- Some say research is me search, and I guess that's how I came to do my research on Black women athletes.

- Imagine going to dinner with me knowing that I have a PhD in nutritional epidemiology and training as a dietician.

- And it was in this moment, I realized that greatness was upon me.

We were all the same, sharing the same skin tones, but so vastly different, the way that we presented ourselves, our dance styles, how we showed up in the world.

(soft, inspirational music) - Some say research is me search, and I guess that's how I came to do my research on Black women athletes.

I was looking for pieces of myself.

You see, touchdown was my first word.

I grew up drawn to sports for many of the reasons we love sports today, the excitement, the thrill, the raw energy, the competition.

As a young kid with ADHD, I was always in motion.

I relished the freedom and the discipline that sports gave me.

I could simultaneously have no regard for, and complete control of my body.

Plus, I love to win.

Basketball, softball, track and field, football, I loved it all, but soccer became my sport until I was 16, then my appendix burst.

Now usually you'd have surgery, a quick two, three day hospital stay and be good to go but, because the doctors didn't believe my symptoms, they didn't get me to surgery fast enough.

I spent weeks in the hospital while they reconstructed my stomach, and I kissed my soccer season goodbye.

It was the first time I had to define myself outside of sports.

Who was I if I wasn't fast?

Who would value me if I couldn't score?

Two years later, a unexpected pregnancy ended my hopes of a college comeback and closed the athlete chapter of my life for good, but my obsession with sports remained, so when I got a chance to do research as a McNair Scholar in undergrad, I knew I wanted to research sports history.

I wanted to find the stories of Black girls like me who played sports, who loved sports.

I wanted to tease out the meanings of their participation.

What I found instead was silence and symbol.

Black women athletes live in the slippage between silence and symbol.

When I started looking for books on Black women athletes, I found nothing, hardly any studies, no reports, no monographs, nothing.

Silence.

Professor Tina Camp says, "A silent portrait of any Black women is unbearable.

Our refusal of words is an invitation to impose a narrative that we have neither authored nor authorized."

When I finally found some Black women athletes, they were in children's books.

Black girls who only have a ball and a dream, but somehow overcome racism and sexism in 20 pages, a narrative that is rarely authored nor authorized.

Why were they so overrepresented in children's lit?

What made Black girls and women athletes worthy of subjects of short children's books, but not serious, scholarly study?

Now, I had a feeling that Black women in sports were more silenced than silent, but their bodies were and are absolutely a sight for imposed narratives, so I set out to find their voices.

I set out to listen, conducting oral histories, pouring over news clippings in old newspapers, looking for records of Black girls in sports in forgotten folders covered in dust, and also in plain sight in the pages of popular histories that had just been completely overlooked, and what I found was a long history of Black women who played, coached, wrote about, managed, cheered, built, maintained, and changed sports.

I found stories that remind us that sports is political, stories that remind us that sports is labor, stories that are messy and tangled, stories that are inspiring and provoking.

I found stories about athletes that I thought I knew, like Wilma Rudolph, where I'd only heard about her polio and her three gold medals, I now learned about her activism, like the time her hometown wanted to give her a segregated parade after coming back from the Olympics, but Wilma refused to go until it was desegregated, the first desegregated event in Clarksville, Tennessee.

I found athletes who I had never heard of before, like Rose Robinson.

In 1958, Rose Robinson was named to the national track team.

She was tapped in a goodwill tour by the US State Department.

It was a Cold War effort, propaganda strategy aimed at demonstrating to the world that the United States was a great place of multiracial harmony.

Rose, however, wasn't having it.

She refused to compete, telling reporters that she had no interest in being used as a political pawn, and when they retaliated, arrested her, and threw her in jail, she staged a hunger strike.

I learned about Whyomia Tyus, who refused to be ignored by her male teammates who didn't think to include women in their protest plans.

She staged her own protest at the 1968 Olympics, and when history forgot her, she wrote herself back in.

These women, and so many more, made a way between silence and symbol, and their legacy is seen in the Black women who refuse today.

Standing on the shoulders of giants, Black women athletes are writing their own narratives, taking up space, building together, and refusing to be satisfied with the crumbs society wants to hand to them.

Leading the way, the members of the WNBA.

Back in 2016, months before Kaepernick took a knee, members of the W shut down press conferences, wore protest shirts, and even refused to back down, even when their own league threatened them with a fine.

Four years later, they kept that same energy, dedicating their 2020 season to Black Lives Matter, and specifically to Say Her Name, working to uphold the stories of Black girls and women who are often overlooked when we talk about police brutality and state sanctioned violence.

And when a former owner tried to use them to bolster her Georgia Senate campaign, they refused to say her name altogether.

Instead, they found a candidate for their values, Reverend Warnock.

When they started campaigning for him, his campaign was polling around 9%.

They helped his campaign to victory, flipping Georgia blue, and literally changing American history.

History, how will this history be written?

Will they become forgotten, silent symbols, only to be found in children's book and annual Black History Month posts?

The histories I tell, they help us see the present more clearly, help us understand that Black women athletes, and Black women in general, are fighting a constant battle to not be erased.

Their lives and stories have so much to teach us if we resist the urge to turn them into one dimensional superheroes, if we can look past celebratory children's book narratives and actually reckon with their words, their action, their nuance, their full humanity.

Black women athletes then and now are not here just to entertain, and they're not simply grateful to be here either, but they're deserving, they're vocal, they're visible, they're unyielding.

Their protest historically has revealed deep hypocrisies of this country.

Their voices now has forced national conversations on pay equity, healthcare, mental health, and more.

Their refusals to shut up and dribble remind us that athletes are workers, and that labor resistance is a key tool for Black liberation, but as Black women athletes from Wilma Rudolph to Simone Biles show, the work that comes after refusal is just as important, lest it be co-opted and commodified or used as a shield to prevent, delay, and disrupt future resistance.

As a child, I poured my energy into sports to prevent disruption in all the other spaces that were hostile to energetic, confident Black girls.

Now, as a researcher and podcaster of sports, I lean into the disruption.

I harness the power of narratives to upend the histories we thought we knew.

Black women athletes, their history and their present, are so much more than convenient footnotes.

Paying attention to why their stories were overlooked, or how they became symbols in children's books actually reveals larger questions about the power and production of history itself.

It asks us, no it requires us to think critically about the stories we tell, how we tell them, and what we do once we know them.

(soft, inspirational music) - So imagine going to dinner with me knowing that I have a PhD in nutritional epidemiology and training as a dietician.

These credentials might suggest that my sole purpose in life is to separate you, particularly you women, from your food.

This however, couldn't be further from the truth.

I am not the Black food police.

As a matter of fact, I'm a simple, country girl from South Carolina who grew up eating fried fish and grits with sliced tomatoes fresh from on the garden.

I also ate steamed oysters, greens, and of course macaroni and cheese, and I'm not talking about the one from the box with that orange powder, but the one with two kinds of cheese, both diced and shredded.

To be clear, I am a southern food foodie.

I love to eat, and since I have a habit of running long distances, okay, very long distances, I can eat a lot.

You see, my mission in life is to inspire women and girls to live active, balanced lives, a life where you can have some cake and eat it too.

So you might be thinking, "Well, how am I going to do that?

", especially when the doctor, the media, and everyone else keeps telling us that we need to lose weight, therefore we need to stop eating the foods that we love.

These messages are reinforced with data stating that Black women are disproportionately affected by obesity, and nearly three out of five of us have hypertension.

So these are the facts, but we Black women, we still have our lives to lead as the managers of our family, but I have some ideas about how we might reimagine our wellbeing.

We can reframe our approach to wellness by experimenting with small changes or new habits until we find what makes us feel better.

The scientific evidence says that when we track our habits, we increase our awareness of our behavior, which allows us to better self-regulate, and to see our progress.

More specifically, when we track our food intake, whether it's on paper or via an app, or if it's in pictures, just the mere act of tracking often results in changes in our food choices, perhaps smaller portions or more fiber, which can contribute to successful weight management.

In a clinical trial of Black women, food tracking was ranked among the top four strategies associated with keeping the weight off.

So let me be clear, this message is not about weight loss.

It's about illuminating how it is possible for us to be well, feel good by becoming more aware of our habits and trying different strategies until we find what works for us.

As a person who has a habit of running every single day for more than 1600 days, I have found that being flexible, running at least one mile each day, allows me to make daily progress towards big goals like completing 100 mile trail races.

And you might ask, "Why?"

Because running makes me feel good, and it reduces my risk of hypertension and diabetes, which run in my family.

I also run with a bunch of other crazy people, which makes it a lot more fun.

Now, I would like for you to focus on how you want to feel, and choose a habit to try, a small change, from eating or serving of vegetables that you like, to getting eight hours of sleep per night, or going for a daily walk to de stress.

Start with something that nourishes and empowers you.

And last but not least, find your tribe or community to support you in your efforts.

I know change isn't always easy, but as the saying goes, "A little bit of something is better than all of nothing."

Thank you.

(soft, inspirational music) - Black, brown, African American, African Indigenous, African Caribbean, African American, Black, Black, Black, Y'all, I had an outer body experience.

For the first time in my academic career of undergraduate and graduate, the entire room was filled with nothing but Black people.

Y'all, it was looking like Wakanda Three up in there.

I'm talking about Michael Jackson "Thriller" Black at the University of Texas Dance and Theater Department.

From the head of the department to the student peer group, everyone in the room was Black, bliggity, Black, Black, And to me, I said in my head, "Yo, why isn't CNN covering this?"

I mean, shouldn't we be in the newspaper?

'cause I mean we are all up in here.

We are Black, we are loud, and we are proud, each one of us in our own unique way.

And it was in this moment, I realized that greatness was upon me.

We were all the same, sharing the same skin tones, but so vastly different, the way that we presented ourselves, our dance styles, how we showed up in the world, and in that class it was a war zone.

I mean, we sharpened each other, we chiseled away, and we knocked off everything that would prevent us from being our whole, authentic Black self out in the academy.

And amidst all of our differences of our Black, I realized, in that setting, that there is no monolithic way to be Black in the academy, and for my people who from the hood, from the southwest like me, there is no wrong way to be Black in school.

So I say if you're hood and Black, then be just that, but if you're intelligent and Black, then be just that.

If you're reserved and Black, then you gotta be that.

If you are ignorant and Black, then just be that.

You know what I'm saying?

There's no monolithic experience for being Black.

And there I was, I was evidence, I was proof.

I mean just as Black as I wanted to be.

I'm a man from the southwest side of Alief, Texas representing hip hop and cultural expression with an attitude, with crazy clothes, talking my talk with cool (indistinct) sneakers at a university that otherwise needed my color, but y'all, I'm not talking about the color of my skin.

I'm talking about my essence, my masculinity, my force as a Black man in a PWI.

I needed to be myself so that I could say to the next generation, "You have the lifting to do now, and you can express that freely."

We have tiptoed, we have code switched, we have tap danced our way into these safe spaces, and for once, we need to let them be uncomfortable.

If they don't know what this means, don't explain it.

You know what I mean?

All I'm saying is that whatever kind of Black you are, you gotta be your Black.

That means to you Black prince watching this, go ahead and do you.

To you Black Princess, Addie Grace, go ahead and do you.

Hold yourself, not only as if you were meant to be there, but you're there to influence the change intentionally for everyone, and so I'll close with this story.

I used to walk on campus, and there was this huge stretch called the drag, and I would always walk and there would be student orgs there all the time, and they would greet people and they'd say, "Hey, how you doing?

Come join our club.

We would love to have you."

But I would walk, and no one would speak to me.

And at first I thought this was odd and I was like, "Maybe you know, I don't know, maybe I'm being standoffish", so I look for eye contact and nothing.

And on occasion when they did ask the question, they would start with not, "We're happy to see you" but "Do you go here?"

And when they asked that question, it wasn't like friendly in a way that like, you understand it, but it's like they could not wrap, or put their minds in the fact that somebody like me, dressed like this, talkin' the way that I do could possibly be here.

And so to that I say, "Yeah, May 2022".

I can proudly say I did go to the University of Texas, and I was the first Black male to ever graduate from the dance department and theater department for dance and social justice, but not only that with honors, but I'm not saying that to brag or flex, like that's not a flex.

The flex is is that maybe, because of representation, the next time that they go to ask that question to you, they won't even ask it, 'cause they know you're supposed to be there.

This next piece that you're about to see is my graduate school experience, what I had to go through, the trials, the tribulations, the undoing, the untethering of old ways and old habits that prevented from me from showing up as my authentic self expressed.

I'm Jarell Howard Rochelle and this is "Be Just That".

Thank you.

(audience applauds) (soft music) Yo, I'm a tell you a story.

It's my story.

Check me out.

Hip hop raised me.

The five elements were my guide stones long before I knew who I was, break dancing, graffiti, EMCing and DJing, and the knowledge of self.

Long before I knew I needed the help, it was from this foundation I learned to express myself, who I was, what I wanted to be, and who I am not.

You see, long before I had teachers, I embodied the culture and rocked my dope sneakers.

A culture birthed by Black and brown unsung heroes who wanted to get away from the gang violence created an alternative sometime ago in the boroughs of NYC.

More than a culture, it was source for establishing my identity.

Hip hop is, to me, loud, flashy, unabashedly honest.

Some would consider this to be rude yet, at the same time, it is welcoming, forgiving, and invites change, even transformation through adaptation just like ya boy.

(laughs) Yet I found those attributes don't translate well in the academy, because as far as my truth is concerned, the academy wasn't built for the Black and brown hues in which hip hop exists.

Check it out off the riff.

When it comes to where I am from, recruiters ain't coming to no jams.

Oh man, you just let the cat out of the bag, and I might have just made a case.

If you didn't like me after what I just said, then this next thing gone to make you groan, "Oh great."

Wait.

I believe the academy attempts to strip us of our Black essence, and that's why we be code switching.

That's why we don't attempt to stick together, and your type of Black isn't my type of Black.

Instead of bearing arms against the enemy and lifting triggers, reminder to all the people in power in the academy for them, us color folks, we still are just- (laughs) You fill in the blank 'cause you already know.

Kanye West raps, "Some people graduate but be still stupid.

They tell you, read this, eat this, don't look around.

Just peep this, preach this.

Teach us Jesus.

Okay, look up now, they done stole your streetness.

After all of that, you received this, Good morning."

(laughs) Not me.

Call me uncultured, call me a illegitimate, call me illegible, I don't care.

To reiterate and reinforce, if you are legible and Black, then be just that.

If you are creative and Black, then be just that.

If you're a wordsmith and Black, then be just that.

If you are smart and Black, then be just that.

Whatever you are, then be just that in this space.

All I'm saying is don't put limitation on your brand of Blackness.

Just be your whole, incredible Black self, and everything will fall into place in this system for there is no monolithic experience for the Black academic, and I think I represent that fact well.

I'm just speaking for the underrepresented, the marginalized, the forgotten from where I am from, the school of hip hop.

I want you to see that if I am up here struggling for you, there has to be reciprocity for me, and the way that you pay it forward is by replacing me where I stand and sharing your story.

Don't let all of this change you, but be the agent of change inside of it.

Yeah, I am the first Black male, hip hop, street, battle legend obtaining my MFA at the University of Texas, and because of that badge of honor, I will keep the hip hop culture in me and on me, stay connected to my community, and continue to spread the word of the legends who paved the way for me to exist, 'cause without all of that, I wouldn't be all of this.

Holler at me.

(soft, inspirational music) (soft, inspirational music continues) (soft, inspirational music fades out) (whistling flute tunes)