What football tells us about race, labor and power

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The way football is played and who plays it — from the pee-wees to the pros — tells us so much about race, labor and power in the United States. In a conversation with cultural anthropologist Tracie Canada we explore how starting from young ages, Black players are nudged towards more physically taxing positions that require more strength, athleticism, speed. That affects who gets injured, how they're cared for and how they get paid.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Technologist Powell Garcia is using AI to create photos of people's most precious memories.
0:08.0	How her mother was dressed, the haircut that she remembered.
0:12.2	We generated tens of images and then she saw two images that was like, that was it.
0:18.2	Ideas about the future of memory.
0:20.6	That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR.
0:24.1	Just a heads up, y'all.
0:25.1	This episode is going to contain some salty language,
0:26.9	which means it's fitting to be some cousin.
0:30.6	What's good? You're listening to Code Switch.
0:32.9	I'm Gene Demby.
0:34.3	By the time you hear this, the winner of Super Bowl 59,
0:37.3	will be decided, but since
0:38.8	we're recording this before the game, I can't really know if my Eagles have won. Let me back
0:45.8	up a little bit. Let me just do some storytime with you. So when I first met my now wife,
0:50.6	one of the things we found out we had in common was football. Like when we first started kicking
0:54.9	it, she would come over to my crib on these fall Sundays with her big ass 49ers scarf and she would
1:00.8	drape it over the back of my couch. It was really long. Like fit the whole length of the couch.
1:05.1	And I'll put on my Eagles fit the hat, you know what I mean? And we'd settle in, put on NFL Red
1:09.9	Zone. That's this channel where you can basically watch all the action across the league that day.
1:16.2	But with no commercials, you're just guzzling straight from the hydrant of football.
1:20.9	And my now-wife used to get so mad when the Niners lost.
1:26.2	She would just have a stank attitude for the rest of the afternoon.
	...

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