Hey, Flintbroughes. To say this week has been exhausting, almost is inadequate of a description. To be a black woman in sports, to be a black woman in the academy, to be a black woman,

has left me bone dead tired. It feels like every day there's a new story, whether it's

Shikari Richardson and over penalization for something that is a legal activity in multiple states and has no bearing on the

outcome of a race, whether it's Breonna McNeil needing to talk about personal trauma and abortion

in order to plead her case for her suspension to be overturned, whether it's Afro swim caps being banned from the Olympics

or multiple athletes being told they're not female enough to compete, whether it's Maria Taylor

and a continued reminder about how people will talk about you, specifically white women,

weaponize gender and paint black women

into a corner in which they're undeserving, their affirmative action recipients, or they're somehow

only in their position for diversity points. Whether it's the ongoing tenure drama with Nicole Hannah-Jones or the names we don't know

of black women in very similar positions, it has felt like a constant deluge of reminders

of the state of being. And two weeks before that, Naomi Osaka impressed upon people, A, she's not playing around,

and B, what does it look like to take mental health, specifically black women's mental

health seriously, but also the exclusion of people like Midge Purse or Nekogumakeh from national teams,

I would just say that this past month has basically had me in my Black Girl feelings.

And to process that and break it down and understand how all these things feel intersecting and overlapping

in ways that I cannot disentangle, even if the context for each of

these things are certainly something to think about. The overwhelmingness of it is the fact that

they're compounding. And so I had to call up my friend and co-conspirator Courtney Cox,

assistant professor of indigenous race and ethnic studies at the

University of Oregon and a brilliant mind on race and sports and cultural politics and transnationalism

and diaspora and all the things. So Courtney, welcome back to Burn It All Down. Thank you so much for

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