2021 Best Of Burn It All Down Part 1
In this episode Brenda Elsey shares her favorite discussion (Episode 198: The NCAA Is Still Laughably Sexist) and interview (Shireen Ahmed with Dr. Sophia Azeb on Palestinian Liberation and Sports) from 2021.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg and Ali Lemer. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Brenda: Welcome to Burn It All Down. It’s the feminist sports podcast you need. I’m Brenda Elsey, and I get to host the very first Burn It All Down best of 2021, of three. There will be three of these, as we take a little pause for the holidays and the end of the year and think and reflect upon what’s been a really difficult time for a whole lot of people. We’re also going to try to think through some of the things we’re exited for in 2022, or resolutions that we have. And I can’t say that I’ve come up with any good resolutions. I do this every year; we talk about it on the show, and I am just the absolute worst at that game. Just to say, my resolution is to keep on keepin’ on, to try to not let my judgement of others affect my empathy for them, and to keep doing cool ass shit on Burn It All Down. But I am looking forward to – and I think this won’t surprise anyone – the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
I’m not looking forward to Qatar being able to sportswash this tournament, but I am really interested in the conversations that it keeps bringing up now that a lot of athletes, well, now that they’ve qualified as national teams, and a lot of athletes have taken this moment to try to talk about human rights and the violence that has been foisted upon a number of migrant laborers, particularly from South Asia, from Nepal, in Qatar; and to try to sort of hold FIFA as much as they can accountable for selling the game that we love by, if not condoning, certainly perpetuating the status quo of human rights abuses in all kinds of places. I still however am looking forward to Qatar in 2022. It’s a tournament that still takes place every four years. There’s going to be wonderful stories, wonderful stories, and I can’t wait to actually watch the best football in the world.
So, when we do these episodes, we choose the ones we learned from, or we were moved by, all types of reasons. It’s hard. It’s actually really hard to nail them down. For mine, I chose episode 198 for the segment portion of this, called The NCAA Is Still Laughably Sexist. Nothing has changed, sadly, [laughs] since that episode aired. I wish that I could say that it did. And this episode, for me, is important for a couple of reasons. First, we are going into the 50th anniversary of Title IX. One of the important points that Jessica Luther makes on this episode is that no school is really compliant with Title IX, and you’re going to hear Lindsay, Amira and Jess discuss the ridiculously unequal treatment of women athletes in the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament.
But the thing that I love about this episode is that you can hear Lindsay and Amira and Jess switch back and forth between their excitement around the tournament, analyzing the bullshit behind it, and really speaking about women athletes with an articulation and a depth that we rarely see in sports coverage of women’s tournaments. So, enjoy this discussion.
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.
Brenda: An interview that I want to feature on this best of is Shireen Ahmed interviewing Dr. Sophia Azeb. What I love about this particular interaction, this conversation, is that Dr. Azeb brings to light some of the really complicated but exciting issues and possibilities around solidarity, and that’s a theme that we’ve been developing all year. Her book project, Another Country: Constellations of Blackness in Afro-Arab Cultural Expression, looks at how Blackness and Black identity is translated and mobilized and circulated and contested by African-American, Afro-Caribbean, African and Afro-Arab cultural and political figures across North Africa and Europe. And I know that that sounds really complicated, and that’s why this conversation needs to exist, and that it’s so worth listening to.
Shireen: Hello flamethrowers, Shireen here. Today I have Dr. Sophia Azeb, who is an assistant professor of Black studies in the department of English language and literature at the University of Chicago. Her current book project, Another Country: Constellations of Blackness and Afro-Arab Cultural Expression, examines how Blackness and Black identity is variously translated, mobilized, circulated, and contested by African-American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab cultural and political figures across North Africa and Europe in the 20th century. She's a regular contributor to The Funambulist magazine. She's a dear friend, an educator, community organizer, and she loves popcorn. Doctor, hello.
Sophia: Hello, Shireen. It's so good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Shireen: Thank you. And I wanted to take a minute to recognize our listeners who are grieving, who are saddened by any of the traumatic events happening, particularly in Palestine and around the world. As we know, oppression continues in many places. I have wanted to have you on the show for a long time. I hate that this is the reason that you're here, but I'm so grateful to you for coming on.
Sophia: I'm also really glad to be here, and saddened that this is why we're coming together. But yes, it is an ongoing liberation struggle, and even with a ceasefire the violence has not stopped. But I am so happy to just be here and recognize all of the work that so many people, cultural figures, people on the ground are doing and have done, past and present.
Shireen: So, you're a big sports fan. We commiserate very often on Arsenal and the other football ongoings in the world, and one of the things is – and I’ll use this in quotation marks – the “polarizing” topic, I really hate that word, of Palestine and how it's been addressed in sports. And until very recently we hadn’t…We’ve seen examples of failure like Frédéric Canute, Michael Bennett has been public, and Jusuf Nurkić has, of the Portland Trailblazers, and recently Kyrie Irving.
Kyrie Irving: There’s just too much going on in this world not to address, you know? It’s sad to see the shit going on. And it's not just in Palestine, it's not just in Israel, there's all over the world, man. And I feel it.
Shireen: Were there more?
Sophia: Yeah, so in days past, obviously this has been at the forefront, and I'm sure many folks caught Leicester City’s Hamza Choudhury and Wesley Fofana during the FA Cup final carrying a Palestinian flag during celebrations, as well as Man United's Paul Pogba and Amad Diallo lifting up Palestinian flags in support of Palestinians under Israeli bombardment in Gaza, as well as Palestinians who face armed mobs in so-called mixed cities like Haifa and Lydda, and also the Palestinians who face settler police and military violence throughout the west bank and in occupied Jerusalem, particularly but not only in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. So, you know, this is not a new phenomenon.
Perhaps the only unusual thing I would note about this moment in comparison to sports figures in the past is that there has been a general refusal by the footballing bodies to which these players kind of belong to, to sanction them. And so this is really different than let's say Canute’s experience in 2009 when he celebrates a goal while playing with Sevilla by lifting his shirt or his jersey to reveal a Palestine shirt, and he was fined as I recall about $4,000 US. Mohamed Aboutrika, one of Egypt’s superstars who's now in exile of course from Egypt, famously revealed a “sympathize with Gaza” shirt beneath his jersey during a goal celebration while playing with the Egyptian national team during the 2008 African cup of nations.
These players were carded or sanctioned in other ways. And so now I'm kind of enjoying the turnabout where, you know, the FA is like, yeah, we're not gonna do anything about this. Because there's a clear kind of sea change that I think really actually we have to thank the global Black uprisings of the past many years, in particular with the Black Lives Matter movement, for sort of changing how especially footballing bodies internationally have responded to politically active players, right? Football is not apolitical, and this has finally been pushed in particular by Black sports figures throughout the world and in the US.
Shireen: I mean, we're still not in the clear. For example, like Lavazza, the coffee giant that supports and sponsors Arsenal, is trying to find a way to actually fire Mohamed Elneny for tweeting about it. So there's still this censorship and there's still this policing of athletes globally, and I think that while you're right, the FA is just like, we gotta step back a little bit. But there's still ways in which this particular type of activism is so staunchly policed. And what is it? What is it, Sophia, that is so fiery about this topic? Why is it so fearful for people to discuss Falastin?
Sophia: You know, I think a lot of people would have very different takes on why open advocacy for Palestinians and Palestinian liberation, in particular the end to the occupation as well as the end to the siege on Gaza. I think a lot of people have very different answers about why it seems like such a uniquely hazardous or dangerous kind of a form of solidarity to enter into. And, you know, I'm obviously not unbiased as a Palestinian-American. I have my own kind of takes on it. And I think one of the resounding reasons…I guess I'll kind of express this from the position that I am in as an academic, you know, I think there is a lot of understandable fear about this being a religious conflict that's quote unquote “ancient,” right? And so it would seem like, you know, “Why would we weigh in at this moment?” Like, “I don't know enough,” right? Or anyone who kind of speaks up, it's like, what is your knowledge? What is the validity that you carry, bring with you into this conversation?
So, I think that that kind of framing that this is like an ancient religious conflict and it's about indigeneity, but who's the indigenous peoples, like, we have no idea, the Jews have a claim, the quote unquote “Arabs” have a claim – and I'm putting Arabs in quotes because of course what we don't want to say is Palestinians! If we say Arabs or Muslims, which is usually what we hear, it's easier to think of it as sort of a religious conflict. When in reality, of course, we're talking about a settler colony, which is the state of Israel, that was in large part established thanks to antisemitism in Europe, famously centuries-long antisemitism culminating in the Shoah and in which Jews who are Palestinian, who are Arabs, were also then caught up in and exiled from Arab countries with the collusion of states like the UK as well as the state of Israel.
And so what we're talking about is a settler colonial conflict. We're talking about colonization, and when you frame it like colonization it's much easier to understand why so many sporting figures – not only, but I think particularly figures who bear a similar history of experience with colonization, right? Whether they are French, right? Like Pogba, who's born in France, raised in France, and yet has the experience of being an African French person and, you know, subject to as many Black and brown footballers are, incredible racial violence.
Shireen: That's like half of Les Bleus. It's literally like almost the entire squad, more than half.
Sophia: Right. And you know, sort of like “black, blanc, beur” celebration of like the '98 World Cup team falls really short of actually acknowledging the endemic racism that these players have faced and continue to face, like, from the great ’98 team to the present. And so it's really easy to understand why people like Sadio Mané and Riyad Mahrez – Algerian, right? Or Club Deportivo Palestino in Chile or Canute or Aboutrika find it so easy to be invested, whether or not they are Palestinian – and actually we haven't named any Palestinian players yet. But because they are commentating on sometimes a religious connection, right?
I think especially we see Muslim footballers in Europe that come to knowledge about Palestine and the Palestinian liberation struggle through a shared faith in Islam usually, but also I think primarily through an experience with racism and colonization. And so, this is an experience that even very successful footballers experience, and it is not something that stops once they achieve that kind of visibility and fame. And so these players emerge out of a long tradition of other players who have used their platforms and mobilize them on behalf of others around the world.
Shireen: I mean, we’re hearing about a lot of men in the struggle against occupation, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism. So, where are the women? [laughs] You talked about leadership of a global mobilization movement of Black communities, and we know that for Black Lives Matter it's queer Black women who are at the forefront, like the WNBA are at the forefront. What's the barrier here? Where are the women in this?
Sophia: So, now I'm taking my scholarly hat off, [laughter] but I wanna first acknowledge this great statement that the Palestinian Feminist Collective recently issued. This is a US-based network of Palestinian and Arab women and feminists, who affirmed that Palestine is a feminist issue. And this is important, not only because also in the Palestinian liberation struggle women have historically been at the forefront, right? Not only in terms of emotional labor, which I think we kind of get caught up in with the Black freedom movement, with other third worldist liberation movements, like Angola and Mozambique's wars for independence. Not only in emotional labor, but you know, actively strategizing, right? And like boots on the ground leaders of this movement. And so I want to just read a small portion of the Palestinian Feminist Collective's statement, because I think it's actually really illuminating.
In this statement, they “uphold the legacies of solidarity between Palestinian, Black, Indigenous, third world, feminist working class and queer communities who struggle side-by-side with larger anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and anti-racist movements in the US and globally.” And what it means to embrace Palestine as a feminist issue is to acknowledge and uplift and kind of throw our advocacy towards Palestinian feminists who quote, “resist Israel's masculinist and militarized siege of Palestinian land and life.”
And what that means – and I'm not going to speak for the Collective at this point – what that means for me, “Israel's masculinist and militarized siege of Palestinian land and life” is a look at how even in these last two weeks deaths on the ground are reported. It's not “men, women, and children,” right, who are targeted by a naval strikes or Israeli airstrikes on Gaza. It's “including women and children,” right? So what are the Palestinian men in this scenario? Well, ostensibly, I guess we're supposed to imagine that they are the ones leading the charge. Whether you are pro Palestine or not, you are imagining Palestinian men are somehow directly involved in the struggle in a way that women are not, right? Women and children are cowering over here.
But the thing is, is that men, women, and children and people of all genders, right, are equally subject to this violence. And so it is the obligation and unfortunately the responsibility that falls on all Palestinian peoples and all marginalized peoples, particularly those most exploited within those kinds of gendered structures in a society, or racialized structures in a society that is besieged, to kind of be the ones who have to take up the charge and to lead the way. And so a masculinist and militarized siege is both on the part of the Israeli state representing Palestinian men as threats, but there was a time not too long ago, especially during the first Intifada, where Palestinian women were equally frightening.
We can look to the French colonization of Algeria, right? Algerian women were the biggest threat because you know, the whole purpose of unveiling the Algerian woman was so they couldn't like smuggle arms into French areas of Algeria. And you see that, you know, depicted really beautifully in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. So yeah, that's a long winded sort of response, but it is to say that women, Palestinian women have always been at the forefront and will remain at the forefront of this struggle, and Palestinian queer people in particular have done so much work, particularly in communicating to folks in the west who want to be in solidarity with Palestine but have perhaps sort of retrograde ideas of Palestinian or Muslim or Arab relations to gender and sexuality and gender expression. So yeah, we have a lot of folks that won't ever get the due that they deserve, but are leading this struggle, nonetheless.
Shireen: And it's not as if we haven't seen this documented, like Amber Fares came out with this documentary called Speed Sisters in 2015 and talking about using speed racing to bring attention to and amplifying not only that they're women, because again, there's the conflation of “they’re Arab” – no one wants to say Palestinian – and they can't drive, but they’re race car drivers, they’re drag racing. And that was really powerful. And we've heard, you know, Honey Thalijeh is a Palestinian Christian woman who has worked with FIFA about amplifying opportunity.
But since then, because we know the infrastructure is being bombed, we know intentional destruction of sporting places in Gaza is being destroyed to, you know, sort of affect the mental health and the possibility and feelings of hope of youth there through sport, because sport can be a vehicle for onfidence and empowerment and healing for many youth all over the world. We see it. But since that, because that's like 2015, that's a while ago – are there movements on the ground using sports within Gaza and occupied places in Palestine to help youth?
Sophia: That's a really good question. I don't know that I have an answer to that just because it's not something I've really looked closely at myself. Of course now I want to look into that.
Shireen: Yeah. Let’s co-write something! [laughs]
Sophia: You're right, like, sport is an avenue towards kind of building up the self and the nation, right? Like culture is super important to that. I think what's really interesting is to look at the critical attacks on Palestinian cultural life that is not only limited to denying the tools or travel necessary to play. So, the Israeli state has a long record of denying travel visas to players in Gaza as well as the west bank. I'm going to use Palestine as a shorthand from now on because it is Palestine. So, for both domestic and international tournaments, right? This is a regular occurrence in which Palestine in 2006 was eliminated from the World Cup because the entire team was denied travel permits by the state of Israel. And at the time FIFA deputy general secretary Jérôme Champagne, I don't actually know how to say his name…
Shireen: Jérôme Valcke?
Sophia: But, you know, at the time he said this thing, when he refused to reschedule the match, which was “football cannot go faster than politics.” But of course it has to, because in 2007 the Israeli blockade on Gaza also banned one particular item from being imported, which were soccer balls. Like, the actual way that you play the game. In July, 2014, two teenage footballers were shot in the feet and the legs by Israeli soldiers while walking home from a training session from a stadium in Jerusalem. And then of course there is a moment that really resonated internationally in a way that maybe had not reached audiences that tend to be skeptical of the situation that Palestinians have endured for 73 years, which was when four children were murdered by an Israeli Naval shell while playing football on a beach in Gaza. They were two 10-year-olds, an 11 year-old and a 9-year-old. And so this deep resistance to the occupation that takes place within Palestinian cultural life in committing, recommitting to a cultural life, is not just symbolic, right?
So, “football cannot go faster than politics” I would say as a deep misnomer, because in fact sport is moving much faster than the political life of let's say international sporting organizations, because it is so much more urgent, that this is not just something, a sport that we love to watch and heckle each other about, but it is something that expresses the cultural life of peoples all around the world. It's a moment of connection. And I know our friend, formerly @FutbolIsaCountry, hated when people would say football is a language, but honestly, I'm still attached to that sentiment that sport is a language that draws people together. You see that with the number of sports, sporting figures who in spite of either tacit or literal threats for their careers continue to vocally stand up for Palestinians and for Palestinian liberation.
Shireen: Yeah. I also agree that football is a language. I think it's a way to communicate. I think it's a connector. I don't like the word unite because I'm just tired of words that are over…I don't like “diversity.” There’s words that I just stay away from. One of them is “unite.” That makes me so irritated. But it's a way to connect. Like, you can go anywhere in the world – I was in Jordan a couple of years ago, you can play in the street, you put on the street; Brazil, I was there playing, like, do you know what I mean? Like, you don't have to talk. You can just come and use this as a form of communication. And you know, there's still that resistance that I see of athletes not talking about it. Like, we see it's very brave of Pogba – and I use the word brave carefully, because I don't think that that should be, but recognizing that not everybody's in the space to be able to speak openly.
It can be harmful, you know, to their…I say this as a journalist, it is a country where journalists are being policed for what they say on this particular issue. And I understand that. The road is wide to activism, you know? There's many ways to disrupt, and not everybody can be as public. I've struggled with Zinedine Zidane whom I will say Dr. Azeb loves as much as if not more than I do – the only other person on the planet who I can say that about – but why he didn't speak up more, you know, at the time? But then understanding that they're restricted because if they're associated with Fédération Française de Football, they can’t.
So they're restricted, but then Pogba will use his Manchester space to be able to do it. It's a very intentional way, like, you're not going to see this man with a flag when he's playing for a country; he can do it for a club. So I mean, how much grace do you afford athletes? That's my little spiel. How much grace do you afford athletes in not speaking up about this?
Sophia: I feel like I change my mind on this like every week, honestly, because sometimes it is so frustrating. Particularly last summer, right in the midst of this global uprising led by Black people around the world in response to the shooting death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer and all of the previous and subsequent state-sanctioned murders of Black people in the US, the UK and elsewhere, it's always frustrating, right? That certain sporting figures will not speak out in those moments, and you just really crave them saying something. And yet you're right, I think. I kind of afforded some grace to folks like Mohamed Salah, for instance, who yes has in the past been quite vocal in solidarity with Palestinians, but is under the eye of the Egyptian surveillance state.
And so when I think about Elneny and Salah and other international footballers and sporting figures who are from authoritarian countries and retain their citizenship in those nations, they're all looking at somebody like Mohamed Aboutrika, who lives in exile, who had his assets seized by the Egyptian government. Because the thing is, is when it wasn’t politically popular the Egyptian state was more than happy to throw these figures under the bus and accuse them of Islamism or whatever it may be. And so, you know, I want Mohamed Salah to say more than like “stop the violence” [Shireen laughs] or I think that was what it was he tweeted or put on Instagram the other day. I was like, oh, this is so boring.
But then I remember, right? Yeah. Salah and Elneny and many, many other figures, they have family back home, you know? I try to remember that and give them grace, and so the reality is also that yes, we cannot know the interior lives of all of these figures who are very public to us through their participation in international, national sports. But you know, there may be other concerns that we don't know about. So I'm trying, you know, to be generous. I will not be generous to all the famous post-colonial theorists who have yet to say anything about Palestine, though. They absolutely can, and they don't want to.
Shireen: No, I see them. I see them quoting Edward Said and staying silent. Like, come on, white feminist academics. You don't think I'll see you? You know what I'm saying? So, here's the thing. Circling back to the question about women, and not only specific to women, but I want to be mindful. Athletes in the North America and the global north contexts may not know about this. What can we do as supporters, as fans, as people that are in the game as media, to help? Because I feel like there's a disconnect, like I said, you've got like Michael Bennett out there who was very much influenced by understanding, but he's few and far between. And if those that don't have a connection, whether it's to Islam or culturally to Arabs or have had experience with those communities and interconnectivity, how do we share this stuff? How does this information get disseminated to athletes and to sports communities in Turtle Island, North American spaces?
Sophia: You know, there's this great magazine, Jewish Currents, and they recently did a podcast the other day…They’re just trying out podcasts, so it's not yet as good as Burn It All Down. [Shireen laughs] But where it was in a very perpendicular way, like, a similar question, which is how do you talk to your Jewish relatives about Palestine? You know, like how do we do this in our own communities? And essentially I think the question is how do you talk to people who have mostly an emotional and affective relationship to the state of Israel but may not actually have thought very deeply or had reason to think very deeply about what a settler colony is, right? Whether in Turtle Island and across Turtle Island or elsewhere overseas – Kashmir or Palestine and so on and so forth. How do you broach that conversation with like your fellow supporters of Arsenal? [Shireen laughs] Well, we could ask the Celtics for tips on that.
Shireen: Oh, yeah. The Celtics are fantastic.
Sophia: Right? Ride or dies. Like, there's some never not be in solidarity with like all marginalized peoples.
Shireen: For those that don't know, we're not talking about the Boston Celtics. We're talking about the Scottish league, the football league. The Celtics are a team in Scotland that have been unequivocally supportive of Palestine. They have flags at their matches and they're just, yes, they're like a blueprint for how to do this and anti-oppression in sports.
Sophia: Yeah, and it's not separate, right? It's not a tangential issue. It is deeply informed by…This is a Glaswegian team, right? So like by a particular historical relationship that many of their supporters feel that they also have with empire. I don't think metaphor is always the way to go, and in fact I think there's a lot of limits to building solidarity out of analogy. But if you look at people like Muhammad Ali, if we look at folks like Sadio Mané, Eric Cantona, like, they're not speaking out of a deep well of study for the most part of the relationship with Palestine and Palestinian liberation, but because they felt the call as people whose fans and whose political, national, cultural affiliations sort of demanded their attention to the issue. So I think it's sometimes as simple as saying, well, why would the Celtics have this deep relationship to Palestine? Why is Paul Pogba and Wesley Fofana…You know, Fofana, who's from Marseille? Why are they grabbing Palestinian flags and running them down the pitch?
I think asking that question is just a really great way to maybe provoke yourself and your community into thinking about like, “They're not Palestinian – why do these people who ostensibly have no connection to this issue care so much?” And I know that's kind of like, facile, but I think it's a really good question to ask. It's something that if you just ask yourself that question when you encounter something that seems quite bizarre, it is just a good way to start thinking like, all right, what is the connection? What connection does Cantona have to Palestine? He’s not Palestinian, right? What connection do these French players have to Palestine, to Algeria, to racism in France, to Islamophobia within Europe? You know, these are some of the pathways, but they're not the only pathways.
Shireen: And I think one of the things that you brought up, Muhammad Ali, and I would be remiss if I didn't talk about him in the sense of that part of not addressing his Islam or even his connection to being pro-Palestine and visiting refugees and talking about this, which is a part of the white washing of his history. He was the greatest and arguably one of the most powerful if not the most powerful athlete-activist we’ve ever seen, and this part of his history is often omitted, and it gives you pause as to why. Because this situation, as you mentioned earlier in our conversation…And speaking of Michael Bennett that I've mentioned, and he's a friend of the show, that he has specifically remarked that Muhammad Ali was his role model for this, of how to go about it.
Because Muhammad Ali embraced Islam later, he became Muslim later in his life, but had a connection and understanding to oppression and combating oppression, and that's what this was about. Although some people may not know that Jerusalem in itself is the third holiest city for Muslims in the world, and there is a deep spiritual connection there. But his connection was the same way he rejected participating in the Vietnam War. It was on a basis of colonialism and it was on a basis of him anti imperialism, and it was on a basis of fighting oppression. So I mean, my question is, do we still look to him as that blueprint or do you think there's more emerging?
Sophia: I think Muhammad Ali is a wonderful representation of a long history of resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine that has always been deeply intertwined with pan-African, pan-Arab and third worldists tri-continental solidarities. And Muhammad Ali, who was beloved throughout the world and then not beloved and then beloved throughout the world again in this kind of like evolution of his political life and how that is parlayed to different publics, was stridently pro-Black, but also anti-colonial and anticapitalist. These were commitments that he had to the idea that, to this phrase that so many of us have heard over the last few years, that none of us are free until all of us are free. And so when you look at Ali's evolution, I think something that's really important is I try really hard in my own life and practice, especially as an organizer, not to exceptionalize Palestine. And what I mean by that is not to minimize or flatten the profound sorrow and violence, also the profound resilience and resistance that characterizes Palestinians and the Palestinian struggle.
But also to note that like, we are always learning from one another. And so Muhammad Ali represents this kind of…It’s not natural, it's not organic, but a sort of trajectory that we can all kind of commit to, where we note the connective tissue, not the sameness, but the connective tissue across different struggles. So you're right. Ali, like Malcolm X, people who come to Islam or are Muslim, who find themselves increasingly then informed about let's say like a Muslim international, including many but not all Palestinians. But Islam is not the only throughway, right? It's also a deep commitment to anti-colonialism, a deep commitment to anti-capitalism, a deep commitment to Blackness and Black liberation. This is a trajectory that is not restricted to somebody who is, you know, Muhammad Ali. [laughs]
This is a trajectory that many of us can opt into, and. that kind of brings back to me this sort of really early history of organized resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which actually goes back to like the first African nations who were admitted into FIFA, which is Egypt in 1934, I believe, and Sudan in 1948. Egypt and Sudan in one of the first World Cup qualifiers that they were eligible for immediately boycotted because they were slated to play the Israeli national team. The Israeli national team, which actually emerged in the 1930s I believe, as the cultural arm of the Zionist movement, right? So a way that sport is also mobilized for nationalist purposes and not for liberatory purposes. And the Palestine football association, founded in 1952, was not recognized by FIFA until 1998.
So, there's this larger history, and so within that, like when you need to be recognized by something like FIFA in order to participate in these international tournaments, it's not just on the basis of shared space or religion or racial identity or even shared struggle that leads to these kinds of political commitments by cultural institutions, such as sporting teams or amongst individual sports players. But it's the commitment to say, we're not going to recognize what is a settler colony imposed onto Palestine by European nations and by the United Nations. We're not going to recognize it to the point that we will not play them on the pitch. And so I believe in 1958 Israel qualified for the World Cup without playing a single qualifying match because nobody would play them.
Shireen: That's right, yeah. Nobody would play them. And it's really interesting to also note that they're actually a part of, to avoid that moving forward, they were moved to UEFA to play in the European league, and they don't play in the Asian Confederation, which is sort of geographically where they belong. So, that was something else, the loophole that was found. And we talked about it on the show. Dr. Brenda Elsey is very critical of that. And we've talked about the spaces and the way that occupied land has been used, stolen land, is used to satisfy the state of Israel's league, and many many other things that keep coming up. So, it's really funny, to round this off and say, oh yeah, the naysayers sports isn't political – oh, it is, historically, in every context!
Sophia: Always.
Shireen: Always, right? And that's how you and I actually connected was through those intersections of sport and football, particularly. Soph is a killer player too!
Sophia: [laughs] Not anymore.
Shireen: I mean, none of us are. I haven't touched the pitch in a year. It'll take me a year just to be able to get back, maybe. So, just to move this a little bit, and we're talking about these things that are heavy and being mindful of holding space, but also one of the most beautiful things that I've had the opportunity to witness and participate in from chosen family, that is Palestinians holding joy through all this. How are you doing, Soph, and how are you holding joy in this time?
Sophia: My therapist and I talked about this yesterday. [laughs] I find it, especially in the context that we are all in around the globe with the panini going on, that it has been very easy to fall into doomscrolling and being very frustrated and worried and feeling useless and wanting to help and not being able to do anything. But then I remember that I have all of these accomplices all around the world, and that we all do, and I seek them out, virtually and otherwise. It's a great way to make space, to just make some popcorn and gaze at a framed photo – I have one of Zinedine Zidane – and you know, text my friends about anything except for how Arsenal is doing great now. [laughs] So, that's what I'm trying to do. And gardening, I'm trying my hand at that. I'm not really good at it.
Shireen: Oh, how's that going?
Sophia: I don't think I really have the skills for this. I don't know. We'll see what happens. I have a feeling I'm going to be looking at a lot of really sad pepper plants in a few weeks.
Shireen: I mean, I wish you the best. I have a basil who's really angry with me right now. [Sophia laughs] They’re so like they're temperamental and I'm like, I raised four kids! Do I need this grief? But I have a balcony, a little balcony garden thing happening. I think I over water – it's the brown auntie that’s constantly trying to feed. So, I have drowned plants before and yeah, my son's lurking, laughing at me cause you know, I have a black thumb. But I think that's really important to say, of also being in activist spaces and taking some time for yourself, you know, and putting that mask on, and self-care is part of self preservation and it's a form of political warfare, which is what Audre Lorde said.
I want to thank you for being here, because this is probably the most also…You know, therapeutic for me is to be able to talk and discuss and share information. And I thank you very deeply for having this conversation with me, because it's not one that we hear out there very much in the sports world to begin with, and I thank you for that. Lastly, where can our listeners find you and your work?
Sophia: Oh, I'm a sad academic. So, a lot of it's behind paywalls. But I really value the contributions I've done for The Funambulist magazine. And I'm on Twitter @brownisthecolor, and I'm happy to always email people things that are behind the paywall. So, don't be shy. I'm inarticulate today, but usually a little bit more put together.
Shireen: I think you're perfect, and I thank you so much. I hope I get to see you again. The last time we hung out we were looking around public libraries in New York City, and that was a lot of fun. Still have the selfies from that day. So, shukran katheeran so much for this. Your presence is so wonderful, and thank you so much for sharing this so brilliantly and in a way that we can understand.
Sophia: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Brenda: That’s it for this best of episode of Burn It All Down. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our web and social media wizard. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. I also do want to take a moment and send out my particular thanks to Ali Lemer, who did produce episode 198, the segment that you heard, The NCAA Is Still Laughably Sexist. So, thank you so much, Ali, for your work on that episode. You can follow Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Listen, subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and TuneIn.
For show links and transcripts, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. It’s actually sometimes a real joy to read. So, again, if you get sick of listening, don't be afraid to go there. You’ll also find links to our merch at our Bonfire store, if you want some very belated holiday presents. And thank you to our patrons – your support means the world. If you want to become a sustaining donor to our show, visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. I’m Brenda Elsey, and behalf of all of my wonderful co-hosts, burn on and not out.