Hey everyone, Just a note that we discuss offensive, racist, and sexist language in this episode. In two thousand and seven, the Rutgers College women's basketball team had a Cinderella season. Despite a rocky start and relative inexperience, they fought their way to the final four.
Have to be so impressed with what Rutgers has done. It was tournament they have just been sent.
Ultimately, they would lose the championship game to a powerhouse Tennessee team, but the Rutgers women had still achieved the unthinkable.
When we returned to New Jersey, it was almost as if we won. Our fans were so supportive, they were so welcoming.
And then the morning after the game, a hugely popular shock jocks named Don Imuss got on the air.
So I watched the basketball game last night between a little bit Rutgers in Tennessee the women's final.
And with a string of racist and sexist comments about the predominantly black team, I mis diminished their remarkable achievement and threw them into a national firestorm. I'm Susie Bannacharum and I'm Jessica Bennett, and this is in retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.
And that we just can't stop thinking about today.
We're talking about a college basketball team that was thrown into the national spotlight against their will, but we are also talking about who is allowed to respond in anger when they are publicly targeted, and who gets centered when these stories get told. This is part one. Jess, do you remember this story? Do you remember when this all happened?
Yeah? I actually have quite a vivid memory of it because I was in Newsweek at the time as a young reporter, and Newsweek, who would do the story of the week every week on the cover of their magazine, put this on the cover. I remember the headline was race power in the Media, and it had an image of the basketball team against I Miss, looking sort of stern and forlorn, and it was a huge deal.
Yeah.
I was at ABC when this happened, and it was kind of an unavoidable story for a few weeks, right. It just completely dominated national headlines, so much so that I think there was a poll at the time where people said they felt like it was getting too much coverage, which is something we experienced a lot in media. I think stories become red hot, and then they're sort of obsessed over and then people kind of move on.
And it's interesting too because I guess don I Miss was huge, That's what I learned when this story came out. But I had never heard of him, Like, I don't know if that was kind of an elite East Coast thing to know about him, or maybe I wasn't running in those circles. I remember he didn't. He famously wear cowwabs. He had this essence to him. He was hugely popular, but I at the time was like, who the hell is?
Yeah, weren't his demographic And I think also just we didn't commute to work in a car, so we weren't as likely to be into talk radio, right.
Well, okay, and so I remember him being a shock dooc. I remember this story was a huge deal, but I don't really understand sports.
I'm not a big sports person either, as you know.
Yeah, I understand them enough, but I'm not a huge sports person either. And so what exactly does he say? And why?
So we didn't play the don Imus comments in the introduction because I have to say they're quite jarring. I remember hearing them all the time when it happened, but for some reason, going back and listening to them again feels really strange. They're so offensive. And I'm going to play them for you now because I do think it's important to hear them for yourself. But let me give you a little context. The Rutgers women's basketball team has
made it to the Final Four. They've had this crazy season where they were not expected to be a powerhouse team. They are having this amazing moment. And the next morning, don Imus gets on his radio show that he does every morning.
Wait and quickly, how many people are tuning in too, iMOS at this point?
Oh?
Millions.
He has millions of daily listeners across the country. He's available on more than seventy stations, and in addition to that, his show is actually simulcast on cable on MSNBC. So he wasn't just a radio show. He was also a morning show on television where they literally just filmed him and his crew at the MIC's in the studio.
Oh okay, just talking. It's like very early podcast.
Yeah, very early podcast. And roughly an additional three hundred thousand people are watching on TV right. It's a sizeable audience, and he has a lot of influence.
Okay, so back to the comments.
Yeah, so the comments come on April fourth, two thousand and seven, the same day the team has returned home from the championship game and at the end of this historic season, and don Imus has this exchange with his executive producer on the show.
So, I watched the basketball game last night between a little bit of Rutgers in Tennessee, that women's final. Awesome rough girls, some Rutgers man, they got tattoos, and some hardcore hos.
That's a nappy.
Headed dolls there.
I'm gonna tell you that, Jesus. It's like, you know how they talk about bystander intervention. It's like, these are these guys who are just like egging each other on, and there's no sand person in the room to be like whoa hey, Like it's not funny, and what you're saying is deeply offensive.
Yeah, it's just disgusting.
And there's something so stark about how casually he's talking about this group of college girls. And also something that really bothers me about it is the way they're giggling, like they just love how funny they're being.
Right. The other thing I think is interesting is that he often would say, don I miss that it was like a locker room.
He would say that his show was like a locker room.
Yeah, like this is a locker room.
Oh wow, that is much more meaningful now and the Trump era, Yes.
It makes me think of that whole thing when Donald Trump was like, oh, I said I grabbed women by the pussy, and it was just locker room top.
Locker room talk. So this is don Iamss's personal locker room.
And I think that's what's hard to listen to here, the idea that this is just what a group of white men say to each other when they think no one's listening.
Or except.
Right, like, they felt comfortable saying this. They did not feel like this was wrong in any way. They don't seem even a little hesitant about it.
And you actually cut some of this. This isn't even the full clip.
Correct. Yes, there's a longer version of this.
We did not include all of it because everything they say is really offensive. And the part that really got the most attention at the time was when and I just want to say, even repeating this makes me uncomfortable, but when he called them nappy headed.
Hose right, I remember that as being the headline.
Yeah, and that's a really complicated insult. We'll get into why that has cultural and racial underpinnings that make it even more offensive than you might initially realize. But again, these are kids, these are girls, and he's calling them horse.
This is the kind of trash that don iMOS was known for. Correct. But who was iMOS? Can you tell me more about him?
Yeah? So he was kind of an odd character.
He was this really tall, lanky man who always wore a cowboy hat and he carried a gun for protection. He had this very famous ranch in New Mexico he would go to a lot of the time when he wasn't recording, and in the eighties he actually had a pretty serious alcohol and cocaine problem and admitted later that he was often drunk or hot during the show. So even though he was really popular, he was very erratic, Like he missed one hundred days of work in one year.
He would sleep on park benches, he would show up barefoot. But he was the number one DJ in the country, so he got away with a lot of that, and then eventually they had to cut him loose and he cleaned up his act and he went and did a radio show somewhere else in the country and eventually made
his way back to New York. So he wasn't under the influence when he made these comments, and he had at this stage established himself as a very mainstream figure in politics and journalism despite this crazy past.
I'm assuming he was a conservative.
No, actually he wasn't conservative. In fact, he had endorsed Bill Clinton in his first run. So what's interesting is he was kind of equal opportunity. He to stand all politicians and railed against them and said they were all phonies. But he did occasionally endorse some and Bill Clinton was one of those. But what's interesting is that the audience was most likely Republican and conservative, because Republicans and conservatives were about twice as likely to listen to talk radio
at that time. And I think the thing about Don Imus is his audience was very varied, meaning a lot of Washington elites listened to him, and also just random Joe blow in the country.
But his famis was very attached to him.
I think partially because he was on the air for so many hours it felt like you were kind of part of this party.
I guess for lack of locker room, this locker room, lock this locker room. Okay.
And so Imus was considered a shock jock, which sounds very like eighties when we say it. Now, what does that mean exactly, other than like doing wild antics?
I think's original old timer crazy.
Yeah.
So this was a term that was first used in the eighties. It's essentially a radio personality who is deliberately provocative and inflammatory and says really offensive things. So that was kind of Imish's shtick anyway, But it was a term most associated with Howard Stern. I don't know if you know Howard Stern. He's a radio personality. He's still on the air now, and he's the person who gave rise to the concept.
Oh, he's the original shockjock.
He's not the original shockjock, but he's the one most people think of when you say the word.
Okay, I'm looking at examples of what shockjocks are, like attempting to sneak toy weapons onto a plane at an airport, blocking off traffic lands in San Francisco during rush hour while his sidekit got a haircut. I don't know what the point of that would be. I do remember Howard Stern always doing like creepy, gross sex things like having women mud russel or other. But I guess I just didn't realize they were like just doing dumb shit.
I mean, it was incredibly juvenile, right, It was just silly. But occasionally, because there was this undercurrent of sexism and racism in a lot of these environments, sometimes the jokes crossed the line into things that were pretty unpleasant. Most
shock docs didn't have the kind of platform. I missed it, right, I miss went from being this kind of thing, right, this kind of jokester who was just calling a politician to ask if he wanted to join show biz, or calling a phone operator and asking her if she wanted to mess around. He went from that to being a more national figure because he actually was kind of intellectual.
So he started to ask people whose books he read and whose ideas he was interested in to join the show, and over time that became a really big part of the show. So Bill Clinton, who I mentioned he endorsed, appeared on his show regularly during his presidential campaign. Senators regularly appeared on the show, and Joe Biden was one of those senators. John McCain, John Kerry, and really famous journalists at the time Tim Russert, who was the host of Meet the Press for a long time at com Brokaw,
who was very famous Blake. It was a commonplace to go for journalists who wanted to mix it up and show that they weren't as stiff or stayed as they appeared on the air. And interestingly, Barack Obama had once been on the show.
And I think that just was because he had a lot of power. Right.
He was on the air for many hours a day, five days a week, and as I said, millions and millions of people were watching, and his influence was very broad. He was reportedly making almost ten million dollars a year when this happened, which sounds like a lot, but his employers at CBS were actually making fifty million dollars a year office show, So he had the kind of power you have for making that kind of money also.
Right, I imagine even someone like Charlotte Mane mcgod or Joe Rogan would probably be the modern equivalent of that.
Right, Yes, probably the closest thing we have. But to be honest, it's just not the same, right because you still make the choice to listen to those guys in a way that if they were on your radio for four hours a day, or on national times and four hours a day.
And you didn't have another option, and you.
Didn't have as many options as we do now, you would just happen upon them a lot. And because there's no obvious modern equivalent, I actually called Jamel Hill, who you and I both know. She's an Emmy Award winning sports journalist who in two thousand and seven was actually an ESPN columnist, and she covered this story as it unfolded.
Don Imus at the time was considered to be probably the most powerful radio personality in America. He had an enormous, massive platform. So if he says something on that show, it's not hitting with a whisper, it's hitting like a thunderclap.
Oh, that's like the perfect quote. It's just making me think back to this team. They're basically kids, they're out of school like Ruckers. That's not necessarily a national brand. They're not in the spolt in that way. And then suddenly like bam, this guy is weighing in on them and it's reaching a million listeners.
Yeah, and Jamal talked about that too.
These women had just played on the biggest stage in their sport. They had a phenomenal season, they were led by an incredible coach, and so in that moment, even with the disappointment of losing in the final four, it was still very much a celebratory achievement for him. And just upon hearing those comments and to see how it went from people celebrating them to them just being degraded in the next moment, it was disheartening, to say the least.
I just really felt for those young people because they had achieved something really, really spectacular, and it just felt like the moment was stolen from them.
You know, in a lot of ways, what Javelle is saying is I wanted to look back at this, this idea of having the moment stolen from them, because obviously we were both working in news when this happened. But I remember, even at the time, it really struck me
how young the team was. You know, it was five freshmen, so we're talking about genuinely eighteen and nineteen year old girls, and as I said, they were a majority black team, and these comments just felt so cruel and ugly at the time, and the headlines were so intense, right it was as if they went from the end of their season where they should have just been able to enjoy that and chill and finally have a moment to reflect to being in the hottest spotlight you could possibly be put under.
Right, and the hottest news story of that moment.
And you and I know that when you get thrust into these really hot spotlights we've worked on these kinds of stories, right, it can feel like it obliterates everything else in your life and that you're just come completely taking it in from all sides, trying to figure out how to navigate it. So I really wanted to understand that part of the story better, and I reached out to Essen's Carson, who is a WNBA superstar. She played for the New York Liberty among others, and is now
a creative executive. But most relevant for this, she was the captain of the two thousand and seven Rutgers women's basketball team.
I just want to know that Essence Carson is like a really big deal. Yeah.
I mean, she's obviously had this amazing career and been able to put this in her rearview mirror. She doesn't actually talk about this very often for obvious reasons. So I was really grateful that she agreed to talk to me, and she said, to really understand how deeply these comments cut at the time, you have to go back and understand what the team had gone through just to get to the championships.
Just that group that was at Rutgers in two thousand and seven, it was a very unique group. We all come from all walks of life, but we all bought into the idea of that championship and how we weren't going to allow the lack of experience be the one sole thing that keeps us away from that.
You've mentioned this a couple of times too, that they were inexperienced.
Yeah, the Rutgers team went into the season as underdogs because they were a very young team. There were no seniors. They had lost a lot of their really strong players that year before, so it was mostly made up of recent high school graduates now starting at the college level. So the beginning of the season was rough. They were losing games. There was a game early on that they lost by forty points at home. That was pretty much unheard of at Rutgers.
It was a tough toll to swallow. It's embarrassing. No true competitor, everyone wants to lose in that but it happened all right, and you know that was that was the beginning of you know, the wake up call.
Okay, wow, so things were going really poorly, but then they turn it around. What does that?
Honestly, it seems like it was just sheer grit.
They had an amazing coach, this Hall of fame coach, Vivian Stringer, who is very famous in women's college basketball, and essence told me that she very aggressively pushed them to get their act together, and they did really coming together as a team.
The world in the beginning was a bit bumpy, but what truly makes a great team is how you overcome adversity. And after overcoming a slow start, we were able to regroup and figure things out, leading us to a Biggia's championship and onto our historic run in the NCAA tournament.
Will you tell me what it felt like going back when you won that last game that meant you were going to the final four, and just did that feel amazing? I just I can't imagine what that felt like.
I'm not sure if there are any words to describe that feeling. It's imagine losing everything and getting it back and at that time winning it all. You know, when you're looking at the Big East Tournament, you know that was just one step, and then it's like, oh, we can keep going, we can keep this thing going. There were just truly no words that can explain that. It was an unreal ride.
For sure.
Oh that's interesting. I really hadn't realized how up and down the season had been for them.
Yeah, it really had been a wild season. But sadly, like all good things, it does come to an end. So, as I said in the introduction, they go up against this powerful, top seeded team in Tennessee for the championship and they lose, but there's still a lot to celebrate.
It was definitely bittersweet. Of course, there were tears shed in the locker room after that loss, because it's like, oh, you were so close. You almost completed the Cinderella story. You were so close. Of course, those feelings set in, but in the same we were reminded that what we had done was amazing. When we returned to New Jersey, it was almost as if we won. Our fans were so supportive, they were so welcoming. The fanfare was amazing.
Even the people at the airport, the firefighters, everyone the entire state of New Jersey was so proud of us. It was like they went on that ride with us, you know, it was like they climbed from the bottom with us. They wanted to remind us that, hey, good job.
I love hearing her describe how they arrived home to this kind of heroes welcome. But at what point then did they actually hear about these comments?
So Essen said she first heard about the comments right after they had a.
PEP rally, immediately after it concluded. It was almost like it was still going on a bit, and I don't remember what we had to do next, because this moment actually kind of just took over everything. I remember coming down and we were on the court and our sid at that time, Stacy Brand, she would handle like the publicity to media requests for the team. She came to me and asked me, did I hear what was said or what happened? And I had no clue what she
was talking about. And then she gave me, you know what happened, blow by blow and even had the transcript, and I was blown away by what was said, mainly because I couldn't fathom anyone being able to say things of that sort live on air. Although I was no stranger to racism and the nuances of it, I didn't necessarily think it would be possible, and especially you know, towards a group of young women and like ourselves.
Had you heard of Don Aimas when this happened. Did you know who he was?
No? No, But I also don't think I was just demographic.
Do you remember when you actually heard it for the first time.
I think I heard snippets at first. It was being played everywhere, so you would hear snippets even if you didn't want to encounter, and you kind of just did.
It's maybe hard to remember now because we don't have radios and televisions on all the time and we're always on our phones, but to describe just how saturated the news was with what she is talking about, like truly, I remember it was on every cable news channel, It was playing on the radio at all times. It was on the cover of the weekly magazines, It was in the paper, and every single article was repeating the comments
over and over and over again. So you can just imagine they get home and suddenly they are just hid in the face with this statement.
Yeah, that really struck me too, because it's just this idea that even if they had wanted to get away from it, they didn't have that choice. Initially, they tried to ignore his comments. They chose to go home early. It was Easter, so they went home to spend Easter with their families. But they were being bombarded with requests for comment, and also just every time they turned on a TV or walked into a store where the radio was on, it was just being played everywhere.
I imagine too, the reporters are like camping out at the school trying to get statements like it probably was a very tabloid esque situation.
Yeah, she said they were being accosted even when they were just like trying to go to class or go to the cafeteria. Okay, but they were trying to see how the story played out before they decided what to do, and the story just kept growing. What's interesting about this is that it was an early example of something going viral, right, Like you can imagine if this happened today, it would be all over TikTok and Twitter immediately, But back then that's not really how a story grew.
Do we know how it initially took off? Who noticed that this had occurred, and how did it spiral from there?
It was actually a guy at Media Matters, which is a left leaning media group, who flagged the clip. He had gotten a tip and he dug it up and he sent it around to their newsletter and then it was stood on YouTube. And YouTube had launched in two thousand and five, so it had just pretty recently become
really huge. And for context, in one of the articles I read, they mentioned that it was such a huge story that this YouTube video had gotten a million hits, which is a lot of hits, but today it would get like ten million hits, right, right, so this might have been like missed or ignored.
That's so interesting because had this happened even a few years before, Yes, he's got this huge following on radio, but like a thing happens on radio and then it's over, you're not recording the clip and sending it around, right like you're not with the call set tape r exactly, So like maybe some people would have been offended, but it would have just disappeared.
Yeah, and that's the world. Don I miss really knew? Right, He'd been a radio host for a long time pre internet, so when the Internet changed the landscape. I think it was a real shift for him, and this was the first time he really came to understand that. And CBS and MSNBC, who were his employers, CBS ran his radio
show and MSNBC simulcasted on the air. I think they were both waiting to see if this would blow over like the other things he had said, because he did have a history of saying really awful things.
I guess I'm asking you to repeat all the awful things, but what are what are some of the awful things? Can you say the ones that aren't that of what are the ones you say?
I mean, I can say them carefully, And yes, he and his merry band of idiots just had this horrible history of saying controversial or offensive things. And I literally cannot go over all of them because there's so many racists and sexist and anti Semitic and homophobic things. I mean, islahob Yeah, they checked all the boxes every day as
far as I can tell. But the one that really stood out to me is that after the Rutger slurs, Gweneiffel, who was this groundbreaking and widely admired journalist and relevant for this conversation. A black woman wrote an op ed for The New York Times about how I Miss had once said about her when she was a reporter for the Time. Isn't the Times wonderful? It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House? Oh wow, right, it's just disgusting.
He said that to her face.
No, he just said it on the air about her.
He said it on the air. Oh my god.
Yeah, he said it on the air about her. And she said she suspected it was because he had once or twice asked her to be on the air and she just hadn't had time to go on, so he had held this grudge against her. But it's just a really terrible way to talk about someone. And you know, I mentioned Howard Stern. Interestingly, Howard Stern and Don Imus did work together briefly in the eighties and then became
bitter rivals. They hated each other for the rest of their careers, and despite his own history of controversy, Howard Stern came forward during this time and said that when they had worked together in the eighties, he had heard I Miss call a black female coworker the N word, and Robin Quivers, who was one of Stern's co hosts said that he had also called her the N word
to her face when they were working with him. Oh wow, okay, and just to put a cap on that, I miss had also called Howard Stern a jew bastard on the air in nineteen eighty four and suggested he should be put in an oven.
Wow. What is mind boggling to me is that this is a man saying these things who then turns around and has all of these really prestigious people on his show.
Right.
I mean, Howard Stern was also controversial, but he didn't have Senator Biden and mckayn on his show, so I think he just didn't reach this level of scrutiny. Another example that comes out after all this is that in nineteen ninety eight, when Don Imss was doing an interview for sixty minutes, he told one of the producers off camera that his executive producer was hired to perform nward jokes. And to be clear, he didn't say the N word. He said the word.
None of these cases he's saying.
And worright right, he's saying the word.
What does that even mean?
What it means is that he want someone making those jokes, and so he hired this man to be the racist on the show so he could be a little less racist.
I guess.
Honestly, it's shocking that he was still in the air.
Yeah, I mean, two thousand and seven doesn't feel like that long ago. So it is shocking that he had gotten away with this blatant bigotree for so long. But the Internet wasn't the same, you know, as it is now, and don Imus wasn't used to being held accountable. So, you know, initially, in the day after he makes the comments, he goes on the air and he says he's heard a few people are upset, but basically everyone needs to calm down because it's just an idiot comment that was
meant to be amusing. But pretty quickly it becomes clear that this time is going to be very different for don Imus.
Susie. Before the break, you were giving us a rundown of some of the terrible things that has said about various people, But the comments he made about the Rutgers women's basketball team really weren't blowing over. So what happened next.
Actually, Jamel Hill, who as I mentioned, was a columnist at ESPN at this time played a role in making sure the comments were heard pretty broadly.
It struck me because of his having that kind of platform and for a lot of his listeners who maybe have never heard about this team or didn't know anything about them, and the very first thing that they hear about is them being called nappyheaded.
Ohs.
He ridiculed them, he demeaned them, he denigrated him. And as a black woman in sports myself during that time, all of those things resonated deeply inside of me, and so I felt like I had to speak out about it and make it known that this crossed so many lines for so many different reasons, from a gender perspective, a racial perspective, and I thought it would be a disservice for somebody not to stand up for those women.
That's so interesting what she's saying in terms of all the different ways that across these lines. How does Jamel make sure that the story gets national attention.
Well, what happens is the day after the comments, Jammel hears them and sends them to the email list for the National Association of Black Journalists, and then they become really widely circulated among black journalists in general, and by the next day, the NABJ issues a statement saying that they are outraged and disgusted and they demand an apology, but also they call for him to be immediately fired.
That's so interesting too, because with so many of these stories like this, it takes someone in some position of power to really raise the alarm on it. And so having someone like Jammel in a position of power who can then reach out to this whole association of black journalists like her, who can put out this statement goes to show why it matters so much to have media representatives.
Yeah, and she actually explains why she thinks there was more of a reaction this time.
It was different because we're talking about college kids and we're talking about young women, and I think it resonated a little bit differently. Sometimes when you have people like that who constantly say the same things or the same type of destructive things about people, it starts to become a little bit of white noise. Not that it was ever right with the other things that he said, but it was who he picked. He had done it before, and there was a track record of him particularly saying
and espousing some pretty dangerous tropes about black women. And finally, I think a lot of people said enough is enough.
I think what Jamal is saying about the tropes is such an important point, and I know that she's going to talk to us about this a bit more later, but I think it's worth noting that part of what she's referring to, I presume, is the incessant conversation about black women's hair texture on how it has been used against them.
Yeah.
I mean, I think this idea that black women men's natural hair is somehow unkempt or untidy or unclean, that is really a racist trope that black women have had to fight against for a really long time. So he is tapping into something with real historical context.
I want to take us back to the timeline. So, Okay, the team has returned, they've gone home for Easter. They are being bombarded by the press. As we just heard Jamal say, the National Association for Black Journalists has now called for his firing. But Susie does don Imus ever finally apologize.
He does finally apologize, so a few days later, when it is obvious that it is not just going to blow over, he issues a formal apology on his show.
Here's what he said.
I want to take a moment to apologize for and in sensitive and ill can sive remark we made the other morning referring to the Rutgers women's basketball team. It was completely inappropriate and madn understand why people were offended. Our characterization was thoughtless and stupid, and we're sorry.
Clearly a scripted apology, not his usual off the cuff remarks.
Right right, not how you expected on I was an issue in apology exactly.
It obviously wasn't like from the heart.
It was clear that he was starting to feel some heat here, but it was too little, too late, and it did not stop the backlash. More and more mainstream press started to pick up the story, and significantly. Al Sharpton, who as you know, is a longtime civil rights activist and who has a big media profile, especially at that time, enters the fray and also demands that I must be fired.
He says that he's happy to accept his apology, but he wants his bosses to accept his resignation as well, so it's not dying down, and Imus agrees to go on Al Sharpton's show, who also has a radio show at this time, as sort of a mia culpa and to deny that he's a racist, and he says that he and his sidekicks were just trying to be funny and that you know, he understands now why it wasn't funny, but that he was never intending to be racist.
I mean, okay, sure, yeah.
Ultimately, though, it starts to get contentious and he makes things much worse because he says at some point to Al Sharpton and his black co host, I can't get anywhere with you people.
It's like, if you're.
Trying to apologize, perhaps you don't use another widely understood racial trope, which is to call black people you people, you people.
Wow.
Okay, So I guess my next question then, is what are his bosses doing while all of this is going on and he seems to be just digging himself deeper.
I mean, this is a great question. They are panicking. By all accounts, they are doing meetings with their internal staffs. Black employees are going to and BC bosses to be like what the hell. CBS is trying to decide what to do. But remember they're making fifty million dollars, so they are very reticent to fire him. So instead they try to just suspend him for two weeks and hopes that that stops the damage, and that is again not
well received. No, and now we really see a cascade of media, people's words, people, politicians, even Obama.
Okay, I was wondering. I had wanted to ask, but I didn't want to mess up our flow.
Great cresident. So, as I said, Obama had been on the show. He was a senator from Illinois. At this time, he has already announced he's running for president, and so people are asking about it, and he does also demand that I must be fired. He says he didn't just cross the line. He fed into some of the worst stereotypes that my two daughters are having to deal with today in America, which does again really remind you that these are just kids.
So is this all happening over days or weeks? What is the timeframe here?
It's really over the course of a week that we get to the apology and then the Sharpton Show and all this backlash, and then finally the team decides that they have to respond. They can't wait any longer because at this point it's really becoming untenable for them to just you know, go to class.
Students. Yeah, so you need to play basket.
So they decide to do a press conference. And here's Essence again on why they decide to do that.
The press conference. Well, the press conference was seen as the best way to move forward. Why because you have a group of young women somewhere in between the ages of eighteen and twenty that aren't only athletes, but they're students. So when you're trying to go to class, or you're trying to, I don't know, go get some lunch at the calf, just basic things, you're being chased by media outlets. You lose your privacy and at the end of the day,
we like to get our education. So I, coacher and the rest of the staff came with the idea of a press conference because then that way you can address everyone at one time. So make sure that we were able to get together collectively and take a stand together and control our narrative because it was already spinning out of control.
Jess, I think, actually this is a pretty good place to end it, with Essence having this last word, because things are spinning out of control, but the team is about to take control of the situation and there will be a turning point with this press conference, so please join us next week for part two and we will tell you all about it. This is in Retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a pop culture moment you can't stop thinking about and want us to explore in a
future episode. Email us at Inretropod at gmail dot com or find us on Instagram at in retropod.
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You can also find this on Instagram at Jessica Bennett and at Susie b NYC. Also check out Jessica's books Feminist Fight Club and This Is eighteen.
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and The Media. Lauren Hanson is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Emily Meronoff is our producer. Sharon Atia is our researcher and associate producer.
Our executive producer from the media is Cindy Levy. Our executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stemp and Katrina Norbel. Our artwork is from Pentagram. Our mixing engineer is Amanda Rose Smith. Additional editing help from Mary Do. We are your hosts Susie Bannaccarum.
And Jessica Bennett. We are also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod dot com. See you next week.