Hot Take: Dr. Sophia Azeb on Palestinian Liberation and Sports
In this Hot Take, Shireen Ahmed interviews Dr. Sophia Azeb, assistant professor of Black studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago and regular contributor to The Funambulist magazine. They discuss the recent trauma in Palestine, how athletes have addressed the violence, Black and Palestinian transnational solidarity, and how sports are wielded politically.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
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.