The Power of Solidarity: Frank Guridy
June 15th, 2023
“History changes when people start making different decisions.”
Frank Guridy is the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University and the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies. We discuss social movements in the past, present, and future.
Social movements consist of mass participation from outside of established political structures to address grievances or to pursue larger social goals. They are often long term endeavors that might not fully achieve their goals but nonetheless move the needle in social attitudes. Sometimes they achieve the unthinkable, like freedom from slavery or marriage equality.
Follow Frank on Twitter:
Follow Mila on Twitter:
Follow Future Hindsight on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/futurehindsightpod/
Sponsor:
Thanks to Shopify for supporting the show! Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful.
Love Future Hindsight? Take our Listener Survey!
http://survey.podtrac.com/start-survey.aspx?pubid=6tI0Zi1e78vq&ver=standard
Take the Democracy Group’s Listener Survey!
https://www.democracygroup.org/survey
Want to support the show and get it early?
https://patreon.com/futurehindsight
Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Frank Guridy
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis
-
Frank Guridy Transcript
Mila: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like myself the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/ hopeful, all lowercase.
Mila: [00:00:24] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
Mila: [00:00:41] A while back, we had a season on the power of protests, and I have to admit that I was surprised by how much protests can accomplish in moving the needle on public perceptions and even enacting major legislation. In fact, protests are often an instrumental, indispensable, and visible part of social movements. Just think of all the marches leading up to the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s. So today we're looking at the history of social movements in the United States. Joining us is Dr. Frank Andre Guridy. He's the executive director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia and the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Ford professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies. Thank you for joining us.
Frank Guridy: [00:01:27] Thank you for having me.
Mila: [00:01:28] So you are a leading scholar of the Black freedom movement in the United States. And I thought we should start with defining what a social movement actually is and why they're important.
Frank Guridy: [00:01:42] That is a great question. There have been many, many, many books and tracks and articles and documents that have been written trying to define what a social movement is. So I'll give it a shot at defining it in a succinct manner. To me a social movement is one that, one, has mass participation. It's not a small fringe movement. It's something where you see a substantial number of people being actively involved. They tend to be movements that emanate outside of the established political structure. Groups of people who feel a sense of marginalization, who are interested in pushing for the desires of the group that they represent. Right? Often from marginalized backgrounds. Sometimes those desires are for specific policy changes, expanding the
right to vote, for example. Sometimes it's for something bigger, something more nebulous called liberation. The gay liberation movement, for example, was after a host of discriminatory policies that instituted homophobia in our society. But they were after something bigger, sometimes something bigger that they saw as beyond the changing in the established political structure. So to me, a social movement has those elements. It has the mass participation, it emanates from outside an established political structure, and it has specific goals that can be addressed in the established structure or thereafter something bigger than that.
Mila: [00:02:53] So this might sound pretty basic, but how are social movements built? Like what are the building blocks? How do they get started?
Frank Guridy: [00:03:00] They get started through grievance number one, right? So there has to be some sort of notion that something's wrong and there's got to be some sense of a commonality around what that grievance is. But grievance is not enough, right? What's necessary is mobilization and organization. So that means people who have a sense of how the grievance can be addressed or as they imagine it to be addressed, then organize with other people. Right? They start doing the kind of basic kind of thing that we've seen throughout history, including in the present day, which is holding meetings, going door to door, trying to generate interest in your cause, and building from the grassroots level a sense of commonality around a shared grievance and something that could remedy that grievance. So the kind of building from the basic grassroots level is essential, right? But then you have to have different elements. You have to have folks who are very good at propagandizing, sort of promoting your cause. You have to have folks who will do the dirty work, the organizing the chairs for the meeting, you know, making the flyers or whatever the digital equivalent that is, you know, that we have today in the 21st century. And then it's about being able to sort of have access to some sort of broader platform. And of course, that platform has changed over time from the newspaper, from leafletting to, you know, what we now have seen in social media. Right? So you need those sort of different elements to make a social movement work. And then when you're really effective is when you're able to somehow have access to policymakers who can make some changes.
Mila: [00:04:20] So historically, we think of successful social movements as resulting in a watershed moment, passing major legislation like the Civil Rights Act. But as you just
mentioned, it's sometimes something even bigger, sort of capturing the popular imagination. But social movements are also key in changing public attitudes. How do you think about what it means to be successful today, now in the year 2023?
Frank Guridy: [00:04:46] Yeah, another great question. I have an expansive notion of success. You know, I'm very influenced by the thinking of the historian Robin Kelley, who has written and republished a classic work called Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, in which he makes the basic but profound point, which is that if you actually look at the history of the black freedom movement from the time the enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas, forcibly brought here until the present, the vast majority of black social movements have failed. You know, they haven't ended racism, right? They didn't end slavery until 1865. They hadn't achieved full citizenship rights until the 1960s. So then you've got a host of these other movements that had some of those aspirations but didn't succeed. So then the question is, how do we see their effectiveness? And often, and he argues this and I think I would agree, that it does result in the moving the needle in terms of attitudes, even if policies don't change. And that usually is a long term, protracted, attenuated process. Even if you look at the history of the abolitionist movement in the 19th century, abolitionism started actually in the late 18th century at least, or certainly since the moment when Africans were brought to the Americas, were enslaved on plantations and in domestic labor arrangements.
Frank Guridy: [00:05:53] So obviously people were mobilizing and resisting slavery from the beginning. But, you know, we don't start to see movement in terms of attitudes until you see a kind of full fledged abolitionist movement in the antebellum period, the 1830 and 40s in this country. Right? People are mobilizing in the Underground Railroad, right? Helping enslaved people escape slavery from the South or from other parts of the Americas. So at that point, you're already seeing attitudes change towards slavery, right? And those changed attitudes result in one of the reasons why we wound up having a civil war from 1861 to 1865. And I think we see this again. We saw this in 2020, even though I think the verdict on 2020 is still yet to be determined. But there's no question in my mind that what we saw transpire in that summer was a changed attitude towards the question of police violence against Black people and people of color in general. You know, we haven't seen effective policies to curb that problem, but we certainly have seen, you know, an awakening around those questions. And of course, the backlash, too.
Mila: [00:06:45] Right, Right. Well, it's interesting you mention the protests of 2020 in the context of the abolitionist movement to free the enslaved people. And I think at that time, the abolition time as well as in 2020, I think what happened was that the movement for freedom, the movement for the ending of police violence included allies from across the spectrum, which is totally, I don't want to say new, but it doesn't happen with every cause. And I think that makes it all the more powerful. And like you said, in terms of the protests of 2020, the jury is still out. In fact, of course, now here we are three years after the murder of George Floyd, and we thought the situation would be much better today than it is. So in the arc of history, where would you situate us today?
Frank Guridy: [00:07:34] Wow, where would I situate us today in the arc of history? I think we're seeing, you know, a long standing pattern, certainly in the history of this country, but not just this country -- you see this elsewhere -- of advance and push back, the dialectic of pushing ahead around certain questions and then the reaction. And I think in an accelerated fashion, we've seen just in the last three years both of that; both of those dynamics at work. Right. You're absolutely right that allyship, and I like to call it solidarity work or the power of solidarity was beautifully illustrated that summer, as it has been in the past. Right? In an extraordinary way, which I do think, and I'm going to use that overused 2020 word: it was unprecedented. And I hate using it, but that's the word that comes to mind. So there's no question that just on the level of the extraordinary solidarity that people who were not defined as black rallied to the cause, put their bodies on the line for this, around this question of racial injustice and police violence. It was extraordinary. Right? So now we're in the midst of the backlash. I mean, this is the historian now talking. In some ways, what we've seen in the last three years is what we've seen transpire in the United States since the 1960s.
Frank Guridy: [00:08:43] So by the time you get to, you know, Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, you know, you've seen now kind of the push back away from the sort of aspirations and the goals and the expansion of citizenship rights that we saw in the 1960s and 70s as a result of the civil rights, the feminist movement and also the gay liberation movement, among other movements. So now we've sort of seen that kind of dynamic of advance and push back, you know, very quickly just in the last three years. And I think that's because we're just in a more polarized moment. This is not the 1970s and 80s where there was a kind of pushback or backlash, but there's still a shared
sense that there's some notion there's a common Americanness or a sort of investment in an American political system that we don't see now. Right? We're just seeing an accelerated process of what we've seen over the last 50, 60 years, and you could argue since the republic was founded. You know, that things have just intensified, I think, and the technology allows that intensity or facilitates that intensity and the ways in which politics is just much more polarized than it was even during the Obama era.
Mila: [00:09:39] Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, I think the problem is in part because we live in these silos basically based on whatever it is that we're consuming and we're being fed the same content or variations of the content that we already like. And so we have a sense that in fact, things are perhaps more polarized than they are on the ground. Like in real life. You know, I have friends who are across the political spectrum and when I have dinner with them, it's like having dinner with a normal person, you know, not like the caricature that you encounter in popular media. So in this context of the backlash, how are social movements sustained? You know, we mentioned that the efforts take decades long. And I'm thinking now, of course, about the Black Lives Matter movement. We're three years out, although of course it existed before then. But the murder of George Floyd, of course, really brought it to the forefront. So their work continues. Tell us about how in your scholarship you have found people to continue to be engaged and fight the good fight, so to speak?
Frank Guridy: [00:10:43] Yeah, I date the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement to the murder of Trayvon Martin. Right? I mean, I do think we see a shift or this iteration of the long-standing, what I would call and other people have called, the Black freedom movement, which again dates to the beginning of when slavery starts and racial discrimination starts in this country. But this iteration really takes shape after 2012 and certainly with Ferguson and on and on and on from there. We saw the extraordinary effectiveness of this iteration of the Black freedom movement because of its ability to use the technology of our time, Twitter, social media. You know, when it was in an embryonic state, you know, and I'm really hesitant to historicize social media because we're in the moment now. But I do think that Twitter era was different than now. I don't think I'm saying anything profound when I make that statement. So you saw a younger generation with a different conception of leadership. I think historically speaking, you know, traditional civil rights organizations tended to be led by men, tended to come from, you know, certain messianic traditions of Black male leadership. You know, we
didn't see that. We have not seen that. Or we see the kind of institutionalization of Black feminism in contemporary Black freedom movements, even if it's just on the rhetorical level, just the unquestioned role of Black women and women of color in leadership, in the movements of our time and queer people and trans people as well.
Frank Guridy: [00:12:00] So in some ways, 2020, you know, really demonstrated the impact of this version of the Black freedom movement because of the way in which it mobilized people who are not Black. Because of the ways, as I look at in my own work on sports and politics, the ways in which kind of famous athletes were rallying to the cause of George Floyd and Black freedom and racial justice. Which we really hadn't seen for a long time with respect to Black athletes in this country, certainly not since the 1960s and 70s. Right? There are some exceptions after that. So now we're in the midst of a very powerful backlash, which, you know, was galvanized by the Trump election. And then in everything that's happened since then. To some degree, there have been issues with, you know, the leadership of certain Black Lives Matters organizations. And there's been sort of addressing those issues, too. So we're sort of in this moment of flux. But I think what will happen is once the next election comes along, 2024, we're going to see, you know, another revitalization around these questions because they're still not resolved, as you said earlier.
Frank Guridy: [00:12:53] There's ways in which we're still dealing with questions of racial injustice, police violence, and all sorts of issues that politicians, at least rhetorically, have to respond to. So I think the promise of the election season is that it brings those issues to the fore. What we haven't seen yet are the ways in which these movements can be sustained after the election moment. You know, and I think about this and I'm now going back to 2008, I'm thinking about the Obama campaign, which truly was transcendent. I say that as a scholar, as somebody who's just lived in this country for 50 years or a little more than that. 2008 campaign for Obama was extraordinary, and Obamaism showed how people from different backgrounds can be brought together, you know, around a common cause to elect a candidate. But then once the election happens, then that the energy kind of dissipates. And I think the challenge for us to figure out how the energy stays strong even after the candidates we want, even after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris win in 2020, the electoral politics can't determine the way we carry out these movements or the way that we evaluate their success or failure.
Mila: [00:13:55] Yeah, for sure after the Obama election, all the scholarship on this has said that people relaxed and then didn't pay attention, and then 2010 was really surprising. But I'm also thinking about sort of the gay liberation movement and how they achieved marriage equality. And that took many, many decades. And it was something that people didn't think was ever going to be possible. And they just had so much passion and faith in moving the needle. And I don't know if they ever think, "yes, we're going to achieve this one day." You know, I also think in this moment, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade, I don't know whether the people who were involved in the Dobbs decision making that possible to come before the court again, a very similar case that had already been decided, but making it all possible to reappear in front of the Supreme Court in an almost identical case and having the groundwork. I think what's really amazing about some of the people who are the old faithful, so to speak, it doesn't matter which movement, is really about the passion. And I think it's very instructive for us if we're not part of a movement to see those people don't give up. They think about these trends in decades and not in election to election.
Frank Guridy: [00:15:11] That's exactly right. Angela Davis, the great scholar, activist, you know, as one of many people who basically said freedom is a constant struggle. It's never something that's fully achieved, which on the one hand sounds really disheartening, but if we view it as a practice instead of just a goal, if we're interested in the practice of freedom, then we see that it's something we have to attend to all the time, whether that's on the interpersonal level or on a bigger societal political level. Right? And you're exactly right. A dear friend of mine who's been in the trenches with abortion rights for decades, Amy Hagstrom Miller, who was one of the plaintiffs in one of the Supreme Court cases around abortion and has been basically, not just opening and having clinics to ensure that working-class women get health care and abortion care when they need it, but has been in the trenches politically for decades. And you really see the ways in which the movement not only keeps the issue of women's health care alive, but you see the ways in which that organization creates another way of being, the ways in which she, as a white woman, has women of color in leadership in her organization. The ways in which you see her foregrounding and that group and that organization, the needs of women of color, many sometimes undocumented, sometimes women who are totally in the shadows, that's the clientele that she serves. And so having been around her and seen her when I lived in Austin years ago and seeing that
movement in the ways in which they're mobilizing around the craziness with the different laws around abortion and different states now, you're seeing a struggle, but you're also seeing the ways in which these women are creating something different, culturally speaking. And that's the way we move the needle on those issues. When we as people come together and enact, you know, our aspirations, even when the policies don't live up to what we're calling for. But the actual work of movement-making creates the change in some ways. Certainly on the interpersonal level, I think it does. I believe that.
Mila: [00:16:57] Well, I think it's very powerful what you just said about creating another way of being, you know, to be in the constant struggle for freedom, depending on whatever is really important to you in the realm of freedom. And it's very large.
Mila: [00:17:13] We are taking a quick break to thank our sponsor, Shopify. When we come back, we're going to look at the intersection of sports and social justice, how social movements can find voice with athletes. But first...
Mila: [00:17:29] Hear that? It's the sound to start selling on Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you're selling custom bracelets or cutting boards, Shopify simplifies selling online and in person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Shopify covers every sales channel from an in-person POS system to an all-in-one e-commerce platform. It even lets you sell across social media marketplaces like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Packed with industry leading tools ready to ignite your growth, Shopify gives you complete control over your business and your brand without having to learn any new skills in design or code. And thanks to 24 over seven help and an extensive business course library, Shopify is there to support your success every step of the way. Shopify makes selling simple so you can put yourself and your ideas out there. Whether your thing is making sun hats or stuffed animals, Shopify makes your success possible. Making your idea real opens endless possibilities. I love how Shopify makes it easy for anyone to successfully run your own business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/hopeful to take your business to the next level today. Shopify.com/ hopeful. And now let's return to my conversation with Dr. Frank Guridy.
Mila: [00:19:04] So I want to pivot to your recent research, which has focused on sports history. During the pandemic, you published a book about the sports revolution in the 1960s and 70s, which happened in a time when the civil rights and feminist movements were reshaping the nation. Your book is called The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics. You looked at a place about which we already have a bias. How did Texas, of all places, revolutionize sports? And how does this history inform your current thinking about social movements?
Frank Guridy: [00:19:38] So I lived in Austin, Texas, and I taught at the University of Texas at Austin for 11, 12 years. And I have in-laws in Texas. So I have a certain view as a Northeasterner who was reared in the snobbiness of New York City. I say that jokingly, of course, but there's some validity to that. We're parochial here in New York sometimes. And so I was astonished when I was there, just experientially, at the role of sport in Texas society. But beyond the stereotype, right? The stereotype that we have is that all Texans are fanatical about football, that's all they really care about. And that is true to a point. But there is, if you look at the history of it in the state, this fascinating way in which it becomes a space where marginalized people, Black, Mexican, sometimes indigenous, were able to sort of find themselves and struggle for equality through the realm of sports. And that's what the book wound up being about, the ways in which, you know, marginalized athletes came together with far sighted sports entrepreneurs, most of them white, wealthy men who decided that their investment in sport meant that they had to do away with Jim Crow segregation. Texas was a segregated state, like all the states in the South, legally and culturally speaking, until the 1960s and 70s. And it's interesting to see how some prominent civically minded sports entrepreneurs decided, you know, we want to bring professional sports to our state. And in order to do that, we need to be able to sign Black athletes and we're going to do away with racial segregation. So it's a very interesting moment in the history of desegregation, which we see in other parts of the state.
Frank Guridy: [00:21:06] But the fact that sports becomes this catalyst toward desegregation really interested me. And so I was really interested in that forging of this alliance, which you would think is unlikely. Lamar Hunt, who was the son of the oil baron, H.L. Hunt, who was a segregationist to the core. His son was not. His son realized, okay, we're going to create a new football league, which was the American Football League, which becomes part of the National Football League in 1970. And he's
one of the owners that's signing Black players from the beginning once his team is formed in 1960. Right? So I was interested in that dynamic and I also was interested in the ways in which sport becomes this vehicle for women pushing for gender equality in the early 1970s. You know, the very famous Bobby Riggs / Billie Jean King tennis match happens in the Houston Astrodome, September, 1973. And that match has a larger national significance because it popularizes the notion that women deserve equality in all realms of American society, not just sports, but it's really coming out of this interesting moment of Texas-based athletes and entrepreneurs organizing what becomes the WTA, the women's professional tennis tour. The women's professional tennis tour was partially financed by Philip Morris Tobacco Company. So I was really interested in this kind of, again, this alliance between athletes, activists, and entrepreneurs producing a monumental social change in Texas. And because Texas is so large, because the most impactful sports entrepreneurs are coming from the state, in that period, they wound up having a national significance. And that's really what the book was about.
Frank Guridy: [00:22:27] And I was really also interested again in the moments when, you know, if you look at why does desegregation happen? You could look at it in this broad sense, okay, well, we've got the Civil Rights Act. You've got the Voting Rights Act. You've got legislative changes. You have Martin Luther King, you have the Black freedom movement. But I really wanted to focus on the moment when people decided that they were going to make decisions, you know, against the grain of history. And so to me, I became really interested in folks who were like, for example, white football coaches who decided, okay, I'm going to sign a Black player. I'm going to do something that most white coaches would never do, which is to sign a Black player in 1964 or '65, as Hayden Fry did when he was the head coach of the Southern Methodist University football team. He signs Jerry LeVias in 1964. He basically says, "if you don't let me sign a Black player, I'm not going to take this job." And so I was really interested in that dynamic because I want us to see that it's not inevitable that all white people will decide to be racists. It's not inevitable that people just go along with the current of history. History changes when people start making different decisions, right? And I really isolated those moments in different realms in that book because I thought that's just an important thing to sort of highlight for readers. And so that we think about those questions today, you know, we can feel empowered as decision makers, which I think is really important.
Mila: [00:23:35] Yeah. Well, it connects back to what you said about a different way of being. Like you make a personal decision about your own life and how you're going to be in the world.
Frank Guridy: [00:23:44] Yeah, and those are the moments I love to write about. I do. You know, as a historian, we tell stories and I think people who are not historians tend to think that history repeats itself, that there's just an inevitability about the dominated, that oppression is just an ongoing occurrence in human history and nothing changes. My whole career is showing that that's not the case. That in fact, certainly oppression continues. But when things move is when people start making different decisions and they stand outside of history and those moments happen. They don't happen all the time, but they do happen.
Mila: [00:24:14] Yeah, that's very powerful. And it's a good reminder that we have a lot of power as individual people. So you mentioned this just now about tennis and the WTA, and when I was reading this chapter in your book, you set it up talking about how Title IX was also passed right around the same time. And it coincided with the second wave of feminism. And now, of course, we think about feminism and advancing women in sports as being hand in hand, which I think at the time was not necessarily obvious. And, of course, sports is one of the biggest and most visible arenas for women to succeed. For example, the pay equity struggle for women in soccer. And yet there is still a long way to go for women. So how do you think about women's sports advancing feminism?
Frank Guridy: [00:25:06] You know, the historian Susan Ware wrote a book. It's about Billie Jean King and the Second Wave feminist movement and Title IX. It's called Game, Set, and Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women's Sports. And she makes this argument that what we do see in the history of that period of women in sports is that you could identify what she would call sports feminism just by the vision and just by women performing and participating in sports in an unprecedented manner, because participation rates of women and girls in sports skyrocket after Title IX in the 1970s and 80s, that that transforms so many things about American culture. It gives women an opportunity to participate in sports, sometimes have a career in sports, sometimes have, as Title IX actually intended, it became a space where women could achieve equality in
education. So there's no question that it's this fascinating place to see what feminism looks like in real time. When the Williams sisters, you know, arrived on the scene in the 1990s and they were doing things that Black women tennis players or tennis players period hadn't done before. That, to me, is an act of feminism, even if they weren't themselves feminists, right? I mean, Billie Jean King said in the early 70s, you know, "we're feminists because we just do it. Feminism, to me, is an action oriented practice.
Frank Guridy: [00:26:20] It's not something that we write about and debate and discuss only." And I agree with her totally. I mean, the debate and discussion is really important. But the ways in which women athletes and other athletes are able to sort of embody that in practice is a powerful thing, especially when it's televised and millions of people see it or when you see it in your local neighborhood soccer field or, you know, softball field or whatever it may be. So so there's been enormous change in the realm of sport. But as we saw, and one of the things I argue in the book is, in some ways we see the change on the field and on the court and on the pitch, but we don't see it at the level of management, whether that's professional sports teams ownership, whether that's those who control collegiate athletics or high school athletics. One of the unfortunate consequences of that period is that most coaches of women's teams are men. Only 40% of women at the college level are coaches, which is kind of astonishing. That was not the case in the 1970s and 80s. So what have we seen? We've seen men still dominating the decision making apparatuses of sport. You know, there's been change on that front, but not enough. Right? And I think that's one of the things that we've seen in the realm of sport, that white men dominate those processes because they're the ones who are wealthiest and own teams or have the connections to have the influential management positions in collegiate or high school or professional sports.
Frank Guridy: [00:27:33] And that's where we're at. And this is what people are organizing around now. And I think we're starting to see a little change on that front. But, you know, part of the challenge is that sports, or at least the professional level, is big time business. That really requires enormous amounts of capital that usually white men are the ones who possess that. Right? And so that's the contradiction and that's the challenge. And I think we see that in terms of gender, but also in terms of race, the limited numbers of Black coaches in football and other sports, too, because one of the consequences of the sports revolution is that sports became big business, right? An enormously profitable business for entrepreneurs and corporations and things like that.
And advertisers, etcetera. And some of that wealth comes down to players who are enormously talented and lucky to stay healthy enough to perform and have successful careers. But the mass majority of athletes don't. So therein lies the contradiction that we see around sports since that period. That's still the case to this day.
Mila: [00:28:21] Yeah, well, I feel like I have to ask you now this question, which everybody is going to ask while they're listening to this episode about pay equity for women. And I'm thinking now actually of Brittney Griner and how she had to go play in Russia because she wasn't getting paid enough here. And the constant argument against paying women more, which is that they don't have enough views. What's your opinion on this?
Frank Guridy: [00:28:46] Well, that's been debunked over and over again. You know, the people who say those things are the men who control the sports media landscape and their partners in the sports media. Reporters and commentators and things like that. The women's college basketball Final Four had record ratings for sporting events, period. More people watched that Final Four than people watch the World Series, Major League Baseball, for example. So that has been disproven over and over again. And I think that that's just an excuse for folks to actually not be imaginative in terms of how we cover sports or how we support women's sports. I think that's been shown. I mean, we see this again and again. People clearly from a market standpoint, "people aren't interested in women in sports." They are. And yet there was an article in The New York Times, the Italian Open, which is one of the tennis tournaments that are the lead up to the French Open in Paris. You know, men prize winners are getting two times the amount of money as women players in the major tennis tournaments. You know, men play longer matches. But in this tournament, that's not the case. In both cases, both the men and the women win matches at two out of three sets. And yet the Italian Open is still paying men more money than women. There's no excuse for that. I do think that we are seeing way more pay equity around, certainly the tennis world, than we had before. And it has to continue in terms of soccer and basketball and other sports where clearly there's enormous interest in women's sports now. I think that that's been shown to be true over and over again.
Mila: [00:30:02] Yes. Thank you for setting the record straight. So a conversation about sports and social movements must include a question about the intersection of sports
and social justice. We touched on this briefly earlier. And of course, although sports activism has a long history, our collective awareness has more recently been captured by Colin Kaepernick, using his sports stardom as a platform to speak out against police brutality. And in the past three years, it seems that the NBA, a whole league now and not just one person, has grown into a platform for Black Lives Matter. What's your take on this in the context of advancing social movements, of achieving their goals?
Frank Guridy: [00:30:42] Yeah, athletes at the professional, collegiate level, the big- time level amplify social justice concerns. They don't create them, right? It's the people in the streets, the people doing the organizing who actually do the hard work. Which is not to say that athletes don't do that, but usually the contribution of the athlete, certainly at the big-time level, is to make those issues visible because there's a platform, because they're covered extensively on television and all sorts of media outlets today. So certainly the NBA and the WNBA took a leading role, the players in those leagues, in amplifying the question of racial injustice and police violence in an enormously effective manner. I mean, the most obvious case where we saw this clearly in 2020 and 2021 was the Senate election that resulted in the election of Raphael Warnock in Georgia in 2021. Literally, the NBA, WNBA players are campaigning for Raphael Warnock. They played a huge role in making his candidacy even known because he was polling at super low levels until they started wearing Vote Warnock jerseys during games that summer. That's a concrete example of the power of the athlete activist because they have a platform, because they're covered extensively. And that's the women players, right? Let alone the men players. So I think that the contribution of athletes is to use their place as a platform. But nor should we look to them only as the ones who have platforms in our society. I do think there's an expectation that all athletes somehow should be educated on these issues. But in some ways that's an unfair burden we place on them. I think sometimes the failure of mainstream politicians to follow through on promises then leads us to look to a LeBron James or a Brittney Griner or, you know, Megan Rapinoe to sort of do the work that really political leaders should be doing.
Frank Guridy: [00:32:28] Those folks do leadership work, but they're not the ones making policy decisions. And so I think sometimes we have to be careful that we don't expect athletes to have the sort of latest take on the intricacies of a certain policy issue, because I think that's an unfair burden. I think their job is to be performers, right? There are other people whose job it is to sort of- the ones who make those decisions that
actually are the ones who should be more impactful. But nonetheless, I think it's extremely important. I think it's been wonderful to see athletes, you know, speak out on social issues. And I think that that's going to continue because I do think the prevailing notion, you know, much to the dismay of some people, that sports should be removed from politics has been debunked. It's just not it's not the case. There are too many things in the political realm that make sports possible, certainly at the business level, at the big-time level, that we can sort of sustain a notion that sports just should be apolitical. That doesn't mean every sporting event should be political and people should be protesting at every event. But it is to say that the big-time sports industry is possible because of politics and decision making by politicians that enable sports franchises and sports leagues to be profitable and prominent in our society, for better or for worse.
Mila: [00:33:33] Right. Well, I think as Americans, our identities are so intricately interwoven to our identity as a mecca for professional sports, but also, as you know, the beacon of democracy in the rest of the world, so to speak. Right? So it's sort of like you said, I think they're not really separable, which is not to say that they need to necessarily be together all the time.
Frank Guridy: [00:33:56] You're saying something very important there. I think, you know, we in the United States, we take pride in the notion that sports is somehow a meritocracy. That sports, you know, is this realm where anybody can make it. And a lot of that is mythology. But there's some truth to that, too, right? I do think that after Jackie Robinson becomes the first Black player for the Brooklyn Dodgers in Major League Baseball in the 1940s after World War II, the dominant discourse around sports is that this is a space where racism was overcome. And sometimes that's true. But I think we've seen in many ways where it's not. Inequities continue in that realm. But it has this place for better and for worse, not just because we're fanatical about sports in the United States, but because in our dominant discourse of democracy, it has this place that this is where we can sort of feel good about ourselves as Americans, because this is a realm where people from different backgrounds are able to have a career and make and become famous and make money, etcetera.
Mila: [00:34:46] Well, one of the things I'm thinking about here, as you're saying this, is your book that you're working on right now. And one of the goals you told me is to address the questions of the role of the sports industry in the reconstitution of
democracy and justice in American life. So tell us a little bit about what you're thinking, what you're writing right now.
Frank Guridy: [00:35:11] I'm writing a book about the stadium in American history. And I think what I'm going to say is relevant to other countries, but I'm working on the United States. I'll just stick with the US. The stadium has been an institution. It's not just a place where people go to see their favorite team or their favorite athlete or their favorite concert performer. It has played the role of a semi-public square in American history. And I say semi because usually you're charged admission to enter into that building, though not always, but it's been this place where politics has been carried out. Social justice movements have been carried out since the earliest iterations of these buildings in the mid, late 19th century. And I became really interested in like, well, how did that happen? And why is it that these arenas become places where politics happens, where social justice concerns are being expressed? And of course, that question was prompted by the politics of the last ten years or so around Black Lives Matter. But I've been preoccupied with this question for a long time. So just look at the history of political conventions. The first chapter of my book starts with the 1924 Democratic Convention, which was held in the old Madison Square Garden when it was in Madison Square in 1924, where the Democratic Party is fighting intensely about for its party platform. And one of the questions that's being posed there is, "should the Democrats denounce the Ku Klux Klan," which was very prominent in 1920s America, and they didn't do it.
Frank Guridy: [00:36:31] They didn't do it, right? But here's Madison Square Garden, a building that we associated at the time with boxing and the horse shows and the circus, becomes this arena of political contestation. And it's not by accident that political conventions are carried out in arenas and stadiums since that time every election cycle. So I'm like, wow, that's a really interesting story about like, okay, what's the role of this building that we just associate with entertainment in American political life? And indeed, it's played an enormously significant one, long before Colin Kaepernick took his knee in 2016. And that's part of the story I'm telling about the ways in which these buildings become places where folks congregate for pleasure and fun. But oftentimes they also come together there because they're interested in other questions. Right? And because the stadium is like the television, like the media, it is an amplifier, because when you bring tens of thousands of people together in a building, things will happen, often unexpected. Looking at the ways in which this building has operated in American civic
and political life, right down to the conversion of stadiums and arenas into voting centers during the 2020 election, which is enormously impactful in terms of generating historic voter turnout in different parts of the country. So it's really about how this American institution, for better and for worse, has played a significant role in American political, civic, and social life.
Mila: [00:37:45] Well, I'm really hearing here that you are a very action-oriented historian and you have just completed your first year of being the Executive Director of the Eric Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights. So to me, that's again, all action- oriented. I want to know what's happening in the classroom. As a historian, as a scholar of social movements, what is top of mind as you're teaching the students?
Frank Guridy: [00:38:10] You know, it is a great time to be a historian in the United States. People are debating history all the time, right? Often manufacturing and mythologizing and mischaracterizing history. But nonetheless, that means history is top of mind in our society right now. And it's top of mind among our students in ways that was not the case when I started teaching 20 years ago. When we were lulled to sleep and thinking that everything was fine for the most part, or at least certainly some version of the 1990s attitude.
Mila: [00:38:38] The end of history, as Francis Fukuyama said.
Frank Guridy: [00:38:40] That's exactly right after, the Cold War ended. So there's a sense of urgency that I see among students that is wonderful because I got into academia and I took on this position of being the Executive Director of the Holder Initiative because I'm interested in social change. I'm interested in equality in scholarship for sure. I'm interested in being an educator and being the best educator that I can be. But I'm also interested in showing how education can shape the next generation of changemakers. And that's the little calling I've taken up in my career. One of the callings, I would say. So our students are really feeling a sense of urgency. Sometimes that takes the form of mental health and challenges and depression. I mean, it's really a real issue, certainly since the pandemic, since Covid upended our lives three years ago, you really do see a sense of, if not pessimism, but a sense that, you know, the belief that I had growing up here in the 70s and 80s, that somehow the freedom movements and the questions of inequality have been resolved or certainly have been
addressed in a substantial way. I think this generation of students doesn't think that. They don't. A lot of them don't. Right? If I may speak in a general sense, they really feel a sense of urgency and they feel a sense of, like, we're on the precipice of catastrophe, you know, in terms of looking at climate questions.
Frank Guridy: [00:39:52] So, you know, that's sobering, but it's also a wonderful audience to teach right now. You know, doing this work with the Holder is basically empowering students to get involved in issues they care about, whether it's racial justice, whether it's abortion or reproductive rights, whether it's questions around sexuality, whether it's around questions of mass incarceration, take that interest, use it and develop it in the classroom and then turn out and do impactful work during the time that they're at Columbia and ideally beyond. And these students at my institution are enormously privileged. They have a platform just by being graduates of Columbia University, you know, and I think that's a great thing. And we have traditions at our institution where students have been doing and Columbians have been doing impactful work around social justice for decades and decades and decades, even longer than that. And so, you know, Eric Holder is just Exhibit A of that legacy. So I've sort of stepped into that role because I want to continue that legacy. And I think that's our version of it at Columbia. But we see that at institutions all over the country. Right? And I think to do this work now, I don't feel like I have to convince them of its importance in ways that I did when I started teaching years ago.
Mila: [00:40:54] Right. So we're always trying to build our civic action toolkit. What are two things an everyday person can do to be a part of any social movement, any of the ones that you mentioned here? To be a real citizen changemaker?
Frank Guridy: [00:41:08] I think it is enormously important to -- this sounds simplistic, but I don't think it is -- to pick the issue you're passionate about. Don't pick something you think you should be taking up because it's the issue of the moment, for example. I think that, on the one hand, we're seeing people feel a sense of urgency, but there's also enormous fear. Fear of saying the wrong thing. Fear of not reading the right book. You know, there's enormous fear about making mistakes. And it pains me when I see people operating from fear and feeling like they have a motive to act, but they're afraid. So I think that, number one, people need to take up the issue that they believe is important, even if it's not pertinent to their community, because as I said earlier, the
most powerful thing that social movements show is the power of solidarity. It is the power of identifying with people who are maybe not from your community. I mean, the story of the antiwar movement in this country were millions of Americans, you know, certainly concerned about American citizens and men fighting and women fighting in Vietnam. But they were really standing up for the people of Vietnam, a country they knew nothing about before the 1960s, most Americans. So that's the first thing. Find your issue that you're passionate about, even if it seems like it goes against your own socialization. And I think, again, embracing the power of solidarity. I can't emphasize that enough.
Frank Guridy: [00:42:28] We use this term allyship, and I think that's okay. But allyship presumes a kind of subservience. That's not necessary. I think that people really should just jump in. And if they make a mistake, they'll make a mistake and that's okay. And that's people from majoritarian backgrounds, whether you're from a racial or sexual or gender perspective, don't be afraid to jump in. That's something I try to encourage people and I encourage myself to not be afraid. And it's hard. It's hard to not be afraid. But I think that it's essential because I think that's when the needle moves, when people jump in, when they're not operating from fear, when they're operating from a sense of solidarity and commitment to others.
Mila: [00:43:00] Yeah, hear hear, well said.
Frank Guridy: [00:43:01] And my thinking around these questions really is informed by, you know, the work of Grace Lee Boggs, a very famous Chinese American activist who lived well into her 90s and exemplified that over and over again, as a Chinese American who winds up living and being active in Detroit for decades. And, you know, Vincent Harding talked about that, the Black theologian who was an advisor to Dr. King. Robin Kelley, Angela Davis, on and on and on. I mean, their conception of liberation is not that just Black people are fighting for their own freedom, but it's an inclusive model of liberation that includes everyone. And the only way that works is when people actually embrace the power of solidarity.
Mila: [00:43:33] Yes, the power of solidarity. I totally agree with you 100% there. So here's my last question. Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Frank Guridy: [00:43:43] You know, historians have a burden. When you know history well, you know how things can go wrong over and over again. And you could say, wow, America is going down the road of going towards Nazi Germany. Right? It does feel that way sometimes. We're in a Weimar Republic moment. It feels that way. And that's the sobering aspect of being a historian. But being a historian also brings you in touch with the ways in which the unthinkable, you said this earlier, Mila, the unthinkable becomes a reality. The notion of an enslaved person becoming a free citizen was absolutely unthinkable in 1791 when slaves in colonial Haiti decided that they were going to rise up against slavery. Right? And 14 years later, Haiti becomes an independent republic and slavery is overthrown. It absolutely unthinkable idea way before its time, the Haitian Republic was formed, unfortunately before its time, and that shaped its post- emancipation and post-independence history. That's another story. But nonetheless that unthinkable becoming reality. We've seen that over and over and over again in history, and that's what keeps me hopeful. And I feel like in the 50 years I've been on this earth, I have seen the unthinkable become a reality. You know, even if it's, again, just Barack Obama becoming president, that was an unthinkable thing. And I was a skeptic and I just didn't think it was ever going to happen. I thought Hillary Clinton is going to win that election easily. And she did not. And it was extraordinary. She should have won in 2016. That's another story. So that's what keeps me hopeful that the unthinkable thing becoming reality, whether it's marriage equality- I mean, we've talked about these issues already. That's what keeps me hopeful. And I think I'm excited to see what's unthinkable becoming reality in the rest of my life and my career.
Mila: [00:45:18] Yes, me too. Me, too. Well, thank you very much for joining me on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Frank Guridy: [00:45:25] A pleasure to talk with you today. Thank you, Mila.
Mila: [00:45:27] Dr. Frank Andre Guridy is the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia and the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Ford Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies.
Mila: [00:45:44] Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Anna Chu. She's the Executive Director of We The Action, an organization that connects talented volunteer lawyers with critical causes to protect and defend nonprofit organizations who need it.
Anna Chu: [00:46:01] We saw that there were lots of lawyers who want to be part of a broader effort to advance access to justice, but may not know how to do that, how they can apply their skills. And then we also see nonprofits in huge need of pro bono free legal services. But many are not set up to access the law firms or access the community of pro bono volunteer lawyers.
Mila: [00:46:32] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
Mila: [00:46:36] We're also active on Twitter and would love to engage with you all there. You can follow me @milaatmos -- that's one word -- @milaatmos. Or follow the pod @futur_hindsight. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:47:05] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.