Pushkin. I grew up playing sports baseball, bowling, volleyball, football, floor hockey, dodgeball, track basketball. Loved the battle, the competition, the trash talking, and I hated losing. Days were lost when I lost big games. I played baseball and basketball the longest. Growing up in Queens, New York and Manassas, Virginia, I dreamed of playing in the NBA, duking it out with the next Michael Jordan as the next John Starks. But as high school graduation approached, I knew the dream would remain a dream. When I arrived at college in the fall of two thousand on a backup plan sports journalism. I never imagined writing about racism. I planned on sticking to sports. I'm Abramax Kendy, and this is b anti racist. I worked tirelessly to jump start my sports journalism career. I took unpaid internships at notable papers, took after hours jobs to make ends meet. I became the sports editor at my college newspaper. Shortly after my junior year, I landed my first paid internship at the Mobile Register. The year was two thousand and three, four decades after President Kennedy had ordered the National Guard to desegregate the University of Alabama this afternoon. Following a series of threats and defined statements, the Presidence of Alabama National Guardsman was required on the University of Alabama to carry out the final and unequivocal order of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Alabama. That order called for the admission of two clearly qualified young Alabama residents who happened to have been born Nigro. Now there was a big sports story on campus. The university had considered hiring Sylvester Crum to become the first blackhead football coach at the institution and in the entire Southeastern Conference. Crum was born in Tuscaloosa and was one of the first black football players at Alabama, playing for a legendary coach, Bear Bryant. When Croom played for the crincon Tide the University of Alabama's football team, they won all but two of their games, won three consecutive conference championships, and were the nineteen seventy three National champions. He went on to have a career as an assistant coach in the NFL, but the University of Alabama snub crewm in favor of a white coach with significantly less coaching experience. CREWM said at the time, black guys are good enough to play for them, good enough to be assisting coaches, and not good enough to be in the positions of decision making and the positions of high financial reward. At the Mobile Register that summer, I wondered what some of the top high school football recruits in the region thought. It was two thousand and three and the SEC still had never had a blackhead football coach. I was surprised when every single recruit I interviewed said they'd prefer to play for a blackhead football coach. Readers of the Mobile Register were surprised when we reported the news. I served as a vehicle for these black athletes to speak their truth. They didn't just shut up and play. They inspired me as I learned firsthand the interplay of race and sport. When I returned to campus in the fall of two thousand and three, I decided to double major in African American studies. I came to see how much black athletes and other athletes of color were treated as commodities whose points on the square board mattered more than their lives. Policies and decisions concerning the upcoming Tokyo Olympics have offered painful reminders of this fact. The International Olympic Committee bar Kary Richardson, the fastest woman in the United States, from participating in the one hundred meter dash, for legally smoking marijuana after learning about the passing of her mother. USA Track and Field recently announced that cc Telfer, a black trans runner, will not be able to participate in the four hundred meter hurdle despite meeting the performance requirements for the event. The policing of black women's femininity did not end there. Christine Umboma and Beatrice Massilingi, two sister gender sprinters from Namibia, have been ruled ineligible to compete in the women's four hundred meter due to natural high testosterone levels. The International Swimming Federation banned the use of soul caps designed for black hair on the grounds that the caps did not follow the so called natural form of the head. At the same time that these racist, misogynistic, and transphobic policies were enforced, the IOC has ruled that athletes could not stage protests against them during events or metal ceremonies. Thinking back on it now, I got into writing by writing about sports, But it was sports that pushed me into writing about racism, and the rest is history. Welcome to Be Anti Racist in Action podcasts where we discuss how to diagnose, dismantle, and abolish racism, how to save humanity from the divisiveness of racist ideas and the destructiveness of racist power and policy, how to free humanity through the unity of anti racist ideas and the constructiveness of anti racist power and policy. On Be Anti Racist, we discuss how to make the impossible possible and how to bring into being what modern humans have never known, a just an equitable world. You ready, let's roll. There's a huge bass to people who believe that sports and politics should mix, But in this case, they've always mixed together. I mean, think about it, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell. We've always had these different intersections between sports, race, politics, and gender, and usually people that object to that intersection because they don't like the viewpoint or opinion being expressed. So it's not really about the fact that they're mixing. They're just mixing in a way that makes them uncomfortable. Similar to how athletes are told to shut up and dribble, many journalists of color are told to shut up and write. There is perhaps no one better versed in this reality than Jamal Hill. Jamal went from being the only black woman sports columnist in all of North America to co hosting her own show, an anchoring sports center on ESPN, but everything changed in twenty seventeen. On Monday, the ESPN host went off on social media, criticizing the President and going as far as calling Trump or white supremacist. Trump went out to Jamal, as he did a series of other black women journalists during his presidency. His tweets said the following, with Jamille Hill at the mic, It's no wonder ESPN ratings have tanked, In fact, tanks so badly it is the talk of the industry. She ultimately left ESPN. Jamal Hill is now the host of a podcast with the illest name, Unbothered. She's also a contributing writer at The Atlantic. We sat down recently to discuss how important it is to overhaul sports from ownership to fandom to media if we want to achieve an anti racist future. Jamale, I'm so glad we're able to get some time to chet. It's a pleasure definitely for me. To be here as well. Me and my husband actually are in the process of reading. Just so you know, I first want to ask you about I know you wrote about it in The Atlantic, but your reaction to what's been happening with Naomi. You wrote about it being a larger struggle within sport into if you could just share with your thoughts about that, naomeal Socta. You know, it's a really complicated issue, her mental health, of course being the first major component of this conversation for people who maybe don't follow tennis. What she said about the anxiety depression, I think the scope of it was new, But Naomi has always intimated that she struggles in terms of public speaking, which is always interesting to me because every time she does speak, it's always eloquent, thoughtful, direct, It's everything that you want as a journalist when you cover an athlete of her magnitude. She was very eloquent on this subject. But yet we have to remember she's twenty three years old. Her career is like literally just taking off. She's the highest pay female athlete in all of sports. This comes with a lot of pressure, a lot of expectations, and at the same time as she is coming into her own As a tennis player, she has the double duty of having the unfortunate task of unseating her iconic hero, which is Serena Williams. I think back to twenty eighteen when she beat Serena in the US Open for her first major title, and the crowd booed her, and she revealed in the last couple of weeks that that was a major source of the depression and anxiety that she's felt. So there's one part of this as a mental health conversation, and it's our responsibility as sports journalists to put this into context. Then the other part becomes about athletes in their own agency, and given Naomi's financial capabilities, the leverage that she has both socially culturally in her sport, I think that saying that she not only would have to face a fifteen thousand dollars fine, but she also would face maybe being excluded from future majors if she did not adhere to their media policy was one of the dumbest things I've ever seen in sports, especially considering this as someone who is a jewel in your sport, who continues to drive popularity and drive eyeballs and viewership and fans, both long standing fans and new casual fans who just really like her, and you alienate her. If you're an official with the French Open, what's better this week to have Naomi Osaka in the tournament or out of it? I'm gonna say in it. So this was just a really bad play on their part. Consider that playing time and money have always been two things that they have used to try to quote unquote keep athletes a line, especially black athletes and especially black women. Her withdrawing from that tournament said a lot about who she is as a person and a lot about for that matter, that she values her piece more than performance. So good for Naomi Osaka. I think as a media member, we do really have to think about our approach. You are two words that I wish somebody would have told a French Open official pool reporter use them all the time in the White House, could have used one with her. Maybe that would have been a very viable solution. Indeed, and one of my first reactions when I heard the response that basically these athletes, as I knew across sports a more or less required to talk to the media was why aren't our elected officials required to talk to the media. Why is it that we have athletes who are required to talk to me and people rally around it and say, oh, it's important, it's part of the game, it's part of the sport. But we have elected officials, even during a pandemic, can go months without talking to the media. How does that happen? It tells a lot about our priorities. Right. What people have to understand is that there is a I know this is no shock to you, but there's money involved when it comes to these press conferences. Of course, there is a logistical component to this that is workable for both athlete organization or sport they represent and journalists. The other part is that sometimes if you're watching a press conference, I want people to pay attention to the banner that it's usually behind the athlete that's there talking. Or look at the table. You usually see a company's name, right, You usually see some kind of positive right right here. That space ain't free and those okay, so that that company or that business or that sport can get prime time placement. Because if it gets pn US to run a clip of this press conference, guess what you get to see? That it's sponsored by lumberjack, okay, like you see it, and then it's growing and expanding the reach of the sport. And the way that you do that is that you make the athletes accessible. You get them written about, you getting them talked about. For journalists, they're very useful. I've spent twenty years now in sports journalism, and so I think what you brought up is a very important point. I think there's some debate or some discussion at least about whether or not making the mandatory. It's perhaps sending the wrong message, but it does say something that we expect our professional athletes to answer to their performances, but we do not expect take Cruise to answer why he's often can't cooled while his constituents are literally freezing to death. The government, which we pay with our tax dollars, is able to avoid our scrutiny as well as our questions, and we're unable as a citizens ry to hold them accountable other than through journalists. So there's something kind of bizarre about that culture, especially when you consider that other entertainers and sports is entertainment, they don't have to make themselves available in the same way. How much of that do you think has to do with sport, particularly the major moneymaking sports, being so racialized, so we're really talking about black men and women oftentimes and requiring on mandating them to do something. Of course, as you know, many journalists and writers who've written at the intersection of race and sport have compared the relationship between the way society understands and looks at black athletes and the way in which they have looked at other people they want to control and dominate. There's this almost inability to imagine a Naomi or soccer with agency for so many people. Yeah, black athletes in particular, the majority of their careers are covered by white people, white men who are creating narratives about them, who are culturally disconnected from them, who do not understand some of the other racialized issues around sports and can see and report on them through that context. We've had this conversation for my entire career about the utterly embarrassing lack of representation in sports media. To give people an idea, even now twenty twenty one, roughly eighty percent of sports reporters in the US are white men. It's the same when it comes to executive leadership at sports media organizations. It's the same. When it comes to columnists, it's the same, up and down the line. I was a sports columnist in daily newspapers in two thousand and five. That was my last year as the columnists had a daily newspaper, and at that moment, I was the only black female sports columnist in North America, the only one out of four hundred and five daily newspapers that is shameful. Shameful is not even the word I want to use a customer, but I want to impress you, so I won't use it. And so that's pretty bad, and not a whole lot is changed. I think back to Colin Kaepernick when he began his protest in twenty sixteen, and look at how that was covered. Now, the person who originally wrote about why Colin Kaepernick was doing it and what he was doing was a black reporter who noticed that he was sitting down on the bench. And after that you saw a media narrative, mostly again framed by white reporters and analysts and commentators, that was so disconnected to what Colin Kaepernick was actually talking about. You know, I didn't see a whole lot of people in sports commentary delving deeper into the issues of police brutality or trying to understand the message that Colin Kaefernick was trying to send. And certainly, once the conversation got hijacked and became about patriotism, a modern people in sports did not resist that false narrative, and as a result, or at least contributing factor, I should say, Colin Kaefernick got cast as a villain pretty early, pretty quickly, and with resounding damnation. This is the danger when you have a media that is as white as sports media still is. When these narratives are formed about black athletes, they tend to stick. And when it comes to women of color, and it comes to black women, much like it is in the rest of our society, there's an rature, there's a depiction. I mean, I think about how often and how regularly that Serena Williams throughout her career was picked it as aggressive, confrontational. She has a competitive fire that is on the same level of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, many of the great athletes of our time. But a lot of times she was called rude or impolite or doing something that was offensive to tennis and not to mention the body shaving that Serena went through in her career. So Naomi Otaka is getting a firsthand look at this firsthand look, and they're shocked that she would feel uneasy and anxious when she's around the same media that is very quick to paint Serena Williams as some kind of monstrous villain. I think this generation of athletes has a new sense of empowerment and a more heightened sense of agency, and that social media has allowed them to directly reach who they want to reach. They want to create and craft their own narratives. They're tired of depending on the media to do it, and certainly to do it responsibly. Hey, what's up for everybody? This is Jamel Hill and you're listening to be anti racist with doctor Ebram X Kidney. I'm happy we're talking about this heightened agency to use that term of athletes today because even you've written about just how to think about ways to transform sports. I can remember back to a piece that I read calling for black athletes to return to HBCUs and being an alum of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, no doubt, no doubt, and you know, of course, knowing that in the nineteen sixties, nineteen fifties, many of these top athletes, particularly from the state of Florida, particularly in football, were going to FAM you just as in Louisiana they were going to Grambling. But now, of course they're going to UF and LSU and as a result, the money is following them or money is being made. If you can talk about potentially high profile and highly recruited black athletes returning to HBCUs and what that would do in terms of the changing of sports and even the changing of this country. Well, I think it's important that we start the conversation realizing what they used to think amateur athletics, which is when it started, that's what it actually was. It was amateur what they thought it was going to be, And nobody thought it was going to become a billion dollar enterprise, not even HBCUs. Yeah, HBCUs, I don't think they not only couldn't anticipate what all college football, college basketball was about to be, they also to some degree didn't think that white people would ever come up with the idea of integrating because why would they right, why would they ever think that they would considering the treatment that they had already faced, and the whole reason we have HBCUs being because white institutions were not allowing black people in them. It was our only resource in terms of higher education. Of course, once you saw black athletes trickling in slowly to these predominantly white institutions, people point to when I believe it was Alabama play usc Bear Bryant, and I can't remember his name, but I think it was a black running back. It was either running back or a quarterback who just demolished Alabama. And after that moment, Bear Bryant understood, if we are to survive as Alabama, we have to have black athletes, and so they aggressively began to shepherd all the black athletes. You know, this is another side of our conversation I'm sure you've had about the negative aspects of integration. You know, we wanted equality, but I don't think we wanted to be robbed of our greatest resources. And that's what happened. And those great resources were these incredibly skilled, talented, highly capable college athletes that suddenly stopped going to grand blame Sam You, Hampton and Howard and began to go to white institutions because they of course had more financial resources than HBCUs, as they had from the very beginning, they had more to offer. And you look up in twenty twenty one and black athletes have built an empire that is worth billions off their free labors, and thinking about how that money has been used to create a level of financial success at these universities that people never thought was possible. I wondered what would happen if some of our best resources, being the athletic community that we have, begun to take their talents to HBCUs and what that might look like for these colleges and universities who certainly have been able to stay afloat. Some are thriving. But when you think about the fact that the biggest HBCU athletic budget might be about thirty or forty million dollars, and the fact that Texas' athletic budget is two hundred million, Clipson has a fifty five million dollars locker room, a locker room. Alabama has a sixty five million dollar locker room that comes with a barber shop. Okay, this is what is being built because of the success of black athletes, and so thinking about the kind of endowments that HBCUs have and what that looks like compared to a dude or North Carolina. It's not even close. I mean, Howard probably is the biggest endowment out of HBCUs, and it probably wouldn't even be in the top one fifty or perdomin million white institution. It's not even a billion. No, But yeah, I don't think it would. I would taking a while stamp, but I was like, I'm guessing it wasn't. And so the sports economy has been major for higher education, and it feels like, especially with the political climate in this country, the grievance climate in this country, and how racially polar I think things are, that it definitely feels more so than I've seen probably in my career, that more black high school athletes are considering HBCUs. But there's a lot of us that don't know that HBCU history, are not as well versed. And I get it. I understand why the players want to go to Texas A and M or the University of Texas rather than Prayer View because the facilities are completely different. But I do think that at this time in our community that it's important that they really consider HBCUs, especially when they start to think about how much money that they are willingly making for other schools. So it was just an important issue I wanted to raise and the first one to think about it. But I thought that laying it out there would be something that people could really critically think about, critically thinking about it even more, especially when we think of SEC schools and ACC schools like Clemson and Florida State, and how these universities private and public are sitting in states where currently black people are facing this wave of voters depression as our people of color more broadly, and you have many of the constituents voters in those states electing officials who are supporting those types of policies, just as they themselves are fans of these teams, and so on the one hand, they root for black people when they run, but then of course they're simultaneously running away from the rights of those very people. And this is normal, right, This is I mean, this is so normal. And then I mean to break it down even more, Jamil, one of those very campuses, you have football coaches, basketball coaches who get fired if they do not recruit the top black athletes. And right down the road you have partment chairs in deans and provosts who don't have a mandate to recruit the top black professors can say, oh, they just didn't want to come here. I tried, but the pool wasn't diverse. And so I think, to me, these just glaring contradictions show themselves most obviously in the Southeast, where we have the greatest populations of black people, but then also you have the greatest assaults on the lives of black people, particularly at an electoral level right now. It reminds me of I don't know who to specifically give credit for, but it's a phrase that I've heard a few times, and especially in the last few years, is if only white people love black people as much as they love black culture. In this country, we don't produce a whole lot anymore, but the one thing that we still produce is pop culture is entertainment, right, and I would put sports in that crock pot, and our fixation, our dependency on sports is pretty over the top, and it is constantly both a contradiction utter hypocrisy that on one end you will hear and see many in leadership who constantly undermine the progress of black people. At the same time, do everything possible to make sure black production in athletics is unfettered, is untethered, is unbothered, if you will. And a hope of mine is that athletes and sports figures who have the ability to do so will use that dependency to help progress along. I'm thinking of the young man whose name hopefully will come to me, who I believe is that Mississippi State, if I'm not mistaken. Last year he was. And as we're having this conversation in this country, this quote unquote racial reckoning. So I'm not sure what was actually reckon it, but all right, i'll call iterate the reckoning. But the Mississippi state flag, which diod for over a hundred years, had a Confederate emblem, and this particular athlete, who happened to be the leading rusher in the SEC tweeted that he wasn't gonna represent the state anymore. And I don't know if that meant he was gonna leave. I don't know what it meant he was gonna do unless they changed that flag. And the governor of Mississippi, who had been playing both sides against the middle of him and in halln not really wanted to change anything. What do you know, within weeks it changed, and they made a collective decision to redesign a new state flag and also to ban Confederate symbol, and also to move forward in what had been a conversation that had been going absolutely nowhere not at the same time. And I don't know how many people are aware of this, but there's a water crisis that was going on in Jackson, Mississippi. Yeah, and Jackson that was on the level of Flint, and this same governor, Governor Reeves pretty much told Jackson get in it on your own right, abandoned people about a issue of clean water, and was very obstinate, insulting, racist in his response to Jackson. But he didn't want to lose that running back, so he changed that flag. And we have seen this going back to slavery, as everything often does. Predie Douglas even talked about this before witnessing the role of sport and about how those who were black athletes during slavery, being in boxing or wrestling or other forms of sports, that they would do entertainment for the white masses, how they made sure to segregate them and treat them differently than to create a level of division in the ranks just based off treatment. Even then, those were those natural hypocrisies of loving to see the brilliance of black people, but at the same time never wanted to see the progress of black people, not on a social or political level. What I like about what's happening now is I don't think today's athletes are in a go along to get along mood. We saw it in the bubble when they were prepared to stop playing after what happened to Jacob Blake. Yes, and we see the w NBA and one of the greatest acts of political courage in sports. They changed the whole complexion of the political landscape when they got Kelly Lefler up out of Georgia. Right, their boss who signs paychecks. This is a team owner, right, This is not just some executive. This is somebody who is writing their paychecks. And they said, you know what, Reverend Raphael Warnock, that's what we got. So that is what I'm saying, is like, I think that there is a level of resilience and just downright progressive stubbornness that have swept through these athletes. They're not having it anymore. They're just not for those of us who are witnessing the increased amount of activism and resistance from athletes and who are inspired by them, inspired by what those NBA players did, inspired by Colin, and they're interested in supporting the efforts to end the exploitation of black athletes in college sports, who are interested in figuring out ways to prevent certain members of the media from demeaning and creating racist narratives. You know, people who want to do something and want to play a part. Where can they begin? What should they be thinking? Well, I do think that sports fans have to demand more. They can't always be on the athletes. I think a great mistake that was made with Colin Kaepernick is that the other players didn't rally to support him, not soon enough. You know, whether you agreed with his method or if you have some issues, okay, that's fine. But the general idea that your career could be ruined, that you could be blackballed because you were taking a stands for humanity is something that should not have set right with any player in the NFL. I think they missed the opportunity there, and I also think for a lot of fans to support a Colin Kaepernick. There is an opportunity there for them. You vote which you are remote. You know I love football, college ampro. You know I love sports as a whole. But in some cases we got to ask ourselves to what extent because the owners and those gatekeepers in these sports are going to use your love of something, something you think you can't live without, against you. And so I do think that the fans and viewers can be very key in holding these leads accountable. The challenge also is definitely on the media because what happens, especially now that we have a shrinking media landscape, you have networks that are in business arrangements with all the professional sports. The ability to hold these leagues accountable is often non existent. And as long as they're kind of able to get away with all of this, they're going to do it. I mean college sports is a really, really good example in that years from now, when this house of cards has fallen, if older people are displaying the even younger people, Yeah, we used to have a college system where the athlete made billions of dollars that never got paid. They don't look at us like we're crazy. I think it's incumbent on us to keep critically asking these questions and not creating systems where they're able to outright exploit people. The NFL when you look at how far things have come, and they are not perfect by any stretch when it comes to head injuries and other advancements that have been made and protecting their health and even on the money, and so they still need to have fully guaranteed contracts for everybody. That sport has come a long way, and part of the reason they came a long way is because I think both the players and the fans begin to hold the league accountable. So I think those partnerships work. I want to see fans side more with players because I don't think fans really understand that this is symbolic of the working relationship in this country. Like we're a country that has been able to make a lot of employment advancements because of unions. You don't side with the people who own Microsoft, you side with the workers. Part of that racial dynamic that you've talked about is that, unfortunately, because the most dominant in terms of popularity sports in America are dominated by black athletes, that mainstream fans are very quick to side with the billionaires over the players, not understanding that they have far more in common with them than they do some billionaire writing a check from this guy. So sports fans have to get out of this mindset of being so pro owner and pro sports socialism, as I like to call it. You know, being upset that a player is making one hundred million dollars, but you're not upset that an owner is giving you to pay for a ten billion dollars stadium. I don't understand it. So yeah, I mean, I think there's a level of accountability there that sometimes it's missing, and that's what I think fans and players can bring to the tables, you know, making sure that these systems are not allowed to go unchecked. Jamel, I'm sure you've seen more and more athletes who expressed interest in being owners or who actually are becoming owners. And this makes me think about and correct me if I'm wrong. The last time I believe it was the NBA was in a lockout. Some of the players, like I think Kevin Durant and others began organizing games in high school gyms or college gyms, and then they became talk of the players almost creating and running their own league, and then there was all this blowback in which people were like, oh, the players can't run their own league, or there were all these demeaning words about the players. I mean, I know you mentioned about the house of cards falling in terms of college sports, but when it comes to professional sports, do you think that that could potentially be the future, and you think that could be an anti racist future. It would be a great anti racist future. But that's difficult. That's a difficult subject to tackle because I do think it's so deeply entrenched the way the system works now that it would be hard to convince the players to do it, even though they could. You know, overall, in sports, there is not the realization that you would think among players them understanding you are the product, you have all to say. So we're seeing signs of that increasing awareness, but it's still increasing awareness within a system that was only designed to exploit them. Yeah, that's true. The NBA is a great example because I think, especially with what Lebron James has come to me just as a total humanitarian, it has changed all the power dynamics in that sport. And I know that there's probably a lot of NBA owners who don't appreciate it, but I think the players have just become so much more savvay. You know, they went back to work on the promise that NBA owners would open their arenas as voting centers. Okay, that's why they went back after Jacob Blake. That was a big component and as you see, it was very important that they did that. But I think they can get even bolder, even more aggressive, not just demanding things but creating things. I do think ownership is the next path for the modern player, and it being all about ownership, not just the ownership of a team, but ownership of their talent, ownership of their stories. They're trying to own every aspect of who they are because they're coming to realize that they themselves are the Fortune five hundred company, and so they're trying to make sure that they treat themselves as such. But I think the way that things are, it would just be hard to imagine. It's certainly not impossible, but as always, you're going to need a courageous soul or souls in this case to really try to make something like that happen. I mean, just because it hasn't happened, or maybe we can't imagine. It doesn't mean that it won't, but I think we are definitely getting to a point where at least the possibility of that will become stronger as athletes continue to develop their own agency. It's so much more about their ability that they're able to control and draw revenue from than there was before. That they have single handedly been able to put themselves in positions to be empires onto themselves so collectively, I like to see what they do with it, because they may get to that point where they say, you know what, we don't really need the NBA anymore, you know, maybe we do our own things. Yes, I suspect that one of the ways that which these new entities could become successful, as if we as fans, those of us who are viewing as you said, you vote with your vote, and we support that, and we support players functioning as owners, workers functioning as owners, just as we hopefully would support it in society in general. Thank you so much, Jamal. It's always an honor and pleasure to talk to you and learn from you and to even dream as we were towards the end of this podcast, Well, thank you. I appreciate being here and having this conversation with you. I always feel smarter when I talk to you, just because by listening to you. So I really do appreciate not just this podcast and this conversations, but just like all the amazing thoughtful work that you're doing. Thank you so much. Speaking with Jamal Hill really helped clarify for me that every sport speed is a race beed in a way. Just take this one story that broke around the time Jamel and I spoke. The National Football League has agreed to end a practice so called race norming, in connection with a landmark concussion settle move. Some former players say that the controversial race norming practice assumed that black players start out with lower cognitive functioning than that was used to deny the black players equal money in the brain injury claims the one billion dollar brain injury lawsuit for repetitive concussive injuries. Black professional athletes are viewed too often by ownership, the media, and fans as what journalists William Rodin calls forty million dollars slaves. When athletes of color reclaimed their narrative like Naomia Socca or enter ownership positions like Lebron James, they are treated almost as runaways from a system designed to exploit them. Racism in sports is a microcosm of racism in the world, and anti racist solutions applied in sports can provide a model for anti racist solutions in society. Jamel and I talked a lot about power. Who is in the owner's box, who is making the rules in teams, who is in the press box, who is shaping the stories and narratives. Change won't come unless the power structure in society in sports shifts. At its core, the racial struggle is a power struggle between people being racist and people being anti racist. Let Us be Anti Racist, Be Anti Racist is a production of Pushing Industries in Our Heart Media. It is written and hosted by doctor ibramx Kindy and produced by Alexandra Garriton with associate producer Britney Brown. Our engineer has been Talliday, Our editor is Julia Barton and I'll show under Sashimathias. Our executive producers are All the Time Wilad and Mio Lobel Funny. Thanks to Tammy Winn and doctor Heather Sandford at the Center for Anti Racist Research at Boston University for all of their help at Pushkin thanks to Heather Fame, Carli Migliori, John Schnars, and Jacob Wiseberg. You can find doctor Kendy on Twitter at d r Abram and on Instagram at Abram XK. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin pods, and you can sign up for our news that are at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the our heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you'd like to listen

Pushkin. I grew up playing sports baseball, bowling, volleyball, football, floor hockey, dodgeball, track basketball. Loved the battle, the competition, the trash talking, and I hated losing. Days were lost when I lost big games. I played baseball and basketball the longest. Growing up in Queens, New York and Manassas, Virginia, I dreamed of playing in the NBA, duking it out with the next Michael Jordan as the next John Starks. But as high school graduation approached, I knew the dream would remain a dream. When I arrived at college in the fall of two thousand on a backup plan sports journalism. I never imagined writing about racism. I planned on sticking to sports. I'm Abramax Kendy, and this is b anti racist. I worked tirelessly to jump start my sports journalism career. I took unpaid internships at notable papers, took after hours jobs to make ends meet. I became the sports editor at my college newspaper. Shortly after my junior year, I landed my first paid internship at the Mobile Register. The year was two thousand and three, four decades after President Kennedy had ordered the National Guard to desegregate the University of Alabama this afternoon. Following a series of threats and defined statements, the Presidence of Alabama National Guardsman was required on the University of Alabama to carry out the final and unequivocal order of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Alabama. That order called for the admission of two clearly qualified young Alabama residents who happened to have been born Nigro. Now there was a big sports story on campus. The university had considered hiring Sylvester Crum to become the first blackhead football coach at the institution and in the entire Southeastern Conference. Crum was born in Tuscaloosa and was one of the first black football players at Alabama, playing for a legendary coach, Bear Bryant. When Croom played for the crincon Tide the University of Alabama's football team, they won all but two of their games, won three consecutive conference championships, and were the nineteen seventy three National champions. He went on to have a career as an assistant coach in the NFL, but the University of Alabama snub crewm in favor of a white coach with significantly less coaching experience. CREWM said at the time, black guys are good enough to play for them, good enough to be assisting coaches, and not good enough to be in the positions of decision making and the positions of high financial reward. At the Mobile Register that summer, I wondered what some of the top high school football recruits in the region thought. It was two thousand and three and the SEC still had never had a blackhead football coach. I was surprised when every single recruit I interviewed said they'd prefer to play for a blackhead football coach. Readers of the Mobile Register were surprised when we reported the news. I served as a vehicle for these black athletes to speak their truth. They didn't just shut up and play. They inspired me as I learned firsthand the interplay of race and sport. When I returned to campus in the fall of two thousand and three, I decided to double major in African American studies. I came to see how much black athletes and other athletes of color were treated as commodities whose points on the square board mattered more than their lives. Policies and decisions concerning the upcoming Tokyo Olympics have offered painful reminders of this fact. The International Olympic Committee bar Kary Richardson, the fastest woman in the United States, from participating in the one hundred meter dash, for legally smoking marijuana after learning about the passing of her mother. USA Track and Field recently announced that cc Telfer, a black trans runner, will not be able to participate in the four hundred meter hurdle despite meeting the performance requirements for the event. The policing of black women's femininity did not end there. Christine Umboma and Beatrice Massilingi, two sister gender sprinters from Namibia, have been ruled ineligible to compete in the women's four hundred meter due to natural high testosterone levels. The International Swimming Federation banned the use of soul caps designed for black hair on the grounds that the caps did not follow the so called natural form of the head. At the same time that these racist, misogynistic, and transphobic policies were enforced, the IOC has ruled that athletes could not stage protests against them during events or metal ceremonies. Thinking back on it now, I got into writing by writing about sports, But it was sports that pushed me into writing about racism, and the rest is history. Welcome to Be Anti Racist in Action podcasts where we discuss how to diagnose, dismantle, and abolish racism, how to save humanity from the divisiveness of racist ideas and the destructiveness of racist power and policy, how to free humanity through the unity of anti racist ideas and the constructiveness of anti racist power and policy. On Be Anti Racist, we discuss how to make the impossible possible and how to bring into being what modern humans have never known, a just an equitable world. You ready, let's roll. There's a huge bass to people who believe that sports and politics should mix, But in this case, they've always mixed together. I mean, think about it, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell. We've always had these different intersections between sports, race, politics, and gender, and usually people that object to that intersection because they don't like the viewpoint or opinion being expressed. So it's not really about the fact that they're mixing. They're just mixing in a way that makes them uncomfortable. Similar to how athletes are told to shut up and dribble, many journalists of color are told to shut up and write. There is perhaps no one better versed in this reality than Jamal Hill. Jamal went from being the only black woman sports columnist in all of North America to co hosting her own show, an anchoring sports center on ESPN, but everything changed in twenty seventeen. On Monday, the ESPN host went off on social media, criticizing the President and going as far as calling Trump or white supremacist. Trump went out to Jamal, as he did a series of other black women journalists during his presidency. His tweets said the following, with Jamille Hill at the mic, It's no wonder ESPN ratings have tanked, In fact, tanks so badly it is the talk of the industry. She ultimately left ESPN. Jamal Hill is now the host of a podcast with the illest name, Unbothered. She's also a contributing writer at The Atlantic. We sat down recently to discuss how important it is to overhaul sports from ownership to fandom to media if we want to achieve an anti racist future. Jamale, I'm so glad we're able to get some time to chet. It's a pleasure definitely for me. To be here as well. Me and my husband actually are in the process of reading. Just so you know, I first want to ask you about I know you wrote about it in The Atlantic, but your reaction to what's been happening with Naomi. You wrote about it being a larger struggle within sport into if you could just share with your thoughts about that, naomeal Socta. You know, it's a really complicated issue, her mental health, of course being the first major component of this conversation for people who maybe don't follow tennis. What she said about the anxiety depression, I think the scope of it was new, But Naomi has always intimated that she struggles in terms of public speaking, which is always interesting to me because every time she does speak, it's always eloquent, thoughtful, direct, It's everything that you want as a journalist when you cover an athlete of her magnitude. She was very eloquent on this subject. But yet we have to remember she's twenty three years old. Her career is like literally just taking off. She's the highest pay female athlete in all of sports. This comes with a lot of pressure, a lot of expectations, and at the same time as she is coming into her own As a tennis player, she has the double duty of having the unfortunate task of unseating her iconic hero, which is Serena Williams. I think back to twenty eighteen when she beat Serena in the US Open for her first major title, and the crowd booed her, and she revealed in the last couple of weeks that that was a major source of the depression and anxiety that she's felt. So there's one part of this as a mental health conversation, and it's our responsibility as sports journalists to put this into context. Then the other part becomes about athletes in their own agency, and given Naomi's financial capabilities, the leverage that she has both socially culturally in her sport, I think that saying that she not only would have to face a fifteen thousand dollars fine, but she also would face maybe being excluded from future majors if she did not adhere to their media policy was one of the dumbest things I've ever seen in sports, especially considering this as someone who is a jewel in your sport, who continues to drive popularity and drive eyeballs and viewership and fans, both long standing fans and new casual fans who just really like her, and you alienate her. If you're an official with the French Open, what's better this week to have Naomi Osaka in the tournament or out of it? I'm gonna say in it. So this was just a really bad play on their part. Consider that playing time and money have always been two things that they have used to try to quote unquote keep athletes a line, especially black athletes and especially black women. Her withdrawing from that tournament said a lot about who she is as a person and a lot about for that matter, that she values her piece more than performance. So good for Naomi Osaka. I think as a media member, we do really have to think about our approach. You are two words that I wish somebody would have told a French Open official pool reporter use them all the time in the White House, could have used one with her. Maybe that would have been a very viable solution. Indeed, and one of my first reactions when I heard the response that basically these athletes, as I knew across sports a more or less required to talk to the media was why aren't our elected officials required to talk to the media. Why is it that we have athletes who are required to talk to me and people rally around it and say, oh, it's important, it's part of the game, it's part of the sport. But we have elected officials, even during a pandemic, can go months without talking to the media. How does that happen? It tells a lot about our priorities. Right. What people have to understand is that there is a I know this is no shock to you, but there's money involved when it comes to these press conferences. Of course, there is a logistical component to this that is workable for both athlete organization or sport they represent and journalists. The other part is that sometimes if you're watching a press conference, I want people to pay attention to the banner that it's usually behind the athlete that's there talking. Or look at the table. You usually see a company's name, right, You usually see some kind of positive right right here. That space ain't free and those okay, so that that company or that business or that sport can get prime time placement. Because if it gets pn US to run a clip of this press conference, guess what you get to see? That it's sponsored by lumberjack, okay, like you see it, and then it's growing and expanding the reach of the sport. And the way that you do that is that you make the athletes accessible. You get them written about, you getting them talked about. For journalists, they're very useful. I've spent twenty years now in sports journalism, and so I think what you brought up is a very important point. I think there's some debate or some discussion at least about whether or not making the mandatory. It's perhaps sending the wrong message, but it does say something that we expect our professional athletes to answer to their performances, but we do not expect take Cruise to answer why he's often can't cooled while his constituents are literally freezing to death. The government, which we pay with our tax dollars, is able to avoid our scrutiny as well as our questions, and we're unable as a citizens ry to hold them accountable other than through journalists. So there's something kind of bizarre about that culture, especially when you consider that other entertainers and sports is entertainment, they don't have to make themselves available in the same way. How much of that do you think has to do with sport, particularly the major moneymaking sports, being so racialized, so we're really talking about black men and women oftentimes and requiring on mandating them to do something. Of course, as you know, many journalists and writers who've written at the intersection of race and sport have compared the relationship between the way society understands and looks at black athletes and the way in which they have looked at other people they want to control and dominate. There's this almost inability to imagine a Naomi or soccer with agency for so many people. Yeah, black athletes in particular, the majority of their careers are covered by white people, white men who are creating narratives about them, who are culturally disconnected from them, who do not understand some of the other racialized issues around sports and can see and report on them through that context. We've had this conversation for my entire career about the utterly embarrassing lack of representation in sports media. To give people an idea, even now twenty twenty one, roughly eighty percent of sports reporters in the US are white men. It's the same when it comes to executive leadership at sports media organizations. It's the same. When it comes to columnists, it's the same, up and down the line. I was a sports columnist in daily newspapers in two thousand and five. That was my last year as the columnists had a daily newspaper, and at that moment, I was the only black female sports columnist in North America, the only one out of four hundred and five daily newspapers that is shameful. Shameful is not even the word I want to use a customer, but I want to impress you, so I won't use it. And so that's pretty bad, and not a whole lot is changed. I think back to Colin Kaepernick when he began his protest in twenty sixteen, and look at how that was covered. Now, the person who originally wrote about why Colin Kaepernick was doing it and what he was doing was a black reporter who noticed that he was sitting down on the bench. And after that you saw a media narrative, mostly again framed by white reporters and analysts and commentators, that was so disconnected to what Colin Kaepernick was actually talking about. You know, I didn't see a whole lot of people in sports commentary delving deeper into the issues of police brutality or trying to understand the message that Colin Kaefernick was trying to send. And certainly, once the conversation got hijacked and became about patriotism, a modern people in sports did not resist that false narrative, and as a result, or at least contributing factor, I should say, Colin Kaefernick got cast as a villain pretty early, pretty quickly, and with resounding damnation. This is the danger when you have a media that is as white as sports media still is. When these narratives are formed about black athletes, they tend to stick. And when it comes to women of color, and it comes to black women, much like it is in the rest of our society, there's an rature, there's a depiction. I mean, I think about how often and how regularly that Serena Williams throughout her career was picked it as aggressive, confrontational. She has a competitive fire that is on the same level of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, many of the great athletes of our time. But a lot of times she was called rude or impolite or doing something that was offensive to tennis and not to mention the body shaving that Serena went through in her career. So Naomi Otaka is getting a firsthand look at this firsthand look, and they're shocked that she would feel uneasy and anxious when she's around the same media that is very quick to paint Serena Williams as some kind of monstrous villain. I think this generation of athletes has a new sense of empowerment and a more heightened sense of agency, and that social media has allowed them to directly reach who they want to reach. They want to create and craft their own narratives. They're tired of depending on the media to do it, and certainly to do it responsibly. Hey, what's up for everybody? This is Jamel Hill and you're listening to be anti racist with doctor Ebram X Kidney. I'm happy we're talking about this heightened agency to use that term of athletes today because even you've written about just how to think about ways to transform sports. I can remember back to a piece that I read calling for black athletes to return to HBCUs and being an alum of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, no doubt, no doubt, and you know, of course, knowing that in the nineteen sixties, nineteen fifties, many of these top athletes, particularly from the state of Florida, particularly in football, were going to FAM you just as in Louisiana they were going to Grambling. But now, of course they're going to UF and LSU and as a result, the money is following them or money is being made. If you can talk about potentially high profile and highly recruited black athletes returning to HBCUs and what that would do in terms of the changing of sports and even the changing of this country. Well, I think it's important that we start the conversation realizing what they used to think amateur athletics, which is when it started, that's what it actually was. It was amateur what they thought it was going to be, And nobody thought it was going to become a billion dollar enterprise, not even HBCUs. Yeah, HBCUs, I don't think they not only couldn't anticipate what all college football, college basketball was about to be, they also to some degree didn't think that white people would ever come up with the idea of integrating because why would they right, why would they ever think that they would considering the treatment that they had already faced, and the whole reason we have HBCUs being because white institutions were not allowing black people in them. It was our only resource in terms of higher education. Of course, once you saw black athletes trickling in slowly to these predominantly white institutions, people point to when I believe it was Alabama play usc Bear Bryant, and I can't remember his name, but I think it was a black running back. It was either running back or a quarterback who just demolished Alabama. And after that moment, Bear Bryant understood, if we are to survive as Alabama, we have to have black athletes, and so they aggressively began to shepherd all the black athletes. You know, this is another side of our conversation I'm sure you've had about the negative aspects of integration. You know, we wanted equality, but I don't think we wanted to be robbed of our greatest resources. And that's what happened. And those great resources were these incredibly skilled, talented, highly capable college athletes that suddenly stopped going to grand blame Sam You, Hampton and Howard and began to go to white institutions because they of course had more financial resources than HBCUs, as they had from the very beginning, they had more to offer. And you look up in twenty twenty one and black athletes have built an empire that is worth billions off their free labors, and thinking about how that money has been used to create a level of financial success at these universities that people never thought was possible. I wondered what would happen if some of our best resources, being the athletic community that we have, begun to take their talents to HBCUs and what that might look like for these colleges and universities who certainly have been able to stay afloat. Some are thriving. But when you think about the fact that the biggest HBCU athletic budget might be about thirty or forty million dollars, and the fact that Texas' athletic budget is two hundred million, Clipson has a fifty five million dollars locker room, a locker room. Alabama has a sixty five million dollar locker room that comes with a barber shop. Okay, this is what is being built because of the success of black athletes, and so thinking about the kind of endowments that HBCUs have and what that looks like compared to a dude or North Carolina. It's not even close. I mean, Howard probably is the biggest endowment out of HBCUs, and it probably wouldn't even be in the top one fifty or perdomin million white institution. It's not even a billion. No, But yeah, I don't think it would. I would taking a while stamp, but I was like, I'm guessing it wasn't. And so the sports economy has been major for higher education, and it feels like, especially with the political climate in this country, the grievance climate in this country, and how racially polar I think things are, that it definitely feels more so than I've seen probably in my career, that more black high school athletes are considering HBCUs. But there's a lot of us that don't know that HBCU history, are not as well versed. And I get it. I understand why the players want to go to Texas A and M or the University of Texas rather than Prayer View because the facilities are completely different. But I do think that at this time in our community that it's important that they really consider HBCUs, especially when they start to think about how much money that they are willingly making for other schools. So it was just an important issue I wanted to raise and the first one to think about it. But I thought that laying it out there would be something that people could really critically think about, critically thinking about it even more, especially when we think of SEC schools and ACC schools like Clemson and Florida State, and how these universities private and public are sitting in states where currently black people are facing this wave of voters depression as our people of color more broadly, and you have many of the constituents voters in those states electing officials who are supporting those types of policies, just as they themselves are fans of these teams, and so on the one hand, they root for black people when they run, but then of course they're simultaneously running away from the rights of those very people. And this is normal, right, This is I mean, this is so normal. And then I mean to break it down even more, Jamil, one of those very campuses, you have football coaches, basketball coaches who get fired if they do not recruit the top black athletes. And right down the road you have partment chairs in deans and provosts who don't have a mandate to recruit the top black professors can say, oh, they just didn't want to come here. I tried, but the pool wasn't diverse. And so I think, to me, these just glaring contradictions show themselves most obviously in the Southeast, where we have the greatest populations of black people, but then also you have the greatest assaults on the lives of black people, particularly at an electoral level right now. It reminds me of I don't know who to specifically give credit for, but it's a phrase that I've heard a few times, and especially in the last few years, is if only white people love black people as much as they love black culture. In this country, we don't produce a whole lot anymore, but the one thing that we still produce is pop culture is entertainment, right, and I would put sports in that crock pot, and our fixation, our dependency on sports is pretty over the top, and it is constantly both a contradiction utter hypocrisy that on one end you will hear and see many in leadership who constantly undermine the progress of black people. At the same time, do everything possible to make sure black production in athletics is unfettered, is untethered, is unbothered, if you will. And a hope of mine is that athletes and sports figures who have the ability to do so will use that dependency to help progress along. I'm thinking of the young man whose name hopefully will come to me, who I believe is that Mississippi State, if I'm not mistaken. Last year he was. And as we're having this conversation in this country, this quote unquote racial reckoning. So I'm not sure what was actually reckon it, but all right, i'll call iterate the reckoning. But the Mississippi state flag, which diod for over a hundred years, had a Confederate emblem, and this particular athlete, who happened to be the leading rusher in the SEC tweeted that he wasn't gonna represent the state anymore. And I don't know if that meant he was gonna leave. I don't know what it meant he was gonna do unless they changed that flag. And the governor of Mississippi, who had been playing both sides against the middle of him and in halln not really wanted to change anything. What do you know, within weeks it changed, and they made a collective decision to redesign a new state flag and also to ban Confederate symbol, and also to move forward in what had been a conversation that had been going absolutely nowhere not at the same time. And I don't know how many people are aware of this, but there's a water crisis that was going on in Jackson, Mississippi. Yeah, and Jackson that was on the level of Flint, and this same governor, Governor Reeves pretty much told Jackson get in it on your own right, abandoned people about a issue of clean water, and was very obstinate, insulting, racist in his response to Jackson. But he didn't want to lose that running back, so he changed that flag. And we have seen this going back to slavery, as everything often does. Predie Douglas even talked about this before witnessing the role of sport and about how those who were black athletes during slavery, being in boxing or wrestling or other forms of sports, that they would do entertainment for the white masses, how they made sure to segregate them and treat them differently than to create a level of division in the ranks just based off treatment. Even then, those were those natural hypocrisies of loving to see the brilliance of black people, but at the same time never wanted to see the progress of black people, not on a social or political level. What I like about what's happening now is I don't think today's athletes are in a go along to get along mood. We saw it in the bubble when they were prepared to stop playing after what happened to Jacob Blake. Yes, and we see the w NBA and one of the greatest acts of political courage in sports. They changed the whole complexion of the political landscape when they got Kelly Lefler up out of Georgia. Right, their boss who signs paychecks. This is a team owner, right, This is not just some executive. This is somebody who is writing their paychecks. And they said, you know what, Reverend Raphael Warnock, that's what we got. So that is what I'm saying, is like, I think that there is a level of resilience and just downright progressive stubbornness that have swept through these athletes. They're not having it anymore. They're just not for those of us who are witnessing the increased amount of activism and resistance from athletes and who are inspired by them, inspired by what those NBA players did, inspired by Colin, and they're interested in supporting the efforts to end the exploitation of black athletes in college sports, who are interested in figuring out ways to prevent certain members of the media from demeaning and creating racist narratives. You know, people who want to do something and want to play a part. Where can they begin? What should they be thinking? Well, I do think that sports fans have to demand more. They can't always be on the athletes. I think a great mistake that was made with Colin Kaepernick is that the other players didn't rally to support him, not soon enough. You know, whether you agreed with his method or if you have some issues, okay, that's fine. But the general idea that your career could be ruined, that you could be blackballed because you were taking a stands for humanity is something that should not have set right with any player in the NFL. I think they missed the opportunity there, and I also think for a lot of fans to support a Colin Kaepernick. There is an opportunity there for them. You vote which you are remote. You know I love football, college ampro. You know I love sports as a whole. But in some cases we got to ask ourselves to what extent because the owners and those gatekeepers in these sports are going to use your love of something, something you think you can't live without, against you. And so I do think that the fans and viewers can be very key in holding these leads accountable. The challenge also is definitely on the media because what happens, especially now that we have a shrinking media landscape, you have networks that are in business arrangements with all the professional sports. The ability to hold these leagues accountable is often non existent. And as long as they're kind of able to get away with all of this, they're going to do it. I mean college sports is a really, really good example in that years from now, when this house of cards has fallen, if older people are displaying the even younger people, Yeah, we used to have a college system where the athlete made billions of dollars that never got paid. They don't look at us like we're crazy. I think it's incumbent on us to keep critically asking these questions and not creating systems where they're able to outright exploit people. The NFL when you look at how far things have come, and they are not perfect by any stretch when it comes to head injuries and other advancements that have been made and protecting their health and even on the money, and so they still need to have fully guaranteed contracts for everybody. That sport has come a long way, and part of the reason they came a long way is because I think both the players and the fans begin to hold the league accountable. So I think those partnerships work. I want to see fans side more with players because I don't think fans really understand that this is symbolic of the working relationship in this country. Like we're a country that has been able to make a lot of employment advancements because of unions. You don't side with the people who own Microsoft, you side with the workers. Part of that racial dynamic that you've talked about is that, unfortunately, because the most dominant in terms of popularity sports in America are dominated by black athletes, that mainstream fans are very quick to side with the billionaires over the players, not understanding that they have far more in common with them than they do some billionaire writing a check from this guy. So sports fans have to get out of this mindset of being so pro owner and pro sports socialism, as I like to call it. You know, being upset that a player is making one hundred million dollars, but you're not upset that an owner is giving you to pay for a ten billion dollars stadium. I don't understand it. So yeah, I mean, I think there's a level of accountability there that sometimes it's missing, and that's what I think fans and players can bring to the tables, you know, making sure that these systems are not allowed to go unchecked. Jamel, I'm sure you've seen more and more athletes who expressed interest in being owners or who actually are becoming owners. And this makes me think about and correct me if I'm wrong. The last time I believe it was the NBA was in a lockout. Some of the players, like I think Kevin Durant and others began organizing games in high school gyms or college gyms, and then they became talk of the players almost creating and running their own league, and then there was all this blowback in which people were like, oh, the players can't run their own league, or there were all these demeaning words about the players. I mean, I know you mentioned about the house of cards falling in terms of college sports, but when it comes to professional sports, do you think that that could potentially be the future, and you think that could be an anti racist future. It would be a great anti racist future. But that's difficult. That's a difficult subject to tackle because I do think it's so deeply entrenched the way the system works now that it would be hard to convince the players to do it, even though they could. You know, overall, in sports, there is not the realization that you would think among players them understanding you are the product, you have all to say. So we're seeing signs of that increasing awareness, but it's still increasing awareness within a system that was only designed to exploit them. Yeah, that's true. The NBA is a great example because I think, especially with what Lebron James has come to me just as a total humanitarian, it has changed all the power dynamics in that sport. And I know that there's probably a lot of NBA owners who don't appreciate it, but I think the players have just become so much more savvay. You know, they went back to work on the promise that NBA owners would open their arenas as voting centers. Okay, that's why they went back after Jacob Blake. That was a big component and as you see, it was very important that they did that. But I think they can get even bolder, even more aggressive, not just demanding things but creating things. I do think ownership is the next path for the modern player, and it being all about ownership, not just the ownership of a team, but ownership of their talent, ownership of their stories. They're trying to own every aspect of who they are because they're coming to realize that they themselves are the Fortune five hundred company, and so they're trying to make sure that they treat themselves as such. But I think the way that things are, it would just be hard to imagine. It's certainly not impossible, but as always, you're going to need a courageous soul or souls in this case to really try to make something like that happen. I mean, just because it hasn't happened, or maybe we can't imagine. It doesn't mean that it won't, but I think we are definitely getting to a point where at least the possibility of that will become stronger as athletes continue to develop their own agency. It's so much more about their ability that they're able to control and draw revenue from than there was before. That they have single handedly been able to put themselves in positions to be empires onto themselves so collectively, I like to see what they do with it, because they may get to that point where they say, you know what, we don't really need the NBA anymore, you know, maybe we do our own things. Yes, I suspect that one of the ways that which these new entities could become successful, as if we as fans, those of us who are viewing as you said, you vote with your vote, and we support that, and we support players functioning as owners, workers functioning as owners, just as we hopefully would support it in society in general. Thank you so much, Jamal. It's always an honor and pleasure to talk to you and learn from you and to even dream as we were towards the end of this podcast, Well, thank you. I appreciate being here and having this conversation with you. I always feel smarter when I talk to you, just because by listening to you. So I really do appreciate not just this podcast and this conversations, but just like all the amazing thoughtful work that you're doing. Thank you so much. Speaking with Jamal Hill really helped clarify for me that every sport speed is a race beed in a way. Just take this one story that broke around the time Jamel and I spoke. The National Football League has agreed to end a practice so called race norming, in connection with a landmark concussion settle move. Some former players say that the controversial race norming practice assumed that black players start out with lower cognitive functioning than that was used to deny the black players equal money in the brain injury claims the one billion dollar brain injury lawsuit for repetitive concussive injuries. Black professional athletes are viewed too often by ownership, the media, and fans as what journalists William Rodin calls forty million dollars slaves. When athletes of color reclaimed their narrative like Naomia Socca or enter ownership positions like Lebron James, they are treated almost as runaways from a system designed to exploit them. Racism in sports is a microcosm of racism in the world, and anti racist solutions applied in sports can provide a model for anti racist solutions in society. Jamel and I talked a lot about power. Who is in the owner's box, who is making the rules in teams, who is in the press box, who is shaping the stories and narratives. Change won't come unless the power structure in society in sports shifts. At its core, the racial struggle is a power struggle between people being racist and people being anti racist. Let Us be Anti Racist, Be Anti Racist is a production of Pushing Industries in Our Heart Media. It is written and hosted by doctor ibramx Kindy and produced by Alexandra Garriton with associate producer Britney Brown. Our engineer has been Talliday, Our editor is Julia Barton and I'll show under Sashimathias. Our executive producers are All the Time Wilad and Mio Lobel Funny. Thanks to Tammy Winn and doctor Heather Sandford at the Center for Anti Racist Research at Boston University for all of their help at Pushkin thanks to Heather Fame, Carli Migliori, John Schnars, and Jacob Wiseberg. You can find doctor Kendy on Twitter at d r Abram and on Instagram at Abram XK. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin pods, and you can sign up for our news that are at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the our heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you'd like to listen