Journalist Jemele Hill on the intersection of sports and race (revisiting)

In Berkeley Talks episode 205, sports journalist Jemele Hill discusses her career at the intersection of sports, race and culture in the U.S. at a UC Berkeley event in January 2020.

"Sports journalism," began KALW radio journalist Hana Baba, with whom Hill joined in conversation as part of a Cal Performances speaker series. "So you’re growing up, you’re watching TV, you’re reading the papers ... When did you realize that this is a male journalist's space?

"I knew that, but I didn’t know it," replied Hill, author of the 2022 memoir Uphill and host of the podcast Jemele Hill Is Unbothered. "And this is why — whenever I talk about mentorship, I preach this to both mentees and mentors: The first thing you can give a mentee and the first responsibility as a mentor, you need to give them a sense of belonging."

She went on to describe how, when she was in an apprenticeship program for the Detroit Free Press, two women journalists — feature writer Johnette Howard and sports writer Rachel Jones — were assigned to be her mentors.

"So I never knew that it was something I wasn’t supposed to be doing because the very first person I knew that did it was a woman. ... And so because I got that early confidence at the beginning of my career, I just never went through a period of self-doubt, which is totally normal for any woman in a male-dominated space, especially a Black woman. So I was very lucky that I got that sense of belonging early." 

Later on, Hill discussed when NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem throughout the San Francisco 49ers’ season in 2016 to protest racial injustice, effectively ending his football career. 

“I mean, the NFL owners are spineless,” said Hill, who worked for ESPN for more than a decade and was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists in 2018.

“I knew Colin Kaepernick would never play in the NFL the moment Donald Trump said his name … One of the few things that a lot of people unfortunately agree with the [former] president about is that Colin Kaepernick should not be taking a knee. So, he [Trump] knows every time he says his [Kaepernick’s] name, that it is giving him a level of universal support … that he doesn’t experience usually.

“And so what does that say about people in this country? … We just celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, commemorated him. And the same people I saw talking about how great Dr. King was for his nonviolent protest are also the same people who think Colin Kaepernick doesn’t deserve to play in the NFL? … But the NFL, I think, as we have seen in the case with Muhammad Ali, as we have seen is the case with a lot of history, 20 years from now they’ll be telling a different story. They’ll act like all of this never happened.”

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by Daniel Stark/ESPN.

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