2018 Pauley Lecture

Department of History Author

11/05/2018 Added

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The Department of History's 2018 Pauley Lecture, featuring Dr. Amy Bass

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[00:00:18.420]Our own student athletes have taken knees
[00:00:21.480]and taken criticism, our students have demonstrated
[00:00:25.190]in local and national protests and rallies,
[00:00:28.690]drawing heightened scrutiny to our campus
[00:00:31.140]from media and politicians alike.
[00:00:34.090]Our speaker tonight is a prominent historian
[00:00:37.430]of sport, culture, and politics,
[00:00:40.360]who can help us put all these events
[00:00:42.600]into historical context.
[00:00:45.190]We invited her to campus, not only because her work
[00:00:49.268]might help us to reflect on the tensions
[00:00:50.980]still palpable on our campus,
[00:00:53.500]but because our department has been honoring
[00:00:55.760]the 50th anniversary of that tumultuous
[00:00:58.460]and seminal year, 1968.
[00:01:02.753]In 1968, we lost Dr. Martin Luther King
[00:01:05.810]and Bobby Kennedy to assassins.
[00:01:08.620]Americans protested the Vietnam War on campuses
[00:01:12.590]and capitol lawns throughout the country,
[00:01:15.010]and two black Americans raised a salute
[00:01:18.210]from their Olympic podiums in Mexico City.
[00:01:22.000]Our department has commemorated the Prague Spring of 1968
[00:01:25.890]earlier this year, honoring the legacy of Czechs
[00:01:29.050]who fought against repressive Communist regimes
[00:01:32.220]before going underground during the period of normalization.
[00:01:36.190]Now, in 2018, historians worldwide
[00:01:39.403]are observing a growing surge of nationalism,
[00:01:43.580]forced migration, and conflict,
[00:01:45.940]while they reflect on the revolutionary
[00:01:48.210]and radical legacies of 1968.
[00:01:51.680]Dr. Amy Bass's work manages to address
[00:01:54.530]all of these issues through the lens of sports,
[00:01:58.010]and we are honored to hear from her this evening.
[00:02:01.400]Dr. Bass received her PhD with distinction
[00:02:04.330]from Stony Brook University, and is currently
[00:02:06.730]the director of the honors program
[00:02:08.613]and professor of history at New College
[00:02:11.840]of Rochelle at Stony Book.
[00:02:14.430]She is the author of four books, some of which
[00:02:17.340]are available for sale here this evening.
[00:02:21.300]One Goal is her most recent.
[00:02:24.133]One Goal: A Coach, a Team, and the Game
[00:02:26.430]that Brought a Divided Town Together,
[00:02:28.250]features a Maine soccer team,
[00:02:30.260]comprised of Somali refugees and multi-generation Mainers
[00:02:34.360]as they vie for a state championship
[00:02:37.000]while working out their internal divisions.
[00:02:39.830]She is also author of Not the Triumph, but the Struggle:
[00:02:43.260]The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the black Athlete,
[00:02:47.280]focusing on the legacy of the black Power salute
[00:02:50.400]Tommie Smith and John Carlos displayed in Mexico City.
[00:02:54.210]In addition to her academic work,
[00:02:56.410]she's been on the Today Show, can be heard on NPR,
[00:02:59.820]including the Takeaway and Midday, and CBS Radio,
[00:03:03.550]and has been featured on the Boston Globe.
[00:03:05.960]She has written about sport and politics
[00:03:08.590]for Slate, Salon, the Allrounder, and CNN Opinion.
[00:03:12.960]She hosts a weekly radio show,
[00:03:14.740]Conversations with Amy Bass, on WVOX.
[00:03:18.600]In television, she served as senior research supervisor
[00:03:22.280]for NBC Olympic Sports across eight Olympic Games,
[00:03:26.610]winning her Emmy for her work
[00:03:28.190]at the London Olympics in 2012.
[00:03:31.030]This is her second time speaking on the UNL campus,
[00:03:34.980]and I hope you will join me in welcoming her back today.
[00:03:38.213](audience applauding)
[00:03:50.312]Thank you, thank you, Katrina
[00:03:51.200]for that really lovely introduction,
[00:03:52.800]and thank you to the entire history department
[00:03:55.700]for its hospitality today.
[00:03:57.910]Thank you all for coming, and a very special thank you
[00:03:59.870]to the Pauley family for supporting these kinds of forums,
[00:04:04.860]which I think we could use more of everywhere,
[00:04:07.550]and I'm delighted to be here in Lincoln
[00:04:09.640]to participate in one.
[00:04:12.560]So about, where I'm gonna start,
[00:04:16.360]about a year before One Goal, my latest book,
[00:04:19.930]which Katrina just mentioned, came out,
[00:04:23.000]a friend sort of casually asked me what I was working on,
[00:04:25.950]and when a non-historian asks a historian
[00:04:28.460]what they're working on, it's really exciting,
[00:04:30.050]because most normal people don't ever ask us what we do.
[00:04:33.300]So I was excited, and yet,
[00:04:35.160]I didn't really have a good answer,
[00:04:36.510]'cause we never get asked that question.
[00:04:39.350]So I said, "Nothing all that relevant,"
[00:04:41.120]'cause it was sort of a defense mechanism.
[00:04:43.457]"Just a book about Somali refugees who play soccer."
[00:04:47.810]The conversation took place mere hours,
[00:04:50.160]hours, I'm not exaggerating, after the man
[00:04:53.200]sitting in the White House signed the first executive order
[00:04:56.980]about immigrants and refugees,
[00:04:59.420]a travel ban that focused on seven
[00:05:01.760]Muslim majority countries including Somalia.
[00:05:06.400]Timing can be everything.
[00:05:08.490]I first wrote about the Lewiston Blue Devils,
[00:05:11.620]which is this soccer team in Maine,
[00:05:14.230]for CNN after the so-called Paris attacks
[00:05:16.890]occurred in November 2015.
[00:05:20.790]The first blasts on that terrible night in France
[00:05:25.070]took place at the Stade de France.
[00:05:27.660]Inside, there was a soccer game going on,
[00:05:29.790]a friendly between Germany and France.
[00:05:34.200]From the Munich Olympics in 1972,
[00:05:37.060]to the cancellation of the Dakar Rally in 2008,
[00:05:40.840]to the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013,
[00:05:44.690]sporting events are no stranger to terror.
[00:05:49.450]The Paris attacks added to an already intense conversation,
[00:05:54.440]global conversation, about refugees.
[00:05:58.220]Especially when rumors, which were later proven false,
[00:06:00.953]emerged that the bomber in Stade de France
[00:06:04.570]who had accidentally detonated the bomb too early,
[00:06:07.480]in the tunnel of the stadium, had entered Europe
[00:06:10.510]by exploiting a Syrian refugee network.
[00:06:14.000]This wasn't true, but this rumor took hold.
[00:06:18.050]In response, a slew of US governors responded
[00:06:21.770]by declaring that their states would be off limits
[00:06:24.700]to any Syrians entering the United States.
[00:06:28.200]Ignoring that refugee resettlement is a federal order
[00:06:31.820]and not left for the states to decide
[00:06:33.910]where people who enter the US legally will reside.
[00:06:38.930]In the midst of this crisis, a story landed on my desk
[00:06:42.190]about a remarkable high school soccer team
[00:06:44.310]in Lewiston, Maine, and there's a Lewiston, Nebraska,
[00:06:47.020]I know, 'cause I get Google alerts about it, occasionally.
[00:06:50.300]But this is Maine.
[00:06:52.530]It caught my eye because I lived in Lewiston for four years
[00:06:55.190]as an undergraduate at Bates College.
[00:06:58.240]That was a long time ago.
[00:07:00.300]When I was at Bates, Lewiston was not
[00:07:03.180]what Lewiston is today.
[00:07:04.250]Lewiston was an economically depressed,
[00:07:06.605]Quebecois, Catholic, overwhelmingly white, former mill town.
[00:07:12.780]Today, this city of about 36,000 people
[00:07:17.350]is host to nearly 7,000 African immigrants,
[00:07:21.650]the majority of whom are Somali,
[00:07:24.550]and many of whom play soccer,
[00:07:27.720]play soccer really, really well.
[00:07:36.670]So this is a picture of the team shirt in 2015
[00:07:40.450]for the Lewiston Blue Devils soccer team.
[00:07:43.320]Co-captains Abdi Shariff-Hassan,
[00:07:45.460]who was born in the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya,
[00:07:48.539]and Austin Wing, whose French-Canadian heritage
[00:07:51.810]exemplifies much of Lewiston's immigration history
[00:07:54.610]until recently, settled upon this shirt
[00:07:57.830]via a text exchange during pre-season.
[00:08:03.640]These are the two gentlemen I just mentioned.
[00:08:05.960]Two captains, one the top scorer
[00:08:08.490]in the history of the school,
[00:08:10.270]and an All-American, and the other
[00:08:12.337]the greatest goalie, Austin, in the school's history,
[00:08:14.580]and also the son of the most active members
[00:08:16.573]of the soccer team's booster club.
[00:08:19.330]So they modified the US men's national team motto
[00:08:22.750]to capture who they were and what they wanted to be,
[00:08:26.990]and what they wanted to do,
[00:08:29.120]and that was to win their school's
[00:08:30.600]first state soccer championship.
[00:08:33.975]And they thought about it,
[00:08:35.570]and they thought about the question,
[00:08:37.580]what does it mean to be on a team?
[00:08:41.500]It means a lot, in Lewiston, Maine.
[00:08:43.580]In Lewiston, it means that kids from different countries,
[00:08:45.950]speaking different languages, can come together and win.
[00:08:49.870]It means more, because in Lewiston,
[00:08:51.900]these guys will tell you, soccer isn't just soccer.
[00:08:55.850]Soccer is life.
[00:08:58.380]Sports can do one of two things.
[00:09:01.070]Sport can bring people together,
[00:09:03.030]and if you go over to my hotel right now,
[00:09:04.500]you will see sport bringing people together
[00:09:07.050]as they come into town for homecoming,
[00:09:09.550]or sport can push people apart.
[00:09:12.010]It's powerful,
[00:09:14.350]and it's never free and clear of its political moment.
[00:09:21.192]You knew this was coming.
[00:09:23.010]How does an image of Colin Kaepernick on bended knee
[00:09:26.170]bring people together?
[00:09:28.440]How does it pull people apart?
[00:09:31.310]The key, in terms of unpacking questions like this,
[00:09:35.780]is that it isn't, it can't be, a bunch of simple narratives
[00:09:40.660]that sports are either good or sports are bad.
[00:09:47.580]It can't be that people wanna burn their Nike shoes
[00:09:51.430]or buy more Nike shoes.
[00:09:54.330]It's got to be a bigger look, it has to be
[00:09:56.670]a more complicated and nuanced look,
[00:09:58.900]a contextualized look, a historical look,
[00:10:02.540]because sports matter.
[00:10:05.100]As a historian, studying sports,
[00:10:07.160]and by that I mean investigating them
[00:10:09.828]with the same intellectual rigor
[00:10:12.200]and the same intellectual curiosity
[00:10:14.160]and methodological ethics that we apply
[00:10:16.200]to any of more conventional areas of history,
[00:10:19.890]is not easy, despite what many people think
[00:10:22.287]when I tell them what I do.
[00:10:24.687]"You write about history?"
[00:10:26.320]they usually say, "How fun."
[00:10:28.429]And that's dismissive.
[00:10:32.200]One of the biggest hurdles about studying sports
[00:10:35.010]is that which makes studying them so important.
[00:10:37.260]Sports are everywhere.
[00:10:38.950]They saturate our universe.
[00:10:41.640]So, how then, can we find a context
[00:10:43.650]in which to study sports, in which to think about sports
[00:10:47.327]without knee-jerk reactions to what we see
[00:10:50.190]and what we hear on ESPN, or on Football Night in America,
[00:10:53.820]or on the Twitter feeds of sportswriters
[00:10:56.110]and fans and athletes,
[00:10:58.380]in the headlines of the daily sports pages
[00:11:01.070]or on the cover of Sports Illustrated?
[00:11:03.250]How can we convince people, for example,
[00:11:06.170]that what Colin Kaepernick did every time
[00:11:09.030]he went down on bended knee during the national anthem
[00:11:11.538]before a game, had a long and storied history behind it,
[00:11:16.760]on many different levels, and from numerous perspectives.
[00:11:22.600]In 1968, some 50 years ago, the New York Times
[00:11:26.140]ran a map of apartheid on the continent of Africa,
[00:11:31.120]explaining what apartheid rule meant
[00:11:33.260]in the midst of the decolonization phenomenon
[00:11:35.500]unfolding in the thick of the Cold War.
[00:11:38.162]This map and these explanations did not run
[00:11:41.390]on the front page or on the editorial page.
[00:11:44.456]They ran on the sports page.
[00:11:47.810]The newspaper needed to give sports fans
[00:11:49.950]a little bit of a geopolitical history lesson
[00:11:53.170]because of the increasing presence of an upstart group,
[00:11:56.200]The Olympic Project for Human Rights, spearheaded
[00:11:59.130]by a young, radical sociologist named Harry Edwards.
[00:12:03.460]It was a movement designed to disrupt
[00:12:06.190]the narrative of the role of athletes,
[00:12:08.290]perhaps especially, black athletes on the field,
[00:12:11.730]initiating a critical shift in the perception
[00:12:14.560]of the relationship between politics and sports.
[00:12:23.293]The eventual action taken by Tommie Smith
[00:12:24.850]and John Carlos, gold and bronze medalists
[00:12:27.210]in the men's 200 meters on October 16th, 1968,
[00:12:31.430]at the Mexico City Olympic Games
[00:12:33.720]was the culmination of the OPHR's quest
[00:12:36.140]to use sports for political gain.
[00:12:39.920]Originally, The Olympic Project for Human Rights
[00:12:43.030]had proposed to boycott the Mexico City Olympics,
[00:12:46.020]using the leverage of the potential medal haul,
[00:12:49.234]sort of an ultimatum, listen to us, or else,
[00:12:53.880]that was so important in Cold War America.
[00:12:55.940]The medal race between the United States
[00:12:57.790]and the Soviet Union was an intense factor of the Cold War.
[00:13:02.390]Who could win the most medals?
[00:13:03.990]Who had the most sophisticated sports institutions?
[00:13:07.850]And so it felt like the future of the nation,
[00:13:09.870]in many ways, was in black hands,
[00:13:12.040]as statisticians started to figure out
[00:13:13.950]how many medals the United States stood to lose
[00:13:17.010]if black athletes stayed at home.
[00:13:20.280]They gave this ultimatum, the OPHR,
[00:13:23.180]to expose the inequities within sports,
[00:13:25.520]as well as achieve a series of what are now
[00:13:27.980]fairly familiar civil rights demands.
[00:13:31.140]So they announced the boycott with six demands.
[00:13:35.490]Fulfill these six demands, or we don't go.
[00:13:38.810]The first was the restoration of Muhammad Ali's title.
[00:13:42.130]Muhammad Ali lost his championship title
[00:13:44.490]when he declared conscientious objector status to Vietnam,
[00:13:48.020]so the restoration of his title was number one.
[00:13:51.740]Number two, the removal of South Africa
[00:13:54.100]from international sporting competition.
[00:13:57.540]Number three, the desegregation
[00:13:59.720]of the New York Athletic Club, a whites only athletic club
[00:14:03.900]that sponsored the largest indoor track meet of the year,
[00:14:06.860]which invited all athletes as performers,
[00:14:10.280]but didn't allow them to be members.
[00:14:12.930]The addition of two black coaches to the Olympic team,
[00:14:17.240]the addition of two black members
[00:14:19.270]to the International Olympic Committee,
[00:14:22.010]and lastly, number six, the removal
[00:14:24.730]of Avery Brundage as president
[00:14:27.460]of the International Olympic Committee,
[00:14:30.580]a man that Harry Edwards declared
[00:14:32.530]to be a devout racist and anti-Semite.
[00:14:36.590]I love the use of the word devout there.
[00:14:39.550]While the boycott effort failed to come to fruition,
[00:14:42.620]and it's a really interesting thing to think about,
[00:14:44.650]in terms of the role of the individual
[00:14:46.490]within a political movement, and the consequences,
[00:14:49.220]and decisions that have to be considered and weighed,
[00:14:53.150]and that's something to definitely think about
[00:14:55.831]when we're thinking about someone like Colin Kaepernick.
[00:14:57.530]Smith and Carlos used their moment once in Mexico City,
[00:15:01.330]and it was a rare moment for black men.
[00:15:03.720]In front of the world, during the first major broadcast
[00:15:07.280]by an American network of an Olympic Games,
[00:15:09.817]ABC broadcast Mexico City in a 44 hour program,
[00:15:13.980]which, I think NBC issues 44 hours
[00:15:16.490]of programming on the first day.
[00:15:18.411]There's more Olympic programming today
[00:15:20.463]than there actually are hours in a day.
[00:15:22.130]But 44 hours coming from Mexico City
[00:15:24.850]was the first time anyone had done this,
[00:15:26.350]so this was a platform that had never been seen before.
[00:15:30.040]So they used this moment in front of the world
[00:15:33.300]to symbolically speak out
[00:15:37.020]against racial oppression.
[00:15:39.300]And as you look at their image, black gloved fists,
[00:15:42.300]bowed heads, bare feet, before an audience
[00:15:46.260]that was held captive by The Star Spangled Banner,
[00:15:49.390]and the American flag,
[00:15:51.090]they demanded that people listen to a silent gesture.
[00:15:55.890]As headlines around the globe began to focus,
[00:15:59.380]not on the race that these two had just run,
[00:16:01.820]and it was a significant race,
[00:16:03.290]Tommie Smith won the gold medal in the 200 meters
[00:16:05.910]with a sub-20 time, the first man
[00:16:09.450]to go below 20 seconds for 200 meters.
[00:16:12.650]They focused less on the race and his world record,
[00:16:16.340]and more on the statement, which would eventually lead
[00:16:18.640]the United States Olympic Committee
[00:16:19.960]to revoke their credentials and send them home.
[00:16:23.334]But with this moment, a collective political notion
[00:16:28.088]of the black athlete had become solidified.
[00:16:32.360]These guys, in so many ways, drew Colin Kaepernick,
[00:16:36.190]and so many others, a blueprint.
[00:16:39.313]So my work on Smith and Carlos,
[00:16:41.350]which resulted in my first book,
[00:16:43.430]Not the Triumph, but the Struggle,
[00:16:44.263]which came out really long ago, 2002,
[00:16:47.660]looked to complicate the history
[00:16:50.030]of the black athlete in the United States,
[00:16:52.790]posing that while sport had been seen
[00:16:55.480]as a means of upward mobility for African Americans,
[00:16:58.860]it ensured the reinforcement of racialized notions
[00:17:01.950]of innate ability, as well as social progress,
[00:17:04.609]and it created this dangerous battle
[00:17:07.051]between myth and reality.
[00:17:09.820]I designed my investigation into the black Power action
[00:17:12.630]that took place in Mexico, to shake up
[00:17:15.410]what I called the holy quartet of black athletes.
[00:17:22.700]Joe Louis, do you wanna guess?
[00:17:24.720]Do you wanna take a minute?
[00:17:26.020]Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson
[00:17:29.110]and of course, Muhammad Ali.
[00:17:32.570]It's what I call the big four.
[00:17:34.860]If you want to get into a more nuanced
[00:17:36.940]and better gendered and less optimistic specific group,
[00:17:40.670]we can add figures, and we should add figures.
[00:17:44.090]This slide is probably a little bit more typical to get.
[00:17:48.030]Jockey Isaac Murphy, cyclist Major Taylor,
[00:17:51.850]boxer Jack Johnson, tennis player Althea Gibson,
[00:17:55.680]Olympic decathlete Rafer Johnson,
[00:17:58.150]track superstar Wilma Rudolph, and so on.
[00:18:02.410]We can keep adding to this list of individual standouts,
[00:18:06.460]but regardless of how lengthy the list gets,
[00:18:09.090]the story of the black athlete in America
[00:18:11.340]tended towards, in the popular imagination,
[00:18:14.704]and still does largely, this familiar
[00:18:16.790]and terribly simplified chronology, political chronology,
[00:18:20.619]a chronology of individuals.
[00:18:24.220]The triumphs of Owens at the Berlin Olympics,
[00:18:26.670]situated as a defilement of Hitler's ideologies
[00:18:29.530]of Aryan supremacy, the 1938 boxing bout
[00:18:33.360]between Louis and German Max Schmeling,
[00:18:35.560]which was situated as a battle of democracy versus fascism,
[00:18:40.530]the integration of major league baseball in 1947,
[00:18:43.470]with Jackie Robinson placed as the beginning
[00:18:46.570]of the end of segregation in America.
[00:18:47.900]And think about that, 1947, that America got to look
[00:18:52.220]at a moment, what does desegregation look like?
[00:18:55.620]Almost a full decade before the Brown decision.
[00:18:59.088]And then there's the warrior poetry of Muhammad Ali,
[00:19:02.700]positioned as something both beautiful and frightening,
[00:19:05.470]something black, and yet something so very American
[00:19:09.280]in an age when the two identities
[00:19:11.380]seemed almost incompatible to so many people.
[00:19:15.910]The modern black athlete, in an equation
[00:19:19.020]that pairs visibility with progress,
[00:19:22.220]is perceived to compete on a playing field
[00:19:24.380]that has been smoothed to create equal opportunity.
[00:19:28.840]In such a scenario, sports exist, then,
[00:19:32.400]in a vacuum without politics.
[00:19:35.750]We know better, I hope we know better.
[00:19:38.880]Sports are a great place to find politics.
[00:19:41.710]Sometimes those politics are implied,
[00:19:43.750]a product of the athlete's performance.
[00:19:45.932]Jesse Owens in Berlin is probably
[00:19:48.900]the best example of how that happens.
[00:19:53.900]Sometimes, there's smaller moments that can compare,
[00:19:57.400]like this image, which I illegally shot off my television,
[00:20:01.330]so apologies to NBC. (audience laughing)
[00:20:05.240]This is an image of Korean speed skater Lee Sang-hwa,
[00:20:07.870]who's being comforted by Japan's Nao Kodaira.
[00:20:11.880]This happened after she failed to defend her title
[00:20:14.420]in the women's 500 meter speed skating,
[00:20:16.480]in front of a home crowd,
[00:20:18.000]and this is what happened after the race,
[00:20:20.020]the two of them skating side by side,
[00:20:22.570]the Korean flag and the Japanese flag mingling.
[00:20:26.380]The turbulent history of the two countries,
[00:20:28.530]a profound part of the moment,
[00:20:30.050]and yet somewhat put on the back burner,
[00:20:33.650]because it's also just an image of a winner
[00:20:36.290]trying to comfort a loser.
[00:20:39.788]Sometimes these politics are more overt.
[00:20:50.630]Smith and Carlos took their stance
[00:20:52.660]in the midst of a politically tumultuous year,
[00:20:55.620]one documented in black and white footage,
[00:20:58.360]one that feels deeply and visually embedded in our psyche.
[00:21:03.240]Thinking about, and Katrina went through some of these,
[00:21:06.220]the escalation of Vietnam,
[00:21:07.950]thinking of the very way that 1968 started,
[00:21:11.330]with the Tet Offensive, and the Tet Offensive
[00:21:13.680]being launched to make the evening news
[00:21:16.400]back in the United States,
[00:21:18.040]the idea of the political spectacle,
[00:21:19.860]the assassination of figures
[00:21:21.190]like Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy,
[00:21:23.570]student protests that enveloped the world,
[00:21:26.010]Paris, Mexico City, Prague, Chicago.
[00:21:29.360]This is the timeline that these two men
[00:21:31.590]inserted themselves into,
[00:21:34.010]and they inserted sports into it, as well,
[00:21:38.180]because there's no such thing as a level playing field,
[00:21:40.580]and an athlete should not have to stop being
[00:21:42.750]who he or she is the moment he or she steps onto the pitch
[00:21:47.230]or the track or the court or the field.
[00:21:50.944]But we never learn, that's why I have a job.
[00:21:55.130]Despite the fact that the Olympic Games
[00:21:56.720]are inherently political, athletes march in
[00:21:58.910]with flags waving over their head,
[00:22:00.730]medals are counted according to country,
[00:22:02.680]which was never part of Pierre de Coubertin's game plan.
[00:22:06.310]Collectively, we are shocked every time
[00:22:09.470]politics overtly rises to the top of a sporting event,
[00:22:13.628]like this commentator, Susan.
[00:22:17.720]I don't know Susan's last name.
[00:22:19.160]Susan was a commentator on CNN,
[00:22:22.430]and Susan had his to say after Lindsey Vonn
[00:22:25.130]gave an interview to CNN about a month
[00:22:27.590]before the PyeongChang Olympics,
[00:22:29.840]in which she said that if she was invited
[00:22:31.670]to the White House after the Games, she would not go.
[00:22:36.810]I pray our Olympic Committee does a thorough check
[00:22:39.010]on its athletes to make sure they don't choose athletes
[00:22:41.450]who will kneel during our national anthem.
[00:22:44.940]Well, that would make for an interesting
[00:22:46.270]kind of Olympic trial, that you qualify for the team,
[00:22:50.270]but we have one more test for you.
[00:22:52.130]We're gonna play the anthem and see how you react.
[00:22:57.120]If any of you followed the Vonn story,
[00:23:00.054]after that interview people went into death threats.
[00:23:06.650]They wished her to crash, they hoped she broke her back,
[00:23:09.210]they hoped she broke her neck.
[00:23:10.620]When she became the oldest alpine medalist,
[00:23:13.178]but not gold, they said that God didn't want her
[00:23:15.740]to have gold, because she said
[00:23:17.220]she wasn't gonna go to the White House.
[00:23:22.410]We continue to marvel
[00:23:24.380]that there might be politics in sports.
[00:23:26.390]People hear athletes say these things,
[00:23:30.080]but are they really listening to the athletes?
[00:23:33.140]It begs the question, what does it mean to represent?
[00:23:36.450]When is protest disrespectful?
[00:23:38.340]When is it heralded as part of an American ethos?
[00:23:42.390]When is protest something that we are proud of,
[00:23:45.360]and when is it something
[00:23:46.810]in which we yell the word ungrateful at the protestor?
[00:23:51.860]That there is still shock and awe
[00:23:53.870]at the politics in sports can be head scratching stuff.
[00:23:57.290]If you think about the back and forth
[00:23:59.670]between North and South Korea
[00:24:01.320]and the questions about North and South Korea,
[00:24:03.520]going into the PyeongChang Olympics,
[00:24:05.900]or questions about why openly gay athletes,
[00:24:08.330]like Adam Rippon and Gus Kenworthy,
[00:24:10.410]had a problem with Vice President Mike Pence
[00:24:12.720]leading the US delegation into opening ceremony?
[00:24:15.920]Or the horror at the near collapse
[00:24:18.150]of Brazil's infrastructure from hosting
[00:24:20.600]not just an Olympics, because why host an Olympics,
[00:24:23.810]when you can host an Olympics and a World Cup?
[00:24:27.500]Or four years ago, Sochi.
[00:24:31.130]A little bit more than four now.
[00:24:33.260]I mean, Sochi, Sochi had everything.
[00:24:35.789]It had political oppression, it had anti-gay legislation,
[00:24:39.280]environmental concerns, the protests
[00:24:41.630]of indigenous peoples who found it offensive
[00:24:44.340]that sporting venues were being built on their sacred lands.
[00:24:47.980]Bloated and corrupt and mysterious budgets,
[00:24:51.290]and a state leader that used the Olympics
[00:24:53.380]as a vanity project in a way
[00:24:54.810]that we hadn't seen since Hitler,
[00:24:58.510]which brings us back to PyeongChang for a moment,
[00:25:03.410]because this happened.
[00:25:05.930]The Vice President of the United States
[00:25:07.930]decided to sit when the unified Korean delegation
[00:25:11.640]marched into opening ceremony.
[00:25:13.470]So if you take a close look at this,
[00:25:16.270]everybody else in the dignitary box stood
[00:25:18.810]when North and South Korea marched in together,
[00:25:21.427]and Mike Pence and his wife sat.
[00:25:25.070]Think about that for a minute.
[00:25:26.650]Pence, sitting at a sporting event
[00:25:30.461]to make a political point.
[00:25:33.187](audience laughing)
[00:25:35.570]Which is his choice, because sports
[00:25:38.920]are a great place to make a political protest.
[00:25:42.770]But this is the guy who walked out of a Colts game
[00:25:45.347]when players knelt, and this is a guy
[00:25:49.040]who went to that Colts game because he knew
[00:25:51.420]that the players were gonna kneel.
[00:25:53.470]This is a guy who told the press pool
[00:25:55.020]outside the stadium to stay put
[00:25:57.340]'cause he was only going to be a moment or two.
[00:26:01.740]He knew he wasn't going to be long.
[00:26:04.890]By all accounts, then, it seems
[00:26:06.650]that Vice President Pence also mobilizes
[00:26:09.160]sporting events to make political points.
[00:26:13.070]There are many many many places
[00:26:14.580]to find politics in our world.
[00:26:16.300]We just need to look beyond the usual subjects, sometimes.
[00:26:19.070]My work on Smith and Carlos tried to do that.
[00:26:21.330]It tried to create a different window
[00:26:23.040]into histories of civil rights movements.
[00:26:25.590]It tried to work beyond the usual cast
[00:26:27.520]of characters, as important as they are,
[00:26:29.460]Malcolm X and Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar and Elaine Brown
[00:26:32.450]and of course, King.
[00:26:34.300]And to move beyond our most famous speeches
[00:26:36.660]and protests and spectacles.
[00:26:39.520]With my work on those two, what I wanted to do
[00:26:42.010]was bring sports more firmly into the equation of 1968,
[00:26:46.430]in order to gain a more fully fleshed out understanding
[00:26:49.220]of the impact of civil rights strategies
[00:26:51.420]and conversations regarding race
[00:26:53.700]and politics, overt politics.
[00:27:00.330]But my fourth book, One Goal, which is about soccer,
[00:27:04.293]is about the political impact of sports in a less overt way.
[00:27:09.310]It is a story of community and immigration,
[00:27:11.960]a topic, that as I was writing it,
[00:27:14.440]I hoped would still be relevant by the time I finished it.
[00:27:18.180]And that part is really bittersweet,
[00:27:19.990]because I had no idea, I don't think any of us did,
[00:27:22.390]just how relevant a conversation about immigration
[00:27:25.250]and community and refugees was going to be.
[00:27:29.640]One Goal tells a seemingly impossible,
[00:27:33.560]inexplicably local story of soccer and politics,
[00:27:37.410]of community and country.
[00:27:39.300]One reviewer said that it was Friday Night Lights
[00:27:41.160]for the 21st century, and I think
[00:27:42.840]that the most important part of that,
[00:27:44.560]all apologies to football, is 21st century.
[00:27:47.640]To think about what America looks like in the 21st century.
[00:27:53.400]This is Lewiston, Maine.
[00:27:54.920]You knew right away it was not Lewiston, Nebraska.
[00:27:59.040]Starting in 2001, thousands of Somali refugees
[00:28:02.868]landed in Lewiston, Maine, an economically depressed town
[00:28:07.420]with the families of French-Canadians
[00:28:08.880]who worked in the once thriving
[00:28:10.580]and now gone textile mills that dot the rushing waters
[00:28:14.860]of the Androscoggin River.
[00:28:16.840]So you can see here, the high school
[00:28:18.410]is on the upper left hand side,
[00:28:19.760]one of the largest high schools in Maine.
[00:28:21.871]The Bates Mill on the right,
[00:28:25.350]the canals in the bottom two photos.
[00:28:28.910]The questions about this refugee migration
[00:28:32.690]probably seem kinda obvious.
[00:28:34.240]Why Lewiston, why Somalis?
[00:28:36.460]How did they get there?
[00:28:38.124]The story is one of what we call secondary migration,
[00:28:41.523]meaning that they didn't first land in Maine,
[00:28:43.990]they landed somewhere else.
[00:28:46.070]They didn't look at Maine and think,
[00:28:47.500]hey, that's the second whitest state
[00:28:49.380]in America, let's go there. (audience laughing)
[00:28:52.640]So they landed elsewhere.
[00:28:55.160]Secondary migration is a really tricky thing to capture,
[00:28:58.130]because once a refugee leaves his
[00:29:00.180]or her initial relocation spot,
[00:29:02.010]and most of Lewiston's population
[00:29:03.820]originally traveled from refugee camps
[00:29:06.560]like Dadaab or Kakuma in Kenya to the outskirts of Atlanta,
[00:29:11.350]and these are shots of Kakuma Refugee Camp,
[00:29:14.810]but once they leave that initial relocation spot,
[00:29:17.183]the Feds largely drop out of the equation.
[00:29:20.164]So if you look at where they came from,
[00:29:22.687]and the upper right hand corner,
[00:29:25.340]you can see what they're doing at the camp.
[00:29:28.060]They're playing soccer.
[00:29:31.610]They wind up in one of the coldest,
[00:29:33.380]whitest, most Catholic, French speaking,
[00:29:36.640]economically depressed towns in the Union.
[00:29:39.900]Once, what happened is, that a few families found their way
[00:29:42.940]there because of some weird relocation stuff.
[00:29:45.530]But once those few families settled,
[00:29:47.887]word of mouth motivated more to come.
[00:29:51.859]They came, at first by the hundreds,
[00:29:54.640]by the busloads, and then by the thousands.
[00:29:57.530]It was not necessarily a smooth transition.
[00:30:00.450]I'm sure that's shocking to you.
[00:30:02.680]Within a year or so, the city's mayor
[00:30:04.290]wrote an open letter asking the Somalis
[00:30:06.160]to tell their relatives and friends to stop.
[00:30:09.210]Stop coming, he wrote, that the city was at capacity.
[00:30:13.070]A few years later, a man threw a frozen pig's head
[00:30:15.880]into the downtown mosque during evening prayers,
[00:30:19.700]an incident that became the center
[00:30:22.874]of Elizabeth Strout's award winning novel, The Burgess Boys.
[00:30:24.858]But in more ways than not, and I always say this
[00:30:28.740]really cautiously, Lewiston is an example
[00:30:32.080]of a refugee community successfully integrating
[00:30:35.100]and negotiating with its chosen landing space.
[00:30:38.730]Walking through the streets of this French-Canadian town
[00:30:41.851]is now a global experience, and that's a critical facet
[00:30:46.060]to how this place has tried to carve out a better future.
[00:30:52.460]The high school soccer team, in no small way,
[00:30:55.530]has played a truly significant role.
[00:31:00.250]This is my single favorite photo
[00:31:02.160]that I shot for the book.
[00:31:03.540]This is summer soccer in Lewiston.
[00:31:06.020]In the distance you see a roof,
[00:31:07.490]that's the Androscoggin Colisee,
[00:31:09.020]which is the single most important building in Lewiston.
[00:31:11.460]It is the hockey arena.
[00:31:13.876]The Somali kids play soccer in its parking lot in the winter
[00:31:17.810]because it is the very first parking lot to be plowed
[00:31:20.460]in the entire city. (audience laughing)
[00:31:22.820]And they learned that early.
[00:31:25.970]So this is before a summer game,
[00:31:28.140]and what you see is the players talking
[00:31:29.680]to Coaches McGraw and Gish, and in the background,
[00:31:32.800]you can see their mothers and sisters
[00:31:34.730]who use the games as a place
[00:31:36.858]to find some leisure time to talk and catch up.
[00:31:41.430]This is Maine.
[00:31:44.100]In the fall of 2015, the Lewiston Blue Devils
[00:31:47.870]had a historic, nationally ranked undefeated season,
[00:31:52.670]putting up the most ungodly numbers
[00:31:54.890]and statistics of any team I've ever looked at.
[00:31:59.500]When they landed in the state championship game
[00:32:02.050]the year previously, 2014,
[00:32:05.210]the number one seed, they lost
[00:32:07.230]to upstart Cheverus High School, the number seven seed.
[00:32:10.620]It was one of those games where the day after,
[00:32:12.380]no one talked about who won the game.
[00:32:14.520]They talked about Lewiston losing the game.
[00:32:17.830]But in 2015, they were a veritable dream team.
[00:32:21.470]On their road to that state final,
[00:32:23.350]they outscored opponents 113 to seven.
[00:32:29.300]Soccer is not a low scoring game in Maine.
[00:32:33.160]I know that's one of the big complaints of soccer,
[00:32:35.570]and in fact, they beat Messalonskee
[00:32:37.310]two nights ago, 11 to one, double digits.
[00:32:43.570]Lewiston is even more remarkable,
[00:32:47.000]113 to seven, when you think that this
[00:32:49.370]is a really sportsmanship minded team
[00:32:51.530]that tries to keep the scores down
[00:32:53.310]so that they don't humiliate their opponents.
[00:32:55.840]So these are the records that they put up
[00:32:57.970]putting in their second string, their third string.
[00:33:00.940]Once they're up by five, all starters sit down.
[00:33:05.400]At the 2015 state championship game,
[00:33:07.700]which took place at Portland's Fitzpatrick Stadium,
[00:33:10.385]over 4,500 people filled the bleachers,
[00:33:14.370]the most ever at a soccer game in state history.
[00:33:20.490]Take a look at that crowd for a minute.
[00:33:24.010]This is Maine.
[00:33:26.520]So One Goal is very much about that season.
[00:33:29.630]It's about the art of soccer that these young men play
[00:33:32.570]and the support network
[00:33:33.690]that the community built around them.
[00:33:36.300]It is about why sport matters, about where it fits
[00:33:39.440]into the threads of our daily lives
[00:33:41.210]and what we can learn from it.
[00:33:43.860]Soccer is a microcosm of Lewiston's transition
[00:33:47.010]from former factory town to global host.
[00:33:50.820]It's not a hoop dream story,
[00:33:52.370]where kids are using sports to escape something,
[00:33:55.170]because these kids aren't trying to escape.
[00:33:57.370]That part already happened in their lives.
[00:34:00.330]Soccer, rather, as I write in the introduction
[00:34:02.810]of the book, is how these kids live where they landed.
[00:34:07.820]The story of the Lewiston Blue Devils
[00:34:09.490]is not one of overt politics in the way
[00:34:12.360]that Smith and Carlos was, or the way that taking a knee
[00:34:15.789]before a football game during the national anthem is.
[00:34:19.377]"This team, rather," says their coach,
[00:34:21.527]"plants seeds for their community to grow."
[00:34:24.720]And the coach, the players say, don't care
[00:34:27.700]where they're from as long as they pass the ball.
[00:34:31.640]In One Goal, listening to athletes
[00:34:33.800]isn't necessarily about paying attention
[00:34:36.460]to their explicit politics.
[00:34:38.010]It isn't about asking why they do or don't want
[00:34:39.880]to go to the White House to celebrate a victory,
[00:34:42.520]or why they might raise a black gloved fist into the air
[00:34:45.050]or take a knee during the national anthem.
[00:34:47.520]It is about actually listening.
[00:34:49.170]As the varsity roster for the Lewiston Blue Devils
[00:34:52.100]began to change, Coach Mike McGraw,
[00:34:54.440]who'd been in the driver's seat for decades,
[00:34:56.290]when he makes it to that state championship game,
[00:34:58.110]he was in his fourth decade of coaching,
[00:35:00.350]Lewiston born and bred, but he had to listen.
[00:35:05.370]This isn't necessarily an easy task for a head coach,
[00:35:08.700]and anyone who knows a coach knows that listening
[00:35:10.910]is not always their strong points,
[00:35:14.650]especially a coach who was so firmly entrenched
[00:35:17.430]in a team's history and in a school's history,
[00:35:20.269]and in a city's heart and a city's culture.
[00:35:25.080]This is Mike McGraw, who texted me
[00:35:27.730]about 30 minutes ago 'cause the freshmen
[00:35:29.450]beat Brunswick seven to one. (audience laughing)
[00:35:34.757]"One of the things I've learned,"
[00:35:37.230]he said to me, "Is to do less talking,
[00:35:40.527]"which is really hard for me."
[00:35:42.720]You have to do a Maine accent, I can't do a Maine accent.
[00:35:45.530]McGraw had to listen to his players
[00:35:47.320]when they showed up late for practice
[00:35:48.740]because they had to accompany a parent
[00:35:50.480]to a doctor's appointment and serve as a translator.
[00:35:53.610]He had to listen to his players on hot days during Ramadan,
[00:35:57.400]when running laps was simply impossible.
[00:36:00.450]He had to listen to his assistant coach, Dan Gish,
[00:36:03.400]about how the talents and skills of the new players
[00:36:06.110]necessitated a change in strategy
[00:36:07.990]from a direct game, what we would call
[00:36:10.180]kick and chase soccer, kick the ball as far as you can,
[00:36:13.000]everybody run and kick it again,
[00:36:15.150]to a possession style of soccer,
[00:36:17.280]which is fast moving and patient, unselfish and beautiful,
[00:36:24.970]and he had to listen to this guy, Abdijabar Hersi,
[00:36:28.880]who he hired as an assistant coach
[00:36:30.760]in what was a really key turning point
[00:36:34.050]in how McGraw listened to his team.
[00:36:37.020]Abdijabar, who's on the left,
[00:36:38.570]he's standing next to Maulid Abdow,
[00:36:40.380]who's a central character in the book,
[00:36:43.021]he's the master of the front handspring flip throw-in,
[00:36:45.200]and if you don't know what that is, read the book.
[00:36:49.773]Hersi is the son of Abdullahi Abdi,
[00:36:51.920]and Abdullahi Abdi is the 8th grade coach,
[00:36:53.710]he's the middle school coach, but he is really,
[00:36:55.760]as one community leader said to me,
[00:36:57.680]the coach of everyone.
[00:36:59.560]He is a constant sideline presence for the Blue Devils,
[00:37:02.540]he is someone who works with every player
[00:37:04.730]before they hit the varsity roster,
[00:37:07.050]and he really, he coaches so many different community teams
[00:37:09.920]that I couldn't tell you how many there are.
[00:37:12.770]His son, Abdijabar, played for McGraw,
[00:37:15.790]like most of his brothers did and still do.
[00:37:17.900]Bilal Hersi is the top scorer for the Blue Devils right now.
[00:37:21.360]And in 2014, Abdijabar Hersi became the first Somali coach
[00:37:25.940]hired by the Lewiston School District.
[00:37:30.470]I'm gonna read a very short passage
[00:37:33.290]about how that came to be.
[00:37:36.820]Hersi says, "I always wanted to get into coaching."
[00:37:39.810]He shrugs, smiling, before saying the obvious.
[00:37:42.867]"My dad is a coach."
[00:37:44.880]Several people applied for the job,
[00:37:46.440]but when Hersi walked into the interview,
[00:37:48.170]Fuller, who's the athletic director,
[00:37:50.350]knew he was the right person at the right time.
[00:37:53.480]Hersi, too, could feel it as he answered
[00:37:55.150]a barrage of questions from Fuller and McGraw.
[00:37:58.007]"I already knew," Hersi says Fuller later told him,
[00:38:01.007]"As soon as I saw your name, I was happy."
[00:38:04.740]McGraw was excited to add Hersi
[00:38:06.130]to the coaching staff, and not just because
[00:38:08.720]he finally had someone who could shout directives
[00:38:10.970]in Somali, something he knew would be a strategic advantage,
[00:38:13.879]keeping other teams in the dark.
[00:38:16.440]He had spent years wrapping his head around
[00:38:18.430]the changes taking place on his roster
[00:38:20.520]and in his classroom.
[00:38:22.200]He'd buried himself in books and attended
[00:38:24.100]coaching conferences and clinics,
[00:38:26.056]but most of all, he listened to the people around him,
[00:38:30.140]knowing he needed them if he was going
[00:38:32.070]to win a championship with these players.
[00:38:34.737]"I need to take who their mentors were,
[00:38:36.627]"like Abdullahi Abdi and Abdijabar,
[00:38:38.917]"all of those leaders in the community who coached them,"
[00:38:41.440]he says, "I embraced them and listened to them,
[00:38:44.977]"and I listened to the players, because I wanted,
[00:38:47.137]"I needed to understand."
[00:38:50.590]Fuller views McGraw's relationship with Coach Abdullahi
[00:38:53.540]and the hiring of Hersi as further evidence
[00:38:55.900]of how much McGraw changed
[00:38:57.240]to accommodate his evolving roster.
[00:38:59.820]He became a better, more inclusive coach,
[00:39:02.390]and developed a deeper level of trust
[00:39:04.250]with his faster, experienced players.
[00:39:07.457]"He was the first coach in our department,"
[00:39:09.410]says Fuller, "to say, If I'm gonna be good,
[00:39:12.460]"and I'm gonna relate to these kids,
[00:39:14.897]"I've got to go into the community."
[00:39:20.710]So, Hersi brought a lot to the table, right,
[00:39:23.050]he created a solid link between community coaches
[00:39:25.880]like his dad and the school's coaches,
[00:39:28.220]and he also brought, again, the strategic advantage,
[00:39:31.540]because directives in sidelines could be communicated
[00:39:34.210]in Somali or Arabic to the field,
[00:39:36.100]and that is a huge advantage in Maine,
[00:39:39.400]to be yelling your strategies out in Somali.
[00:39:43.670]So reaching into the community,
[00:39:45.170]listening to the community,
[00:39:46.460]whether they be mentors or players or assistant coaches,
[00:39:49.160]by listening to needs and wants and suggestions,
[00:39:52.550]it helped forge a path for this community
[00:39:54.930]to lay the foundations to figure things out.
[00:40:00.380]So, on the one hand, this is heart warming
[00:40:02.940]and thrilling and uplifting, but in so many ways,
[00:40:06.360]the story of One Goal is also a sobering tale,
[00:40:09.143]because McGraw might not care where his players are from,
[00:40:11.870]as long as they pass the ball,
[00:40:13.460]but the United States does care.
[00:40:15.520]As of January 2018, the International Rescue Committee's
[00:40:18.910]evaluation of the current administration's
[00:40:20.830]travel bans include shocking stats that Muslim refugees
[00:40:25.890]entering the United States has plunged 94%.
[00:40:31.330]The United States, which was once this beacon,
[00:40:33.620]this global leader in offering the most desperate people
[00:40:36.220]of the world refuge, is pretty much closed for business.
[00:40:41.170]But this soccer team in Maine, and the community
[00:40:44.090]that surrounds it, shows a way forward, a way in.
[00:40:47.500]And it's not just about tolerating difference,
[00:40:50.690]or embracing difference, even,
[00:40:53.080]but it's about capitalizing on it.
[00:40:55.600]Just as Jackie Robinson, again,
[00:40:57.680]showed America what integration looked like,
[00:41:00.380]so many years before the Brown decision,
[00:41:03.240]this team represents a coming together
[00:41:05.940]in a community that's had a lot of pushing apart.
[00:41:11.930]So I go back to another shot of Fitzpatrick Stadium,
[00:41:14.480]that day in November, and this again,
[00:41:17.600]if you take in, this is Maine.
[00:41:22.170]Coming together doesn't always mean staying together.
[00:41:25.030]There's an ebb and a flow to change,
[00:41:27.505]steps forward, steps back, and let's think
[00:41:29.050]about the 4,500 people watching that game.
[00:41:31.970]There were more people at the state championship
[00:41:33.970]soccer game that year than were at the football championship
[00:41:36.780]two weeks later, in Maine.
[00:41:39.210]That's a really big deal.
[00:41:41.280]More people at a soccer game than a football game.
[00:41:44.550]Imagine that happening in Nebraska.
[00:41:46.743](audience laughing)
[00:41:49.543]Okay, it's almost the exact same thing.
[00:41:52.060]But what these numbers meant, 4,500 people,
[00:41:55.400]was that it's not just the parents
[00:41:57.623]and friends of the players
[00:41:58.785]and the coaches and the cheerleaders.
[00:42:00.480]It was everyone.
[00:42:02.300]It was a coming together of black, white,
[00:42:04.220]Catholic, Muslim, Franco, African.
[00:42:06.920]It was a we moment, a moment in which everyone
[00:42:10.020]had one identity, bleeding blue,
[00:42:12.630]as they say in Lewiston, above everything else.
[00:42:16.470]It was the same kind of moment
[00:42:17.930]that brought the ancient Greeks together
[00:42:19.980]for the Olympic Games, and think,
[00:42:23.490]for a minute, about what is supposed to happen
[00:42:25.470]during Olympic Games and sports and politics.
[00:42:29.084]The Olympics originated in an effort
[00:42:32.190]to stop the ongoing wars of the Greek states.
[00:42:35.650]King Iphitos consulted the Oracle at Delphi,
[00:42:38.780]which advised him to introduce sport
[00:42:40.780]every four years to disrupt the cycle of wars.
[00:42:45.090]So the Olympic Truce, which is still ratified
[00:42:47.640]by the United Nations, lasted months.
[00:42:50.680]It was designed to allow safe travel
[00:42:53.400]for athletes and spectators to and from the Games.
[00:42:56.290]The death penalty was suspended,
[00:42:58.540]and wars were halted
[00:43:01.050]so that people could visualize peace.
[00:43:04.260]The Greeks had a word for it,
[00:43:06.122](speaking in foreign language),
[00:43:07.590]it, loosely translated, means truce.
[00:43:10.130]It does not, as some simplify,
[00:43:12.260]mean that sport, as the Greeks saw it, was apolitical
[00:43:15.590]or a level playing field.
[00:43:17.520]The Greeks didn't see the Olympics
[00:43:19.090]as eliminating politics from daily life,
[00:43:21.860]rather, they saw sports as a way to visualize
[00:43:24.980]peaceful resolutions to political problems.
[00:43:27.750]Connecting athletic competition to diplomatic measures,
[00:43:32.070]and invoking (speaking in foreign language)
[00:43:34.559]to disrupt feuds and rivalries, wars and hostilities.
[00:43:39.040]How do you know when peace has come
[00:43:42.190]if you've never had a chance to experience it?
[00:43:44.810]How will you recognize it if you've never seen it?
[00:43:49.660]A championship soccer season doesn't fix everything,
[00:43:52.690]but it brought that community together.
[00:43:54.440]It was their (speaking in foreign language),
[00:43:55.820]for that game, and maybe even for that season.
[00:43:59.560]And I think that envisioning peace
[00:44:01.040]is a really political thing,
[00:44:03.410]and a spectacle as small as a high school soccer game
[00:44:06.230]can let us do that, it creates a moment
[00:44:08.960]for us to see what America looks like
[00:44:11.540]when it takes a moment to be what it's supposed to be,
[00:44:14.610]what is written in all of those documents
[00:44:16.540]that are stored in the National Archives.
[00:44:18.840]It's about finding a one in the midst of the many,
[00:44:21.880]and finding a we in the midst of the us versus them.
[00:44:25.470]Having a moment of together,
[00:44:27.010]which is the word Lewiston coaches yell
[00:44:30.480]more than any other word from the sideline.
[00:44:32.830]Sometimes in English, sometimes in Arabic,
[00:44:34.700]sometimes in Somali, finding the together.
[00:44:38.540]Years ago, Mike McGraw asked a few players
[00:44:40.680]how they would say it, how they would rally
[00:44:43.990]around the idea of together.
[00:44:46.770]This is what they answered.
[00:44:49.402](speaking in foreign language),
[00:44:51.770]it means brothers together in Swahili,
[00:44:53.800]which is one of the languages of the refugee camps
[00:44:56.060]where so many of them came from.
[00:44:58.580]Before every single game, the entire team,
[00:45:01.780]black, white, immigrant, native, Franco, African, whatever,
[00:45:06.453]yells one, two, three, hands in,
[00:45:09.496](speaking in foreign language).
[00:45:12.320]It's a really good motto, and it's one
[00:45:15.480]that has become part of the ritual
[00:45:17.580]of being on a team in Lewiston,
[00:45:19.810]because Coach McGraw asked, and then he listened.
[00:45:23.800]Thank you. (audience applauding)
[00:45:37.253]Are we doing questions?
[00:45:39.580]So we do have time for questions,
[00:45:42.810]and I'm happy to come into the audience
[00:45:45.330]to broadcast any of your questions,
[00:45:47.180]since we don't have a second mic.
[00:45:49.570]I can repeat, too. That's good.
[00:46:06.470]I can shout.
[00:46:07.710]I guess I have two questions.
[00:46:09.830]One, did their opponents, or the opponent cities,
[00:46:13.690]was there any resentment towards them
[00:46:16.320]having a much more integrative team,
[00:46:17.920]or maybe even having the advantage for communications?
[00:46:22.610]There's resentment about how good they are.
[00:46:26.090]I mean, the rest of Maine still looks
[00:46:28.160]like exactly what you would think Maine looks like.
[00:46:31.260]There are these pockets, Portland and Lewiston,
[00:46:34.300]that have these populations.
[00:46:36.463]Lewiston's demographics changed 800%
[00:46:40.080]over the course of just a few years.
[00:46:42.580]So, what really happens with the other sides,
[00:46:47.330]first of all, is a very physical form of soccer.
[00:46:50.560]It's an abusive form of soccer
[00:46:51.850]because Lewiston is fast, but they're small.
[00:46:55.700]So you see a very rough game.
[00:46:57.210]So that's, I think, resentment
[00:46:58.630]playing itself out, that the, sort of the motto is,
[00:47:02.180]if you wanna beat Lewiston, you've gotta hurt 'em.
[00:47:04.724]But the other piece of that is the racial slurs
[00:47:08.960]that get thrown around the field,
[00:47:13.830]so a big part of this is learning how to cope
[00:47:16.960]with being different in a community and on the field.
[00:47:25.120]What your parents tell you to do
[00:47:26.420]and what your coach tells you to do,
[00:47:27.680]coach's answer, always, is just put it on the board.
[00:47:30.690]Beat 'em, because if you retaliate,
[00:47:33.780]and there's actually a chapter called, Do Not Retaliate.
[00:47:36.840]And if you retaliate, you're gonna get the card, right,
[00:47:39.510]you're gonna get booked for the foul.
[00:47:42.280]So really, learning how to deal with it is the focus
[00:47:46.308]more than worrying about the other team's resentment,
[00:47:52.040]but it's there, and it's there, it's there in ways
[00:47:56.830]that are uglier than you would think.
[00:47:58.240]There's something about taking a high school sporting event
[00:48:00.970]seriously that I don't think we do often enough,
[00:48:04.750]and yet, then we look at some of the things
[00:48:06.700]that go down at high school sporting events,
[00:48:09.400]and some of those have made national headlines,
[00:48:11.460]the chants to immigrant heavy teams or what have you.
[00:48:15.660]But this perspective is, if you're the player on the field,
[00:48:18.450]how do you deal with it?
[00:48:20.110]And that's become a big change,
[00:48:21.990]and that's become something that they also have to listen to
[00:48:25.640]is what are these guys hearing and experiencing,
[00:48:29.280]in terms of other teams, and how do you cope?
[00:48:33.924]Did the city, say,
[00:48:36.063]in rec league for elementary age students,
[00:48:37.924]did they do anything specific to integrate
[00:48:40.220]this community in at the smaller, younger levels?
[00:48:43.780]Yeah, so that's a really good question,
[00:48:45.600]and I appreciate that.
[00:48:48.047]So one of the really interesting things
[00:48:49.010]that the Somalis do when they get to Lewiston
[00:48:50.790]is they start to found their own organizations,
[00:48:53.520]so the Somali Bantu Youth Association
[00:48:55.480]is one of the earliest, it's now
[00:48:57.364]at Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services,
[00:48:59.167]and they create their own soccer league almost immediately.
[00:49:03.330]The other thing that emerges, and you have to remember,
[00:49:05.510]this is Lewiston, Maine, this is a hockey town.
[00:49:09.320]They've run out of green space for soccer at this point.
[00:49:12.530]Everywhere you look, there's a kid with a soccer ball.
[00:49:14.950]So there's youth leagues,
[00:49:17.010]there's Lewiston-Auburn Youth League,
[00:49:18.230]which has always been the youth league,
[00:49:20.800]then there's the Somali Bantu Youth League,
[00:49:22.960]and then there's Abdullahi's various leagues,
[00:49:25.130]because there's Somali tournaments
[00:49:26.460]all over this country, in Ohio
[00:49:28.140]and Kentucky and what have you, that they travel to.
[00:49:30.980]There is an elite pay to play team in New England,
[00:49:33.840]Seacoast United, which eventually,
[00:49:35.880]some very good, community minded folks,
[00:49:38.575]figure out a way for these guys to get onto.
[00:49:41.500]So there's soccer everywhere,
[00:49:43.260]but the single most important game
[00:49:44.570]happens down by the river every night
[00:49:46.000]as the sun's goin' down, and that's the pickup game,
[00:49:47.700]that's street soccer, and those are teams
[00:49:50.380]of 40, 45 guys, just to a side,
[00:49:52.960]all ages, and it's the damndest thing I've ever seen.
[00:50:01.230]Have the Somali immigrants
[00:50:02.700]begun to integrate into the other sports too?
[00:50:06.640]Yeah, track and field and cross country
[00:50:10.430]is where you will find a lot of the girls.
[00:50:13.290]Volleyball, to a degree, softball,
[00:50:15.870]and girls are starting to play soccer.
[00:50:18.810]Folks, a big question I always get is,
[00:50:20.660]do the girls play soccer?
[00:50:21.630]In Somalia, soccer is not a girl's sport,
[00:50:23.640]just, sort of like field hockey
[00:50:25.150]isn't really a men's sport in the United States,
[00:50:27.440]so we have those sort of cultural tendencies.
[00:50:30.830]But the longer they're there,
[00:50:32.040]the Somali Bantu Youth Association
[00:50:33.620]did field girls' teams, and there are
[00:50:35.250]some girls who are playing, but running,
[00:50:37.310]track, in particular, which I talk about in the book,
[00:50:40.550]is where you will see the record breaking women.
[00:50:45.660]Yes, sir.
[00:50:46.920]I had an anecdote
[00:50:48.280]rather than a question, I hope you don't mind.
[00:50:50.770]I would not mind at all.
[00:50:52.591]About the relationship
[00:50:53.424]between the Olympics and politics.
[00:50:58.058]Yes.
[00:51:00.580]The 1936 Olympics
[00:51:02.636]was well known for Jesse Owens.
[00:51:05.010]What we don't know is, or don't talk about very much is,
[00:51:07.503]that the Germans won the 1936 Olympics.
[00:51:12.880]But what is less well known is that the Germans
[00:51:17.570]were ordered to be on their very best behavior
[00:51:21.250]towards foreigners, this included my grandparents,
[00:51:25.200]actually, who attended the Olympics.
[00:51:28.380]My grandmother told me once that my grandfather,
[00:51:31.980]in typical American fashion, unwrapped a piece of gum
[00:51:36.330]and threw the paper on the ground,
[00:51:40.410]and was at first chewed out by a German policeman
[00:51:43.270]until he found out that he was an American,
[00:51:46.130]even though he was of German heritage,
[00:51:48.047]and then, at that point, he was very nice to my grandfather.
[00:51:51.590]For littering. (laughing)
[00:51:54.140]But I had a student
[00:51:55.480]working on the United States
[00:51:58.316]press reaction to the '36 Games,
[00:52:04.860]and his conclusion that he came to
[00:52:07.090]was that the Germans were on their very best behavior,
[00:52:11.108]by government order, and when they were over it,
[00:52:15.160]the New York Times said that the Olympics
[00:52:17.280]oughta be held every year, and oughta be held
[00:52:19.990]in Germany every year, that that would take care
[00:52:23.640]of the Jewish question because
[00:52:25.631]they were on their best behavior.
[00:52:28.271]At a more personal level, I was in Moscow,
[00:52:31.990]visiting a former roommate, Austrian roommate of mine,
[00:52:35.231]who was in the Austrian embassy.
[00:52:39.880]And I commented to him about how few propaganda posters
[00:52:45.150]there were in Moscow.
[00:52:46.713]I expected to see a lot.
[00:52:47.770]He said, "Well, it's because of the Olympics.
[00:52:50.507]"They've taken them-- Taken them down.
[00:52:52.880]So it's a good exactly of how Olympics can,
[00:52:56.831]it was actually kind of going back
[00:52:59.471]to the Greek idea that maybe we can have peace
[00:53:01.410]for awhile, or at least we can look good--
[00:53:03.850]Yeah. For awhile.
[00:53:05.460]It was, I remember staying in Athens in 2004,
[00:53:08.850]during the Games, Athens ran like clockwork.
[00:53:11.530]And if you've ever been to Athens, it felt so strange.
[00:53:15.140]Cabs took you to where you actually wanted to go,
[00:53:18.160]and traffic moved and everyone was,
[00:53:21.590]you know, the city was on, and then,
[00:53:24.370]for those of us who stayed a couple days later,
[00:53:26.367]as soon as that flame went out,
[00:53:29.345]cabs were like, well, maybe I'll take you
[00:53:32.140]where you wanna go, but they were,
[00:53:34.140]exactly what you're saying, on best behavior.
[00:53:36.569]And those things can show a city
[00:53:37.530]how beautiful and well functioning it can be,
[00:53:40.089]and then you have stories like in the days
[00:53:43.020]leading up to Atlanta in 1996,
[00:53:45.600]in which the homeless were sort of swept out of town,
[00:53:49.590]or Mexico City, when the students were massacred
[00:53:51.807]to clean house before the world descended upon it.
[00:53:55.508]So it's interesting, the choices that the host makes,
[00:53:59.527]in terms of, one of the biggest spectacles
[00:54:03.020]that humans experience.
[00:54:09.425]Are there any questions or comments?
[00:54:16.466]Dr. Vazansky?
[00:54:23.240]You're telling a local story,
[00:54:24.876]but it has a lot of international significance, right,
[00:54:27.476]and talk about the immigrant community.
[00:54:29.847]The other question is actually soccer.
[00:54:32.521]Having been brought up in Germany,
[00:54:34.980]where soccer is huge, but then coming to the States
[00:54:37.380]where, like we had in the 80s,
[00:54:39.961]if we had anybody who knew anything about soccer,
[00:54:43.870]I think it needs to be part of that story,
[00:54:45.924]how much more relevant soccer has become
[00:54:47.560]in our society, maybe also related to kind of how
[00:54:53.488]the immigrants have confidence,
[00:54:54.971]we haven't had the confidence.
[00:54:56.810]Yeah, no, absolutely.
[00:54:57.810]I mean, soccer, it's interesting,
[00:54:58.980]because there were always a couple reactions
[00:55:01.370]that I had when people would say,
[00:55:03.960]okay, the United States is terrible at soccer,
[00:55:06.070]first of all, well, yeah, the men.
[00:55:08.768](audience laughing) For a long time.
[00:55:09.601]The men! But you know,
[00:55:12.247]can we be a little bit more specific
[00:55:13.380]about the United States is terrible at soccer,
[00:55:15.470]because the US women's national team
[00:55:17.770]has been one of the longest running
[00:55:19.360]dominant sports teams the world has ever seen,
[00:55:22.040]and really sort of invented the way.
[00:55:24.347]So that's the first thing, right,
[00:55:26.390]Americans are terrible at soccer.
[00:55:27.590]Well, not all Americans.
[00:55:29.488]This last World Cup we'll just sort of pretend
[00:55:32.140]it didn't happen, and even,
[00:55:34.820]sort of thinking about how some people still ask,
[00:55:37.330]well, how are the Americans doing it?
[00:55:38.580]It's like, they're not there, right,
[00:55:40.560]and sort of having this, it was good for the United States,
[00:55:42.848]to, you know, you don't get to participate.
[00:55:44.630]You have to qualify.
[00:55:47.050]The second part of that, I think,
[00:55:48.600]is that no one in America plays soccer.
[00:55:50.280]And that, of course, ignores
[00:55:51.430]what every Saturday and Sunday
[00:55:53.300]in so many communities look like.
[00:55:54.900]Lewiston was not one of those communities.
[00:55:57.110]Lewiston was a hockey town.
[00:55:59.240]And hockey's an expensive sport.
[00:56:01.230]Lewiston is a working class to poor community,
[00:56:04.900]the poorest neighborhoods in Maine
[00:56:06.510]are in Lewiston, Maine.
[00:56:08.060]This is really a town, and I spend a lot of time
[00:56:10.208]talking about what happens, because this is a very typical
[00:56:13.280]New England mill town story.
[00:56:15.220]When the mills move, what happens to what's left behind?
[00:56:18.750]You know, Lowell, Massachusetts
[00:56:20.170]turned itself into a national park, that worked.
[00:56:23.620]There's lots of other towns that didn't have that.
[00:56:26.290]So soccer was, and I think
[00:56:28.170]that this is part of the reaction to soccer.
[00:56:30.010]Soccer is often posed against football,
[00:56:32.370]American football, which would also be a low scoring game
[00:56:36.030]if each goal didn't count for seven points.
[00:56:41.430]But I think that, so there was always
[00:56:42.660]that back and forth, and it was considered
[00:56:44.380]an immigrant game, or a foreign game.
[00:56:47.451]So that fit, when these kids came,
[00:56:50.210]the fact that they played soccer made sense,
[00:56:52.170]I think, in an American context,
[00:56:53.870]and so it was sort of an under the radar thing
[00:56:55.330]until it begins to creep.
[00:56:58.070]And the attachment of Mike McGraw to that
[00:57:01.050]is really important, I think that talking about timing
[00:57:04.220]and place and person, he made it okay
[00:57:08.120]for a lot of people to cheer for this team.
[00:57:10.590]He told me, and I think this is so significant,
[00:57:13.067]there's a group of old men
[00:57:14.650]who sit high on the hill of Lewiston High School
[00:57:17.010]looking down at the football field,
[00:57:19.340]and they sit up there, they say it's a better view.
[00:57:21.150]There's no admission up there, of course,
[00:57:23.510]you don't have to buy a ticket to the game,
[00:57:24.571]but this is where these old guys watch,
[00:57:26.367]and I think they make a donation
[00:57:27.670]to the booster club every year.
[00:57:28.503]And he said, "One day, I looked up,
[00:57:29.567]"and they were there for one of my games."
[00:57:31.950]Right, the old men football watchers
[00:57:34.650]were there to see soccer, and one of the things
[00:57:36.380]that I couldn't get over, I'd be at a practice,
[00:57:38.180]or hanging out with the guys on one of the side fields,
[00:57:40.731]the passerbys who would slow down
[00:57:43.460]to see what was going on, because this was,
[00:57:45.680]you knew it was different and special
[00:57:47.760]and something that you hadn't seen before,
[00:57:49.489]but it was a foreigner's game in the heads
[00:57:53.250]of so many of these hockey and football loving people,
[00:57:55.530]and then they got good, and you know what?
[00:57:57.610]If we're gonna, who doesn't wanna win?
[00:57:59.947]And so then that gets on board.
[00:58:02.827]And then they didn't just win, they really won,
[00:58:05.260]and then natural attention came
[00:58:06.660]and writers came and all of these people
[00:58:08.740]wanna see them and film them and do what have you.
[00:58:11.864]And then, soccer becomes a marquee sport.
[00:58:15.740]And Mike McGraw will tell you that 20, 25 years ago,
[00:58:19.130]if you wanted a varsity letter,
[00:58:20.280]you played soccer, because you could just walk on the team,
[00:58:22.790]and that most of his players were basketball players
[00:58:25.867]and hockey players who were trying
[00:58:27.870]to get in shape for season,
[00:58:29.140]so they just played soccer as a lark.
[00:58:31.600]These were kids, it's hard to get on the soccer team now,
[00:58:33.910]right, you gotta really want it, you gotta work.
[00:58:37.147]And that alone, right, that work ethic piece
[00:58:40.300]then comes into play, so I think
[00:58:41.760]all of these different factors,
[00:58:43.860]and the most important is that Lewiston,
[00:58:46.750]in Lewiston it wasn't hockey or soccer,
[00:58:49.230]it became hockey and soccer,
[00:58:51.430]and that that was a significant thing
[00:58:53.390]for the town to recognize about itself,
[00:58:56.027]that we're good at these things.
[00:58:58.070]When Abdi Shariff-Hassan, who's now playing D-1 soccer
[00:59:01.080]for University of Massachusetts-Lowell,
[00:59:03.530]when he was named All-American his senior year
[00:59:05.840]and Gatorade player of the year,
[00:59:08.970]sort of just like Joe Louis, back in '38,
[00:59:11.260]he's one of us, he belongs, we did this.
[00:59:14.630]So I think that that's what grapples with
[00:59:17.950]and soccer became less of the outlier with all of that.
[00:59:23.198]But yeah, if you look at television ratings,
[00:59:25.470]if you look at, even a non-American World Cup
[00:59:28.660]still had tens of millions of people watching it.
[00:59:32.201]You look at the numbers for the women's final,
[00:59:35.422]at which, we'll get to see that again next year.
[00:59:40.000]Yeah, there's interest, there's real interest,
[00:59:42.060]and now we finally have networks
[00:59:43.280]who have figured out how to commercially broadcast
[00:59:45.140]a soccer game without commercial breaks,
[00:59:47.210]which was really driving networks crazy.
[00:59:49.960]We can't televise this, they don't stop, right?
[00:59:52.955](audience laughing)
[00:59:53.788]They figured it out.
[00:59:57.300]Yeah. What are the conversations
[00:59:59.690]that you hear around the travel ban
[01:00:01.550]in a place like Lewiston?
[01:00:04.730]So here's the most heartbreaking page of the book.
[01:00:11.130]Androscoggin County voted Republican
[01:00:12.580]for the first time in 30 years in 2016.
[01:00:17.300]Maine is a striped state, you guys are familiar with that,
[01:00:20.040]it doesn't go blue or red,
[01:00:22.130]and that is absolutely, has to do
[01:00:25.240]with the change in the demographics of the city.
[01:00:28.430]So what, where you end, and this is what I mean about,
[01:00:32.460]there's fractures and there's coming togethers,
[01:00:34.340]and you hope that the next fracture
[01:00:36.690]isn't quite as intense as the last fracture,
[01:00:38.690]that the coming together is a little bit more profound
[01:00:41.050]than the last one, it's a work in progress.
[01:00:44.700]So there's a lot of support for the travel ban,
[01:00:47.130]and there's also a lot of separation.
[01:00:48.880]Where some of the most ardent supporters of this team
[01:00:52.316]are the most anti-refugee, anti-immigrant.
[01:00:56.020]You know, you're okay, but not them.
[01:00:59.570]And this story is an excellent way
[01:01:01.630]to get into the heads of how that exists, right?
[01:01:04.320]It isn't, it's not hypocrisy, you can't call it that,
[01:01:07.380]because those two things very rationally live
[01:01:11.610]within a whole lotta people, and understanding that
[01:01:14.580]and putting it into a historical and political context,
[01:01:16.750]I think, is vitally important.
[01:01:18.930]So understanding why the member of the booster club,
[01:01:21.937]who writes checks to make sure that these kids
[01:01:24.870]have all the cool swag that all the other teams have, right,
[01:01:28.770]or the guy who has very quietly sponsors this team
[01:01:32.610]on the bus ride home, one of the big changes,
[01:01:35.150]the team used to stop, in the old days,
[01:01:36.630]at McDonald's and everyone would get food
[01:01:38.070]for the ride home, then they had to stop doing that,
[01:01:40.551]'cause these kids don't have money for McDonald's,
[01:01:43.490]right, so then suddenly, it's a very quiet person
[01:01:46.450]wrote a check and made that meal happen,
[01:01:48.410]and so these kinds of things, some of them
[01:01:49.830]are coming from people who are very much
[01:01:51.440]trying to build this community and find a way forward,
[01:01:54.473]and some of them are coming from people
[01:01:56.620]who love this team and don't necessarily love
[01:02:00.060]the bigger picture it represents.
[01:02:04.140]But, you have to sort of hope
[01:02:06.960]that time and familiarity works a little bit at that,
[01:02:09.270]that you know, what if one of these kids
[01:02:11.731]was threatened in some way.
[01:02:14.540]What if one of their mothers couldn't get back
[01:02:16.480]after visiting family in Africa.
[01:02:18.050]What if one of those stories was here?
[01:02:20.110]And we see that over and over again,
[01:02:22.530]and the players experience that.
[01:02:24.450]You're okay, but not them.
[01:02:28.014]Because there isn't an understanding
[01:02:29.390]that they are them, right?
[01:02:33.710]Yeah, Janelle.
[01:02:35.097]That was true in Austria, too,
[01:02:36.574]that my Jewish neighbor is a good guy.
[01:02:39.930]Right. The grocer down the street,
[01:02:42.730]he's a good guy, but Jews in general--
[01:02:45.610]Correct, absolutely.
[01:02:49.490]Yeah, I mean, it's just a followup
[01:02:50.720]on that, and I don't know if it's so much
[01:02:52.090]this is a question or a comment is that,
[01:02:54.833]I mean, this is the story of racist sport, right,
[01:02:57.780]in the United States, and particularly,
[01:03:00.070]as sports are desegregated, that people love the sport,
[01:03:04.580]right, they love the player, well,
[01:03:07.134]they love the sport, and they love what the team does,
[01:03:08.640]but they don't necessarily like the people
[01:03:11.233]who are on the team, so some of the most ardent racists,
[01:03:15.292]with the bans and support the team that I hate,
[01:03:21.380]they Catholics, right?
[01:03:22.213]But do you not think so,
[01:03:24.604]that this is a story that has a long history, right,
[01:03:29.580]in the United States, that there are sports
[01:03:33.260]that have a lot of minority players on
[01:03:35.600]that people gravitate towards,
[01:03:37.890]but then the minute it's around the politics
[01:03:40.070]of what those people, those players represent,
[01:03:42.360]whether they're refugees or immigrants
[01:03:44.730]or LGBTQ or black or Latino, or whatever,
[01:03:48.200]then you start to see these fissures,
[01:03:49.690]and I think that's, what's interesting
[01:03:51.730]is that those same people who support
[01:03:53.830]these students and love that Lewiston is winning
[01:03:57.440]don't wanna see immigrants or refugees
[01:04:00.330]or some of the people. Some of the people.
[01:04:01.163]And increasingly, like I said,
[01:04:03.058]they're figuring it out, and it's a story,
[01:04:05.540]not of assimilation or Americanization,
[01:04:07.270]it's a story of negotiation.
[01:04:09.610]But again, the other piece of that, I think it can work
[01:04:11.900]even more detrimentally, because in addition to,
[01:04:14.550]I love watching him play, but I just wish he'd shut up,
[01:04:17.270]right, don't have a voice, don't have an opinion,
[01:04:20.230]that you're fine, but do what you're supposed to be doing,
[01:04:23.660]and this isn't what you're supposed to be doing.
[01:04:26.200]The other piece of it is that sports
[01:04:27.950]can give us a really false sense
[01:04:29.943]of comfort that everything is all right in the world.
[01:04:33.320]You know, you're telling me that people are oppressed,
[01:04:35.260]look at that Michael Jordan.
[01:04:36.904]Right, 'cause that's a normal example of the everyday.
[01:04:40.861]Or thinking, what are the consequences
[01:04:45.060]for a LeBron James to wear an I can't breathe shirt,
[01:04:49.770]versus a college athlete whose scholarship
[01:04:52.250]might be on the line, right, or even more,
[01:04:55.044]a female college athlete, who's gonna lay down
[01:04:58.700]during the national anthem and not get up
[01:05:00.720]until acknowledged, you know, these tie in,
[01:05:03.228]and that's why I think looking at the micro
[01:05:04.980]can actually be really informative here,
[01:05:07.060]because what are you gonna do, fire LeBron James?
[01:05:09.987]No. No.
[01:05:11.219]Everyone nod, no.
[01:05:13.684]You're not gonna do that.
[01:05:15.890]It's not saying that him taking a stance,
[01:05:18.110]I mean, he might anger right folks,
[01:05:20.540]I mean, we just saw a reaction to Nike
[01:05:24.230]and the 30th anniversary of Just Do It,
[01:05:26.590]with Colin Kaepernick, and you know,
[01:05:28.630]I'm burning my shoes, and Twitter
[01:05:30.900]was sort of a comedy festival for about 24 hours,
[01:05:34.190]because it was like, you already bought the shoes.
[01:05:37.280]Nike doesn't care what you do with 'em.
[01:05:39.690]You can burn 'em, but you already paid for 'em.
[01:05:43.200]And, you know, if you looked at this,
[01:05:45.150]their market value went up six billion dollars
[01:05:49.140]after the launch of that ad, love 'em or hate 'em.
[01:05:52.930]Who's the winner at the end of that?
[01:05:54.700]Kaep got paid, Nike got paid, and these guys
[01:05:57.128]don't have sneakers anymore. (audience laughing)
[01:06:00.189]So none of it is a linear equation of making sense,
[01:06:05.760]but I think that the biggest danger there
[01:06:08.540]is assuming that the level playing field exists,
[01:06:12.440]so why is all of this fuss and furor going on.
[01:06:15.869]Thank you. Thank you.
[01:06:18.125]Yeah.
[01:06:19.225]I don't know anything about soccer,
[01:06:21.561]I'm just here, and I don't know anything
[01:06:23.768]about Africa, the continent, things that go on,
[01:06:26.909]but I'm kind of wondering about Mandela.
[01:06:28.749]When he decided to have that soccer game
[01:06:31.229]to try and get the country kind of--
[01:06:33.944]Rugby. Mm-hmm.
[01:06:36.021]Is that-- You mean, it was rugby.
[01:06:38.581]Rugby. Yeah, it was rugby.
[01:06:40.324]But I just wondered how that,
[01:06:44.063]things like that really make a difference.
[01:06:47.467]You know, I mean, that's where you have to
[01:06:50.100]did a 90 minute state championship soccer game
[01:06:52.650]make a difference?
[01:06:55.990]Part of the, bringing up the question of resentment,
[01:06:59.040]I think there's actually some resentment
[01:07:00.570]in the Somali community that suddenly
[01:07:02.650]all these white people are so proud of us.
[01:07:05.610]Where have you been?
[01:07:06.690]I think that it's complicated,
[01:07:09.820]and I think that that's, again,
[01:07:11.060]the most important way to unpack it,
[01:07:13.140]and it seems, sort of, maybe like a cop out answer,
[01:07:16.882]does it solve every problem?
[01:07:17.715]No, does it perhaps, create a spectacle
[01:07:20.730]that foundations can be built on?
[01:07:23.063]Possibly.
[01:07:26.290]There's a question in the back.
[01:07:28.370]So when you were in Lewiston,
[01:07:30.622]did you see any sort of dichotomy
[01:07:32.845]between the older generation that were there prior
[01:07:36.583]to the immigrants that migrated en masse,
[01:07:40.445]and between the younger generations?
[01:07:43.405]In older and younger generations of Somalis
[01:07:45.870]or of people who were already there?
[01:07:47.682]People that lived there.
[01:07:48.515]Yeah, so there's an interesting thing,
[01:07:49.800]because Lewiston is a French speaking Maine town.
[01:07:54.110]It's the last place in Maine where you can attend
[01:07:56.270]Catholic Mass in French.
[01:07:58.802]An overwhelming number of households speak French.
[01:08:01.910]When you walk into city hall in Lewiston, Maine,
[01:08:04.850]there are four placards of translation,
[01:08:07.030]English, Somali, Arabic and French.
[01:08:10.570]It's crazy.
[01:08:12.740]So one of the interesting things,
[01:08:14.610]and this is a very familiar story
[01:08:16.150]to anyone who studies US immigration,
[01:08:18.180]is that Lewiston is an immigrant town.
[01:08:20.420]These folks all came on the Grand Trunk Railroad
[01:08:22.640]from the north, so it's not
[01:08:23.850]the Ellis Island immigrant story,
[01:08:25.901]but the mill towns, you know, it was Boston entrepreneurs
[01:08:28.730]that built the mills, they harnessed the power
[01:08:30.520]of the Great Falls of the Androscoggin,
[01:08:32.519]it was text, I mean, it was one of the central
[01:08:35.120]textile manufacturing areas in the United States,
[01:08:37.640]it was called Spindle City.
[01:08:39.320]Auburn, across the river, was the shoe manufacturing,
[01:08:42.740]no, it was a mecca.
[01:08:45.561]Where did the labor come from?
[01:08:47.760]The labor came from French speaking immigrants
[01:08:49.703]coming down from Quebec, and it's not that long ago, right,
[01:08:54.946]this is sort of pre-Civil War
[01:08:57.890]onto just before World War Two,
[01:09:01.120]and it even flourished during the Civil War,
[01:09:03.000]because Benjamin Bates, who built these mills,
[01:09:05.426]forecast what was gonna happen,
[01:09:07.450]in terms of the war, and he stockpiled cotton
[01:09:09.880]before all of that got shut down.
[01:09:11.940]So this was a place that attracted
[01:09:13.410]tens of thousands of French-Canadian immigrants,
[01:09:17.290]so you would think, oh, they must be super understanding
[01:09:19.949]of newcomers who have a new language, right,
[01:09:23.270]the largest chapter of the KKK outside
[01:09:25.560]of the South was in Maine, why?
[01:09:27.530]In response to French Catholics.
[01:09:29.920]French was outlawed.
[01:09:31.900]Children who spoke French in school were punished.
[01:09:35.940]Parochial schools were founded all over Lewiston
[01:09:39.150]because they needed to create their own schools
[01:09:42.020]so that they didn't lose their language and their culture.
[01:09:45.350]So preservation of French culture was one
[01:09:48.010]of the identifying factors of Lewiston for generations.
[01:09:52.847]It doesn't make them hospitable to a different
[01:09:55.510]kind of newcomer, and that's where race
[01:09:58.040]and ethnicity and religion, and religion's a big one,
[01:10:01.177]and we haven't really touched on that,
[01:10:03.650]but thinking about all of those factors
[01:10:06.640]of difference and territory, of you know,
[01:10:09.460]we were here first, we were hard working,
[01:10:11.400]we came, we didn't get handouts,
[01:10:12.970]all of those sorts of very stereotypical reactions
[01:10:16.350]to an immigrant community, absolutely are there.
[01:10:19.249]But the kids, talking, getting to your question
[01:10:22.050]about generation, the schools are at the forefront of this,
[01:10:25.020]and that's also a common part of immigration history,
[01:10:27.760]right, that school and workplace are where contact happens,
[01:10:31.690]where Americanization happens, where learning
[01:10:33.350]how to speak English happens.
[01:10:36.810]But Lewiston High School is an interesting high school.
[01:10:39.440]25% of Lewiston High School is now African.
[01:10:43.770]25% of Lewiston High School.
[01:10:45.900]But 75% of Lewiston High School
[01:10:47.820]is on free or reduced breakfast and lunch programs,
[01:10:51.127]so Lewiston's biggest problem
[01:10:53.310]is white intergenerational poverty and opiate addiction
[01:10:57.810]and those things, right, not immigration.
[01:11:00.470]Immigration is turning numbers around
[01:11:02.820]that Lewiston needs to have turned around.
[01:11:05.520]So you have, it isn't really as much of a generational thing
[01:11:09.010]as a who sees this as a way forward,
[01:11:12.350]and who is entrenched in the past,
[01:11:15.920]because there's still many in Lewiston
[01:11:17.620]who think its best days are in the rearview mirror,
[01:11:20.170]and that's something that needs to be turned around.
[01:11:26.529]We'll take one last question.
[01:11:29.103]Coming up on the 50th anniversary
[01:11:32.551]of the Mexico City Games, and certainly,
[01:11:34.050]your seminal work, what are,
[01:11:37.009]my question is maybe twofold.
[01:11:37.920]One, what was one of the interesting realities
[01:11:41.640]that you discovered, or the followup to that,
[01:11:45.900]what were the unanswered questions
[01:11:47.340]that you always were curious about
[01:11:49.050]learning more about, that you wanted to work on,
[01:11:52.310]to hearing your research on that,
[01:11:54.001]and what is maybe, what was one of the most obvious myths
[01:11:58.120]that you think was perpetuated about it?
[01:12:01.160]Sure, I think the most perpetuated myth
[01:12:03.440]is that their medals were taken away from them.
[01:12:06.037]People argue with me about that a lot, yes, they were.
[01:12:09.420]No, they weren't, Tommie has his medal.
[01:12:12.540]In terms of missed, I wish I'd spent more time
[01:12:14.230]on Peter Norman, Peter Norman is the third man
[01:12:17.870]in the famous photo, the white guy.
[01:12:20.450]He's the Australian who just kicked out Carlos
[01:12:24.700]for the silver, and he wore an OPHR badge,
[01:12:28.070]and he was really crucified in Australia
[01:12:31.280]when he went home, for doing that.
[01:12:32.590]He had asked the guys beforehand,
[01:12:34.050]he said, you know, I'm not gonna do this,
[01:12:36.030]but he asked for an OPHR badge as an ally,
[01:12:38.640]sort of before we even had,
[01:12:40.680]we didn't talk about allies then,
[01:12:43.310]but this was a sprinter from Australia who wore the badge,
[01:12:46.220]and I wish I had spent more time focusing on Peter.
[01:12:50.960]Tommie and John were both pallbearers at Peter's funeral.
[01:12:54.662]It was an interesting connection.
[01:12:56.650]It was one of those sort of Jesse Owens
[01:12:58.620]and Luz Long connections that has maybe passed in the night
[01:13:01.250]very quickly in this really critical moment,
[01:13:03.623]but it was a relationship that historically,
[01:13:06.120]I think, was really meaningful, so that's,
[01:13:08.439]I was gonna think, something that I missed
[01:13:10.007]and I wish I had sort of gone after more aggressively,
[01:13:13.040]it would be Peter's story.
[01:13:16.710]All right, well thank you all
[01:13:17.543]so much for coming, are we done?
[01:13:19.003]Thank you so much. (audience applauding)

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2018 Pauley Lecture

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