Season 1 Episode 3
Ben Binversie:
For many people, sports are an escape from the rest of the world, but can we really separate sports from the rest of society? And do we want to? [00:00:30] This is All Things Grinnell. I'm your host, Ben Binversie. On this week's show, we'll talk with some of the guest speakers from the recent Rosenfeld Symposium here at Grinnell. The Off the Field symposium explored the inextricable relationship between sports and politics, economics and society. For this episode, we'll talk with Juliet Macur, the Sports of the Times columnist for the New York Times, about her experience covering stories that transcend the field of sports, such [00:01:00] as workplace harassment, sex abuse, brain trauma, doping, and international corruption. Then, we'll talk with Louis Moore, Associate Professor of History at Grand Valley State University, about athlete activism past, present, and future. This week's show is coming up next after a word from Grinnell College.
The information and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not represent the views of Grinnell College. Before we begin, a warning. [00:01:30] This part of this show involves sensitive content, including discussion of sexual abuse and suicide, and may not be suitable for all listeners.
When Juliet Macur started investing a story about NFL cheerleaders, she told her editor she never expected to be covering the cheerleader beat. He said, "You're not. You're on the workplace harassment beat." With stories filling the headlines lately about sexual abuse and harassment in gymnastics and other sports, I asked her when the #MeToo movement made the leap from Hollywood [00:02:00] to sports.
Juliet Macur:
It had to have been the Larry Nassar case, because that really happened at the beginning of this year, during his sentencing hearing, when there were more than 150 women lined up. Women and girls, really, because there was a girl as young as 15 years old who would give an impact statement. They were lining up to face Larry Nassar and tell him exactly what they thought of him. Tell him to go to hell or whatever other things, nice things, they had to say to him. They said that he wasn't going to crush him and that they were brave [00:02:30] and that they would move on with their life, despite everything he did to them. In some cases, it was pretty sad, because one woman said that her father had killed himself after a long time of her saying, "Larry Nassar has been abusing me. Larry Nassar has been abusing me." The father didn't believe her. When he finally figured out that it was true, he took his own life.
Ben Binversie:
Wow.
Juliet Macur:
So, I think he had other issues going there, but it was obviously, just the whole idea of these women facing their [00:03:00] accuser. Sexual abuse victims really don't do that very often, especially on this magnitude. And that was a huge moment, not only for the #MeToo movement but for women, in general. Women who have been abused in all kinds of ways, finally standing up for themselves. And they're, hopefully, not going to be afraid anymore, or at least as , to speak up if they've been hurt.
Ben Binversie:
These issues, obviously, I mean, with the Larry Nassar scandal, some of that stuff goes back to the '90s. He's [00:03:30] been doing it for a long time. And some of these other issues, as well, have just kind of been entrenched in these sports. What's kept them from being talked about until now?
Juliet Macur:
I think that people have been ... The thing is, this is the crazy thing, is people have been talking about sexual abuse in gymnastics especially. I think there was a book that came out ... Must have been in the mid-'90s. I should know this. It's called "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes," where a columnist for the San Francisco paper, Joan [00:04:00] Ryan, had written this book about all the abuses in gymnastics and in figure skating. It was basically almost a mirror of what's been going on today. I don't think she talked about sexual ... She did not talk about sexual abuse in that book, but it was everything else. It was eating disorders that led to anorexia, daily abuse at these gyms that lead to suicide, all these crazy things that were happening in gymnastics that was a big deal when she wrote about it. Everybody denied it. Even people in gymnastics denied it, because they wanted to stay [00:04:30] in gymnastics, I suppose.
Parents didn't want to acknowledge it. They kept putting their kids in sports. And I'm not sure why nobody stepped up in this Larry Nassar case, but people knew, or suspected, what he was doing. People had gone to Michigan State officials to say he had abused them, and nobody ever did anything there. They just buried it.
Ben Binversie:
In the wake of these scandals, do you see anything changing in the sport of gymnastics? I mean, I know, basically, everybody on the Board of USA Gymnastics has resigned, but [00:05:00] do you think that there's going to be tangible changes moving forward in the sport itself?
Juliet Macur:
Was it just ... No, it's not last week. It's the week before, they hired someone to be in charge of the elite development of the women, which is basically someone who's in charge of little girls coming up and becoming Olympic champions. This woman, two years ago, had defended Larry Nassar, said, "He's really great. He's always helped our girls. I'm sure he didn't do this." So when you ask me if USA Gymnastics is going to be [00:05:30] changing anytime soon, I don't think they can. I actually don't think so. If they need to be prodded into making all these changes, like changing the board of directors, kicking out their CEO ... They needed the USOC to basically tell them to do these things. Then, they hired this woman who was a Larry Nassar defender, and then she got fired a couple days later, because the USOC told them to fire her. I think that I don't expect anything to change in gymnastics anytime soon.
Ben Binversie:
[00:06:00] So how do you see your role as a journalist when you're reporting on these stories? You want to see change, obviously, and you'd like to see justice brought to bear, especially when there's victims involved. But you're also trying to report the stories and maintain integrity. Do you see a tension between the two, ever?
Juliet Macur:
Well, when I started writing about Larry Nassar, I was a columnist, and right now, I'm transitioning back to being an investigative reporter, which I like a little bit better. And I'm not sure if that's going to stick or if I'm going to go back to [00:06:30] being a columnist. But as a columnist, I could say certain things, like I called for the USA Gymnastics Board of Directors to be ousted, and a couple of days later, it happened. So I'm not sure. They probably didn't even read my story, but it made me feel good, the cause and effect.
Ben Binversie:
Let's say they did. Let's say they did.
Juliet Macur:
My mom says it was totally because of me. But as a regular reporter, like investigative reporter, we worked on a story earlier this year that showed that USA Gymnastics [00:07:00] fired Larry Nassar because he was found to ... Or he was suspected of being a serial molester. They fired him, and then, it was more than a year later where he was finally fired from Michigan State University. So, in that time, we reported that more than four dozen women and girls, as young as eight years old, had been molested by Larry Nassar. So that's more of an investigative story.
I feel like my job, as a journalist, is to point these things out, point out the people who have been hurt. Talk [00:07:30] to them, get their stories. I've talked to many of these survivors who have ... I mean, their stories are pretty heartbreaking. Not only what Larry Nassar did to them, but the aftermath, which is thoughts of suicide, lots of eating disorders and self-esteem issues, lots and lots of cutting, and lots of depression and anxiety. These effects on these girls won't be known unless a journalist like me tells [00:08:00] the story. I find that really an honor, to be able to tell their story, and just to show officials, who have the power to keep these people away from little girls, that they need to be doing their job.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. You reported a story about Ryan Hoffman, for example, the former North Carolina football player who had CTE and also struggled with mental illness and addiction and died a few years ago. While football, as a whole, is taking steps to address concerns about concussions, [00:08:30] many people are still concerned that the issue is not being taken seriously enough. You've also talked about the flip side of this, how football can really bring people together and be a source of hope, like in the community of Madison, Indiana. With those two kind of conflicting stories in mind, kind of, how do you see football moving forward?
Juliet Macur:
That's a good question. Obviously, when I was done with the Ryan Hoffman story, which was ... Oh, man, it was really intense for me to report. Not only the first time, where I went down to, basically, find him [00:09:00] in Florida ... He was homeless. I had to figure out where he was and finally track him down, because he didn't have a consistent cell phone number. He kept losing his burner cell phones. He kept losing even the ones that were sent to him by his mom. When I was reporting that story, it was intense just hearing how his mental health was, just how he was living day-to-day. He was living in shacks or not eating very much and doing drugs and all these things. It was very, very emotional to report that story. Then, [00:09:30] to come back, I think it was about a half year later, to hear he had got hit by a car. He had meth in his system, and he died alone. It was really intense.
So after that, you know, if I had a kid, would he be playing football? I seriously don't think so. I don't think I'm a very big football fan because of that. But turn around and do the story about Madison, Indiana, a community struggling not only with a huge opioid problem [00:10:00] but a huge suicide problem. Three or four times higher suicide rate than the rest of the country, which is amazing for this tiny little town and tiny little county. Everybody knows somebody who's died, and lot of those people are kids and young adults. For that coach there in that town to be able to keep kids on his team, to get them excited about football and keep them off the streets ... They're not even in the streets. They're doing drugs in their homes. But to keep them focused and to keep their self-esteem up is ... [00:10:30] That's a very important story, too. It's hard for me to think about your very difficult question, and I'm really upset that you asked me it.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. I mean, it's something that I've always thought about, too, kind of reconciling what I've always thought is like the intangible something about sports that just, like ... It's hard for me to put into words. But there's also the other side, which maybe is just society's issues creeping in on [00:11:00] what is not a wholly separate entity, which is sports, you know? As you talked about today, it's not separate.
Juliet Macur:
One time, I think, when I was in Madison, I thought, what sport can replace football, so I don't have to have these head injuries?
Ben Binversie:
Right.
Juliet Macur:
I would like to say that the Madison football team had concussion protocols out the wazoo. At one point, they had, like, seven guys out of the game because they were watching them for concussions. They did a very good job at safeguarding that and keeping an eye on that. I thought, can I actually [00:11:30] see these guys playing soccer? They can't even play soccer. It won't be a replacement. They can't play baseball. It won't be a replacement because, there's just not enough spots on the team. You know, football you can have so many guys on the team. You can take so many guys and refocus them and be there for them. So it's hard to find a replacement for football that might be hurting some kids in the end. It's a Catch 22 that I don't have the answer for.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. So, it's kind [00:12:00] of a similar question, and maybe you don't have a good answer for this one, either, but I'll shoot anyway. So, you've covered sports for a long time, and you've obviously covered your fair share of scandals, but also, inspiring stories that showcase the power of sports. In both cases, it's evident that the stories are about much more than just sports, but which one of those stories is the reason that you got into covering sports? The inspirational ones or the ones where you're uncovering injustices?
Juliet Macur:
I think [00:12:30] I did not even know what I wanted to do. I just thought I was going to travel the world for free, and that was cool.
Ben Binversie:
That is cool.
Juliet Macur:
I was like, I don't even know. I wasn't on the newspaper in my college. I had written a lot when I was a kid, but I wanted to be a lawyer, because my parent ... We came from a blue-collar family, and I thought, I should be a lawyer. So I really didn't have a plan. The stories [00:13:00] where I look back, I think the emotional stories are important to tell, because you're telling somebody's story that change somebody's life. The ones that change rules or laws and things like that, those are very important. Those who save other people from suffering, like the Larry Nassar case or maybe some of the CTE stories, where maybe a kid won't play football if he gets three concussions. Maybe he'll decide to stop if he's read one of my stories.
I mean, there's been a lot [00:13:30] of those where I've felt pretty good about myself. Not to pat myself on the back, because in the Ryan Hoffman case, he called me from rehab saying that I'd saved his life, and I thought, this is the best moment of my life as a journalist. I mean, I live to try to help people. Then, several months later, for him to pass away by himself without any ID in an ambulance where nobody even knew his name to say goodbye was ... That's not [00:14:00] how it ends.
Ben Binversie:
No. It's an important job. With all these issues intertwining themselves in sports from society, do you think sports provides a particular angle of analysis that can't be gleaned from other perspectives? Or do you think it's simply that we lend a lot of importance to sports, so when these stories come up in the context of sports, they're just more prevalent or they have more traction?
Juliet Macur:
[00:14:30] I think more people pay attention to sports than anything else. If it's something that crops up in business, it's really cutting off half the population that doesn't read the business section or doesn't really care about business. The good thing about sports is it attracts people from all different walks of life, from all different backgrounds and financial means. That's why it's such a good meeting place to discuss these things. We were just talking about the Serena Williams story just a little while ago and debating whether she [00:15:00] was right or wrong in her ... I don't want to call it a tantrum, but it sort of was a tantrum against the umpire. Everybody has a different thought about it, people who didn't even watch tennis. So it's nice to hear all these people talking about an issue, whether it's equality or racism, and it all started with just a tennis match.
Ben Binversie:
One of the quotes in your article about the Madison football team really stuck with me since I read it. The woman in the diner, when you first got there, who [00:15:30] had recently lost her son to suicide told you, "We need your help." I'd like to echo those sentiments and thank you for continuing to tell these stories and coming on the show today, Juliet.
Juliet Macur:
Oh, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure. Thanks.
Ben Binversie:
Juliet Macur is an award-winning columnist for The New York Times. She's also the author of "Cycle of Lies: The Prominent Biography of Lance Armstrong's Demise." You can find links to her recent work on our website, grinnell.edu/podcast.
[00:16:00] Recognize that tune? Did you stand up, hand over your heart, and sing? For our listeners driving in the car, I really hope you stayed in your seat buckled up. For liability reasons, I should mention Grinnell College is not responsible for any injuries or intense feelings of patriotism that may result from listening to this podcast. [00:16:30] Regardless of who you feel about the NFL protests started by Colin Kaepernick, the protests have undeniably ignited discussion and debate. With football season in full swing, the issue's on many people's minds. Joining me to talk about this and other activism in the world of sport is Louis Moore, Associate Professor of History at Grand Valley State University. I asked him how today's athlete activists differ from those in the past, like Muhammad Ali, in terms of the methods of protest, public reaction, and goals.
Louis Moore:
I think [00:17:00] the number one difference between now and back then is that there are more black women involved. When I tell people this, there wasn't a lot of black women athletes in the 1960s and, say, 50 years ago, when track athletes were talking about boycotting the Olympics, the black women weren't asked. The difference today is they're not waiting to be asked. The NBA players were on the forefront two years ago, even before Kaep kneeled. They were talking about Black [00:17:30] Lives Matter. They were getting fined by their league, and they were having blackouts with the media representation. You have Serena before not only talking about equal pay, but she's talked about Black Lives Matter in the past. So you have women in the front lines.
I think the other thing that's different is just how you get that message out there. Back then, you'd have to have a prominent voice and have that interview with a Sports Illustrated or with a national magazine, and they would only let a few [00:18:00] people speak. So if you're looking at, for instance, leading up to the '68 Olympics and the boycotts, there's only a few athletes that get to speak, even though the majority of them are saying, "Hey, we're thinking about not going." Then, there's, obviously, Harry Edwards. Today, you just hop online. You say something on social media, and you have that platform. So I think that's a major difference.
The other thing is just the way they protest. Back then, you had to say something or be very vocal, maybe make a stand like John Carson, Tommy Smith. [00:18:30] What you see today is simply wearing a T-shirt, for some people, is enough. A couple years ago, you have NBA players wear I Can't Breathe shirts, and they got labeled activist athletes.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, social media definitely changes the dynamic of activism, but do you think it makes it harder for athletes to control their message? With Kaepernick, the goal of his protest had nothing to do with the anthem or the flag, yet some people still frame the debate that way.
Louis Moore:
Yes and no. Historically, if you look at it, I think the message always [00:19:00] gets shaped. I'm on social media a lot, and a couple weeks ago, for the anniversary of the March on Washington, which was August 28 ... So I did this August 28. I posted an old editorial from a Southern newspaper about the March on Washington. Then, this newspaper writer, editorialist, was just going against King and the Civil Rights Movement and saying that they're really being disruptive. They're a problem. Whereas, obviously, King was talking about nonviolence. He's talking about peace and violence. [00:19:30] Opposition purposely took that message and distorted it, right? I posted stuff on King after his assassination. There's a newspaper in El Paso. I want to say it's the El Paso Times. The day before his assassination ... Obviously, they didn't know he was going to be assassinated, but they have a political cartoon of King with a gun in his hand, essentially saying he's the reason why you have these riots in Memphis. So they painted him as a black militant, right?
So even though King was saying all this stuff about nonviolence and peace, [00:20:00] the media takes it and runs. We see the same thing with the Kaepernick protest, right? The media and other people took it and made it about the anthem and made it about the flag when it was really about police brutality. Now, the other thing that Kaep could have done better, however, is that he's really been silent for a while. So when you're silent, that leaves that vacuum open, and that's where a lot of it was filled in with that nonsense, when he wasn't speaking intentionally, doing any interviews. Once you do that, you have [00:20:30] new leadership, you have new opposition, and he never really did a good job of fighting back.
Ben Binversie:
That's a good point. What do you think today's athletes can learn from the past history of successful activists?
Louis Moore:
I hate to be cliché on this with Kaepernick's Nike ad about sacrificing and everything like that, but when we look at the athletes of the past who were activists, they had nothing. There was no guaranteed contracts. There's not a lot of money. John Carson and Tommy Smith [00:21:00] were amateur athletes, so they literally risked it all. Ali lost three years of his career. Other football players who protested ... A very famous protest, the '65 boycott of New Orleans’ All-Star Game of AFL players, these guys could have been cut the next day. For them, protesting racism meant that much. I think if you're an athlete and you're on the fence about whether I should do it or not, maybe I only have a three-year career, just know that people risked a lot. [00:21:30] I think they should be comfortable in protesting, if they truly believe that something's truly an injustice, to use their platform.
Ben Binversie:
Do you think certain sports leagues are more likely to be the focus of protest than others? I'm thinking about baseball and football, for example, which have both been, quote unquote, "America's game" at one point or another. Do you think they have a more conservative bent to the culture of the game or maybe the fans of the sport that makes them more likely to be the locus of protests or pushback against protests?
Louis Moore:
[00:22:00] Yeah, and I would think even more, yeah, baseball, football, and hockey. What's his name? JT Brown, when he raised his fist, he was on the Lightning, and he got death threats. I believe he plays for Minnesota now. It's just how we see those games. On the one hand, baseball, we use baseball to tell a story about democracy and integration via Jackie Robinson, so you'll get that pushback to say, wait a minute. This is America's game. How could that be a problem? Football is, [00:22:30] I think, its fandom is very conservative, or the fandom that we get to see. So it tends to be the case that there might be more backlash. The NBA, I wouldn't say the NBA would be able to withstand some of the protests, but we've seen their players like LeBron be front and center, D'Wade, Chris Paul, and their numbers are fine.
Ben Binversie:
Let me throw a couple statistics at you. According to the real GM, [00:23:00] the NFL's players are 75% black, yet its fans are 83% white. 75% of head coaches and 100% of team CEOs and presidents are white men. On the other hand, the NBA has the highest percentage of young fans and black fans. What do you make of those numbers?
Louis Moore:
I think it says something that we look at NFL as a very white fan base. I think when the NFL is figuring out what they should do with [00:23:30] the protests during the national anthem, that comes to mind. They see themselves as having white fans, and they leave out the other black fans. I think part of that, too, is just the cost of the game. It's very expensive to go. Even though they're in cities where there's a large black population, it's very expensive to go to the game. So I think a lot of fans are turned off from that. Basketball just does a better job, also, of understanding it's a black league, I think because [00:24:00] it started out as a black league. By the 1960s, it was more than 50% black. So if we think about it, they integrate in the early 1950s. Within a decade, it's more than 50% black. As much as they try to have quotas on their team, I think the league got the message pretty quickly that they're a black league, and they have to sell that.
Now, they've had some problems, right, trying to be that black league, but by the time you get to that late '80s, early '90s, and as scholars [00:24:30] suggest, they kind of merged themselves with hip hop. I think they embraced that. I think they embraced their blackness a lot better than the NFL has.
Ben Binversie:
Thinking historically about protests, do people ever really approve of the way athletes protest?
Louis Moore:
No, they don't. Get back to King here. I mean, one of my favorite writings that he's done, and certainly many other people's, is Letter From Birmingham Jail. He writes that in 1963, when he's in jail in Birmingham, and the reason why he writes that is white moderates, [00:25:00] religious leaders attack him for protesting in Birmingham, for bringing all this trouble to Birmingham. He sits down and writes about it. He says that famous quote, the whole injustice, where there's injustice everywhere. My favorite part about that is he uses that time to go after the moderate, to go after the people who say, "Why don't you just wait? Why don't you just protest a different way?" We see that still today with the NFL protests. Why do you have to do it during the national anthem? [00:25:30] When else do you want these people to do it? You're not going to listen to them any other time. So that's the beauty of the Kaep protest, is it forces us, right there, right on the spot, to deal with it.
I think that's why there's that backlash, because for the first time in a lot of people's lives, they have to deal with the reality not only that there's racism, but the criminal justice system is racist, and it's brutal to a lot of people. We don't like to think about that in America.
Ben Binversie:
The whole point of the symposium that we're having here [00:26:00] at Grinnell is to question the maybe false distinctions and the lines that we draw between sports and society. Is there a reason to draw lines between sports and society at all?
Louis Moore:
No. I mean, it's part of it. I think what we do, though, is that for the longest time ... Post World War II America looks to sports as something that we want to measure up to be, especially in this kind of post Jackie Robinson era. That allows us not to really wrestle with some of the racism [00:26:30] we see on a daily basis. So we can celebrate Jackie Robinson at this great figure, but at the same time, ignore the racism of him having to go play in the South or ignore the racism of the fact that people who look like him can't get jobs outside of baseball. People who look like him can't move into a white neighborhood.
Before we came here, I was going through some research, as I do in my off time. So it's the 50th anniversary of the Cardinals and the Tigers playing in the World Series, and that's one of the World [00:27:00] Series where everybody says it's great for the city of Detroit, because in '67, they went through a really bad rebellion. They lost their chances, essentially, to be in the World Series the last game of the year. Everything you see about the World Series in '68, when they win it, it's about healing the city, bringing it back together. There's a black writer, Doc Young, who ... There's a famous moment when they clench their playoff birth. McClane, who's their star pitcher, and Willie Horton, who's their [00:27:30] star black player, embrace each other. He calls it ... It's like that Pee Wee Reese/Jackie Robinson moment. Everybody's getting together. In St. Louis, after game one, Bob Gibson destroys the Tigers. He's one of the greatest pitchers ever. On the headlines of the local newspaper is "Bob Gibson for mayor."
After the series, Detroit goes back to being Detroit. Detroit continues in its white flight, where white folks are leaving. There's all these studies about race and the race problems [00:28:00] in Detroit, and we know what happens with Detroit. Bob Gibson, who was a hero in game one, who pitched three games through the series and was just awesome throughout the whole series, he gets hate mail. He gets death threats. He gets letters calling him the N-word, simply because they lose in game seven. So it kind of gets to that point, what you were saying, where, on the one hand, sports is great. We can tell all these stories about people from classes and different races and religions getting together. At the same time, life is life, and there are these [00:28:30] problems with race in America. There are these problems with class in America. Sports doesn't make them go away. What we do with sports is just use that good stuff to hide that bad stuff.
Ben Binversie:
Is there a difference between athlete activism that focuses on the sport itself, as compared to protests that focus on societal issues more broadly and use sports as simply a medium or platform?
Louis Moore:
No. I think when activist athletes are dealing with the problems of a [00:29:00] sport, let's say labor issues in the WNBA, that mirror society ... Lately, we've seen a lot of WNBA players talking about the disparity in pay and the percentages that they get. That conversation is part of our conversation when we talk about women and pay. Serena dealing with sexism, whether we agree with her or not, in tennis is a conversation that we have in society. [00:29:30] The gymnasts talking about sexual abuse and the #MeToo movement mirrors the conversation that we're having in society. By dealing with issues in your sport, you are also having an impact on society, and society is having an impact on you. I don't think it's a coincidence that the #MeToo movement is happening at the same time as what's going down in Michigan State with all that nasty stuff. I believe Nassar is going to be sent to prison for life. Michigan State winds up having to pay [00:30:00] almost 400 women $500 million. It's a very nasty situation, and it happens at the same time we're having a national conversation about the #MeToo movement and sexual abuse and inappropriate actions during work.
Ben Binversie:
The anthem issue has definitely been the focus of much of the talk about athletes and activism. With the NFL season just starting up again and Nike recently releasing their ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, do you think the anthem issue will remain the focus, [00:30:30] and do you think it's a good thing?
Louis Moore:
I think it's a good thing if it remains the focus, as long as our conversation is about what the initial protest was: police brutality, the criminal justice system. I think what happens, though, like we've talked about before, is when that conversation gets hijacked and it becomes about the military or it becomes about patriotism, disrespecting the flag. I think that's unhealthy. That's not what the conversation should be about. We should, as a [00:31:00] society, focus on civil rights, focus on justice, to improve ourselves as a society. So I hope it doesn't go away.
Ben Binversie:
So both Kaepernick and his former teammate Eric Reid have filed grievances against the NFL. Kaepernick's case has moved forward into discovery, so we will see where that goes. Do you have optimism for athletes like Colin Kaepernick, that their protests will yield results? I'm not sure what success looks like for him, whether it's monetary compensation or the chance to play [00:31:30] in the NFL again. But the title of your book, "We Will Win The Day," leaves me to believe you have some degree of optimism. Can you confirm or deny?
Louis Moore:
I'll confirm. Look, I don't think Kaep's ever going to work in football again, as much as he says he wants to. I'm just not sure it's going to happen, and that's unfortunate. The success of it was the conversation. If we're looking at the end game, dealing with the criminal justice system and, in this case, [00:32:00] police brutality has been something on the books since emancipation. You can go back into 1865, and you'll see there's a black newspaper in New Orleans, and they're complaining. They mentioned that they sent a note to Congress to help them out, because not only are ex-Confederate soldiers attacking them, but the police are attacking them, and they're just killing them. You can read an editor in a black New York newspaper in 1886, I've posted this before, [00:32:30] where they're arguing that the police as a body kill more black people than anybody, right? So this has been a long-going fight. You've seen police brutality mentioned in the civil rights for Harry Truman. He puts out a thing that the United States needs to do to bring back civil rights, and ending police brutality is in there.
It was actually part of the GOP platform in 1963. This is not a just one-sided approach, and I know parties flip. It's been there. It's been [00:33:00] a conversation. I think if we can get there and do it in a way where we have healthy dialogue and healthy conversation, shameless plug, we will win the day, right? I think that's the beauty of what Kaep did, is that for two years now, as a society, we've been forced to wrestle with this. Unfortunately, some people don't want to listen. They want to change the narrative. But they still have to be part of the conversation.
Ben Binversie:
Well, Louis, thanks [00:33:30] for coming on the show. I appreciate it.
Louis Moore:
All right. Thanks for having me.
Ben Binversie:
Louis Moore is an Associate Professor of History at Grand Valley State University, specializing in sports, gender, and African American history, often overlapping those interests in his work. This past year, he published two books, "We Will Win The Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality" and "I Fight For A Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood." Links to his work are available on our website, grinnell.edu/podcast.
[00:34:00] And with that, we'll wrap up this week's episode. The next show will feature more from the symposium speakers. We'll talk with Sarah Fields, Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado in Denver, about the intersection of law, gender, and sports and Nola Agha, Associate Professor of Sport Management at the University of San Francisco, about the economic impact and distributive justice of public stadium subsidies. Music for today's show comes from Brett Newski and AudioBlocks. If you'd like to contact [00:34:30] the show, email us at podcast@grinnell.edu. Find us on Twitter with #AllThingsGrinnell, or check out our website, grinnell.edu/podcast for more information about the guests from today's show. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. I'm your host, Ben Binversie. Stay weird, Grinnellians.