Hot Take: Athletes on Strike

On Thursday, August 27, 2020, Dr. Amira Rose Davis, Dr. Samantha Sheppard, and Dr. Courtney Cox discussed the athlete strike that started on Wednesday, August 26, 2020. They talked about their initial reactions when they heard that athletes were withholding their labor, the importance of seeing athletes as laborers, symbolic action/optics vs. material changes, how the WNBA was and is the blueprint for collective athlete organizing, and sports as a platform and/or as a distraction.

Bucks team statement: The past four months have shed a light on the ongoing racial injustice facing our African American community. Citizens around the country have used their voices and platforms to speak out against these wrongdoings. Over the last few days in our home state of Wisconsin, we’ve seen the horrendous video of Jacob Blake being shot in the back seven times by a police officer in Kenosha and the additional shooting of protestors. Despite the overwhelming plea for change, there has been no action so our focus today can not be on basketball. When we take the court and represent Milwaukee and Wisconsin, we are expected to play at a high level, give maximum effort and hold each other accountable. We hold ourselves to that standard and in this moment, we are demanding the same from lawmakers and law enforcement. We’re calling for justice for Jacob Blake and demand the officers be held accountable. For this to occur, it is imperative for the Wisconsin state legislator to reconvene after months of inaction and take up meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality, and criminal justice reform. We encourage all citizens to educate themselves, take peaceful and responsible action, and remember to vote on November 3rd. On the behalf of the Milwaukee Bucks. Thank you.

Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. We’re recording on Thursday August 27th, and on Wednesday August 26th. The Milwaukee Bucks, the NBA team, did not come out of the locker room for game five of their first round playoffs against the Orlando Magic. Word quickly spread – and we’re gonna talk about this – but word spread that there was a boycott, a strike, a walk-out, that the team was not coming out because of what had happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin over the weekend. There was a lot of anger and sadness and grief over what everyone was seeing. I am here today to talk about this with Samatha Sheppard, assistant professor of cinema and media studies at Cornell University and author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen. You should go back and listen to episode 168 when Amira interviewed her. And Dr. Courtney Cox, assistant professor of race and sport in the Indigenous, race, and ethnic studies department at the University of Oregon. You should also go back to episode 133 and listen to Amira talk to Courtney. And then our own Dr. Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of history and African American studies at Penn State University .

So, Milwaukee Bucks don’t come out, game cancelled, and then there’s dominos – the rest of the NBA playoffs cancelled that day. I think the next step was the Milwaukee Brewers, baseball, which…That one still I’m a little in shock over. We had multiple MLB games that were cancelled. Then we had the WNBA, we had Naomi Osaka say that she would not be playing in the semi-finals of whichever tennis tournament is on right now, and I can’t remember! It’s not quite the US Open. So, it was a stunning three hours. I think we can call this unprecedented. Amira, I’m gonna start with you. What was your reaction when you were watching all of this unfold?

Amira: Yeah, I was in a faculty meeting and I saw that the Bucks were not playing, were not participating, were not coming out. I was like, lemme get off this faculty meeting! I was somewhere between moved and also two eye emojis looking 👀 to see what was going down, what the deal was. Then very quickly like I think so many of us was very interested in the language being used in the way that it was very quickly exploding and being applauded as, like, “They’re boycotting something!” and I think my first reaction was to say, well, no. This is a strike; a boycott is a consumptive resistance. A strike is when you’re a laborer and you’re withholding labor. This was a wildcat strike more specifically, which is not with prior authorization or acknowledgement from an organized union head or league. That’s what happened and I thought it was kind of important to make that rhetorical distinction. My colleague, Abe Khan, who’s a rhetorician, had pointed that out. I thought that it was a really important distinction because I think it’s really vital that we understand athletes as laborers and we understand this as a conversation about workers talking about the conditions under which they labor and what happens when the rage that so many of us feel constantly and the grief and the pain becomes too much and you’re just like, “Enough. I don't want to participate in the everyday, the status quo, in your entertainment, today. I’m not doing it” That to me is where I started. That was my initial reaction.

Jessica: Courtney, were you in a faculty meeting? [laughs] What were you doing, what was your initial reaction when you saw what was happening?

Courtney: I was getting text messages from folks, and I was really, like, my day kind of shut down because nothing else was gonna get done because I just was gonna keep scouring and I’m just kind of following this dynamic from the time they were in the locker room, they haven’t come out. Then my questions always turn to, like, who’s on the roster? I have been really following, like, George Hill had some really powerful words. I’ve been interested during these times, weird pandemic times, the bubble, the wubble, thinking about especially within basketball, which is kind of my jam – who the leaders are may not necessarily be the superstars. I mean, people that are reading the most books at the time, right, the people who really have the ideas. So I thought about George Hill, but then I thought about Sterling Brown too because he had a direct involvement relationship, intricately…As many players have, but in a very more recent NBA player moment, a relationship in terms of getting tasered by the police.

So I think about the Bucks specifically and this being a really important move, but my mind started going to, well, how will the W react? The magic of how they responded…Then I started thinking about the other playoff games. There are players and teams where we don’t necessarily think about people that are more politically engaged. Amira and I talk about this all the time in terms of, like, in the W the women have it togehter. They move in a collective that to me is really unprecedented in many ways in terms of getting that many players onboard together. They move together across teams, it’s not a very individualized thing. It has momentum and really resonates with people more and more, and so on the NBA side I was really worried about that. I was going back to that conference call – there were players that didn't wanna play at all and wanted to be fully engaged in social justice, and the players that did.

So I was thinking about LeBron, I’m thinking about what this would be, thinking about Chris Paul and Russell Westbrook as these folks that you kind of do think about having this engagement and a relationship, like, also some of these players know each other really well. Chris Paul being the president of the players association also matters. So even thinking about this Lakers-Clippers debacle in terms of them being, like, “We don’t wanna play the rest of the playoffs” and walking out the meeting is also showing the difference across leagues. I don’t know Major League Baseball as well so I don’t know kind of what those conversations look like. I was just as surprised as you to hear from them. Is this about a protest, is this an individualized one-day thing? When I think individualized I’m thinking about Naomi, and her decision is strong I think in a completely different way, as an individual that can be a very poignant statement right there versus team sports.

Jessica: Sam, your initial reactions when you watched all this yesterday?

Sam: So, also not in a faculty meeting! The first thing that I saw was I instantly went on Twitter just to get a beat on reactions and for the first time in a long time turned on the television to see what was gonna fill in the space and how they were gonna talk about filling in the space, because not only was it reading the corrective of the language of ‘this is a strike, not a boycott’ but then also realizing they’re using the term boycott for labor reasons, for how this played out contractually, all these things. Trying to figure out, well, how does ESPN and its media industrial machine now fill the space of this conversation for which they are complicit in, in the terms of the kinds of ways they had talked about Black resistance. Of course, you know, Stephen A Smith going on, like, “This is so proud, this is such the right thing to do.” Then to find out, you know, it was the anniversary of the first time Colin Kaepernick took a knee, for him to be so outwardly critical of such a moment and then to frame this moment differently…But then I actually found it really unwatchable, the sort of media space, because that actually wasn’t where the work was happening.

So I went back to Twitter to try and figure out, okay, so who else is gonna join? I was like, the WNBA has been about this life, so I was like, what else are they going to do? Because when they're already there wearing homemade shirts with seven bullet holes…The rawness and the visceral reaction…They are engaged at such a visceral level in and through their play that the removal of their play nuances but does not take us to a new place of the kinds of refusals they are already critically engaged in. Then I just saw that tweet that the Clippers and Lakers don't wanna play, and I was like, oh, LeBron’s not playing, nobody’s playing! That's what I’m thinking. Then I wake up and I get a text a little while ago saying, oh, everybody’s playing. I was like, that’s why you can’t sleep in the revolution! You really can’t go to sleep, because you sleep and it’s like your lawyer called, your manager called, your friend, your mama who’s saying, “I really need this! I really need this!” Everybody was like, no, they’re weak. They woke up and it became, like, guys need this to eat, blah blah blah, we got media things, we can make shirts too! This is what it feels like, as opposed to what was really interesting about the conversation happening around the Bucks calling and saying these coaches, the NBA has done a lot – I just put my hands in air quotes for those, I realize this is not a video – they’ve “done a lot.” But it’s like, oh, they have all this political clout that they are actually not using. They’re not using their most expensive weapons.

So it made me think about that, and it made me think about the kinds of ways in which we have tried to imagine what this sporting refusal looks like. Like, cinematically, people are referencing High Flying Bird. I’ve made reference to Haile Gerima’s Hour Glass about what sporting refusal, what the act of not playing means, to refuse white labor, white time, white pleasures. That’s why I was turning on the TV, I wanted to see how are they gonna fill all this white time when there are no Black bodies? The ways in which Charles Barkley sitting there just was not enough. It was interesting to see those Chris Webber moments, it was interesting to see…I’m forgetting his name right now. What’s his face, who walked off and said “Nah…” The check is still gonna hit on the 1st and the 15th, you can leave. So I was really sort of caught up in all of that, just as my first reactions to the news.

Jessica: Wow. So we could go in what feels like a million different directions. Can we start with the rhetoric, I believe it was Sam who mentioned that ‘boycott’ is a safer word when it comes to legal contractual CBA reasons. Let’s talk about the importance of word choice: boycott, strike, wildcat strike, walkout. Why does this matter so much? Amira? 

Amira: It matters to remind people that they’re workers, it matters to say this is a labor resistance, that they’re not just entertainers, they are laborers, they are workers. That’s the distinction between a strike and boycott. I think contractually as Sam pointed to there is anti-strike language is CBAs, right? There is a cover that boycott gives. But it also points to the kind of slippery slope that leagues have planted themselves in this position where they’ve leaned all the way into corporate ties and Black Lives Matter, so it makes it a little harder to do some greasy stuff behind the scenes to then put a squelch on it, but don’t think they’re not trying right? Because we know how power works, we’re not naive. It’s very telling today, right, that Nneka just said this is not a strike, this is not a boycott, it’s a day of action, right? I think that that is one of those places we can see because, as Sam pointed out, the WNBA is not new to this, they’re true to this. But certainly in there the semantics of what it's called matter a lot when you’re playing under a new CBA.

I’ll toss it to you, Court, but that part about worker vs entertainer I think is so fundamental. Sam was saying at the end of that last part…Because the entire setup of this entire moment is just a reflection of the layers of white supremacy that brought us here in the first place. In the long history of the United States it has basically granted space for Black people to exist as entertainers, whether it’s Nancy Green pretending to be Aunt Jemima and people making a career out of that, whether it’s the Fisk Jubilee Singers who were able to earn enough money to buy a whole library on campus in the early 1900s, whether it’s early Black athletes or singers, et cetera – if you’re in a place where you’re entertaining there is a pathway for some sort of privileges, and then it’s become about policing those privileges. So, Jack Johnson: fur coats, cars, white women – too much, now we’re gonna discipline you. Right? This is the genesis of “shut up and dribble.”

I think it’s really important because it also means that the platform that athletes find themselves standing on is constructed because of white people’s racism in the first place. There wouldn’t be a platform if Black doctors or professors or bank tellers, just any person, had the dignity of humanity. But the fact that that’s the platform that has been afforded has put athletes continuous in a position to either be an amplifier, a driver of conversation, or reflective of it. I think the most decisive collective action we’ve seen is when there’s partnership between that platform and the boots on the ground, because this is not happening in a vacuum. That to me is the difference between movement-building and being a worker who needs a day off because you’re tired, because we’re all tired. I think that to me that is a really fundamental kind of distinctive space.

When I’m thinking about the rhetoric I’m thinking about, yes, splitting hairs contractually around strike/boycott/day of action or whatever, but also fundamentally what is the next tangible goal? What is the next step? If you’re setting this up as a strike, what is the aim? What are you withholding your labor for, until? What are you trying to amplify? What is the ask? I think that this is not a sprint – it’s dreaded endurance running, bleugh. It’s a multi-generational fight that’s gonna continue past our lifetimes so for me it really comes down to: are you using that platform to movement-build? Or even the idea of being in a bubble and this bubble as a space where there’s conversations in downtime happening. Like Courtney said, who’s reading books? Who read the most books today? We’ve seen LeBron carrying around Malcolm X’s biography, like, did you read a chapter that just hit you a certain way and now you’re talking to everybody because you’re all in the cafeteria together?

But I think that there’s a danger also in reframing the bubble as this radicalized space when the bubble is an iteration of capitalism and its discontents. They shouldn’t be fucking playing basketball in the first place during a global pandemic, and this drive to get them still on the courts and put them back in the seat of being entertainers, right, is creating this bubble. In that space where they have downtime to have this exchange of ideas and to say, oh my god, this bubble is…To romanticize it and say, “Now they have the time…” Well, they should’ve always had the time! But that's pointing to, right, again, the conditions of their labor. For me, just to make it full circle, when I think of that and when I think of – and this is the closest I’ll ever get from being, like, “Ooh, rhetoric!” because that’s a lot for me – but I think to me this is the moment where it’s really important, because there’s a real power in understanding this as a resistance of labor. Power in understanding them as workers, but also the possibility of collective organizing beyond the court or the bubble or the wubble and onto the streets.

Courtney: I agree. The words matter, but I’m also thinking about framing through everything that also Sam was saying in terms of how it gets picked up on SportCenter, how it gets mapped on in a particular way. So I think about it a lot in terms of…When you call it a “day of action,” is it a single day? Are we tired and saying we’re tired of seeing this, this is something about this ongoing thing? How do we build this momentum? Some of this is that coalition-building, right? They’re in Florida because of the precarity of their labor, where Florida was the place they could create this space when other states were like, “Absolutely not.” Right? I think that’s also something that’s interesting is the language of, like, what is happening, what it means, and who it’s for. Is it for us to have this collective expressing of this trauma? It is putting pressure on teams and leagues? And then finally the general buy in of Black Lives Matter – you put in on the court, we say we care about Black lives, we let them put it on their jerseys, but what happens for Adam Silver? Because you can’t do the suspension, because then what’s the look? Do they forfeit the game? The postponement had to happen because there was corporate intervention into a social movement.

Jessica: Sam, what are your thoughts on this?

Sam: I have to say that I agree with both of you in how you sort of concisely worked through the ways in which the rhetoric has of course social impact and is also existing within a larger capitalistic structure. Because the thing that is really interesting is that boycott as a term itself conjures a kind of imagery that also then aligns it with the late John Lewis, you know, we’re getting Rosa Parks spirit, we’re getting all of this kind of visualization. Also by doing so it divorces the narrative of labor and puts this as Black people are eating themselves, our own consumption. So this version allows for this to be Selma when it doesn’t have to be Selma. That’s the thing. So I think it’s just such a way we ahistorically understand the relationship between sports and other places in society during particular moments of social foment and change. So that’s why the fact that his has been, I would say, like a hurricane, downgraded to a “day of action,” right? From a hurricane to a tropical storm to a day of action, with a small sprinkle of how people may look back at this.

This is one thing in the midst of many things, and so I think while we think about what it means for them to use the term boycott I think it’s also to play into a cultural imaginary about the ways in which Black people have collectively together, physically moved movements. I think that's the kind of physicality that I think is also being rendered and conjured in that. That movement off the court, that movement where we’re sitting on the court, even the referees taking a lap around Disney – all of these kinds of physical movement is supposed to just conjure, like, you’re not getting a bridge, you’re not gonna get the police up, but we want to get this physical movement because how else will we capture the kinds of choices that are being made when it’s also like, CBAs, and we’re not playing today, game five has just been rescheduled, we’ll be back at this time, schedule it on your calendars – this kind of thing. I think that is something that I find really really interesting about the athletes who have spoken about.

I also wanted to say something about the bubble because I think it’s a really interesting…Even the term “bubble” and “wubble” – less so much the wubble because I’m thinking about the wobble. But with the bubble we wanna pop it, that’s all that I’m thinking about, is this false impermeability, right? It is so fragile, we’ve learned that from the testing, right? It could break down at any physical moment. But it’s also like, we’re trying to think about how all the sort of levels of diffusion, what is getting in and what is coming out, what is getting in and what is coming out. That is such an interesting kind of sporting geography that is being created that is why, as a person who studies sports films, it’s such a false world that has been created that it’s just like…You know we can just bust it, right? You know it's not real, right? They’re working without their family, they’re working because they have to work.

Unlike…What was it, Wimbledon? Who said, “You know what, we have hazard insurance, we planned for the pandemic, we got our money back.” [laughs] For something that did not occur. Everyone here did not. I think that there’s something really interesting about the visual imagery, the wording that is used, the rhetoric around the entire thing. Of course the hurricane downgrade of this experience…We’re still in a cyclone, so that’s still happening, it just may not be happening on the court.

Amira: Listen, you should’ve never given me this analogy of Selma, because now I’m about to just–

Sam: [laughs] Take it.

Amira: That was, to me, yes, because I think that in that moment we see so many possibilities playing out with what we’re seeing now, right? So is it the initial violence, do we lose sight of what is compelling the marching in the first place, right? For those of you who are unfamiliar with the history: there was a march planned, Dr. King was there, they didn’t get the injunction to be able to go and they were still being met on the other side of the bridge with full force. King knew this, unbeknownst to people marching. He had planned to march right up to them and then turn around and symbolically…Well, I don’t really understand what the point of that was, but he had a point in his head about it, right? It was this moment that became really symbolic, this march up to and then kneeling and praying and turning away from. The feeling was it was in place of real action – this was symbolic that was made with behind the scenes conversations that everybody wasn’t privy to or engaging with the full understanding of things.

Of course we have Bloody Sunday, and then we have the actual continued march which becomes the most optic moment of it all where they complete the march, that collective movement; they get there, a crowning speech is made – this is where Ava Duvernay’s film ends. Then a lot of people who came to town for that march leave, and who stays largely are people who are SNICC, they’re younger, they’re saying we’ve just endangered people where we’ve come in and we’ve brought them to this march and we’ve done this optically and we’ve done it for the media and we’ve done it for the applause and all that’s happened and now y’all are gone – and we’re still here and none of us can register to vote. We’re still here, still being lynched. In that place there was some actual action that formed early iterations of the Black Panther Party, some more groups of other possibilities that we don’t remember, that don’t get to exist in our corpus of civil rights, Black power history and the long histories of Black freedom struggles.

To me it’s such a useful moment to think through this, right, because it allow us to think about what does it mean to parse through the optics? What does it mean to parse through the symbolic? What does it mean to understand the way that the symbolic can obfuscate, can stand in place of what happens in its wake? I think that that’s a really useful moment because yesterday the symbol was everywhere and it has produced images that will be enduring as we know they become. It’s borne out of history that I have a healthy dose of skepticism to say, well, because of that does it become harder to talk about or think about what is left behind those frozen moments and gestures? 

Jessica: Courtney or Sam, do you wanna respond to that specifically?

Sam: Being a historian…You’re right! [laughs] You see historical patterns both from social movements but also from moments of sporting resistance. History may redeem you but the present often doesn’t. When you’re working with a cultural machine, an apparatus such as the NBA, you also are working with something who has learned to cannibalize the language and even the movement of this kind of change. It has said, hey, we’re about this too, but we’re also still going to need all these things from you. Structurally we are not changing, because we don’t have to. Our faces are not out there. So there’s something really interesting about who is working in the shadows and who is working on the front lines. Then when you look at that, because of course you can point out the narrative of MLK, it’s like…Then all the women who are actually making the movement move are not even on the…Not that they’re not in the shadows, they’re on the front lines, they’re everywhere else. I think that’s where there’s so much…Everybody’s trying to remind us “Don’t forget to talk about the WNBA” because not only as you said they are all of these things, but it’s the ways in which…Courtney, I would love for you to speak on this a bit more, but as you said they are working in a kind of collective. They are working as a union within a union! It’s that kind of unity that they’re functioning with that is making it really really interesting about their actions. I read that some of them were like, “I want to play,” but other people said, “This is really upsetting to me,” and that was enough. Like, empathy in sport as a kind of womanist practice…I would just love to hear you talk a bit more about what you see, really the lessons that the NBA when they’re doing their reading they can continue to do.

Courtney: Absolutely. I feel like there is a way they can come to the table and have those disagreements. There’s a way that they can think about ways to be hopeful outside of the game. I think a lot about erasure and I think that Amira has helped me think about it even further. When we say yesterday was the four year anniversary for Kaepernick we ignore the 2016 season of the WNBA before that, right? They were penalized and they were fined for it. We can think about how this league can now pretend and perpetrate that they’ve always been about Black lives, right? Part of it is they have both demanded as well as decided together what they will do. The WNBA is the case study of white allyship – what that can look like and can be like. Those are our people that know what’s going on. They’re gonna help everyone else get the message. So I really appreciate, for me, even thinking about the role of academics, of us as scholars, right? When they decide to bring in Kimberlé Crenshaw, we know that name, we identify her as an expert; we’re also gonna bring leadership in. The Lakers have done that as well, like, thinking about bringing in Black scholars that do this work in terms of not only…You know, we can sit here and critique them, but what is our role to be in tandem, in step with them? So kind of what I think about a lot in terms of what a team sport can do and what it can look like, and I haven’t really been able to find another modern, like, contemporary case that has the legs that over the past five years they’ve continued to build and get better and better at this. 

Jessica: I wanna ask you guys about a question that we tackled on Burn It All Down before when everyone went into the bubble, and it was about whether or not playing sports would be a platform or be a distraction. Here we are now, today, after everything that happened yesterday. How do we answer that question now? I’m gonna throw it to Amira, because she was part of that conversation when we had it back in June.

Amira: I think that debate is historical – do we boycott, or will we have a bigger platform by going to the Olympics? We’ve talked about some of this. So that’s kind of what I was gesturing to by talking about that platform. If the status quo, if normalcy, if playing is providing cover to a system, window-dressing to a system that is harmful? If it feels like business as usual is a return to a normal that was and continues to kill us, then not playing – that refusal Sam is talking about – can do specific work. I think one of the things that we’ve seen is not all sports have returned, right? It would be really interesting to see if this was during football season. At the same time we’re at the end of a long hot summer, and even with white people suddenly deciding to care which has given us the social safety net, these corporate responses have given athletes a social safety net. You talk about the risk involved, you talk about the action WNBA players were doing, or even Colin, etc, was doing it without the safety net of this kind of corporate response compelled by the decision to…Not by Black people – we’ve been saying the same damn thing for years!

What has shifted after George Floyd was the kind of other empathy, it was the other involvement, it was the other whatever. When you have the pandemic and that together I think it’s created this place where the question of returning to normalcy not just in sports but in schooling, in healthcare, in all things, you know, has really compelled people to think about what that normal looks like, what it contains. I think for me, and maybe this will veer a little bit into Afro-pessimism, is that even in this moment that is anything but normal they’re still killing us. Even in a time when people are inside and social distancing and not really outside and etc, people are still finding ways, you know, to arrest and kill and abuse people at ridiculous numbers, right? And even within that, I don’t know about how y’all feel but I think particularly the racialized and sexualized violence against Black women, I feel like, has even exploded even more in this whatever we’re in.

So when you were talking about where are the women when we’re thinking about civil rights history, right, it’s not just that they’re also benignly in the background after organizing all the same things, it means we’re talking about people like Diane Nash, right? Who was at home with her and James Bevel’s two kids after he was abusing her, despite organizing the whole thing so he could march. There’s a way in which that very real living through what it means to be a Black woman in this country, I think, comes to bear on the hatred that the WNBA gets, constantly. That has toughened them in a way that it doesn’t surprise me sometimes when they take risks, because every day it’s just “the league is too Black, it’s filled with women, and it’s too queer.” It invites the most trolling that I think I’ve seen across all platforms and it’s to me not a surprise that it’s really geared at Black women.

The other kind of new way I think I’ll think about this question is that I feel like in the moment whether they’re playing or not playing, because Maya Moore and now Natasha Cloud and Renee Montgomery, people have laid out a blueprint for staying engaged while you’re refusing your athletic labor, right, and insisting upon using the full expanse of your platform and not just being valued for your physical abilities but also for your mind. I think that part of what I’m grappling with is that whether it’s business as usual or life in the wubble where you have to have your kid with you because that’s life, right? You are still working and doing all this kind of hidden labor. Or you’re not playing. The way in which our bodies are considered by society, are rendered disposable, are unprotected – it’s impossible to disentangle abuse that I see directed at the WNBA and their reaction to it from Megan, from Toyin who would’ve been 20 today. I think the most painful thing about this long hot summer has been the near constant persistence of the misogynoir that people are laboring under, whether they’re laboring under as athletes or as professors or as broadcasters or bank tellers or sex workers. Maybe that’s a way of saying I think there’s now a blueprint for both playing and not playing, and I just don’t know what will ever be the right…Like, it seems like distraction or no distraction, taxes, death, and the visceral hatred of Black women seem to be things that have a damn strong staying power. 

Jessica: Courtney?

Courtney: I really feel like there is a way to do both. But I also want to go back to thinking about the fact that there aren’t all the sports yet and what that would me. I’m thinking about the Detroit Lions cancelling practice because that’s where they are in terms of the NFL season, and what that…Again, a very different CBA, very different labor power, way more players, way more things going on. The fact that we’re even perpetrating and pretending like that’s gonna be a thing, with fans in the stadium? So when I think about the long hot summer I’m thinking about the fall and winter, the very precarity but also beauty of Blackness and just thinking about what the fall will bring. Like you said, in this very hyper-visible moment Black death is still being transmitted to us constantly. Just I don’t think COVID is going away in the fall I think these things will ramp up and move in different ways. So I think not only of how protesters are now being killed, I’m thinking about how these things are ramping up, I’m thinking about how the NFL will be called on, and now with Roger Goodell being like, “So, maybe I should’ve listened to that Colin Kaepernick guy…”

Thinking about how unwelcome these half-assed apologies are in the first place, that are completely misplaced and not helping us move forward. I want that same energy this fall when you’re asking players who are attacking, bleeding all over each other in these spaces; when they stand up, when they have things to say, when they refuse to play, I just wanna keep that same energy because it’s gonna happen. We know, like you said, every sport will get its time because of the cyclical way that this happens and continues to happen and continues to inflict that trauma. So I’m hoping that other leagues are thinking about this. I know college sports are a whole other thing that we can spend a lot of time thinking about in terms of the precarity of their labor, and so I’m really thinking about what this fall will tell us. Hopefully momentum will take different forms and the highs and lows of this will take different forms. Sports that aren’t in session, I’m really inspired by the ways they’re find ways to get together and create different forms of solidarity in different sports.

Sam: When it comes to thinking about posing that question now about platform or distraction, to me it’s like, oh, it’s both! At the same time, I’m also really upset by the answer because I think it allows for all of this space of not owning the fact that we, just like this podcast, like, burn this whole thing down. Like, actually. It’s like the problem of the platform, because it’s not just you, even though it is them. They understand they’re the light, that we’re looking at them, right? So they can stand on the court and we can cast our eyes slightly below and see the words Black Lives Matter next to the corporate symbol that has been agreed upon about what their mascot is gonna be and the colors that they can wear and whether they’re the home court or the away court. It’s like, that's also a platform. These platforms are sharing space and yet it’s assumed that they’re of equal weight, and they are not. So my problem is that it’s not that they don’t know, it’s not that people have just never heard of Black Lives Matter!

If you look at any Twitter thread, this happened, “Oh, Lakers are not gonna play anymore,” I was like, don’t read the comments, because you know…Why play in that arena? But let me just go scroll through, like, “Oh, LeBron definitely doesn’t wanna play, he doesn’t want that other ring” – or, “LeBron’s definitely gonna play, he needs that other ring.” It’s like, oh, no, you all are terrible. [laughs] Is this what this is for? This is functioning for this? I already know this stuff. I’m a LeBron stan, so this is not…Like, this person has an entire production unit. Somebody tells him to go shut up and dribble, he makes a three part Showtime documentary. You are the platform, you don’t need this. The actual thing that would show what could the NFL do? We’re not playing, who’s got next? That’s the thing. What they are showing is how to keep playing, how to keep needing distraction amongst death.

We are already in a reality program hosted by literally a sociopath. So it’s sort of like, you think we need the fantasy of sport? You also think we need the fantasy of Black death for you, visualized on screen all the time. We don’t need the fantasies. We are saturated with fantasies. The great thing about NBA entertainment is they have recorded games since the 1970s – they have content, they can just play shit for hours and years on end! You can go back and relive the classics, you can make 30 For 30 volume 17, keep going through. There is so much content already there that the idea that this has to be created so that we can be pacified or more importantly take our eyes away from over 170,000 deaths…I do not want my eyes to be diverted. I want to look at that fact, I don’t want to look at Jacob Blake’s body getting shot. I want to look at the fact of who is moving on the ground. I do not wanna go to “BreonnaCon” – I just want justice for her. I want to put the pressure on these colleges and institutions who are bringing back students, making entire towns unsafe while not at all worried about who is going to actually care for the people who have children in their house because they can’t go to school. I do not want to be distracted! I don't want your platform, I want the level playing field that sports can promise. So I would love for them to sit down.

Somebody tweeted, “Maya Moore knew to stop the ball from bouncing.” The game will be there! The game above the game, let’s start playing that just for, like, a season or two. Just a season or two! It’ll be there. It will be there. I think it is a major distraction. I think it can of course…They can leverage all these things, but they could be doing that beforehand. They could’ve done that. They could call, they could be doing all this stuff, because they may lose something. That’s where I think about the question of what is being sacrificed. Who is willing to sacrifice? I think everyday people are sacrificing, and I do think that Black women are sacrificing the most. I just don’t need games on every night. We literally have 95 streaming platforms. I’m good. I have to catch up on so much stuff. I’ve got entertainment. 

Jessica: I wanna thank Dr. Samantha Sheppard, Dr. Courtney Cox, and Dr. Amira Rose Davis for this conversation today. Thank you all for being on Burn It All Down, and as always: burn on, not out.

Reporter: Nneka, I wanted to ask you: how did you come to an agreement and what was important about that?

Nneka: To be honest, I feel as though what was most important is the solidarity, the unity, the collectiveness of how we’ve always organized. My role in what I do as president is to lay out the options and to really make sure everyone understands the implications of the decisions that we make, especially if we do it together. There was a lot of oscillation back and forth and eventually most teams or players agreed that not playing today was the option. I ride for my players. So right now we’re not just trying to make a statement today, we’re trying to also figure out what actionable items can come out of this, because we stand in solidarity with our brethren. Right now there’s just so much more that we have on our minds, but with our platform there’s so much more that we feel that we can do to really create some serious change.