the irrefutable picture that is painted, is constant reminders that you are not worth it, that you are not enough, that you should just be happy to get your 150 piece puzzle and an umbrella and shoddy card to go to download a digital library, like, these are the things, right? Then as Jessica just pointed out, there are some larger considerations at play that aren’t just affecting the players. One of the things, one of these little details for instance, is the way that the NCAA just absolutely dropped the ball in offering support for childcare and breastfeeding children for coaches in this tournament, mainly that they’re counting against the travel party limit, including nursing infants.

So, this comes on the heels of a year and a half or so of the NCAA putting out like “We support women coaches!” and “Absolutely you can be a coach and a mom” and “You can do all of that” – but putting people in a position where they have to choose to literally provide sustenance and life to nursing infants, knowing that counts against their travel party. Or for people who are going to be in the tournament, some people could be here for a month, and not being able to...You know, I watched one of Lex’s assistant coaches do a very emotional goodbye to her kid, right?

These are details that they hope that nobody will see, but completely flies in the face of headlines and brochures and feel-good posters and all the bullshit that you knew was bullshit, but I think it's moments like this where you can really see just how stark the contrast is between what they purport and what is happening, especially as they’re tweeting about international women’s day and women’s history month and empowerment. It's like, nah, we see what your priorities really are, you know? I’m glad it went viral, but it shouldn’t take going viral for us to pay attention to these details.

Lindsay: It really shouldn’t. I mean, I don’t even wanna say the phrase “to their credit” but they did in about 24 hours after this went viral get a weight room up, which I think A) shows how possible it was [laughs] to do it at the beginning, and how this wasn’t this impossible task, like, you just had to put a teeny bit of effort into it. Although I do wanna say if anyone has seen the photos of the new weight room there are these blue and orange mood lights popping up from the ground all around that makes it feel like a spa except it's obviously not a spa because it’s obviously a gym, there are these curtains. For some reason it just cracked me up, because it's like, “We still gotta make things feel pretty.”

Jessica: Yeah, feminine. 

Lindsay: Feminine! I just want a 10,000 word piece on how that lighting scheme came to be [laughs] and whose idea it was, and the execution. But anyways, it’s so much much more as we know than just a rack of weights. It’s not treating these women like they're elite athletes and then at the end of the day blaming them when they don’t have the audience or generate the revenue that the men do in this non-profit place where they're not getting paid. But anyways, one of my favorites was Sedona Prince’s video from TikTok, the Oregon player. It went viral and I have to say, as a film major, it was the perfect way to describe this situation. The beats, the reveal of the amount of space in the weight room, the use of the NCAA's quote – every single bit of it, there was not a bit of wasted space, indulging at the end when she said that if this doesn't bother you then you’re part of the problem. We talk about the reactions and the TikTok and how that went viral, but were there any sort of reactions that stood out to you? Jess.

Jessica: Yeah, I really appreciated all the WNBA players who immediately put all this stuff on blast, and I thought it was interesting that Layshia Clarendon from the New York Liberty, they tweeted, “I love this generation of college basketball players because the fearlessness they have to speak up about injustices is something I didn’t have in college. The ‘grateful & happy to be here’ women’s athlete is a thing of the past. I’m celebrating that fact today! Proud of y’all!” I totally understand what Layshia is saying here, but I do think this is as much a result of whatever's going on with this generation, but they're seeing these WNBA players standing up and speaking out and having a collective voice and saying this isn't good enough. They're watching all of these women's soccer teams across the world come together and demand better and demand more and demand it now, and I think you can’t separate out what that…I mean, COVID I’m sure plays a role in this and how everyone has shifted their understanding of their worth in this time. But I just saw a lot of people responding to Layshia like, but you’re part of the reason! Yeah, maybe you couldn’t have done this in college, but you're the reason they can do this now.

Then I just wanna give a shoutout to Sydney Colson of the Chicago Sky – she's hilarious! So, the first thing that she did that I absolutely loved was she took this sort of sad picture of the one weight rack and the massage table, and she photoshopped boxes of tampons underneath it and then tweeted, “Go girls!!” That was just too good. Then she had this great video she did mocking the NCAA’s response, and I just would tell everyone to go watch that. It is so funny. But yeah, seeing all of the professional women get behind all of the college players was really great.

Lindsay: Amira?

Amira: Yeah, that's absolutely correct, and the fact that it also creates more of a safety net for people who do speak out, and that's really important because it’s preciously obviously to do what Sedona did. Those are still risky moves, and when people with bigger platforms and out of the ability to…You know, the NCAA can’t touch them. It matters, right? It lets them say things that the players can’t. I know they’re communicating with each other and I think that that is like you said, Jess, it is absolutely drawing upon the kind of tradition that we see coming. Then the other thing that we see in that is it's not only that it gives the opportunity for athletes to speak up, but it reinforces the platform that the women’s college basketball coaches have, and we know that folks like Muffet McGraw and Dawn Staley have never pulled their punches before, but their ability to weigh in on the tournament that they're participating in also shone through this week with some amazing statements, right Jess? 

Jessica: Yeah. We have one from Dawn Staley, we have one from Muffet McGraw who's obviously retired now, but still; and then Tara VanDerveer from Stanford, and I think the thing…They’re really pointed, they don't pull any punches, they really go hard and they go really hard at the NCAA in particular. So, Dawn Staley wrote, “We need Mark Emmert–” who’s the president of the NCAA and remained pretty quiet through all this, “–We need Mark Emmert and his team to own this mistake and address these issues and the overarching issues that exist in our sport.” Tara VanDerveer, this is how her statement began: “A lot of what we've all seen this week is evidence of blatant sexism. This is purposeful and hurtful. I feel betrayed by the NCAA.” Wow, right?

I think that this is so powerful, and one thing that it does do is it backs up these players who are particularly vulnerable within this system, and these coaches can take this heat, right? Muffet doesn't even work on any of this anymore. They can take it themselves. I’m super cynical about the NCAA so I don't know what this means for next year’s tournament honestly, but it’s really lovely to see that they are saying it is the NCAA's fault and they need to be the ones to fix this.

Lindsay: Yeah, I completely agree and I also wanna say, you notice who's not releasing public statements as well during this. I noticed the coaches and I'm disappointed in the coaches who haven’t released public statements – and of course because there’s not ASAP transcripts, which is another inequity – there aren't transcripts from every press conference made publicly available until the sweet sixteen, versus the men which have them publicly available already. So unless you’re in every single press conference it’s hard to know exactly who's being asked what and what’s happening. But I’ve been hoping to see more from Brenda Frese who just was named coach of the year, and a lot of these prominent male coaches as well within women’s basketball, you know? I'd like to see more pointed statements because I just feel like it gives their players permission, right? Like you’re saying, it takes cover from the players and that’s important.

Another thing that's been happening in the wake of all of this is, of course, it is important to say the NCAA…I mean, this has all been so blatant that not even the NCAA could really excuse them. They had to just say–

Amira: But they still tried it.

Lindsay: They tried to give excuses, but ultimately had to say we're wrong, which…I’m not giving them any credit, I'm just showing how bad this was, because they avoid saying we’re wrong at all costs. [laughs] 

Jessica: Yeah, and part of it was that there were people before they blatantly said this is our fault, there were people who were still trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, right? “I'm sure it's gonna get better, I’m sure that this wasn’t…”

Amira: “They're not finished setting up yet.” 

Jessica: Yeah, that there was…I just don't understand why people feel like they need to give these institutions that have this clear history of exploitation and of telling the women that they're lesser, like, it was wild to watch people give them the benefit of the doubt and then…So, there was a relief, I’ve got to say, for the NCAA to just say this was our fault, we messed up – because they don't normally even do that. 

Amira: Absolutely, but I do think that it’s really instructive to watch the blueprints and the playbooks that they were trying to try on before that, right?

Jessica: Yes.

Amira: Even if it happened fast, right? So, first and foremost it was like, "We didn’t have the space, we were gonna do this at sweet sixteen.” We know that's faulty logic. We saw that video. Change that, right? But then very quickly saying, “The food issue, that’s not on us, that’s the hotel. We’ll work with them to do local food.” That A) is cover, and B) doesn’t talk about how they're regulating people and restricting them, even teams who want to order out to support their girls to eat in different ways, right? But you saw that move. They said, “The swag bags are equal value, blah blah blah.” So, there was all of these attempts to still do the walk back and the passing the ball and stuff like that, and you're right, it ended up being so spotlighted for so long that they absolutely had to walk that back. But it's not for severe lack of trying! [laughs]

Jessica: True.

Amira: I mean, severe attempts in their own regard, and when we’re talking about public pressure it’s not just – and this will lead us into talking about these corporations – they were like, “We’ll adjust that” but it wouldn’t have moved so fast if Orangetheory and Dick’s and Tonal hadn’t said, “No, we gotchu.” Dick’s is tweeting a picture of two moving vans saying, “We’ve loaded up equipment, we can be there to set it up within…" That’s embarrassing, and that mattered in terms of the speed with which they responded, but it's not because the NCAA woke up and decided to give a damn this weekend. I’m not saying that you're saying that’s what it is, but I'm saying that these are the things where you could see them trying to continue to be as awful as they usually are and the things that pushed them to a place where they had to do at least the spa-like weight room.

Lindsay: I do have to say though, so I think we saw Orangetheory and Dick’s and a few of these corporations seize this moment. I got frustrated by that too, though. I got why it was important and why it was important in this narrative, but as someone who covers the merchandise issue in women’s sports, d’you know what I mean? Dick's is very quick to blame others and blame the pipeline and blame the people they work for for not providing enough women's merch. Whereas if you look in their stores you just can’t find any, and they have power in this space and it wasn't just the corporation – it was all of these media entities, do you know what I mean? The USA Today, Sports Illustrated, these places that don't always do the best job covering–

Jessica: ESPN.

Lindsay: Yeah, ESPN. 

Jessica: I watched Jay Bilas on ESPN go hard and you’re like, where were you all the other times, Jay? Where are you when they’re being spectacular? 

Lindsay: ESPN has actually been a little better about it this tournament, which…I must say, they hold the rights to the women's tournament, so there's that.

Jessica: It'll be interesting to see how they actually handle it on the broadcast. We’re recording before we've actually seen them broadcast a game.

Amira: And that to me is part and parcel of the frustration. Linz, you’ve talked about this before, about the disproportionate media coverage of calamity, right? Whether it’s a fight or a scandal or whatnot, right? It’s so frustrating. Today the women's tournament will kick off of 714 days of not having a women’s tournament. This is a wide open tournament. The talent is ridiculous, right? Yet that's not even what all of…

Jessica: Yeah. We're talking about curtains and a weight room.

Amira: Right! All of these people who wanna be invested and wanna generate clicks be being captain save-a-team and showing up with their things, like, that’s great. But also all of this energy can feel so frustrating if you’re like, it shouldn't have taken an edible food and a nicely shot TikTok video to compel this level of investment and interest, and it also shouldn't be centered on the disparity and completely missing the fact that there is a wide open, very talented tournament, that if we all close our eyes about the pandemic and can force ourselves to enjoy and watch, it’s about to kick off. And I think you're right, it will be very interesting to see A) how they handle it in the broadcast, but also what coverage it looks like throughout the tournament, right? After this has kind of died down, is that same kind of energy there? Is that same attention there? Is that same kind of command for respect and all of these kind of platitudes there when we’re talking about the game, when we’re talking about the athletes, when we're talking about the performances? That’s what I'm waiting to see.

Lindsay: One of the things I just wanna make sure we stress is this is just a small part of a much bigger picture of Title IX still not being equal, of when these…You know, I wanna yell at every single media person who’s making tweets about this and say, okay, if you're getting retweets for pointing this out, then by law you have to say “men's basketball” and “women's basketball” or men’s sports and women's sports, or I’m putting you in jail or something, right? Stop referring...Like, part of this problem is the language of using “basketball" as the default to mean men’s basketball and then women’s basketball – which the NCAA does itself in its branding! CBS portrays itself as the official NCAA tournament app, the official everything, but they only have rights to the men's tournament. This is part of a much bigger picture, and Jess, I know you've covered a lot of bigger Title IX pictures here, and I wanted to see if you could just…How does stuff like this play out on campuses every day?

Jessica: There's almost no school that meets Title IX requirements. I think it's almost impossible to find them. We just have a systemic problem around equity within sport, and yeah, back in 2017 I wrote a specific piece about this for SB Nation with my friend Avital called Title Fight, and it was about the Quinnipiac women’s rugby team, but it was stuff like they literally couldn’t get a field to play on that was the right size, so they couldn't practice all of their moves the way they were supposed to, the fields would have lots of rocks so they would literally injure themselves, but then they weren't given access to trainers. A lot of these women’s teams just don’t even have the same kind of people to take care of their health, which we can talk all day about – like tiny locker rooms, or old equipment or borrowed uniforms and stuff. But even basic stuff, I just can’t…Their health is not even a priority. Again, I say this all the time and I know I am a broken record on it, but these are educational institutions. These are students, and this is how we treat them. This is just a systemic and endemic problem within sport everywhere, and I think we all know it, and I think that's part of why these things hit in the way that they do.

Lindsay: Yeah. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s also this kind of hashtag campaign going on, #NotNCAAProperty, which was a protest launched last week by Rutgers basketball player Geo Baker, Iowa’s Jordan Bohannon, and Michigan’s Isaiah Livers, who are all upperclassmen on men’s big ten teams. Baker had said, “The NCAA OWNS my name image and likeness. Someone on music scholarship can profit from an album. Someone on academic scholarship can have a tutor service. For ppl who say an athletic scholarship is enough. Anything less than equal rights is never enough. I am #NotNCAAProperty.” We saw Livers actually wear his t-shirt before the game this weekend and that made a lot of news. But I think there's been a lot of questioning of like, first of all, how are the women involved in this campaign? And is this gonna lead to any boycotts? What are the changes we're seeing here, and also how does the women's game incorporate it? Amira, do you have any thoughts on that part of the activism?

Amira: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s two big things here. One, I think that the idea about leverage, right, like when the statement came out and they were trending the hashtag, a lot of the question was, well, are they still gonna play? Which, you know, we’ve talked about before, puts the burden right back on the shoulders of fairly precarious unpaid laborers. But also, I think that there’s a way that we separate these two discussions we're having when they're really tied togehter, right? One of the things that you saw under comments about swag bags or if you listen to certain ill-informed men’s basketball players, professional ones, saying, “Oh, well you’re the JV team, it doesn’t matter, obviously your food or your swag is not gonna be equitable.” It really betrays the entire logic of the system, the idea that your stakes and your $150 swag bag is equitable compensation for the billions of dollars that the tournament is generating, and then this false idea about revenue, and Oral Roberts is not bringing the same revenue as Gonzaga or as UNC, etc, and they're still getting equitable swag bags, right?

We have false ideas of A) revenue, B) we expect all that revenue and interest without investment like we saw, but also the logic here of why the women don’t deserve this is grounded in the idea that these little perks that the men's tournament is getting is what is given to athletes in lieu of compensation, right? To justify the continuation of an exploitative system that’s generating billions of dollars off of these gains and off of this labor, and so I think that it's really important to have this conversation together and not to use women as a shield for name, image, and likeness. We've talked about this, Lindsay has done fantastic reporting as well as other people on how women athletes stand to benefit from NIL as well, and all of these things are wrapped up together in terms of how the NCAA moves to harm its athletes, everybody under the umbrella of that.

So, I think that it's important to hold not Not NCAA Property in conjunction with women’s players speaking out and pointing to this moment of possibility that keeping this momentum is important, because it is representing a little bit more a step that's kind of tacking away and letting the NCAA know that it's not always business as usual, and that might not mean a boycott this year, but I think they are definitely…I mean, best believe there are panicked conversations happening inside the NCAA because it is indisputable that the tide is rising and that these players and their voices are at the center of it, and I wish them all a great tournament and a continued ability to speak out and keep going.

Lindsay: For this week's interview Brenda interviews friend of the show, Dr. Frank Guridy, on his new book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics, on the integration of sports during its hyper-commodification.

Frank: So, you’ve got this major industry emerging around sports – sports media, professional sports, collegiate sports – happening at the same time that marginalized peoples are fighting for and winning unprecedented political, social, and cultural space in the United States, and that the civil rights struggle has had enormous impact on how we understand sports and how we’ve understood it to this day.

Lindsay: Okay friends, it is time for the burn pile. We’ve got a good one for you this week, as always. I’m gonna start with a very serious subject this week. There have been sexual assault and misconduct allegations arising against Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson earlier in the week. It kind of started as one, and throughout the week we've seen the numbers balloon. We don't know a lot of details yet, and of course we’ll wait and see kind of how this plays out. But the defenses of Deshaun Watson started before any details really even emerged. The first lawsuit that we head about was about Watson coercing a massage therapist to perform sexual acts on him, and when that came out former Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Roddy White tweeted, “I hate this for Deshaun Watson. The quickest way now to get a bag is to sue someone. It's impossible to make someone give you oral sex. This is a far stretch and everybody want to get paid.”

Now, look, we do not know the full details. Like I said, we're reserving judgement on the lawsuit itself, but I wanna say if you can’t stand up for your friends without perpetuating rape myths, then don’t. Shut up. You don't have to say anything. I’m not asking you to defend Deshaun Watson immediately before we know anything, I’m not asking anyone to give an opinion or a take on something they're not comfortable talking about, and as someone who has loved Deshaun Watson and rooted for him I certainly don't want any of this to be true. You don’t want it to be true about anyone. But don't spread false rumors, don't immediately think that women are out for money. Don't immediately say that you can't coerce oral sex, which we know is just not true. That's just false. It’s a misunderstanding completely of power dynamics.

I’ve just seen so much this week of how there’s no way Deshaun Watson could do any of this because he’s a “good guy" or the Houston Texans are starting this as a smear campaign against Deshaun Watson because of the trade value – he wants to get traded, so people are now just trying to smear his reputation. I just think the fact that we immediately jump to those types of defenses, we immediately jump to the fact that these women, the only way they could possibly be doing this is for money and/or to ruin a man's reputation, and there's no way it can be true because this guy was nice to me once. These things just aren't true. So, this isn’t a burn pile for Deshaun Watson, this is a burn pile for the rhetoric that we use when we talk about sexual assault allegations, which this week just perpetuated why more women don't come forward and survivors don't come forward. So, burn.

All: Burn.

Lindsay: Amira, you feeling a little high on sugar today?

Amira: I am! [Lindsay laughs] Alright, so this is a week old but I wasn't here and I just had to say something about this. So, last week in Oklahoma during a girls’ basketball game as the star-spangled banner played the broadcasters on the NFHS network stream told listeners they would return after a break, did not realize the audio was still live, and treated everybody to a running commentary of the scene unfolding in front of them. As the Norman girls’ basketball team knelt during the national anthem you hear announcer Matt Rowan say, “They're kneeling. Fuck them. I hope Norman gets their ass kicked.” A little bit of a pause, and then he says, “Fucking n-words.”

You hear the audio cut out, you hear somebody very quietly saying, “I think somebody might’ve heard that,” another pause, and then they go back to calling the game. As this clip went out we knew we would be treated to an apology, so I got my bingo card ready. As you know, I like to check off things for the non-apology apologies that we are accustomed to hearing, and that was going great, you know? He started by saying, listen, I made these inappropriate comments believing the microphone was off – so, check – you know, I should’ve never said this, I’m a family man, I’m a youth pastor–

Jessica: Ugh!

Amira: I got the free space that I always get, which is, “I am not a racist,” despite saying the word that even racists think is racism, like, even people who refuse to see racism everywhere agree that saying the n-word is literally the only thing that will get you called a racist, and he still is like, “This is not who I am." Right? So that was the free space. What I did not have on my bingo board was the following excuse: “I will state that I suffer from type 1 diabetes and during the game my sugar was spiking. While not excusing my remarks, it's not usual in my sugar spikes that I become disoriented and say things that are not appropriate as well as hurtful. I do not believe I would’ve made such horrible statements absent my sugar spiking.”

First and foremost this is a brand new one. Second of all, what a fucked up thing to say for the type 1 diabetic community, for anybody who's ever had sugar spikes and managed to not descend into racial slurs. But besides that, I believe a few weeks ago I covered that racism is not a bone disease so you can stop looking for the racist bones that you do or do not have in your body. But it’s also not a blood sugar disease! That is not going to make you say the things that you said, and it's just like…It took my breath away, literally, this non-apology. No. It’s ridiculous. I wanna note that a few days later, wearing shirts saying "This is why I keel,” the Norman girls’ basketball team again took a knee before the championship game – which they went on to win, capping their 19-0 perfect season, their second straight title, winning the Oklahoma 6A championship.

The WNBA Players Association had sent them a letter of congratulations on both their win and saying, “To our young sisters, the future stars of our sport and rising leaders of this country: you have our support.” I just want to echo that sentiment that they are the future. I admire their resiliency, and congrats on your championship. That was the cherry on top for a team that had to deal with being subjected to gross, sexist, racist treatment. As to Matt Rowan and his awful racism, his terrible apology and all of the bullshit that was both this broadcast and the days after it…I feel for these girls, and it was painful to hear what was slang at them for taking a stand. I admire their bravery and I hope that this only fortifies it, as it seems to do. The rest of that shit, we can burn it down.

All: Burn.

Lindsay: Jess?

Jessica: So, first I do have a small burn but I just can’t believe that the men's college basketball still plays halves and not quarters, and I find it confusing every single time. So, I just wanna do a little burn on the men playing halves. My bigger burn is Shaq, once again reviving the often bandied about idea that women’s basketball should lower the rim to encourage dunking. On TNT’s NBA postgame show earlier this week, Shaq said the following to Candice Parker: “You think if we just lowered the rim so y'all could dunk like we dunk, that that’d give y’all more oomph than you already have?” Parker responded brilliantly with, “Nah.” [laughs] She just says no, but then said that this is really about opportunity and that the dunk is coming in women's basketball. This is just so exhausting. The women's game doesn't need a new rim height, it needs financial and media support. The game is already great and exciting and implying otherwise is ignorance. The legend herself, Cynthia Cooper, rejected Shaq’s proposal outright, saying, “Men don't get to tell women how to play ball,” and then dropped the hammer with, “We didn't tell guys to bring the rim closer so Shaq could make a free throw.” [laughter] Nneka Ogwumike, on a panel with our own Amira Rose Davis a few years back, responded brilliantly to the idea of lowering the rim. 

Nneka Ogwumike: So, we’re constantly being compared to men. We have people excelling at a 10 foot rim, and now you want us to lower the rim so we can be continually compared, only to still be criticized because now you have someone like me who has done what she’s done but now I have to re-learn the game, to appease people who don't wanna watch it for what it is?

Jessica: She’s right, of course. The point of asking this is to suggest that the game should be something else and that something else is whatever men have imagined it to be, and I firmly believe that if women started dunking the criticism would morph – it’s not gonna go away. The women wouldn’t jump high enough, the dunks themselves would be called boring, or they’d be painted as excessive or showy. The goalposts are always moving.

On a recent episode of the excellent new basketball podcast Spinsters, hosted by Haley O'Shaughnessy and Jordan Ligons, Natalie Weiner goes in depth on the idea that women don't dunk. It's a brilliant episode, you should just go listen to the whole thing. But I do wanna draw attention to two things that Natalie says in the episode. First: women CAN dunk! And they've been dunking for decades now. But they aren't actually encouraged to do so, and they aren't consistently taught how, and so as she says, “At some point over the past 30-40 years, saying women can’t dunk became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there's something more important though that's underneath all of this. There’s something bigger embedded in how we talk about and why we talk about dunking so much.”

Natalie Weiner: A dunk is not just a dunk. The reason it's so fraught for women who play basketball isn’t because of the act itself, but because of what it symbolizes: raw athletic ability, strength, and speed, and dominance – traits that women supposedly don’t have. So, if dunking is possible for women, if it's something they can reach towards, a whole world of athleticism and power between what’s been conventionally understood as the “women’s game” and the air above the rim opens up.

Jessica: Whew. Preach. So let's burn the idea of lowering the rim and even asking about lowering the rim altogether. Burn.

All: Burn.

Lindsay: Alright, after that burning it's time to lift up our torchbearers of the week. Jess, who are our ice queens of the week?

Jessica: Wisconsin women’s hockey won their 6th national championship, defeating Northeastern in overtime. They are technically back-to-back champs, having won in 2019 and last year’s tournament cancelled due to COVID. Congratulations to Wisconsin.

Lindsay: Woo! Amira, who are our game changers of the week? 

Amira: Our game-changers of the week are the WNBPA, along with Steph Curry, who were both awarded the Jack Robinson Sports Awards “for their high achievements in athletics in addition to their contributions in the pursuit of social justice, civil rights and community involvement.” I think these are both tremendous choices, so congrats to you Steph and to all the WNBA’s Players Association for continuing to lead the way and setting the blueprint for what athletic activism and involvement looks like. 

Lindsay: Woo! Love to see them getting their flowers in real time, all for it. Alright, our torchbearers for this week: I just wanted to lift up the Asian community as a whole, but particularly those in sports and the broadcasting side, and athletes who are really using their voices to speak out against anti-Asian hate and to educate those who aren’t Asian about the discrimination they've faced since COVID and well before that. We’re gonna hear a few clips; the first is gonna be from Around the Horn, the ESPN show. That one's this week from March 17th. This is from Pablo Torre and Mina Kimes, two of the most prominent Asian American broadcasters, especially in sports. Then we’ve got a clip from Katelyn Ohashi from a year ago about anti-Asian racism during the time of COVID, and then we’ve got Jeremy Lin from once again before this latest attack – this is a video from Bleacher Report, in which Jeremy Lin gives his thoughts on how we can support the community. So I just wanna say we're thinking of all of you, we hope that all of our Asian listeners are really taking care of themselves, and sending love and support. Listen to these voices, and thank you for using your voices. 

Pablo Torre: This is a story that is just the latest step in a horrifying year that has been defined for Asian Americans by hate crimes and racist abuse and bigotry, and the upshot in all of this is that a lot of Asian Americans feel unsafe and are oftentimes afraid to say that. We’re afraid to butt into the conversation because we often feel like maybe it’s not our place. But this is our place, it is our time to be heard and have a seat at the table, and if you’re not Asian American and you're listening to this and processing this, please take the time to listen and take what we’re saying seriously because Asian lives do matter and so does the conversation that we’re finally having around people who hopefully can get more that they deserve. 

Mina Kimes: Yeah, I’d just like to echo what Pablo said. We’re still waiting for details on this but it does come at a time when crimes are up in particular against Asian women. I think of the last time we talked about it on this show, when Jeremy Lin came our and said he had been called “coronavirus” by another player in the G league, and he said that not to punish that player – who he didn’t name – but to remind our political leaders that your words matter, your acknowledgement that this is happening matters, and your support for the Asian community, my community, it matters a great deal, especially at a time like this.

Katelyn Ohashi: So many people are confused during this time, and the acts of violence against Asian Americans is skyrocketing and I think it's not anything new. So, to come together with the global solidarity act, I think we just need to band together. There was a lady with cancer that went into the store to help her husband and she had a face mask on, and she got chased out of the store because they thought that she had coronavirus. Another thing is there were three grocery stores or three stores open and two were American owned stores and the one in the middle was an Asian American owned store, and that was the only one that got vandalized. 

Jeremy Lin: We’re tired of our cries and anguish not being heard. We're tired of our pain being overlooked. We're tired of keeping our heads down or not making any trouble when our elders are being assaulted, stabbed, and killed. Wouldn't you be? The hate-fueled attacked on Asian Americans are disturbing, but why are we surprised? For many of us as Asian Americans in this country we know what it feels like to be told we don't belong, that we're perpetually foreigners, and even though others try to minimize us to one entity we represent so many different cultures, so many different backgrounds, so many different stories. We’re tired of this hateful violence. We're tired of talking about it, but we’re not done speaking out. Far from it. Listen to your AAPI brothers and sisters. We must learn to love one another, to hear one another’s anguish and to actually care. Don’t overlook the pain those around you are experiencing on a daily basis. Reach out to offer your support, to educate others, and let’s put an end to this violence and hate together.

Lindsay: Alright friends, we made it through the episode. Is there anything good going on in your life? Amira, you actually have things written in the doc so I’m gonna start with you. 

Amira: [laughs] Yeah, so, I got back from my writing retreat in Hilton Head. Me and Samari went down; I had a week to write and work on the final push of my book. It was amazing to be in the sun, I ran on the beach, me and Samari…She held my hand! [Lindsay squeals] We held pinkies through the whole state of North Carolina! It was like, who is this child!? I loved it. She convinced me to go bike riding one day during a writing break. I rode a bike that went places, like, it moved when you pedaled…

Lindsay: [laughs] I’ve never heard of such a thing!

Jessica: Technology! 

Amira: Yeah, but I do have to tell you a story. I got on the bike and Samari was like, “How’s your Peloton training helping you?” in like a little teenage voice. Then we were biking for about an hour and so around 50 minutes in we were on the second loop and I was still going strong because of my Pelo legs, and this girl – out of breath, walking her bike, completely discombobulated. She rolled into a bush, she almost ran over a poor old lady!

Jessica: You are lucky that she held your pinkie all through North Carolina, listening to you. [laughter] 

Amira: She was just absolutely coming apart! So I looked over and I said, “Maybe you should ride the Peloton more often.” [laughs] It was beautiful. It was great. But we had a lovely time, it was tremendous. Yeah, I have two other quick things that are really good. One, I have upcoming talks: I was awarded the Sherman annual lectureship at UNCW and while I’m very sad that I can’t go down to the beach and hang out in Wilmington for the week in person, this has been delayed but I’m happy that this is actually happening this week. I’ll be giving a big public talk there on Wednesday night, the 25th, about my research and sports and global protest. Then the next day there will be a public senior scholar response panel featuring reactions to my work and another discussion.

So, those are big events happening this week. They’re on Twitter for the Zoom links and all that stuff. So I'm very excited, also because I think it closes out my Black History Month/Women's History Month gauntlet of events. Then the best what’s good for me is, as I was driving down to Hilton Head, I called my friend Sarah to say hey, I might need to park my car at your house, and she was like, “I can’t, I'm in labor!" and 45 minutes later her second daughter Raja was born. When we were driving back up a week later she was home and rested and since we were vaccinated and they were vaccinated we were able to see the baby on our way back up. So, I just wanna say welcome to the world, Raja! Happy Nowruz for all our Iranian listeners and friends and family and that is absolutely my what’s good.

Jessica: That was really good.

Lindsay: Yay! Yeah, Jess, I’m gonna make you follow that, because…

Jessica: [laughs] Mine is not that...I will say, I have not this weekend but the two weekends previous, I volunteered down as a mass vaccination site here in Austin, and it was wonderful. It was just really lovely to chat with strangers, which is not something I’ve actually been able to do in a year. Then also participating in people being able to get vaccinated…There was one lady who actually I checked her in and she just started crying because she didn't get the confirmation email so she didn’t 100% know that she was in the system, and so when I just kind of casually checked her in because she was in there, she just broke down with relief that she was actually gonna get the vaccination that day. It was really lovely to participate in any of that and feel like part of the community again and to feel like you were doing something positive after this year of just a slew of negative things.

Later today we're supposed to get Google Fiber, so we're very excited to see how that goes. Last night as we were streaming television, every time it blipped it was like, Google’s gonna fix this tomorrow! So, we’ll see if that actually happens. Then I just wanna say, Aaron keeps being great. We figured out this week that my website that I've had for years was just not working anymore – apparently it had gotten hacked so many times that Wordpress had just shut down access to it altogether, so I couldn't even log in, I couldn’t change anything, the contact form didn’t work, there were sites that were just missing. And he fixed it! Whatever he did…I just said, “Please make it so that it’s easy for me,” and it's now back and beautiful and I just appreciate Aaron all the time. So, that was good for me this week.

Lindsay: Aww. I am coming off another…I know if you listen I’ve been going through a rough patch and, whew, it’s hitting me again. But once again, grace, the grace of people around me has gotten me through it, the patience of people around me, and a good thing is I’m getting really close to being done decorating my condo, so I’ve kind of had to take a break in the month of February because I didn’t have any money in the month of February, but then I got a lot of money for the year at the beginning of March, so it's not like…I’m still checking the price of stuff, I’m trying to do everything as cheaply as I can, but I’m also doing everything I wanna do, you know what I mean? I’m getting everything like I wanna get, even though I'm looking for the cheapest kind. So this week the prints I’ve gotten printed for my gallery wall should come in, and then the frames, so now I just have to put it up, which of course will be really obnoxious. But getting really close to getting this place to the point where it really feels good, and that's exciting to me.

I have to just take a moment…I found out this week that…I think it's really easy, especially when you're at a place where you feel like you're not producing your best work or not producing work at all and just to feel really down, but I found out that…So, it wasn't a Supreme Court opinion, I think people got confused. It isn't an opinion, but it was a brief filed for a Supreme Court case that’s about to be talked about, but two of my pieces on how ending NCAA amateurism would help women, two of my pieces that really counteract the argument of “this would really impact Title IX” were included in that briefing, and so that was really cool to see that a Power Plays and a ThinkProgress piece were included in a Supreme Court briefing!

Jessica: It’s very cool!

Lindsay: Yeah! [laughs] 

Jessica: Had your name and everything.

Lindsay: It had my name!

Amira: And it will be there for…

Jessica: Forever! 

Amira: It's so cool.

Lindsay: Like forever! I talked to the person who did it, and she just said...First of all, she had actually notified me about this like a week or two earlier, which is a reason to check your DMs on Twitter, the ones that are in weird hidden folders! So, do that. But also, she said we were really happy that in the middle of this it was a briefing kind of on behalf of all these players associations so, you know, NBA players association, WNBA players association. She was like, “We’re really happy that we were able to counteract the Title IX myth within this,” d’you know what I mean? So, that was cool. I was excited about that. So, that’s some goodness I'm gonna take through to keep going.

Thank you all so much for supporting Burn It All Down. We are everywhere that podcasts are [laughs] I think is just the easiest way to say it. If you got to Apple Podcasts and leave us a five star review that helps us so so so much. For what we're watching this week: I’m sure there’s other things going on, but I'm gonna be watching the NCAA tournament. [laughs]  

Jessica: Athletes United volleyball! 

Lindsay: And Athletes United volleyball! Thank you, okay. I am watching that, because that's rounding down, so we've got some really exciting games coming from that. Yeah, I'm just excited. There’s lots of women's sports on TV right now, so let’s do it. I wanna thank first of all our patrons for supporting us on patreon.com/burnitalldown. We had a really fun fireside chat with our patrons last week, and it was another what's good, that's another one of those soul-affirming things.

Jessica: Yeah, it was very fun.

Lindsay: Just to be able to talk to our listeners. So, if you support the Patreon you can be a part of those going forward, and also as always wanna thank our social media guru Shelby Weldon and our producer for this episode, Ali Lemer.

Shelby Weldon