Inclusion for trans athletes in sports has become a flashpoint in the culture war that extends from schools to international competitions. Katie Barnes joins Edge of Sports to discuss their new book, Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates, which offers one of the most comprehensive views yet on how the struggle for inclusion in the realm of sports has much wider social and political consequences.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
Audio Post-Production: David Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Dave Zirin:
Trans athletes in sports and the book that explains it all, today on Edge of Sports.
(singing)
Welcome to Edge of Sports TV, only on The Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin. This week we talk to Katie Barnes about their book Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates. It’s the study of trans athletes that many of us have been waiting for, covering the fight for inclusion in the sports world and what that could and should look like. Also, I have choice words about why the public financing of stadiums keeps happening and it’s frankly a little more than corporate theft writ large. And on Ask a Sports Scholar, we have a true star, Professor Tracie Canada, to speak about her cutting edge work about the racial economy of college football. But first, Katie Barnes. Katie Barnes, thank you so much for being with us here on Edge of Sports.
Katie Barnes:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, me too. So the process of you writing Fair Play, it took several years and the political climate has gotten so much uglier for trans kids during the time that you were writing the book, with the politics of exclusion becoming codified in state after state. How challenging was it for you to write this book amidst the changing political landscape?
Katie Barnes:
It was incredibly challenging, and that is true on a couple of fronts. There’s the first in that it’s technically very difficult to write a book, which is a long-term medium, while there’s an active news event occurring. And so even now, there are things that are in the book that are out of date just because enough time has passed since I finished writing. And so that is technically challenging. But then of course for me, as I set out to write the book, because of the nature of the climate and the landscape shifting, the book also shifted pretty considerably in the course of the reporting and writing process. And then on a personal level, as somebody who is non-binary and living in the world and sitting in this space and reporting on it, while also feeling like people that I’m in community with are being targeted by legislation, that’s a hard thing mentally and emotionally as well.
Dave Zirin:
I want to dig a little deeper into something you just said. The reactionary fervor around the issue of trans exclusion, particularly in the world of sports, although of course not exclusively in sports, did it alter your thesis or conclusions at all for the book?
Katie Barnes:
I think at least for me as the writer, there is a place where I feel like my tone changes, and maybe it’s because I wrote it so I feel like I could tell what years I wrote which chapter. And I also think that even culturally in our own climate, there was a fulcrum that we experienced as well. And for me that was Lia Thomas, where even though, yes, there were nine states that had already passed legislation, 10 if you count the executive orders out of South Dakota, by the time Lia Thomas dove into the pool in the fall of ’21.
But after her and her success and that story, I describe it in Fair Play as being a radicalizing event, and I think that is true for a lot of people. I think it kicked the issue into the mainstream in a way that I had not experienced before as a reporter, which led to additional scrutiny for me. And I think as I was finishing the book, it was on the heels of that. And so there are places where I can tell I wrote it after Lia and after that story. So yeah, I don’t necessarily think the thesis of the book changed. I think that the urgency shifted a bit and I think the strength of my own perspective shifted a bit as well.
Dave Zirin:
To stay on Lia Thomas for a second, some of the trans people that I was in dialogue with at the time, some of them were saying, “Go, Lia, this is what we want. We want this in people’s faces that we exist.” But I also spoke to trans people who said, “Oh boy, are we really ready for this right now? Are we ready as a movement to deal with what’s coming our way because of this?” What was your response when Lia first hit that pool and the reactionary fervor really did hit a high thrum?
Katie Barnes:
Yeah, I don’t know if I had an individual response, so to speak. In that moment. I was very in my mode as a journalist where I recognized the size of the story and my immediate impulse was, “We have to go cover. I’ve got to go cover this.” And so I think the intersection of Lia Thomas having her success and that real just drumbeat of just wave after wave after wave of coverage that she experienced from a range of outlets meshed with the legislative session of 2022. I think for me as an individual who is also a journalist, that was when I experienced just a real mental health decline just from really sitting in it, if that makes sense, that that was a real tough time for me.
But that had nothing to do with my personal response to whether or not Lia should swim. I don’t really have an opinion about that. But I was hearing similar conflicts that you were hearing in terms of the differing perspectives of folks, the fear that I was feeling build within queer and trans communities, within those advocacy communities. There was a lot of concern about what this would mean and I think it turned out that some of those concerns were founded.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. What would you want to say to the people who have decided that keeping trans kids off the playing field is just going to be their political mission in life?
Katie Barnes:
I don’t know if it’s for me to say about somebody’s political mission because they’re legislators for a reason, a lot of them are elected. But I think there’s a wider group within the public who have questions who don’t know how they feel about it, or maybe their impulse is to feel, “Oh, it makes sense to me that trans girls shouldn’t play girls sports.” And I think to those folks, and a lot of them are people for whom I wrote Fair Play, is to enter the conversation with openness, with a desire to learn and have those questions answered. I think a lot of times, I found this in my reporting, folks really feel like this issue is incredibly straightforward, that the, quote, “science is settled”, end quote, and it’s much more complex and nuanced than that, especially when we’re talking about different competition levels.
So I think there are a lot of folks who want to look at someone like Lia Thomas and elite athletes as a means of justifying restrictive policy for young people. But I don’t think that we would find that to be appropriate in other settings in terms of the kinds of eligibility criteria that we place on Olympians. We don’t do that for seven year olds and so why are we doing that in this case? And those are often the questions I ask when I’m having those conversations with folks. And I actually, in my reporting have found that a lot of people don’t recognize how broad the legislation is. They think it is about college athletes, or it’s about high school athletes or really competitive sports. And much of the legislation does encompass those sporting levels, but it also goes down to kindergarten in some states and all the way up through collegiate intramurals in other states. And that’s incredibly broad legislation.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. How about chess coming up recently?
Katie Barnes:
Oh, yeah. So then there’s the Chess Federation. Right.
Dave Zirin:
Geez. Unbelievable. You just touched on this, but I’d love to go a little deeper. In your mind, how would sports look if we actually practiced inclusion and didn’t deny kids the ability to play?
Katie Barnes:
Yeah, I think that’s a really great question because ultimately I think the focus on such restriction is really limiting our ability to be creative with what sports could look like at varying levels of competition. One of the things I cover in Fair Play is the idea of maybe having mixed sports longer, just co-ed sports longer, we don’t delineate by gender and we let all kids play together regardless of gender identity until puberty. And a lot of times we don’t do that. I remember growing up playing soccer in the second grade and I played on a girl’s soccer team. And did that need to happen when we were all seven, eight years old? I think a lot of folks would say, no, it doesn’t need to happen physiologically. But we separate by sex for sports very, very young. And there’s a lot of really interesting cultural work that could happen if we didn’t. So I think that’s a really good question.
I do think that when it comes to elite sports and super competitive sports, there’s a reason we separate by sex. And largely, I think those reasons are founded to a point. But there are a lot of places where we might be able to be more creative in our thinking about what an inclusive sporting apparatus looks like. And inclusion doesn’t just mean for transgender girls in girls sports, it means for kids of all genders in all sports. It means for kids of all abilities in all sports, of all socioeconomic backgrounds, in all sports. Our youth sporting apparatus in particular is becoming incredibly exclusive. And that’s not just in terms of restrictive policy for transgender children, it also means… There’s a lot of smarter people than I who are writing about pay to play in youth sports. It’s a big problem. And I think we’re really limiting ourselves from having these more creative conversations and rethinking what sports for young people could look like.
Dave Zirin:
What do you think we should be saying to people? And by the way, one of the brilliant things about Fair Play is the way it’s written in a way that’s going to connect with people that do have questions about this. And it’s going to fortify people who are trying to argue for inclusion because it’s got so much great reportage. And we’re going to get to some of the reportage in a second. But I want to ask, what do you say to people who say, “All right, I’m with you on being more creative in youth sports. I’m with you for more inclusion, but only up to a point. When you get to the point very specifically of…”, and this is how they put it, “… biological males in women and girls spaces.” What do you say to them?
Katie Barnes:
I tend to spend a lot of time asking why they feel the way they feel. And I think also when it comes to in particular, like when you say spaces, I’m assuming locker rooms and bathrooms, there’s this renewed focus on locker rooms and bathrooms, and I often ask, “What do you think happens in a locker room?” If the question is privacy, like, “Oh, I don’t want to shower next to somebody in a communal shower.” Well that’s fair. I don’t want to shower next to anyone in a communal shower. I don’t think that’s a fun time, and I would imagine most people don’t enjoy that. And so if we’re talking about privacy and making sure that people have space and don’t have to be nude in a way that makes them uncomfortable, well then I think that we should just have more privacy for more people. That to me feels like a separate issue than whether or not a transgender woman should be in that space.
When it comes to bathrooms in particular, again, I ask, “What do we think happens in bathrooms?” And there seems to be this real hyper focus on a particular experience that preys on fear in these spaces and that fear is of predators, it’s not of transgender women. And that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a transgender woman who is a predator. There are examples of individuals being predators of all identities. The point is that it’s not exclusive to transgender women and it shouldn’t be presented as such. And so that to me, I tend to spend time asking those questions, “What are we afraid of and what’s the actual issue?” And trying to really unpack that. Because when it comes to sharing space with one another, to me that doesn’t feel like it is the most pertinent issue. Although I recognize that for some it feels like it is, it feels very urgent. But I often don’t necessarily think that those fears are founded in evidence-based reality.
Dave Zirin:
It’s difficult for me to not hear the echo of the 1940s when one of the arguments made against integration in Major League Baseball was the idea of Black and white men in the same shower and even members of the Brooklyn Dodgers raising objections to Jackie Robinson showering with the players. I don’t know, maybe that’s one of those history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme moments. But it does seem to be this line for people that just for me feels very loaded with prejudice. You’ve mentioned reportage several times, and that’s the thing people got to know about Fair Play is that it is filled with great reportage. Anybody out there who’s a journalism student needs to read Fair Play, even if you’ve never thought about this issue before, just by its use of the craft of journalism. I was wondering if you could share one story from Fair Play that you looked into that you turned your journalistic eye towards that you think is a helpful lens for this issue.
Katie Barnes:
Yeah. I think for me, I immediately go to the runners in Connecticut, it’s chapter seven in the book. And Connecticut is often referred to in shorthand as sort of the initial outburst around and the catalyst for legislation, and that holds up in terms of reporting. But often it’s presented in ways that I think are rife with misinformation, that doesn’t give the full scope of what actually happened in the state. So I have reported on Andraya Yearwood, who’s one of the transgender girls who competed in the state of Connecticut at the high school level from 2017 to 2020 since she was 14 years old. She is going to graduate from college next year, so it’s a long time for me to have known her. And I’ve also reported around the plaintiffs in the state of Connecticut who filed a federal lawsuit challenging the transgender inclusive policy at the Connecticut High School Association level.
And so in terms of having a well-rounded picture of what did happen, what did not happen, what races we’re talking about, I really wanted to take the time to actually dive into all of the context around this initial conversation because I think, as I said earlier, a lot of people when they think of transgender athletes, they think of Lia Thomas. But Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, the other transgender athlete competing in Connecticut, really their success in this state inspired the original bill out of Idaho, HB 500. It’s why Barbara Ehardt wrote her bill, and also that’s how Alliance Defending Freedom got involved in terms of filing the Title IX complaint in the summer of 2019, filing that federal lawsuit in 2020, while also helping Barbara Ehardt craft HB 500 and having a hand in crafting a lot of the legislation that we’ve seen filed across the country. That all happened before Lia Thomas, and it happened really beginning with Connecticut.
Dave Zirin:
Do you think Lia Thomas was partly a target paradoxically because of whiteness? Because there had been a lot of criticism of the anti-trans forces by how racist a lot of their targeting seemed to be of non-binary and trans athletes. And you saw a lot of that in how Andraya Yearwood was discussed and portrayed. And I always felt like, okay, it’s going to mute that part of this movement because it’s Lia Thomas. I don’t know. That’s something that as you were talking, it was just thinking about. It sort of stops a constituency from saying, “Wait a minute, this is also racist in terms of targeting and how we perceive of femininity and how whiteness is seen as the primary lens for understanding femininity.” I’m just throwing that out there.
Katie Barnes:
Yeah, I appreciate the question. I have had one anti-trans activist say as such to me essentially, that Lia Thomas’s demographics blunted the criticism. However, I will also say that I think in the fall of 2021, there are a lot of things that would not have mattered in terms of the identities that a transgender woman in particular held if she was successful in a sport. At that point in time, I think it was really a powder keg. It would not have mattered. The fact that there was a division 1 athlete who’s a transgender woman who had not participated in women’s sports prior to that year, who then was going to challenge for a national championship, that was a powder keg of a story. And so I think both things can be true, and perhaps they both are.
Dave Zirin:
By sheer chance of life, I went to high school with Andraya Yearwood’s aunt and I went to college with Andraya Yearwood’s dad.
Katie Barnes:
Oh, really?
Dave Zirin:
Yes.
Katie Barnes:
Wait, I know where you went to college then. I didn’t know that.
Dave Zirin:
Yes.
Katie Barnes:
Went to St. Olaf. I don’t know if you knew that.
Dave Zirin:
Are you kidding me? Of course I know St. Olaf. We’re talking associated colleges of the Twin Cities here.
Katie Barnes:
We love it.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, MIAC as well. My question out of that is, from your reportage, what kind of family does it take to really back your kids when they’re faced with an entire legislature, lawsuits, all of the slings and arrows that are coming after these kids?
Katie Barnes:
Yeah, some of the most emotional interviews I have done have been with parents of transgender athletes who are in the public eye and who have experienced just a tremendous amount of pushback. It takes a lot of strength and courage to withstand that. I think it displays a lot of love they have for their children and the support that they have of them. Because it doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re in the middle of just a public onslaught, that’s just a lot. There’s no way around that. And then to also feel the weight of your state, whether you’re Mack Beggs in Texas or Andraya Yearwood who didn’t experience the weight of Connecticut, but who was invoked in state after state in 2021 in particular, or you’re Lia Thomas who has not competed since the National Championships of 2022 and yet is talked about almost every day. And that is just a tremendous amount of scrutiny that I don’t think people really have wrestled with what that means. And so for families, it’s really emotional. And what I have seen from them is fear but also a lot of hope because they receive support from their communities, hopefully in a lot of cases, and just like a real, I think, desire to return to what their lives were like before, honestly.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. We’re in a moment right now, of course, where the eradication of trans existence is very real in our politics, and I actually think your book could play a role in turning this around. Your thoughts?
Katie Barnes:
Well, that’s very powerful. Thank you.
Dave Zirin:
I believe that.
Katie Barnes:
I think when it comes to being trans in this moment, there’s so many things that I am proud of of our greater community, our joy, our resilience, our hope in the face of just what a lot of people feel is a relentless onslaught. And separate from my identity as a journalist who weighs all of these ideas, who seeks out multiple perspectives, as a human, it’s a hard time. It just is. And what I have found in my time professionally is that a lot of folks simply they just don’t know what information to trust, I don’t think. They are unfamiliar with who we are as people, with our language, and that unfamiliarity spurs fear and desire to push over here. And my hope is that with continued engagement and with books like mine, like others that have come out and are coming out, that there will be a real seek to understand and development of empathy. And hopefully, and all I ask of folks is just to approach all of these conversations with openness, compassion, and empathy. And I think if we can get there, then we may see a capacity for understanding.
Dave Zirin:
We’ll see. You’re having to go out and do interviews like this one. Are you finding it, “Okay, this is fun. I wrote this book, I’m proud of it. Let’s get it out there”? Or is it kind of emotionally exhausting to have to go through this, especially given the climate that we’re in?
Katie Barnes:
I think it depends. In general, yeah, I love talking about this. I’m so proud of this book. I’m proud of what it says. I’m proud of the work that is reflected in it. I’m so incredibly gratified by hearing the responses that people have had to it. When you create something and you put it out in the world, you don’t know how people will respond and if they’re going to get what you were trying to do. And from what I’ve been hearing from good faith reviewers, consistently, people are really getting it, and that’s really special. So I really relish that opportunity to share their perspective of the book, share my own perspective as a journalist and as a person. I think anytime you put yourself out there, of course it’s nerve wracking and it’s draining. So there is a little bit of that too. But the good far outweighs any sort of mental and emotional tax I feel in the process.
Dave Zirin:
Awesome. And then just one last question for you. Everybody I know who’s written a book has had to utilize music either for while they write or maybe just to chill out after they write. What has been your music, your soundtrack in the process of writing Fair Play?
Katie Barnes:
That’s a really great question. So I listen to one song on repeat all the time when I’m writing, just in general. The song changes, but I listen to one song. And I would say that Fair Play is a product of three songs. One is Garands by Young the Giant, Wanted by One Republic, and the other is a Christmas song by MercyMe, it’s called It’s Christmastime Again. It’s my favorite. I love it.
Dave Zirin:
Amazing. Okay, well, we might have to do a little Spotify thing with the Katie Barnes Fair Play soundtrack. Yo, I really appreciate that you made the time for this conversation. Thank you for writing the book. I meant what I said about it being a tool to turn this situation around. Really appreciate you coming on Edge of Sports.
Katie Barnes:
Thank you so much for having me, Dave. Really appreciate your support.
Dave Zirin:
And now some choice words. Okay, look, I thought this issue was mercifully dead. I thought so much data had come out over the last decade explaining why there’s no economic or social benefit from building publicly funded stadiums that no one would dare again make the case that we should subsidize the playpens of billionaires. But like Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers or Donald Trump, just when you thought it was dead, it springs back to life.
Right now, there are a host of new publicly funded stadiums on the precipice of going forward. Just to mention three, and believe me, I could have mentioned more, there’s Wisconsin, where the state GOP wants to give the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers $600 million for stadium upgrades. The Wisconsin Democrats in a show of strength said $300 million. There’s Oklahoma City, a place about as big as a moderately sized airport. They want their own $900 million package for a new stadium for the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder, with political leaders saying that the team will move if they don’t get a new arena. Because yes, how awful that would be for the people of that city to lose the thunder. Let’s please remember that they only have a team because they ripped the Sonics out of Seattle. So please spare us the violin.
Then there are the stadiums already built and being built in Las Vegas, as the 120 degree gambling hub that pro sports used to treat like Sodom and Gomorrah is now their mecca for public funding. In Vegas, schools, libraries and hospitals will be starved so climate controlled stadiums can leave a Shaq-size carbon footprint. It makes no sense until you consider that the entire sports world is now being underwritten by DraftKings. Betting is the massive revenue stream for which the leagues have sold their already desiccated souls. And as a result, the capital of the sports world has become, improbably, Las Vegas. And somewhere probably in Reno, Pete Rose is saying, “I can’t get into the Hall of Fame, why?”
But back to the original question, how is it given all that we know about stadium funding, that these monuments to waste are still getting built with public dollars? I keep thinking of the words of one economist who studied the issue and wrote, “A city would be better off dumping $1 billion from the sky onto its citizens’ heads who could then scoop up the money and spend it than to use it for building a stadium.” And please don’t say jobs are a reason to do it when stadium jobs are seasonal, often non-union, and part-time. $1 billion can’t fund a jobs program better than that? I think it could.
So why do these stadiums keep getting built? There are reasons that I’ve heard like no mayor or governor wants to be remembered as the person who lost a team to another city. Or, it’s a great photo for the leading politicians once it’s built. That’s what my buddy Jules Boycoff calls an edifice complex, and that’s real. But the reason they get built above all else is that its Trojan horse corporate welfare. Corporate welfare is very unpopular with the public, but a new stadium allows for political money laundering that magically turns public money private while most people are too enthusiastic about the new stadium to raise much of a fuss.
It’s also, given that most sports owners are to the right of Mussolini, a kind of political money laundering where our tax dollars enter the pockets of the dark money billionaires that own sports teams, and then those tax dollars become the private funder of causes most fans would find repellent like the DeVos family that owns the Orlando Magic. They are also a family that underwrites the radical, dominionist, Christo fascist movement currently trying to turn back the last century. The DeVos funded organizations like Focus on the Family, to use just one example, are funded in part with the stadium public financing they have received from the state.
Of course, the DeVos family is also married into the Prince family, as in Eric Prince, as in Blackwater, as in a right wing private army that has also received hundreds of millions of dollars in public money. You got to hand it to them. The DeVos-Prince family are true welfare royalty and this political money laundering with our tax dollars, it needs to stop. So in the end, why do stadiums still get built with public funds? I guess it’s just because thieves can never resist a good heist.
And now on Ask a Sports Scholar, from Duke University, thrilled to have her, total rockstar in the field, Professor Tracie Canada. Professor Tracie Canada, thank you so much for joining us here on Edge of Sports.
Tracie Canada:
Thank you for having me.
Dave Zirin:
So let’s get right to it. Your forthcoming book is called Tackling the Everyday: Race, Family and Nation in Big-Time College Football. What are you hoping to communicate with this text?
Tracie Canada:
Yeah, this is a book that’s forthcoming with the University of California Press, and the thing that I write about is Black college football players. I write about them, not necessarily about college football itself. And what I aim to argue in my book is that they have a very particular way of navigating these exploitative and extractive systems that they’re a part of. One system could be the university setting, as students the ways that their experiences are structured by being the, quote-unquote, “student athlete.” But the other system that I write about as well is college football itself, which is a multi-billion dollar system that is based on the uncompensated labor of, again, quote-unquote, “amateur athletes.” And so what is that like for the overrepresented Black college players that participate in the system?
And so because I’m an anthropologist, I had the opportunity to spend immersive time with athletes, which meant spending lots of time just with them through their everyday lives, like going through classes, going to meals, being at games, just hanging out with them, just to really see the ways that they are navigating or tackling, it’s a cute play on words, tackling their everyday lives. So part of what I argue is about the ways that these systems are extractive, the actual ways that this happens. They have lower graduation rates than other peers on campus. They have to deal with these horrible injuries sometimes and the ways that impacts their bodies. They’re quantified in very particular ways because of this intense pressure on their bodies. They have a very specific control around their time and what they’re able to participate in. So there are all of these ways that they are being controlled and disciplined by football.
But then on the other side, they are still young men. They’re having fun and they’re hanging out and they have friends. They are caring for one another, they’re caring for their families, they’re caring for their mothers. So I wanted to understand that dynamic between the two parts. And one of the ways that also comes out is through the ways that they structure family. So a narrative that’s constantly repeated in football is this idea of the football family. We see it with all these hashtags that colleges have. Different colleges have different ways of framing this. We have something like the Falcons, which they call themselves the brotherhood. And so we see this language that’s constantly incorporated into football, but it’s a type of family that’s extractive, that is only concerned with the player. It’s not really concerned with the person because they need the player to perform.
So on the other hand as well, the other thing that I write about is the ways that Black players themselves navigate that tension of this football family that’s really just about how much they can produce. And instead they form these really caring and vulnerable relationships with other Black players and also with their moms. And so to me, their moms are central to all of this. And so throughout the book I try to explain the different ways that family and care come out in sometimes unexpected and sometimes pretty traditional ways, but through their participation in college football.
Dave Zirin:
What I love about this approach and why I’m very excited to read this book is that question of immersion, because I’ve read books before that are just very welcome polemics about college football, polemics about the Black athlete. But this question of immersion really has not been there. I think it’s a missing link. So through this immersion process, I’m sure you had certain assumptions and ideas going in, but what did you learn that surprised you?
Tracie Canada:
Yeah, I definitely had lots of assumptions going into it. And that’s part of what we’re supposed to do as anthropologists. You have certain ideas of what you think you’re going to find and what you think people are going to say and what you think people are going to do. And then usually none of that happens, and then you have to come up with a whole different set of questions and write a whole different dissertation than the one that you thought you were going to write. And so when I was doing field work, which is what we call it an anthropology, when I was doing my field work, it was the 2017/18 football season. And I’m sure you know, you definitely know, that that was right around the time that Kaepernick was kneeling.
So I went in with a project about race, a project about gender. I was interested in youth because age does come into this in a very particular way. And I just knew everyone was going to be talking about Kaepernick. And these protests and what they were going to be doing and how they were interested in it, or not, the critiques of it potentially, that’s what I figured that people were going to be talking about specifically because of the issues that I’m interested in. And I was really surprised that that was not a topic of conversation. It wasn’t something that they were as interested in as I was. And what I found was that even though they weren’t talking about his protest, which was linking to certain issues that they were talking about, they were just discussing it in different ways.
So they were dealing with their own issues of the ways that race plays out in these very particular ways. The ways that racism is apparent, the ways that anti-Blackness is woven into the system, they were dealing with it in their own ways. They weren’t necessarily linking up with the narrative that Kap was talking about at the time, but they’re all connected. And so I think that it was just really interesting to see the ways that that either became part of the conversation or wasn’t, but also the ways that they kind of made it their own. So they were potentially taking elements from it, but just making it their own and making it something that they could relate to themselves. And then eventually it did move into a space where it was linking up with what was happening on a national scale and in the NFL. It just took some time and I was just so surprised by how slow that move was.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. I want to ask you about the plantation analogy to college football. It’s been made, frankly, for decades. You can find players or commentators calling it a plantation, a neo plantation. Taylor Branch said it had the whiff of the plantation. And it’s always controversial when it’s invoked. In what ways do you find it helpful though in explaining the institution of college football, if you find it helpful at all?
Tracie Canada:
I do find it helpful. I am one of the scholars that writes about the plantation logics of college football. That puts me in line with somebody like Billy Hawkins who writes about The New Plantation. But also as you mentioned, other athletes like let’s say Colin Kaepernick, who at the beginning of Colin in Black & White has a whole image of the ways of the draft and how it links up with plantation logics, right? So it’s been infused in a lot of these conversations where a really long time. You’ve even mentioned Taylor Branch, and he was one of the first ones. Also with the executive director of the NCAA when he wrote his memoir, that’s also mentions there, the way that he is actually surprised by what happened with the way that he set up the NCAA.
So I do find it to be a really useful analytic, not only because we see the ways that racialized exploitation and capitalist accumulation go together, right? College football is a billion-dollar industry and it’s based on the uncompensated labor of overrepresented Black athletes. I’ve already said that and that I think is something that can’t be argued. So when you put the two of them together, that’s a very distinct plantation logic that’s happening. But there are other ways that it comes out as well. If we look at the ways that bodies are tracked and quantified in very specific statistical ways, all of the numbers that are attached to a football player’s body, all of the stats, all of the records, that’s one way. We see it in the way that if you look at the way that stadiums are built and there’s this omnipresent gaze all the time, players are always being watched, they’re always under surveillance.
There’s also technological tracking that’s now infused into sport, whether through apps that tell them where they’re supposed to be when they’re supposed to be there, or technology that tracks their uniforms, whether they’re on the field. This intense surveillance is part of it as well. If we look at the ways that some of these colleges used to be actually functioning plantations, it’s infused into the space and into the space that they are constantly in. You’re always in these football buildings, you’re always on a field. And I think that the language of field is interesting here, right? I am a cultural anthropologist, but if we think linguistically about this, the language that we use to describe some of these things are really important. So the fact that they are laboring on a field for free, I think we shouldn’t get away from how important that is.
All of these things that are just normalized in college football, specifically in American football generally, but all of the ways that these are normalized in college football, are infusing the sport with a particular logic that does link us back to plantation slavery. And I think that that’s something that we really need to keep at the forefront of this if we’re having conversations about labor exploitation, if we’re having conversations about the ways that bodies are just being broken down and abused and exploited and kind of forgotten. If we’re thinking about the machine, there’s a lot of machine metaphors that are used in this, right? The ways that players’ bodies are used as machines and just kind of forgotten and thrown away. The need to care for them in a particular way, care and keep them healthy enough so that they can play. But really that’s the only intention behind it. A lot of this links us back to a very particular history. So I think that we just need to be conscious of that and put that at the center when we have young Black men that are making the entire system go.
Dave Zirin:
On the show a few weeks back, we had a representative of the College Football Players Association and their argument is that these college football players are doing a job and they should be paid and have medical benefits, that this should be union work that doesn’t negate going to class or also being students. But it does speak to trying to cut against some of the exploitation with which you discuss. But I’m really curious about the people with whom you are immersed with, the people with whom you’ve spoken. Do you see these people as folks who would be attracted to the idea of a union?
Tracie Canada:
I think they would be attracted to the idea of a union. So when I was doing field work, again, it was 2017 and ’18 when I was immersed in this way that we do as anthropologists when I was doing my dissertation field work. And so at that time, unionization wasn’t really a topic of conversation, not with the people that I was working with. So it was really interesting to see the ways that they were potentially thinking about labor but it wasn’t at the forefront of their minds. And also at the time, I was very interested in the ways that race was mattering in their relationships. So those were some of the conversations that we were having.
So because it wasn’t a national conversation really at the level that it is now, and because I was asking about certain things, it didn’t come up in the topic of conversation. But you could tell by the ways that they were talking about their experiences that they were becoming aware of something going on, something was fishy, and they were questioning it and they didn’t really know what to do with it. And I think that that is very important to this conversation, the ways that they are starting to think about it and then potentially have that snowballs into something else.
So you take several years now into the future where I am now, and I’m a professor and I get to talk to athletes in my classes. And the other day, we were talking about Dartmouth’s basketball program trying to unionize. When we have concrete examples like this that are at the forefront where these athletes are being very explicit about what it is that they want and why it is really important, I can almost see their minds working of like, “Oh, that’d be really interesting if that could work. Because yeah, there are times when I think about what’s going to happen to me when I graduate. What if I do get seriously injured while I’m here and I can no longer play and I have put all of my energy into this one thing? How am I going to be cared for? How can I care for myself and how can I potentially care for my family if I’ve relied on this sport for my entire life?”
So even though those weren’t conversations that were explicitly being had at the time, I could see the beginning of it then. This was also right after Northwestern had attempted to unionize, their football team had attempted to unionize. So it was kind of in the air. But I could see the beginning of it then. But now when we see how far we have actually gone with some of these ideas and the ways that social media has actually come into this, athletes across universities can talk to each other in ways that are a little bit different than they were in the past, I think there’s a lot of excitement around it now. I just really think that someone has to do it first, and then once it happens, then there will be a lot of movement around it. And rightfully so. I think college athletes are sometimes afraid of the consequences of some of these actions. But what I try to tell them is, “You have a lot of power. There’s a lot that you can get done if you really want to, especially if you come together across teams.” If the teams on these different universities could be in conversation with one another, I think that would be a really interesting move, especially when we’re thinking about unionization and labor.
Dave Zirin:
Now you’re at Duke, of course, the football team is frisky this year. Not something you’re probably used to. And are you feeling that on campus this fall? And if so, what does that do to the vibe of a campus, for better or worse, when the football team becomes a topic of national conversation?
Tracie Canada:
Yeah, I mean, you say it’s a topic of national conversation, we’re recording on the day that GameDay is here, right? So GameDay is setting up on the other side of campus. Everyone has been talking about it all week. Everyone is really excited about it. And what I think is interesting is actually that football is starting to match the national attention that basketball gets here. So for me, it’s exciting because what does that mean when a school like Duke, which is a top academic institution, has these top athletic programs? There’s a lot of potential there for someone like me who thinks that we just need to be critical of these systems that we’re engaging in. That doesn’t mean that we can’t participate in them, but I do think that they could potentially be better for the people that have to participate and who want to participate.
So because of the things that I teach, because of the students that I’m engaged with and work outside of the classroom, it’s really interesting to see the ways that they’re talking about football, right? They’re talking about it in part of a larger conversation with what’s happening across the country, potentially with the portal, potentially with the ways that COVID affected how long people are staying in school now. There’s a very particular conversation that I think happens amongst students that have classes with athletes because they see them all the time. They see that they’re just students, they live in the dorms with them, they eat in the dining halls. So they have a very different view of the students that are on these courts and fields rather than just what ESPN is showing.
So it is really exciting for the students to see all of this movement on campus, but then to hear how critical they can sometimes be of these systems, right? “It’s exciting to be on ESPN. But also, this is my friend, and so how can I potentially protect him or her from some of the stuff that’s happening when all this excitement comes to campus?” That to me has been a really interesting space to be in as a scholar who studies the intersection of these things.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. I really hope that you put something to paper about the experience of having GameDay on campus.
Tracie Canada:
Yeah, for sure.
Dave Zirin:
That would be fascinating coming from Professor Tracie Canada. You’ve been so generous with your time, but I got to ask, I understand that you’re starting, and I quote, “a Black feminist sports lab.”
Tracie Canada:
Yeah.
Dave Zirin:
What does that mean?
Tracie Canada:
So I really appreciate this question because I’m so excited about it. It’s something that I’m starting to get feedback from grants for, so I’m starting to get the money for this lab that I’m putting together. I’ve called it the Health, Ethnography and Race Through Sports Lab. So the HEARTS Lab. And I imagine this is a space where scholars, were students, undergrad and grad, or athletes, where writers, where people in the local community can come together and talk about sport, which is something that people in the public talk about all the time in lots of different ways. And academics actually across lots of different disciplines have these conversations as well. But we’re not often in conversation with one another. And I think sport is something that really lends itself to these types of public conversations and academic conversations. And what would it be if we were to all be in conversation together and we could all think about the ways that potentially the media and social media and fans and athletes themselves and scholars who are thinking about it in a different critical light, what would that look like if we were all in a room together through different ways?
So the idea of the lab is to have that at the heart of it, to have these really pressing conversations across multiple groups to allow for networking across groups, to allow for accessible publications to come out, for inclusive programming, for public lectures, so that people in the community, I’m in Durham, so people in the community, people at schools that are close by, I’ve got some collaborations with colleagues at UNC and at State and NC Central, so what is that going to look like when we’re all in a room together and being able to talk about this? So ideally, it will fund a public lecture series. We’ll have a working group. And then we’ll also house all of the research projects. Either my own or those of undergraduates and graduate students that are interested in some type of intersectional study of sport.
Dave Zirin:
Amazing. Could you say the name of your forthcoming book one more time, please?
Tracie Canada:
Of course I can. It’s called Tackling the Everyday: Race, Family and Nation in Big-Time College Football.
Dave Zirin:
Cannot Wait. Professor Tracie Canada, thank you so much for joining us here on Edge of Sports.
Tracie Canada:
Thanks for having me.
Dave Zirin:
Well, that’s all the time we have for this week’s show. Thank you so much to our guest, Katie Barnes. Remember, the book is Fair Play. Thank you so much to Professor Tracie Canada. And thank you so much to the whole team here at The Real News Network. For everybody out there listening, please stay frosty. We are out of here. Peace.
Speaker 4:
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