This problem starts early, as high school sports stars are taught to see girls and women as objects, the sexual spoils of being a star athlete. Parents, coaches, and schools often reinforce this, instead of working to change it. I think all male high school athletes should take part in what is called the Coaching Boys Into Men program, which teaches young men how to interact constructively with the girls and women in their lives.
And when girls express an interest in football, rather than saying, “Make them the cheerleaders,” maybe we can start saying, “Let’s teach them how to coach or become an executive or how to own a team.”
My daughters have opened my eyes to the need to move from philanthropy to activism, but I also credit Angela Davis, once again, and her book Women, Race, and Class—an amazing intersectional work that ties together why women’s liberation is liberation for all of us. Even if you disagree with her politics or her stances on issues, you cannot deny her overpowering intellect, her journey, and the persecution she has suffered. You can’t deny that she sat in solitary confinement and stayed in shape by doing pushups on the concrete floor. You can’t deny how far she was willing to go and how much she was willing to sacrifice. Angela Davis, to me, is a beautiful person and a caring soul. She also does Pilates, and those are no joke. I have got to get back to that myself.
There are a lot of people who have money. There are a lot of people who have fame. But there are very precious few people out there dedicating their lives to making change. I look up to people like Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, two of the organizers of the Women’s March. I look up to Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, two of the women who started the Black Lives Matter movement. I look up to Malala Yousafzai, champion of girls’ education; the women of the entertainment community on the front lines of the Time’s Up movement; and especially the USA gymnasts who faced down their abuser in court, the “trusted” team doctor who had assaulted them over decades.
Angela Davis’s story in particular speaks to me, because it’s also the story of sisters, much like the sisters I’m raising. When Angela was in prison, her sister Fania Davis Jordan was the one going around the world, speaking. Fania Davis Jordan built those rallies to “Free Angela.” She was doing a lot of work, but not too many people know of Fania, because she was willing to do the thankless organizing behind the scenes to make sure that her sister was freed and their work would be seen through. Fania Davis Jordan went into the Oakland public schools, where Black kids were being suspended or expelled just for looking at a teacher wrong—real school-to-prison pipeline stuff—and brought in a restorative justice approach that has almost eliminated suspensions in a bunch of schools and saved a lot of kids from juvenile prison. The number-one factor in whether an adult goes to prison is not race or economics but whether they were in prison as a juvenile, and Fania Davis Jordan has spared so many that fate.
I say it: this is the power of sisters. Then I look at my daughters and say, “Know your role models. Be there for each other and be there for the world.”
ATHLETES FOR IMPACT
No one changes the world who isn’t obsessed.
—Billie Jean King
There is a famous photo from June 4, 1967, of what is called the “Ali Summit.” Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Bill Russell, Lew Alcindor (soon to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), and several dozen other pro athletes stood together in solidarity with Ali for his resistance to the Vietnam War and refusal to submit his name for the draft. They also stated collectively that they believed that the stripping of Ali’s heavyweight title, retaliation for his antiwar stance, was a grave injustice. It’s a beautiful photo of an iconic moment. But it also makes me sad. I think about how important that solidarity was to Ali, for keeping him strong. And then I think about how different the world would be—both on and off the field—if they had been able to hold that organization of athletes from different sports together. Imagine if it had not only sustained itself but expanded over the past five decades.
Athletes in the last several years have done a lot of standing up and speaking out, whether in support of Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, women’s rights, or LGBTQ rights, and this is great. But we are also scattered and isolated. It’s left us vulnerable and open to attack. I have been thinking a lot about the power of athletes, across the sports world, to join together for collective change. Kaepernick’s protest, and what happened to him during the 2016 season, was the main inspiration for my desire to organize. Many of us around the league tried to come together to figure out how to support Colin. Different people wanted to do different things, but the message was the same: we have to act to relieve his burden. Sometimes groups of us texted each other with ideas or got together on group phone calls, but it always felt like a bunch of cooks in a kitchen who wanted to make the same dish but had different recipes. You can’t organize that way. You need more than shared goals: you need shared plans and a shared organization to pound out those plans. It can’t be “Just add water, make movement.”
Imagine if we’d had
