Episode 199: Refugees and Sports
In this episode, Jess, Shireen and Brenda look at the beneficial role of sports — especially soccer/football — in the lives of refugees around the world.
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
Alphonso Davies Wants to Share His Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/sports/soccer/alphonso-davies-bayern-munich
Integration of refugee women through sport continues as INSPIRE Project makes progress: https://www.farenet.org/uncategorized/integration-of-refugee-women-through-sport-continues-as-inspire-project-makes-progress
Five ways sport can help rehabilitate refugees: https://www.sportanddev.org/en/article/news/five-ways-sport-can-help-rehabilitate-refugees/
COVID-19 Brief: Impact on Refugees https://www.usglc.org/coronavirus/refugees
Sport can offer hope to displaced communities during the COVID-19 pandemic: https://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2020/5/5ec3f2e94/olympic-refuge-foundation-sport-offer-hope-displaced-communities-during
Why NBA star Marc Gasol helped crew a migrant rescue boat: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/jul/19/marc-gasol-migrant-rescue-mediterranean-nba-memphis-grizzlies.html
Transcript
Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I’m Jessica, and on this week’s show I’m joined by Shireen and Brenda. On this week’s show we’re gonna talk about refugees, sports, and all of the intersections of these two. Then we’ll burn things that deserve to be burned, highlight the torchbearers who are giving us hope during this dark time, let you know what’s good in our worlds, and we’ll tell you what we are watching this week. But first, before we get into all of that – it’s spring! We’re now in that shoulder season between the cold of winter and the heat of summer. Happy Passover and an early happy Easter to all who are celebrating.
Here in Austin we are in…Though I’m worried we are possibly already on our way out of this magical period where the weather is generally nice and we aren’t completely overwhelmed with mosquitos. Aaron and I do not have a green thumb, we have the opposite of that, so we just had a gardener plant a bunch of plants and flowers in our front yard, so this season I’m particularly excited to see those grow. Then during the horrible week of ice and snow here in Texas, a bunch of plants died. I just took Ralph on a walk and there were just bags of dead plants that people are waiting for the compost people to come pick up. So, I’m excited to see…Anytime something blooms right now, it just feels so magical. What do you like about this season, Shireen?
Shireen: I’m ruminating. Y’all know I’m a fall girl, so I’m ruminating about spring. I prefer fall because there’s something vulnerable…But there’s something vulnerable about spring, like, blooming in what was previously dead, as you mentioned, and the possible rebirth of flora, scented beauty, maybe outdoor visits. We’re getting into our third wave of COVID, we’ll probably be locked down til June. So, that freshness and outdoors, that dew…Does spring bring possibility, hope? This is my novel today. [laughter]
Jessica: You’re like a poet today! Okay. That was lovely, thank you, Shireen. Bren, what about you?
Brenda: Well, one thing I like…I’ll start with the negatives about what I like.
Jessica: Of course.
Brenda: There’s no pumpkin spice in spring, there’s no equivalent, so that’s amazing. McDonald’s tried with the shamrock shake, ha ha, didn’t work. So, it turns out that the real smell of flowers is way better. So, just as a season train, I would try to lobby you over to our spring side. Despite allergies and yard work I love spring because it means that summer’s almost here, and I fucking love summer. So it feels like, how can I complain when it’s just a lead-up, you know?
Jessica: I’m excited because we’re gonna have bluebonnet season here, and I’ve been thinking about ways to get Ralph to go lay down in the bluebonnets so he can have a little photo shoot.
Brenda: Aww.
Jessica: So, hopefully we can find a nice patch somewhere that he’ll cooperate with us. [break]
We wanna introduce you to Alphonso Davies. Here’s a clip from a BBC Sport video from October 2019.
Alphonso Davies: I’m Alphonso Davies, I’m 18 years old, born in Ghana, grew up in Canada. My parents fled from the Libera civil war. It wasn’t easy, running away from war. You don’t know where your kids are at once, all over the place…I think three years ago was the first time I saw my sister. It was a tough time for them, and I’m happy that they came to a good country like Canada where we can be something. Every time I step on the field I do it for my family, I do it for them.
Jessica: As he mentioned there, Davies was born in a refugee camp in Ghana after his parents fled civil war in Liberia. They moved to Canada when he was 5, and he was officially granted Canadian citizenship in 2017. He plays for the Bundesliga club Bayern Munich and the Canadian national team, and he is now a goodwill ambassador for UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. According to the New York Times, Davies “hopes to use the position to raise money to renovate soccer facilities in refugee camps. He is not only the first Canadian, but also the first soccer player, to be afforded the honor.” Here’s a clip of Davies talking about his new position and refugees around the world.
Alphonso Davies: I am proud to join UNHCR as a Goodwill Ambassador, and speak up for refugees. There are over 80 million people around the world who had to flee their homes and these numbers are only going up. COVID-19 has made life hard for refugees for everyone, including refugees. For many of them, access to basic clean water, soap, and now vaccines can be very difficult. When I look back on my life I often wonder: Where would I have been if I stayed in the refugee camp? Would I have made it as a professional footballer? That’s why I want people to know about the importance of helping refugees. They need support for their immediate need to survive but also for education and access to sports, so they can thrive.
Jessica: Shireen – Davies has said that soccer is how he fit in once he got to Canada. Has soccer or even sport more broadly worked this way for other refugees? I know that Amnesty International has a program called Football Welcomes, which uses football to promote integration and inclusion for communities made up of refugees and people seeking asylum. Are there other programs like this?
Shireen: Yeah, I think it’s really important to note that in the tradition of sport being used as a vehicle for empowerment, it's also being used as a tool to help people recover from conflict, displacement, and it really certainly does help. There’s quite an amount of scholarship on this about how it’s used for PTSD.
Jessica: Oh, wow. Okay.
Shireen: Yeah. So, that is actually what we see in the aftermath of what happened in Syria, and these huge displacements of people, particularly in central Africa, football is conveniently used because it’s the least expensive thing to do. You can involve 23 people, which includes an official, and one ball, and you can play with equipment or without equipment, and so it’s commonly done, and this is one of the reasons that it’s probably the most useful. Other types of sport include taekwondo, certainly for young girls. We’ve seen that in Zaatari refugee camp outside of Syria. We’ve seen that in many different places.
I think it’s important to note that this can be done in such a positive way, because not only are we dealing with the complete crumbling of not just a child but woman’s life and community and everything they’ve known; this brings a certain amount of not only physical strength and reestablishment of self, but confidence as well, and then possibly new skill learning, which is always wonderful. Then adjacent to that you see organizations all over the world…And that, what I was specifically referring to, was in camp. So, you have different sport development agencies doing stuff in camps. But after people have applied for asylum and then migrated from those spaces, there’s also organizations around the world that help create policy, they create best practices and harm reduction is the most important and all these pieces.
I was part of Fare Network that we love on the show, they had a project called INSPIRE, so it was basically a best practices document to offer to places, organizations around the world that have seen an influx of refugees wherever they were from. It was provided in different languages and it was called INSPIRE. I think it's something that's based in Europe but it can be applied around the world. I certainly spread it around in Canada to people I knew. I was very involved in working with Syrian refugees when they first came to Canada in 2016 and was part of a program that was unofficial…It doesn’t have to be official. Anybody can do it and get a space and get people together, but it was really helpful because as we know football is a language of the world and you don’t have to speak the same language, you just have to speak football. I could cry about this–
Jessica: Your cat is crying about it.
Shireen: My cat is crying about it. She emphatically agrees with this. So, on the flip side of that, and Brenda and I talk about this all the time, our concerns with white saviorism in terms of these projects being implemented and how is it…Like, what's the white gaze coming in, is there an understanding of geopolitical situations, is there an understanding of the women and what their needs are, are there language barriers, are there cultural understanding barriers? Because as much as I’m a Muslim woman who tries to understand, you can’t just put me there and say that I’ll understand something when I don’t know. It’s crucial to involve people on the ground who are already doing this work, that’s one thing I want to say again, in these places where there are always women doing work, always, already. So, find out what is happening there as opposed to parachuting in and trying to do…Like, intake and centering the people who need that help is always most important.
Jessica: Thank you, Shireen. While these programs are great, I’d like to zoom out for a second because there’s not a lot of coverage about the status of refugees around the world. Brenda, what do we know right now?
Brenda: There's been a huge drop-off in coverage but not any sign of refugees and the need for state waning. So, what we have – and of course these statistics are incredibly hard to come by and you can imagine why – the estimates around over 20 million refugees, and another 5-6 million Palestinians, who we should say don’t have state status in the way that the UN thinks it should. About a quarter of those are from Syria. So, even though there’s been a huge drop-off in the discussion about Syria it doesn’t mean that Syrians have found places that they’ve been settled. So, it’s interesting to think about – interesting as in tragic and awful, I guess – how long these crises happen. One thinks, oh, I think back to the Angolan civil war and there are millions of Angolans that suffered displacement that still today have not been adequately settled.
So, there’s a long way to go, and one of the most troubling things when you read about it is the increase of environmental refugees. Environmental refugees are people fleeing because of natural disasters, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, floods. Right now South Sudan, they estimate this year there’ll be about 350,000 refugees from floods. This is in addition to and compounding the political crisis, and of course that environmental crisis is caused by the world’s most developed nations, but those nations aren’t really interested in providing commensurate help with the crisis. Even though the United States is one of the largest contributors to the UN – both the high commissioner but really the refugee section of the UN – it’s not proportionate, and Germany’s very very low in contributions because it considers itself to be a place that takes in.
So, there's the issue of what you contribute. The US is one of the lowest on the list of developed nations to take in refugees. It takes in so few refugees, but the environment impact of the United States is high, so that it seems really unfair. Right now the International Red Cross estimates there’s more environmental refugees than political refugees today.
Jessica: Wow.
Brenda: I know.
Jessica: I mean, that makes sense when you lay it out, but…Yeah.
Brenda: It’s not separate from the political question, but it's just exacerbating it to a really frightening extent. I will say that President Joe Biden signed an executive order that calls for a change to refugee processing just last week, and he set a limit for the fiscal year but it increased about 125,000, whereas refugee admissions reached a historic low during the Trump administration and he considered that a hallmark of his presidency. So, we should remember that one of the hallmarks of that administration was to deny state status to people fleeing crises created by the United States, in part.
Jessica: And of course we’re now in a pandemic, as we sit here. Bren, what has been COVID’s impact on refugees? What are some of the long term effects of the pandemic?
Brenda: So, it has been as you can imagine a very deadly place, a very stressful place with crowded conditions, people not wanting to work in those places where they normally do, where it’s not even safe. Basically it’s made resettlement much much more difficult, and so who’s gonna take in refugees and who’s gonna take in refugees during COVID? So, almost every place is having a crisis, also because refugee camps are in this weird political space as are refugees, which is what’s so sad, which is: who controls the refugee camp? Are refugee camps run by the state of Greece, for example, or are they run by the UN? Or are they run by the local province? There’s a series of laws that makes that really hard. So, you can imagine that once COVID happens not only are the conditions within the camps terrible, the conditions of people that go to do the work in the camps is incredibly difficult. On top of it, to get people resettled in countries like let’s say Canada has almost entirely closed it borders to places that used to be open. I’m not criticizing that decision, I’m just saying you can imagine.
Jessica: Yeah, and that makes me wonder about vaccine distribution, and if you don't even know who’s in charge of these spaces how will that work when we get there. Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, one of the things that I think is really impactful is the way in which the discussions are done from a critical lens, because UNHCR actually does work intrinsically with the International Olympic Committee, and on the one hand I’m like, ew, because that’s all just a mess – see previous Burn It All Down episodes! But on the other hand, the reach of the Olympic Committee and the budget they have and the lack of constraints that they have…There’s a piece that we’ll put in the show notes, the UNHCR has what’s called the Olympic refugee foundation and they actually offer scholarships too. We’ve talked about Team Refugee before, I wrote about it in 2016, which was the first time I saw it. But what it does is I think when we think about displacement for people, not only are their whole lives upended but when they actually moved and are settled, what kind of supports are offered to them then, as they are stateless? The process as Brenda just defined, of attaining a citizenship somewhere else, is not easy, particularly in a pandemic, and how that's being affected in COVID is in camp and outside as well. The effect on mental health on athletes and everybody has been disproportionately terrible. Those with privilege, with stability, are suffering in this time, and we know that. So, what does it look like for people that do not have that stability? Sports seems to be a place where they can benefit from, for all aforementioned reasons. I think that, you know, the IOC love think tanks, so they have think tanks about this. [Jessica laughs] They have committees. FIFA loves committees! The IOC loves think tanks.
Jessica: Yeah, bureaucracy loves committees. Yes.
Shireen: Loves committees! So, they have committees, they have a call of solutions from the Olympic refugee foundation, and ironically the IOC president Thomas Bach is also chair of the ORF committee. Then as much as I’m uncomfortable with everything that happens there, I know that there's work being done on the ground and that actually does trickle in, and what happens is that settlement agencies and help agencies here or in western countries where mostly people are reestablished, there’s an accountability piece which I think is really important because it’s not just about refugees coming and getting a place here, it's about their settlement literally, where they go and what this looks like. These organizations then help them. I know in Canada Jumpstart, which is funded by Canadian Tire, is a great organization that did this thing where if there were soccer clubs charging fees for Syrian refugees they would just cover all the fees. We don’t think about how expensive sport can be, it’s very expensive, even recreationally. So, who has access to it beyond just being in the camps. We have to think about this holistically.
Jessica: Yeah, put the pandemic on top, it’s quite a thing. Bren, you mentioned this before but I wanna come back to it, that these are stories that are happening now, COVID is happening now; we all hope and pray if you pray that this will go away, that vaccines will work, the variants will die off, all these sorts of things. That does not mean that the impact of what’s happening now will end, right? It could be decades later for a lot of these people. It can take a very long time, right?
Brenda: It can take so long, and it usually does. Just to use football as a way to understand this for me, many listeners who are into global football might recognize this name, and some of you don’t perhaps, but Rio Mavuba, who played for the French national team and captained the u-21 French team, was named Rio for a river because he was actually born at sea in 1984. His father, some people might also remember, was Mafuila Mavuba, a footballer who was at the 1974 World Cup in Zaire. His parents were caught in the Angolan civil war, in a really violent conflict, and they had to leave and essentially his passport read “born at sea.” He was born at sea as they were fleeing this Angolan conflict. It took them a long time to leave and find a boat to take them to France. He doesn’t really talk about the details and he doesn’t really know them because his mother died when he was 2, so only after a year of being in France, and then his father about ten years later. At that point he said he launched his football career to go…You know, he just threw himself into it. He was living with an aunt in Bordeaux. I wanna say, he did not get his French nationality until 20 years later, until 2004.
Jessica: 20!
Brenda: 20 years later, when the French national team…He had no state.
Jessica: So he was stateless for decades.
Brenda: Stateless!
Jessica: Wow.
Brenda: His passport said “born at sea.” So he lived in Bordeaux his entire childhood. It was only when the French national team wanted him, and they started this process in 2004, when the French national team wanted him to play because essentially DRC had approached him and asked him to be on their team. The French said, oh, wait a second!
Jessica: Of course.
Brenda: So, sure, it’s a happy story for him in some way, but mostly heartbreaking and reveals what most people would go through. This happened to him – then think of what happens to people like me without that kind of talent [laughs] who are caught in these situations.
Jessica: One interesting part of all of this is that athletes have, as we’ve talked about endlessly on this show, they have a different bigger platform than a lot of people, and so they end up educating a lot of people about refugees. Bren?
Brenda: They do. A lot of the footballers that we’ve seen have kept some of the stories alive that the press and mainstream journalism have forgotten. For example you have Zlatan, one of the most outspoken and talented footballers of his generation, that is Bosnian, that constantly will reference that conflict. But probably even more productive was the work of Dejan Lovren, who actually fled Bosnia, and the reason his story is important is not only that Liverpool…He made such an effort to campaign for England to open up its borders, and for Germany. That’s because when he fled the Bosnian conflict as a child they fled to Germany and were turned away, and so ended up at a refugee camp and exiled, had nowhere to go, essentially were just turned back at a certain point. They ended up in Croatia, where he eventually would go on to start for the Croatians. When he did that he was very pointed in saying, hey, I’m looking at you Germany, so sure, I fled this conflict but my parents and my life could’ve been very different if you would have allowed us to stay, and so that work I think on Lovren’s part was really powerful.
Jessica: Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, if we're gonna talk Croatia, I mean, one of the most well-known refugees that came from that time was Luka Dončić who is co-captain of Real Madrid and FIFA 2018 finalist runner up. He was a ballon d’or winner and it’s very much a part of his story to be displaced during that time. I was in high school when the war in Bosnia broke out. He was a child, and talks about what his life was like before, and you get a very picturesque idea of his village and there’s mountain goats involved and his grandparents and him learning how to play football as so many children do, and then completely wrecking that. One of the things that is so important in the story is that you can take a ball with you and that is a piece of you and it goes with you wherever you are and it’s something you know and is so built in to your identity that it can go with you, and I think that’s one of the things that sport has the power to do.
There’s ways in which as well Luka Modrić doesn't speak a lot about it, although his story is often…He himself doesn’t speak, and I think for those athletes that choose to all the power to them, although I do understand the trauma that is associated with this and if they don’t we shouldn’t expect that of people, and I feel strongly about that generally. But then you have Alex Scott who was onetime captain of Arsenal women’s side who went in, who does not come from a refugee experience but she went to a refugee camp, an Iraqi one in Iraq of Syrian refugees in 2016, and played with the young girls there, and what that meant to them. Their faces are delighted, it's absolutely beautiful.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a complete opportunity for Arsenal as a club to make themselves look far better in their politics than they actually are, but for her it was undoubted, the effect it had on her personally because we don’t understand the conditions. We think, oh, that's really hard for them but they're getting supported. What that means to have your entire life shattered and then moved, and then how we talk about resiliency and how that word is overused when it comes to kids. The other thing I just wanted to say when we're talking about athletes who speak out about this, because there are not very many to be honest that speak about…There's so many things to speak about it.
But in the wider context particularly from a lens of Canada/the United States, there's not a lot that speak about refugees. Two of the most prominent ones who are doing work and not just talking about it are Marc and Pau Gasol, two basketball players originally from Spain, spent their offseason actually in the Mediterranean helping an organization rescue refugees that were drowning or in peril. They had spoken publicly about this, stories have been done about it, but just the way that they speak of it is incredible to me, and so few do. So I just wanted to say that we’ll also attach that story to the show notes.
Jessica: I wanted to ask about women specifically, if there’s a gendered aspect. Shireen has brought this up before, so I’d to go into it just a little bit. What about women refugees? Bren.
Brenda: Well, as you can imagine, many of the programs that focus on football in refugee living are focused on boys, the idea that boys might fall into “trouble” is part of that, and you hear that language a lot. There are some really prominent women – Nadia Nadim, the Afghani-Danish player whose father was executed by the Taliban, they had to flee Afghanistan and ended up in Denmark. I mean, her story is amazing and nuanced because she's gonna talk about the obstacles to women in Afghanistan playing and that's really important to hear people like her who will explain, you know, if I would’ve been in Afghanistan would I have been a footballer at all? But also saying I shouldn’t have had to leave Afghanistan, right? Both those things can be true. So, there’s a really careful politics around this, but we really do need to constantly remind ourselves that these programs need to be gender inclusive because if left to their own devices they won’t be.
Jessica: Yeah. It’s the world in a recap right there. Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, and I think it’s really important to understand that the stresses and the experiences that women face are absolutely not the same as men. [laughs] And that can be addressed through these programs, like particularly there was one organization that I love – one of my bucket lists is to work with them – they’re in Berlin and they’re called Discover Football and they actually work specifically with immigrant women. There’s organizations like this all over Europe and North America that do specific work around the needs of immigrant women, and they're also facing structures of white supremacy, misogyny, everything else. It uses football to integrate and include them, and include is a really important word.
They're also understanding that they’re suffering from stress and pain from leaving, and one of the foremost things they talk about – and so do Les Dégommeuses who are friends of the show, they're a French organization run by queer women in Paris, and shoutout to them because their work is wonderful, they work a lot with North African women – is this piece of inclusion, but also understanding that women from these situations desperately miss their homelands. It's not like, “Congratulations, you should be so happy to be here,” because this is something we forget in the conversations about refugees. They desperately miss their homelands and they're innocent people who got caught up in a conflict. So, I think that’s just important to keep in mind when we think about this.
Jessica: Yeah. Thank you both so much for all of this, this has been wonderful. To wrap up, let’s talk about one of the best stories about refugees in sport, and we know it’s coming. The Olympic refugee team, Shireen – is there an update? What can we expect this summer?
Shireen: There’ll be an update very soon. We’re not 100% sure. We know that the Olympics are probably happening without spectators, but in terms of this specific thing I think in the next couple of days, weeks, we can expect some more firm announcement with regards to team refugee.
Jessica: That’s awesome. So, we’ll get to hear these people’s stories, it’s another great opportunity for this kind of press that Brenda was talking about that we lose a lot of the time. This is one of, in my limited media around this, that’s one of the biggest stories that I can remember. To wrap this up, we thought it’d be nice to end with the voices of people who participated in Fare Net’s INSPIRE conference, the one that Shireen mentioned earlier in the program. This included our own Shireen Ahmed! It was in Warsaw, Poland, in December 2018. (View video on Facebook)
On Thursday, Amira talks with professional footballer and former US women’s national team player Meghan Klingenberg about re—inc, the lifestyle brand founded by her, Christen Press, Tobin Heath, and Megan Rapinoe. They talk about athletes redefining businesses, making gender-neutral and body-inclusive fashion, and their newest collection, Gamer, which finds connections and empowerment between sports and gaming
Meghan: There’s nothing out there made for people like me or people like us, and so we wanted to go about changing that because ultimately fashion is just an outward representation of your inner power, and we want people to be able to show that on the outside because it’s like, yeah, this is exactly how I feel most comfortable and I love to look dope as hell, but also this is me.
Jessica: Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite segment that we like to call the burn pile, where we pile up all the things we’ve hated this week in sports and set them aflame. I’m gonna start us off today. This week I saw a New York Times article titled, N.F.L. Clears Way for End to Washington Football Team Turmoil and I thought, oh, is Dan Snyder selling the team? Because Dan Snyder is the worst. But truly, Jessica, you naive baby! Of course it’s not that. [Brenda laughs] And in fact it is the opposite. Dan Snyder “is close to a deal with fellow N.F.L. owners that will give him greater control over the franchise while he pays a fine for executives’ misconduct.” He’s asking to take on extraordinary amounts of debt, $450 million, so he can buy out minority partners, and when this happens he and his family will then control 100% of the club.
It’s wild that anyone anywhere thinks that Snyder’s total control of this team will end the turmoil going on there. Lest anyone has forgotten, Snyder was the big white holdout when it came to the team’s former racist name. It was under Snyder that lots of women on the business side of operations were harassed, and that barely paid anything team cheerleaders were used as personal sexual objects for the team’s sponsors and suite holders. Also, let me read to you the literal next to last paragraph of this New York Times article: “The Washington Post reported that two women had accused Snyder, 56, in separate episodes of harassment dating to 2004 — which he denied — and that he reached a financial settlement in 2009 with a female former executive who had accused him of sexual misconduct during a trip on a private jet.” Way to save this for the end of the article, New York Times.
According to The Washington Post, that woman who settled with Snyder made “a serious accusation of sexual misconduct.” Now, stick with me here. The Washington NFL Team’s general counsel sued the woman that has hired to look into all of this. Yes, there's the findings of the investigation coming soon despite the fact that they're gonna give this man the whole team. The team was trying to get that investigator not to look into a particular case from 2009 involving a settlement. The Post couldn't determine if it was the exact same case involving the serious accusation of sexual misconduct they were reporting on, or if there was another one from the same year, though most evidence points to it being the same case. It really makes you wonder what details we’d learn about Snyder if more information came to light. I guess the New York Times and I have a different definition of “turmoil.” I wanna light all of this on fire. Burn.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Shireen, what are you burning?
Shireen: Just a trigger warning as well for white supremacy. Friend of the show, former guest of the show, Hemal Jhaveri, who was employed at USA Today for 8 years and was the sport media group’s race and inclusion editor, was fired last week. I just wanna read you a little clip that we can also put in the show notes where she explains what happened. The email that she got basically stated that she had violated USA Today’s standards and ethics, which is what the editor had said, and this all started from a tweet where she was talking as she very candidly often does tweet, about white supremacy. It was in reference to the shooting incidents that also happened in the United States, and there was social media outrage about what she said and her response…This was actually a response to Julie DiCaro, and she says, “It’s always angry white men, always.” That was her perspective before the shooter, who was actually a racialized man, was discovered to be the perpetrator of this violence.
Essentially she was fired, and one of the things is that she talked about the stress that she's endured, the micro-aggressions that she's endured, and although she's very clear to say her role with her subjection For The Win at USA Today was an incredible group of people who had her back and thought very similarly and had the same vision of anti-oppression that she does, she loved that team to work with, she stated this over and over again, and she will always always support their work. But the higher-ups is where the problem happened, and I think that this is something that I just wanna read from Hemal’s Medium blog post that she wrote. "I’ve often written that, in sports, the burden of speaking out against racism, sexism and homophobia often falls on the shoulders of marginalized players. Within USA TODAY, most of this work is also done by racialized reporters. In my case, I rarely, if ever, had the support of USA TODAY’s top editors. When the fall out from each column left me vulnerable to social media attacks and harassment, USA TODAY never offered public, institutional support.”
I think this is really pivotal to understand, that if you're going to pretend that your network, your outlet, your organization is anti-oppressive or backs your reporters – back them the fuck up! Because there's a stress, there's a burden on racialized and marginalized folks from doing this work and if you don't have the support of your higher-ups it leads you to an inordinate amount of hate, which is what happened with Hemal. The reason this got escalated is because the alt-right got wind of it and started to accuse her of racism against white men. Flamethrowers, that is not a fucking thing. But it became a thing because of the way that she was harassed and the public pressure that was put on by those groups and as women who have been harassed by that specific section we know what this is. Those were targeted attacks, they are organized through different ways just to inundate, and that’s what happened.
I’m sorry, I think this is bullshit. I’m a racialized writer and obviously we at Burn It All Down and all of us racialized or not offer our solidarity to Hemal. Whoever gets you and picks you up for your work will be incredibly lucky. The work you’ve done is profoundly important in these spaces where 5 years ago these conversations were not even happening. So, I wanna take that bullshit in sports media and I wanna burn it all down.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Brenda, what’s on your burn pile?
Brenda: This week civic leaders around Korea held protests demanding the termination of the contract of Japanese footballer Ryohei Michibuchi. He is currently under contract as of last week with K League 2, with Asan FC. He had just transferred because he had been previously fired from club Sendai in Japan. The reason he was fired was because of his at least third charge of intimate partner violence. The first charge came in 2017 and at the time he was arrested and he admitted to the charges. He was then detained – and I just want to give a trigger warning to skip the next few seconds if you want – because of punching a woman in the face, kicking her legs, and leaving her alone after an argument in a building in Tokyo’s Kōtō ward.
So, that happened. Then he went on to continue to play. In 2020 he once again was convicted and he admitted to intimate partner violence. Then again in 2021, and in this case it was an actress, we don't know exactly the person and who she is, she has not decided to disclose her name. But we know she’s a fairly powerful actress that was able to get him fired because that’s what it takes. So, after this he was transferred to the K League. Of course I wanna burn his behavior but that would be too little, so what I would really like to focus on is just the transfer of players in global football. That's what you do when things like this happen.
You transfer teams, you take Cristiano Ronaldo and you send him from England to Spain to Italy, and none of that manages to follow them. We need international regulations in global football to stop the transfer of players that shouldn’t be playing where the leagues themselves would have sanctions. Those need to transfer just like their transfer fees. So, I wanna burn the fact that they get a clean record and the just get to go to another country and sign a contract that they shouldn't be able to.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Now to highlight people carrying the torch and changing sports culture. First, we want to honor snowboarder Julie Pomagalski, who competed in the 2002 and 2006 Olympics for France and who won the world championship in snowboard cross in 1999. She was killed in an avalanche in the Swiss Alps last week. Rest in peace. And now, onto our honorable mentions. Shireen, who are our ice queens this week?
Shireen: The NWHL’s Boston Pride are the first team ever to win the Isobel Cup twice. Congratulations, Beantown. This is very hard for me to say out loud. Formidable performance in the finals, you just plowed through it. Congrats again.
Jessica: Brenda, who are our whistleblowers – get it? – this week?
Shireen: Ahh!
Brenda: France’s Stéphanie Frappart and Ukraine’s Kateryna Monzul will take charge – that means officiate – the FIFA World Cup qualifier, and those will be the first two women who will do that for a men’s match. In addition there were 2 Mexican female match officials and we’ve talked about them for CONCACAF. So, this is the World Cup qualifiers, very big deal. Blow that whistle.
Shireen: Love that pun. That was excellent, Jessica.
Jessica: Thank you, thank you. [Shireen laughs] Shireen, please tell us about the Barrier Breakers of the Week.
Shireen: This brings me a lot of happiness to say. Congrats to the team of women at TSN who were part of a historic all-women NBA broadcast covering the Toronto Raptors versus the Denver Nuggets. The Raptors ended their losing streak and won that game. Meghan McPeak and Kia Nurse on the play-by-play, Kayla Gray on the sidelines, Kate Beirness and Amy Audibert in the studio for the show. Brava, ladies! I just want to add that this is followed by an all-women and non-binary coverage team for the Sacramento Kings game versus the Cavs, Cleveland Cavaliers, including friend of the show Layshia Clarendon. We love them, support this, wanna see so much more of this – not just in women’s history month. We remain not men in other months of the year as well!
Jessica: Brenda, who are our footy champions?
Brenda: Footy champions are Brazil's Guerreiras Grenas, the new Libertadores Feminina Champions! They beat America de Cali Feminino 2-1 to clinch the trophy. All of that is available on CONMEBOL’s Facebook.
Jessica: Can I get a drumroll please?
[drumroll]
Our torchbearer this week is legendary basketballer Elgin Baylor, who died this week at the age of 86. He led Seattle University to the NCAA championship game in 1958, and was then drafted by the Minneapolis Lakers. He won Rookie of the Year in his first season and was the All-Star game MVP. He ended up playing 14 seasons for the Minneapolis and Los Angeles Lakers, earning NBA All-Star honors 11 times with 10 First Team All-NBA appearances. He averaged a double-double for his career, posting 27.4 points and 13.5 rebounds per game over his entire career. He played in the NBA finals 8 times – never won a ring, though. He was the first player to score 70 points in an NBA game and he still holds the single-game scoring record for 61 points against the Celtics in 1962.
But there’s more! After he retired in 1971, Baylor coached the New Orleans Jazz and then was Vice President of Basketball Operations for the Los Angeles Clippers. He was named NBA Executive of the Year in 2005-06, when the Clippers won 47 games and made the Western Conference semifinals. And Baylor did that while being subjected to age and racial discrimination under the infamous racist owner of the Clippers, Donald Sterling. Baylor said that he worked for Sterling because of the limited job opportunities for Black former players and the need to provide for his family.
He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1977. The Lakers retired his jersey in 1983 and honored him with a statue in 2018. His wife, Elaine, released a statement after Baylor’s death that read in part, “Elgin was the love of my life and my best friend. And like everyone else, I was in awe of his immense courage, dignity and the time he gave to all fans.” Rest in peace, Mr. Baylor. Thank you for everything.
Okay, what is good in our worlds? I’m gonna go first on this one too. I actually volunteered again yesterday at the mass vaccination site. It was my third time, and because I’d been there before I have been checking people in, so I was the person that they would talk to when they arrived in their cars and you check them in, make sure they were in the system. And then they would drive off to wherever the medical tent was where they would get their vaccination, but because I had done this before they needed volunteers in the actual medical part and so those of us who had been there and done the check in part, they thought it would be interesting and fun for us to do the medical side.
So, I actually did that yesterday. I saw over 100 people physically get their second dose of the Moderna vaccine. I was just the person opening bandaid packages, and you had to write the time on their windshield for how long they had to sit in the observation area. So really I was not doing anything to do with the actual vaccination itself. But the one story I’ll tell is there was a guy who rolled up in his truck and he looked like he was probably in his 50s I guess, and his dad was in the passenger side and he looked old and frail, and when his dad got his shot this man just started crying, like, the relief on his face was so palpable.
Shireen: Aww!
Jessica: It was just a really beautiful moment, and so volunteering at the site has just been so amazing during all of this. I hope to go back next week – and I actually won’t be on the show next week because on Saturday Aaron and I are scheduled at that site to get our second Pfizer dose, so I hope to volunteer that morning before we actually get our dose because I just love it so much. That has been really good. Then I just wanted to mention that last night I watched Sound of Metal on Amazon starring Riz Ahmed, and it was…I was crying at the end, like, I thought it was a very beautiful film. Shireen, what’s good with you?
Shireen: Thank you, Dr. Luther. I just wanted to say that…No, I just teased Jess about that. Just in light of your medical interaction, I thought that was appropriate.
Jessica: Ohh, got it. Got it.
Shireen: For those that don't know, I make my dad and my sons refer to Jessica as Dr. Luther. It brings me a lot of happiness.
Jessica: And they do.
Shireen: They do. [laughs] I wanted to say just on that, and I will try not to cry – my parents got vaccinated this week, which was hugely important for me, and I just care about my parents getting vaccinated. I was having this conversation with Sandra Herrera, who’s a friend of mine, friend of the show and also a soccer writer. We both felt a lot of things about our parents getting vaccinated. There’s an immense relief and a joy, as Jessica was talking about, and I just wanna hold that because I don’t care if I go last, I want my kids and my parents particularly to be vaccinated. On that note, friendships. Friendships have been carrying me through the week. It’s been a hard week. For those of you students that are in school and stuff, everything’s coming down a pipeline. You’ve got so many due dates. I see you, I feel you, it’s happening for me too.
And the NCAA women’s basketball tournament is giving me joy. By the time this episode drops there would’ve been a result between Baylor and UConn that I love. The Huskies play Monday night against Baylor. I will be a huge ball of stress that night, but that's okay. I also attended a BIPOC group that’s based in Toronto. It was an online meeting, a space to talk about loss and grief, and particularly in a pandemic it was an incredibly important thing. So, thank you Vicky Mochama for telling me about it and me participating in it and the way that this group was run was beautiful, for people from racialized ethnic communities to talk about their experience in COVID and they experienced loss of any kind, and grief and how the structures of white supremacy affect that and how we grieve.
I just also wanted to say two things really quickly on that note. I don’t know if any of you caught the tweet where I shared artist Tracy Park. She is a Korean artist who shared a comic strip that she wrote about being a soccer player who's Asian and being verbally attacked and racially abused while she was not he field, but her teammates stepped in. That spoke a lot to me because of my own experience, and so I reached out to Tracy and she incredibly generously sent me the comic. I love it and I'm so grateful to her, and I was like, “Listen, I’ll pay you!” She said no. She said, “I consider the podcast that you did on anti-Asian hate in sport to be an exchange of labor.” It was just really beautiful and that made me cry. I love that. Thank you, Tracy, so much. I’m a fan forever. Lastly: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier! My children are watching this. Love it! I’m a big Bucky fan, I’m a Falcon fan, and I’ll keep you posted on that experience.
Jessica: I have not started it yet! We will be watching it at some point. Bren, what’s good with you? [Brenda laughs] You can do it. I believe in you.
Brenda: I can, actually. I mean, things with me on a personal level are fine – loving spring, loving not having to wear a parka while I jog outside, that’s really liberating. It’s been a long winter and that’s very cumbersome. Talking to friends on my jog is always wonderful, including my two co-hosts right now, Shireen and Jess. I spent a long time with you on the phone this week while I was jogging and it makes it go by and I love it and it's fun. But in my other capacity of life, you know, I’m really excited to see the Norwegian and German team saying fuck you in regard to the Qatar 2022 and starting to disrupt and wear these t-shirts. They had the t-shirts that are like…Germany, Norway, who’s next? Who’s next, like, challenging other teams. We have to say something now, that qualifying’s happening now, that COVID’s happening.
This 2022 World Cup might actually happen and it shouldn’t and the abuse of workers shouldn’t go unchecked. We talked about refugees on this episode so I have to say the fact that there are just thousands of undocumented workers particularly from South Asia that are there, whose passports have been taken, who have been abused, who have not been paid, who are economic refugees in their own right. It needs to be recognized and I’m just in awe of people right now like Erling Haaland who – Shireen, another what’s good, and I got in a fight about whether he should be overvalued from Mbappé as a player, but–
Shireen: Why would you even say that!?
Brenda: Because I’m about to say I think it's so cool that at 20 years old he’s willing and seems truly enthusiastic and cares about this, and we’ve said players don’t have to, we don’t expect them to. But he’s a guy who comes from a lot of stability and privilege and fuck yeah, if you’re gonna go out there and start to stir it up, thank you very much. So that’s what’s good.
Shireen: You will get a voice note from me right after this recording.
Brenda: [laughs] I have no doubt. I will send you clips that I’ve been saving and editing to prove to you why Erling Haaland is a force to be reckoned with in global football.
Jessica: So, what we are watching this week. By the time y’all hear this the NCAA basketball tournaments, both of them, they’ve be very close to setting their final four. It’ll be the end of the elite eight for both men’s and women’s. The Miami Open, the so-called fifth slam, is underway. It’ll run through April 4th. Then in football we’ll be watching the Africa Cup of Nations and the Liga Mexicana Femenil Clausura.
That’s it for this episode of of Burn It All Down. On behalf of all of us here, burn on and not out. This episode was produced by Ali Lemer. Shelby Weldon does our website, episode transcripts and social media. You can find Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you wanna subscribe to Burn It All Down you can do so on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and TuneIn, all of the places. For information about the show and links and transcripts for each episode, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. From there you can email us directly or go shopping for our merchandise. As always, an evergreen thank you to our patrons for your support. It means the world. You can sign up to be a monthly sustaining donor to Burn It All Down at patreon.com/burnitalldown.