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a conflict between pakistan and india this has implications for the rest of the world we meet with global news makers and talk about the stories that back to 0. hi there yeah ok you're watching news stream on today's episode really looking at sport from the perspective of the fact loving sports when they love you back modern dilemma's of a sports and that's today's topic inspired by this book the openness of joining us as well hey jessica. good to see tell welty you are what you do just. yes i'm just going with her i'm a freelance journalist i live in austin texas i host a feminist podcast called for all down and then of course i'm a co-author of the book with. hi i'm kathy the davidson i'm based in new

york i'm a sports writer and a podcast host i host the athletics flagship show the lead and very proud to be the co-author of this book as well. i love that we have 3 women talking about sport spill it says they say in america audi is heads name will explode in their exploding and that's ok jump into the comments section if you've got questions but jessica okefenokee about being a sports fan in some ways that big dynamics that go along with that jump into that you cheat comments and nicci can be part of the conversation let's talk about these modern dynamics what as a as a sports fan often a sports what that actually means why did you get together to write the book jessica. well i think especially as women in this space we're constantly made to feel like we don't belong as sports fans let alone our sports writers and journalists and you know i think that

a lot of the frustrations that arise from that from being kind of labeled as the unicorn in the room is how i put it really led to you know to us wanting to write this book and to do a deeper examination of some of those dilemmas and still why we continue coming back to sports why we love them so much even when they might not always return the favor. yeah i mean complete the really hit i think the book is structured it's 14 chapters i think we ended up with each chapter is a different theme or an issue within sport that if you just sports fan might have so brain trauma racism or sexism t.q. athletes racist mascots all kinds of stuff and these are the things i can view and i as fans ourselves things that really wrestle with every time that we turn on the t.v. or go to a match or a game and we just really wanted a space where we could work that out for ourselves and talk to a bunch of people who also feel that way who are experts in these fields and and

put all of these different topics in conversation with each other. such good timing i want to share with us i have 9 here now will people set off the perspiring mint of n.b.a. playoff games in protest of the shooting of jake lake so you book came out just around about kovi just around abouts and it's streamed activism from players who up until not playing at been told politics and sports activism and spool it was a really tricky area and then kind of it happened and then the plotlines massive movement became more prominent around the world so this moment when there was these wild cat strikes phaethon jessica how did you break that down in the book the book was just about coming out so how did that reflect what you'd written do ready write your philosophy of the difficulty of being a time and seeing after 8 being activists at the same time well i will say that it's very strange whenever someone says how good timing the book boys coming out of

the time because when kobe hit when really go bare that to be a player tested positive at the entire league shut down we had a panic moment justin i had a call with our publisher and we were like is it going to be relevant is it going to be insensitive people are dying they want to hear about the problems that we have within sport and it turns out because of all of the dilemmas that the pandemic has kind of brought to the forefront and then obviously the black lives matter movement really going global as you said it's been very strange and very very surreal to see the book be more relevant than we ever thought it could be what we try to unpack we have a chapter in it in the book of specifically about athlete activism and about why basically sticking to sports isn't an option for a lot of people particularly for black men and women in america and for athletes finally realizing how much power they have and how much voice they have and being

able to give like speak truth to that power and speak truth to to what they've actually what they have in their hands has been really something to see. yes i'll just add that to add that in the chapter about sports and politics is a lot about athlete activists because there's a long history of that and what we saw with the milwaukee bucks and the w. m.b.a. and all kinds of activism around the world really and sport that history is there but politics and sports are always linked and it's been very clear here in the united states as we went through a presidential election that i know a lot of people who are following college football and its return to the field was part of a presidential debate right that sports often finds itself with in politics as much as we see politics and sport and those 2 things are always mary i always think about the fact that we call them political races even the language that we use with them politics has a sports inflection to it because those 2 things are so similar within so many

cultures so yeah but you can't stick to sports right so what we saw with the wildcat strikes it was an extreme version of something and it could be and i like to have her on that side of i would say just for the full stretch spectrum but this is just part of a long history it's tell us a story from the book or is that the just just tease people a little bit over the activist who we may not have before. it's. like who's in the book. remembering your books. should we talk about in the book i'm going to bring. back the fool taking a knee oh tony yes thank you is a tony thompson and she many years ago now so we would think it was during the i guess. when i was that it would have been after 911 so it was you know almost 20

years ago and she was playing in a very small school in basketball women's college basketball and had her own sort of political awakening and really started to question whether or not the united states flag and the anthem represented her she one of her parents is black and she identifies that way and with all the nationalism after 911 she'll really uncomfortable and started to turn her back during the national anthem and it became a huge story somewhat because the new york times was right down the road they could have heard it she had all this national press and it was it was a kind of action that we've had a lot of conversation around since calling copper neck the n.f.l. player took a knee a few years ago but we see people like tony who was doing it with even a tiny platform right there was a lot about the principal and what this meant to her and using sport as a place to do that. i'm going to share with our audience

a quote from the book so i went to the to talk about why there's so much racism in the sport one of the main reasons that devoted sports fans may not feel welcome is that so much of the coverage is created by specific subset of that population mainly white men most of them straight the vast majority says gender. of sports media cannot be overstated i have heard so many times he is running like a net but across the field look at the bill not actually and and these are up after this of and i'm wondering if a sports passon else was jenna's of kind of but even you use that saying the not can defeat the you start on this one jessica you pick up yeah i it's really doesn't matter who is telling me stories and who is doing the coverage and i think that's why we do have a chapter about about sports media and diversity in sports media and the need for that and exactly what you said because we would not as people of color frame these

stories in the same way and it matters to have a lot more voices and a lot more perspectives coming in especially when the athletes that we cover are people of color and aren't just systemd or white men. it's also it speaks to a broader problem that we have in media particularly united states but i think we probably have has this problem in media throughout the world where the people in power a look like the people who are telling the stories of the people who are doing the journalism and what we wanted to do in west chapter in our book was really highlight the fact that there are other people out there doing this work and they need to be heard and they need to be read and we need to support that. early on in our lives one of my favorite parts of the book is when you just listen to female sports janice it was like a sports journalist fiasco and i was going after a number of the number after that was if you didn't know that many you definitely you know i loathed by the end of that chapter jessica sorry go ahead. yeah i know and that chapter is different than all the other ones in the book it has

a different format it's much more almost like an oral history and what we did exactly what you said there are a lot of female journalists in that chapter and we asked them to tell us something about their experience within the field and we really left it open but we also just asked men of color we asked non-binary are. a sports reporters people whose voices we don't normally get to hear because it's really hard to overstate how. white and male sports media is like media in general has a diversity issue in these sorts of what's that going on my worst version of well. you've been working and you just look around and describe what you see when you're in a working. i mean can i just say that. last year i went to the women's world cup and this is my story i don't often and impress boxes so that's not my experience i write a lot on the culture of sports programs and i'm not impressed boxes and i'll never

forget last year going to the opener for the men's world cup and perez and walked in and was kind of taken aback about how many men there were there were definitely women there but we all kind of congregated together and what hit me was that they're sending people to cover it who normally cover soccer or football and so it's normally men right and so they've just shifted them over to cover the women for a month of time and you feel it like there is a physical reaction you have going in there about you recognize your differences sort of as soon as you step in that space. i can say having having been in quite a few press boxes myself you were very aware when you were the only woman in that space you were very aware when you're the only woman of color in particular and i you know i just as a quick story i was covering the n.b.a.

all-star game at madison square garden in new york several years ago and you know the way that they have the press seating set up is they have 2 rows basically in the arena where it's just press and everyone has their headphones on and they're at their computer typing away and are covering the game and all of that and i noticed the entire press row lift their heads and pay attention to what was happening on the court because the cheerleaders took the court and it's things like that that make you very aware of when you are the only person who looks like you in the room . i want to sink into. mascots if you think as you can you look a lot of those and a 2021 i was that the any mascots of native american indians any mascots that would make us go. that's not quite right because we think. it's a very good question why we're still grappling with this swiss is something that indigenous people especially in this country have been telling us that they are not

ok with for 5060 years at this point i think that it has a lot to do with what our identities are and how they are wrapped up into our sports fandom and that's something that we actually interviewed a sports psychologist about about why it's so difficult for us to separate these these issues that we have with with with our own fandom and what she said basically was when your sports fandom is formed it tends to be earlier in life and it tends to be a part of your own identity formation so if you are a fan of a team that has a racist native mascot when someone comes along and criticizes that you feel like they're criticizing you. they're criticizing from something very core to your identity even though this is hurtful to people and honestly we had we saw the washington football team change their name and their logo this this summer not out of frankly any goodness of their heart because investors had a problem with it so what we can do is we can follow the money and we can put

actual monetary and financial pressure on people to ultimately do the right thing but it is very frustrating that this is still a conversation we're having and jessica will tell you there are still even though the washington football team and the n.f.l. change their game there are still 80 some odd high schools that still have that name and still have some kind of a logo that is problematic and it especially here especially in the united states it runs deep into our core also of our american identity and the foundation of this country based on that kind of violence and it really is difficult for people to try to reconcile those things ladies can i play a video comment fool here this is from elizabeth holloway she's a spokesperson for the accident chiefs and the change in the x. to achieve a united kingdom rugby team and just before we take a little bite from her she explains how when they are trying to talk about this the way that you've been speaking about it. the way that you test jessica that the fans

got really aggressive and they didn't want to hear about racism actual and he still had a little bit more and he's a question for you. additionally the hypocrisy that we're seeing from people like the premiership who who run the competition in england and the r.f.u. the rugby football union who are the regulator for rugby in the u.k. they both launched rugby against racism type initiatives yet when we raised the contradiction with them the exter is allowed to carry on using racist chants racist logos racist imagery they tell us that it's something completely different it's not racism it's not related it's completely different so that hypocrisy of why people say they're against racism say they're against causing offense once to have inclusion and equality yet don't think that this is a problem be really interested in your views on that do we just have to be patient

and keep trying to educate and share these experiences or is there anything more we can to. that's so interesting to me because i'm so happy to have her here as the exeter chiefs as the example i always use of how this has breached the american borders. these images in other parts of the world and i think oh man that's such a good question it's such a hard one because here in the united states we've had indigenous native people for decades half a century telling people in power that these mascots are not honoring anyone that they are in fact bad and they should be changed and in that same time we've seen other teams change their logos change their team mascot it's a it's possible it's not like this is an impossible task we have seen it in action and yet still things don't change and one thing i'll point out i did some research and part of the chapter of we someone did i psychologists sociologist did

a study about this and what they found is not just that need it that they have mascots make native people feel worse about themselves which that should be enough alone but that they actually make white people feel better about themselves and so you're really up against some big societal forces here and trying to get this change and i think what elizabeth this harking about there the people that love the exeter chiefs feel and this goes back to it could be thoughts had to they feel implicated in that racism when you tell them that there's something wrong with the mascot and maybe what they need is to really sit with the fact that maybe they are implicated and they cover really figure that out. i am looking at some questions on you. mind digging into them so d.t. poor d.c. pool thank you for. this topic that you bring up lisa was the thing out these modern dynamics of schools. and some talk about the digital ses talking about the

negative negative aspect there's a little bit of tool that no one really sees them as negative. yeah i think that some fans do talk about these things the reason the whole reason that this book came about was because jessica and i and friends like us and people that we work with have these conversations all the time and one of the things that we really wanted to do with the book was allow the allow the space for these conversations to happen without someone questioning your own faith and if that makes sense we lead the book basically by saying we've love sports we love sports so much that we do this for a living that we cover these things but we believe that they can be better we want them to be better because we think that they have the capacity to do so so in having these conversations and we don't have all of the answers we like very decidedly say in the book we don't have solutions to hold still solutions here because none of these issues are actually black and white right and no individual fan is going to fix systemic racism however if you're at

a bar whatever are allowed to go to far as they can and if you're watching a game and someone mentions that they might be uncomfortable with a player who is up there because of something they've been accused of or that they're uncomfortable about the financial arrangement of the way the game is played being able to have that conversation without policing someone's fandom i think is really important this is spooky it's almost like you're watching the you cheat comments go whizzing by after a brief brief on says ok responses to these hamza bin alley thank you hamza schools because given too much importance by society yes he picked that one out of the the oh no i don't know if they're given too much importance they certainly are given a lot of importance and i think we just have to start think that's just the starting place so they're going to be important and we should be having these conversations around them. mohammed it colleen it says and it is picking up and get the money the money mention that you just make you feel why. don't make war

return to the communities in which those clubs. locate it well because they don't have to. have a yeah i guess if they answer people with a lot of money don't give away money for no reason so unless governments or of our official officials make them do that they're not going to. they is and i think it's a sport a sports have always done is they've it's athletes have always connected with what is going on in the rest of the welt this question is from jennifer mccleary and she's an assistant professor and she has a question for both of you he she is. top of our sports and progressive circles of society yet don't focus in on this idea that representation matters if she could see it she could get my research power entices this assumption and says that or need to think about other issues that why below the surface of what we can see in

terms of representation so for example my forthcoming book looks at you women and u.s.c. and well and increase their level of exposure by a vast by and asked to agree in the past several years there are issues of labor exploitation pain and sexism that lie below the surface that we need to pay more attention to so my question for just a cat is why do you wish fans and supporters and women sports a penguin to join to new terms of equity and social justice. then bring in the great question. i think she answered something so perfect that one of the issues with women's sports is that we're still just trying to get it on television a lot of the time we're just trying to get sports media to cover it at all and so i do feel this i don't want to be the person who's badmouthing anything going on with women's sports because i don't want to give anyone who is ready to push it aside again a reason to do that right and so we're mean i'm glad that jenna's writing her book i think that's so great that we're going to have that you know text to turn to in

order to dig into these issues more deeply and so part of what we need is we need more coverage better coverage we need a more expansive sports media around us so that we have a space to ask all these difficult questions but those don't displace just the general coverage that we get of women sport you feel. yeah i mean exactly what jessica said we need more coverage we need we just need to normalize the idea that not only do women love sports but women play sports and that women playing sports is something valuable is something that it's women's access to sport has been deemed by the united nations as a human rights so there is a reason that we are pushing for this and in addition to to better coverage and better video archives and better stats being kept just being able to tell these stories because again these are human beings and they matter it's. i am just looking at your twitter feed so jessica and i may or may not be screaming right now

i think you're screaming abu quiz for me it is one of the new york times best books to give this year hash tag a loving sports that we remind you nothing sports when they don't love you back di lemons of the month and we just looked at barry surface of the book it's a juicy book if you will all sports there's so much in the head now that it's done now that you're talking about it if you could sum up the experience desk in a sentence and defeat the in a sentence what would that sentence be oh my gosh in a sentence i just think this has been such a rewarding experience and one of the best things isn't meeting other fans who feel this way and feel seen by this book i think it is the out rewarding and i think also cathartic i think it was cathartic to be able to write about these things and to have people agree and receive it in the way that they. thank you thank you so much and also what what what struck me was that every day there is

a new story that you could have put in your book or something new that after that you could bring that about but it is still relevant so don't you see i just can't compete and thank you so much we are going to continue the conversation or needs to graham live not just going to feet but with friend of the street maxwell p.s. he's an athlete he's a humanitarian and an optimist family dynamics for me after these perspective 2030 g.m.t. that's from sunday but for now i believe that tom and i with phoenix international ready to. december on al-jazeera it's 10 years since a revolution in tunisia ignited the arab spring al-jazeera looks back at the uprising and asks what really changed across the middle east this stream is why al-jazeera has global audience becomes a global community a year after the 1st coronavirus case in china will examine the devastation caused

by the virus and the efforts made to eliminate covert 90 people in power is back with more investigative documentaries and in-depth stories climate leaders will gather online to press ahead with a new stage of the paris climate agreement and examine the possible global solutions december on al-jazeera. what is and they've been doing with the money that it's boring we bring you the stories and developments that are rapidly changing the world living large and seen as congress is debating a bill seeking to raise billions of dollars from the super rich poor families hit od by condemning counting the cost on al-jazeera. he kept his memory and present realities and views jenea the camera as a tool photography and often shadow didn't want to when i saw his most deprived

areas children who had nothing. now have a voice. to denny as close a part of the viewfinder latin america series on out as they are. my plan. al jazeera. that's. right. that american people have finally poking around here as i see it. balanced the world becomes more dangerous the world is looking at us next year of sadness and.

with the election behind us will the republican party dump truck fuel weekly take on us politics and that's the bottom. awarding of doc times ahead as the u.s. struggles to stop the spread of covert 19 and records its deadliest week in 6 months. and so i don't know bhosle often hit it like that. at the front of the queue we meet the people preparing to take the 1st doses of the coronavirus vaccine as the u.k. prepares for mass and a collection.