The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Friday, July 3

Hi, all.

Before today’s recommended reading, here’s a shot of OL Reign’s Jasmyne Spencer from this week sporting a headband with the names of Black people killed by police officers.

Ramble of the Day

Last week, Gabrielle Bellot wrote a piece for The Cut about the “glacial march to justice” that Black women experience in cases of police brutality. Bellot references Breonna Taylor, who was killed by police officers in March after they forced themselves into her home without announcing themselves and while looking for someone already in police custody, but names a number of other women as part of a troubling habit to focus less on the oppression of Black women and other women of color.

I won’t add much myself, because Bellot really does the work of outlining the situation, making it essential reading. I will provide a brief excerpt that I found particularly noteworthy (and also works as an introduction better than mine, even though it isn’t the piece’s introduction):

The nation is used to failing Black girls and women. It always has. Their deaths deserve no less fire and fury than those of Black men and white women, and affecting change means also challenging the more discreet forms of violence they face. But the country cannot help those who it fails to see or hear or name.

But when women of color — Black women most of all — react to these abuses with anger, we are all too often reduced to stereotypes; when trans women specifically show anger, we may be criticized for acting “masculine,” as if rage is an emotion exclusively reserved for men. But, as Audre Lorde knew, indignation is a natural response to inequality. “Women responding to racism,” she declared in “The Uses of Anger,” a keynote she delivered in 1981, “means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation.”

It is absolutely worth taking the few minutes to read it, and like the other things I have recommended, explores a few of the layers of systemic racism and sexism faced specifically by Black women.

Links of the Day

A Columbus Crew player tested positive for COVID-19.

USL sides Real Monarchs and Louisville City will have fans in attendance when they return to play next week.

Transfer roundup: Inter Milan signed Achraf Hakimi from Real Madrid; Arsenal signed Steph Catley from Melbourne City

A longer read: David Conn on how Wigan ended up in administration for The Guardian