Melissa: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and this is The Takeaway.

Dave Zirin: Sexism is a hell of a drug, and there's a lot of it in this country, and there's an extra layer of it when we're talking about Black and brown women and their heroism gets routinely written out history, routinely and repeatedly. This is not a modern thing and this is not a sports thing.

Melissa: That's Nation sports editor Dave Zirin who we spoke with earlier in the hour, talking about women athletes and women's teams who are often on the front lines of social and political action, but find themselves there unseen. In the summer of 2020, the Atlanta Dream women's basketball teams' public support of Black Lives Matter drew criticism from their then own owner, the former US Senator who denounced the Black Lives Matter movement. The team responded by donning simple Black t-shirts that read "Vote Warnock".

Now, at the time, the Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock was running a tight race for Georgia's US Senate seat against the incumbent who was also one of the team owners. After a run-off in early 2021, Warnock won and became the first Black US Senator from Georgia. To be clear, these women did much more than just wear a t-shirt. They approached their protest with a clear political strategy. Listen to this CNN interview with Atlanta Dream player, Elizabeth Williams.

Riddell: Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not sure you've referred to her by name yet during this interview. I think you keep referring to her as the co-owner of the team. Is there a reason for that?

Elizabeth Williams: Yes. Yes, there is. As we kind of shifted into this more political sphere of how things were moving, we talked to people in politics and they talked about the power of saying someone's name and so you can also do the opposite by not saying someone's name.

Melissa: Yo, they straight ghosted their team owner, and trust me y'all, this takes some serious courage. Of course, the effectiveness of these actions relies on media coverage, and while D1 football or professional men's basketball routinely garner significant local and national press coverage, many other sports and leagues and women's teams play and protest without headlines. In other words, if a girl's field hockey team protests in the forest of media disinterest, do they make a sound? Joining me now Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of history and American studies at Penn State and co-host of the feminist sports podcast, Burn it All Down. Amira, welcome back.

Amira Rose Davis: Always a pleasure to be here.

Melissa: And Bradford William Davis is an investigative reporter based in New York, exploring race, class, and health, especially within major league baseball and the wider sports industry. Welcome back to you too, Bradford.

Bradford William Davis: Thanks for having me.

Melissa: Amira, how do athletes use the press to make a point if they don't get any press?

Amira Rose Davis: One of the advantages over the last decade or so has been social media, which has really been a disruption to this long history of Black women's protests being overlooked, of marginalized sporting lives being not considered. They move in silence a lot, but they also reach out and use a variety of tools at their disposal, whether it's social media, whether it's Zoom, Elizabeth Williams and the Dream. The whole WNBA, for instance, lived on Zoom calls with Kimberly Crenshaw, with activists on the ground and didn't necessarily work in the spotlight to do the work that they were doing, but built really, really strong connections that a lot of people missed.

A lot of people just didn't see until it popped up because they changed the course of history and the way they impacted the Georgia elections. We see new tools building, but they still are interacting with the media in various ways. A lot of times, it's simply reminding them that they're there again saying, "Hello, this is what you're missing. You're missing this, you're telling it in a very simple narrative, and we're going to continue to tell our story and to live our lives and insist that you cover us, but we're not going to go begging for it."

Melissa: It is interesting this point about the use of new tools, but also Amira, I'm just so impressed by the ways that as emerging activists, they were in contact with folks around philosophy and theories of activism. Bradford, I guess, I've been back and forth on trying to think about whether the pay inequities, the realities that folks like players on the Atlanta Dream get paid so much less than big-league players if that might actually constitute a space of relative freedom or capacity. In other words, if you don't make 10 million or 20 or 30 million, is it easier to risk it or not?

Bradford William Davis: No, that's a great question, Melissa. I have to wonder that the economic proximity to the realities of racial injustice. Not to say that racism doesn't affect anyone regardless of the class status, but it certainly is more of a threat when you are on the economic margins as well. I wonder if that closeness from a league that is newer and also has to deal with institutional sexism and racism leading to just less fruits of capitalistic sports industry. It just makes it a little bit more tangible about the need for change and the desire to fight for it.

Melissa: I like that language of economic proximity to the realities that come from that racial inequities. Bradford, I'm also wondering then part of it is women's teams, women's basketball teams like we saw with the Atlanta Dream, we saw this with New York Liberty when they were out in front around Black Lives Matter wave one. I'm wondering, are there other kinds of sports where you may have queer folk, men, women playing, but simply because of the kind of sport it is, it receives less media attention?

Bradford William Davis: Oh, absolutely. The woman's game has been shaded and dissed since the moment it's been inaugurated in the '90s. I was just a kid when the W started. I grew up sadly making, but also hearing plenty of jokes about like, "Oh, they can't dunk, oh, they can't do this or that." There's always been a fight where they've had to just be respected and dignified on the terms of its own sport as something that is equivalent and clearly in some ways greater than the way the men's league choose to move.

That's a real issue, real problem. It's exacerbated by not having enough women in sports media, especially women of color. There was a recent study done that showed the incredibly low percentages of women of color, including but not limited to Black women who are actually in credential sports media positions. There's lots of fantastic people on blogs and Twitter, but people who actually get to go to games and interview them and then write them up for a paper, the magazine, or whatever, it's few and far between. That's a huge issue.

Of course, people who again are using that word again, proximity, more proximate to the lives and interests I guess in sporting culture of women's leagues are going to not only want to cover the league, but also be able to cover it better in some ways, and they're just not being hired or promoted in the ways that they ought to be. I believe that's a problem and a barrier that leads to less coverage and the persistent discrimination that the league has to continue fighting.

Melissa: Amira. I want to go back to Dave Zirin's point at the very beginning of our conversation and even to what Bradford was just saying, and I'll just put it this way. Is sexism a hell of a drug for sports media?

Amira Rose Davis: Yes. Sexism, racism, the intersection, especially is a hell of a drug. I really like that phrase that you use economic proximity, Bradford, because to your earlier question, is it easier, is there freedom? If you have less, it's very easy to have that taken away, too. When you mentioned at the top of the show when they were wearing protest shirts in the summer of 2016, the league tried to find them for those shirts. I think one of the reasons why the WNBA is such a useful conduit to have these conversations about Black women is because they're really the canary in the minds.

They exemplify how it's very easy to slip through the cracks and be overlooked. Sports that don't get enough traction, women's sports by and large, but also you see here through them what happens when Black women specifically try to claim these sporting spaces. I'm so glad you mentioned that report, Bradford, because I think it also exemplifies this when you think about sports media and that report, you talk about gender gains, you talk about people of color gains, and it looks like it's going up, up, until you zoom in and realize Black women specifically will be like, for example, 1.1% of sports reporters.

I think all of these things tying together helps us see how easy it is for it to persist because these stories aren't being told, and when they are, they're framed very narrowly by people who don't resemble at all, who's on the court, who's on the pitch, who's on the field.

Melissa: Amira, what I've seen you both do here is to reflect and pull out that notion of economic proximity of the players to those who are most affected by the inequities that they're protesting, but I also hear you, Amira, making a claim about the value of proximity, of the reporters themselves to the athletes and their lived experience on whom they are reporting, and yet there's also this old-fashion or maybe new fashion journalistic norm suggesting that proximity to our subjects is actually a problem for our journalistic capacity. How do you speak to that?

Amira Rose Davis: I think we do this in history as well. This idea of objectivity itself is just like, it is a little bit stale at this point. I think that we've been able to see that, especially in sports media, the consequence of not having a diverse rate of voices. We see this when you get Brock Turner's swimming times in many articles about him coming sexual assault. We see this when ESPN colonists take up space to defend the Washington football team's name.

Then when his father-in-law corrects him and says, "No, actually this is offensive, he still has column space to continue to write these articles, because there's not native voices in those newsrooms. I think that we continue you to see the consequence, and yet clinging to this idea of distance of objectivity, I think really just gets in the way of better reporting, better understanding. I think that we should just not be basic. What we know is we get amazing stories with new voices. Shakeia Taylor shouted to her 538, ran a dope piece where she did data analysis on durags in baseball and the correlation to pitching. That is a story that would've been very hard to see even five years ago.

Melissa: All right. I love that specific around that. I remember that piece and was like, "Okay, this is why changing what's happening in newsrooms matters." Bradford, I want to talk on the exactly this topic about Dom Smith of the New York Mets. He took a knee during the national Anthem after Jacob Blake was shot and killed by police. Then he fielded questions during an understandably difficult press conference. I want to just to listen for a moment.

Dom Smith: I've been very emotional just to see this continuously happen. It was a long day for me. I kind of wasn't there mentally, but we'll be all right.

Melissa: Bradford, what difference does it make who writes the story about that moment?

Bradford William Davis: Man, first of all, this connects all the dots because shout out to Shakeia Taylor once again. The durag piece was about Marcus Stroman, Dom Smith's teammate, on the Mets who wears different color of durag and performs differently, depending on the color he's wearing, which is incredible. Again, she's awesome. Yes, Dom you hear and see his hurt on that call. I think the difference between, I guess, cultural competency, which is often aided by lived experience, which means again, higher more black reporters is that having that difference could be a difference between, I think emotional pornography, for lack of better word, to a thoughtful nuance interrogation of all the issues that led to that moment.

What I saw a lot in the vocal press was just that him sobbing just being played over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It's like, "It's clearly not for me because I know I'm sad. I know I'm angry. It's for the presumed, and probably, unfortunately, likely immediately baseball." Majority of media consumers, which are like white folks. White folks of a certain class, and they're the ones who need to be in probably in a line of minds convince that racism actually is bad and makes you feel bad.

I get that, but it's still gross to me because that shouldn't need to be argued, certainly not in 2021. A more thoughtful layered exploration of all that was going down, all the team dynamics, the fact that he was kneeling alone on the field without any of his teammates of any color joining them, all that stuff ought to be interrogated [unintelligible 00:14:11]. It really don't get that far most of the time because of the makeup of the press core on print or on film.

Melissa: Amira Rose Davis is assistant professor of history and African American studies at Penn State and also co-host of the feminist sports podcast, Burn it All Down. Bradford William Davis is an investigative reporter based in New York, exploring race, class, and health, especially within major league baseball and the wider sports industry. Thank you both for being here.

Amira Rose Davis: Thank you.

Bradford William Davis: This is dope. Thank you.

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