The high flying girls who desegregated America

Today, we're talking about a time-honored American tradition, like no other, cheerleading. Consider the cheerleader you have in your mind. Maybe she's bubbly and sweet, like Sandy from Grease. Maybe she's shrewd and calculating, like Santana from Glee. No matter what you think of her, the point is that the cheerleader has become one of America's defining images, symbolizing femininity, youth, beauty, and so much more. But behind the pom-poms and soft sneakers is history that reveals so much about who belongs in America and what social capital that belonging affords you. To get into that history, I'm here with Dr. Natalie Geis-Adams and Dr. Amira Rose Davis, contributors to the cheerleader. Natalie, Amira Rose, welcome to It's Been a Minute. Thank you. Yeah, happy to be here. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute. From NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. And a reminder, if you love It's Been a Minute, which from the sweet comments y'all have been leaving, it sounds like maybe you do, be sure to follow or subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app. That way you get new episodes the moment they drop. I actually was not a cheerleader, but I did something very similar. It's called, I'm about to get real Midwestern here. It's called pom-pon. The second one is an N, pom-pon, which is like a combination of dance, cheer without cheering, and drill, kick line, all kind of put together. And you do it with pom-poms to music at the halftime show at like a basketball game and like homecoming, things like that. So that's what I did for years. But yeah, I mean, I got a lot out of it. But first, I want to go back in time, because I think a lot of people don't know what it's like to be a cheerleader. I want to go back in time. I want to go back in time, because I think a lot of people don't know what it's like to be a cheerleader. I want to go back in time, because I think a lot of people do not know the roots of cheerleading. I'm going to be honest. I certainly didn't until I read this book. What was cheerleading in its earliest form like? How did it become a status symbol? Yeah. Just starting back from the very beginning. I mean, the first cheerleaders, you know, supposedly were in 1869 with the first football game. And of course, they would have all been white men. And fans watching this football game, the first intercollegiate football game, and they just break out spontaneously in this cheer that had actually been borrowed from the military during the Civil War. It's now called the Princeton Locomotive. And it's rah, rah, rah, tiger, tiger, tiger, sis, sis, sis, boom, boom, boom, ah, Princeton, Princeton, Princeton. I'm not feeling the poetry of that. I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not feeling the poetry. It doesn't slap. But I could see how back then it was exciting. Yeah, and it was a military cheer. But, you know, it just evolved. Cheerleading evolved as football evolved. As football grew in popularity, this idea of men being, you know, supporters on the sidelines just became a very high status position. Also, it was often the basketball players and baseball players who would often be the cheerleaders for the football team. Interesting. And so you just see cheerleading evolve to being very. Respected, considered very congruent with the masculine norms of the day. These were men that were being prepared for leadership in the new industrial order. There's a great quote from 1911 where it says that being a cheerleader is only secondary to being that of a quarterback in terms of promotion to public life. So it becomes incredibly just very male dominated. Lots of various, you know, attempts to keep women out. But when you ask what finally changed, well, what changed was the war. Women slowly started entering cheerleading, but it wasn't until World War Two when men left college campuses to go, you know, fight in the war that the spots came open and the women took over. And when the men returned, they kind of wanted to say, thank you for your service. Goodbye. And the women were like, no, no, no, no. We we like. We like it here. And then you see a complete change to the feminization of cheerleading, which is basically complete by the 1950s. And it's really interesting. I just want to really underscore this point of how policed it was. And so I obviously study a lot of black schools, historically black colleges and universities at this time. And there's also the series of letters in the hilltop at Howard, for instance, in the early 1900s, where there's a lot of argument because there's a lot of argument about the black women and the black women and the black women and the black women and the black women at the football game who were cheering, not as official cheerleaders, just as spectators who got reprimanded and told that they were not behaving in a ladylike fashion. So one of the things I track at this kind of 1920s as they're embracing modern Negro womanhood, they're saying as a marker of their modernity, they're saying, why should we not have school pride? Why should we not be able to cheer? That is absolutely part of what we're seeing. I don't know what modern Negro womanhood is, but they're literally defining their modernity in the fact that they are doing something like cheering because of how understood it was to be masculine. Yeah, I want to talk more about that. I mean, I think when most people think of cheerleaders, they're either thinking of depictions similar to those in like Greece, or maybe Bring It On is a more modern example. But like, I feel like even in Bring It On, which was made, I believe, in either 1999 or 2000, somewhere at the turn of the century there. This is a film that is still. It's still playing with this very mid-century image of who the cheerleader is and how she behaves. What were the cultural ideas coming together in the 40s and 50s that formed this idea of the quote-unquote classic cheerleader? Yeah, well, I think there's this whole notion of post-war American nationalism, and that is represented so much by the kind of male athlete, and as the representation of not only their own. individual superpower, but reflected in the U.S. as the new superpower. And the girl at his shoulder is the cheerleader, and she is the feminine ideal. She's the woman of the 1950s that we think of so, you know, stereotypically, who's there to support this new America, this new prosperity, this new sense of nationalism. And she has to have all of the markers of what is kind of seen as ideal femininity at the time. I mean, there's a great list. It's published in 1959 of the traits that are expected of a cheerleader. And it's things like cheerfulness, willing to help others, optimism, attractive physical appearance, which is just embodied in this notion of the 1950s woman or girl who's there to support this new sense of masculinity and this new sense of men who are going to make America be this new superpower. And this all coalesces. It's with the cheerleader. There's a hierarchy. And you see this played out all the time. I mean, there's almost any movie that's about American high schools, particularly during the 80s and 90s, would have the cheerleader as the top of the pecking order. Yeah. I mean, talk to me a little bit more about this. Like, how have movies and TV kind of perhaps, like, perpetuated or even complicated the trope of the cheerleader? Because the cheerleader kind of is like a symbol at this point. Well, if you put a cheerleader on screen, you don't need to do that. You don't need to do that much more to convince the audience to have a certain kind of reaction. Yeah, I think we're in a really interesting time point in terms of media representation. Of course, we're coming off the success of shows like Cheer, which brought us inside of competitive collegiate cheerleading in new ways and caught the country by storm when it premiered on Netflix. Like I said, Bring It On was what I grew up on. But then you also have, like, shows, cult classics like But I'm a Cheerleader, which talked a lot about sexuality and cheerleading playing with the assumptions that, you know, people had around cheerleaders. But I think that for me, one of the things that has come across because of things like new media, YouTube, TikTok, whatever, is a clear distinction in now celebration of Black cheer culture that didn't exist in, like, a lot of media representations when I was growing up at all. And you had Bring It On, but you didn't necessarily have any idea of drill teams or majorettes or Southern cheer. Culture, anything like that, which now you can access through TikTok or YouTube or, you know, wherever, wherever people get that. But one of the things that I pay a lot of attention to is how even in those movies like Bring It On, when it was screen tested, there was not a lot of resonance with a movie about middle class white cheerleaders. But what they found was that their audiences really resonated with any time the Black cheer squad was kind of played off of them. They actually reshot extra. They actually reshot extra content with the Black cheerleaders that are not in the movie, but were used in the trailer to draw people in. So we see that Bring It On's success was not necessarily that it was a movie centered on cheerleading, but that was a movie about racial politics using cheer as the thing that audience gravitated to. And then they were able to obviously work a lot with that. I'm glad you bring that up because, Amira Rose, your chapter, it dives into how cheerleading was for young Black girls. girls in the 1950s and 60s. I'd like to hear from you about what this sort of, I guess, cheerleading aesthetic of that time might have been like for Black girls. Yeah. Absolutely. So the chapter that I wrote in this book, I co-authored with Dr. Paulina Serrano, and we do a comparative kind of racial politics of cheerleading. She's looking at Mexican, Mexican-American girls. I'm looking at Black girls in the 50s and 60s. And it's really interesting because this ideal, like all-American girl wholesome goal, and it still confers status. But in Black communities, it takes on a lot of respectability politics. So you see a lot of colorism at play. I have a lot of oral histories with Black cheerleaders who talk about how they wanted to be on cheer, but they were too dark, so they were a majorette instead, or they were on drill team instead. Also, if you just read Black newspapers for the Black girls and women that they are celebrating, usually they give like a short rundown of their markers as like race, race, race, race, race, race, race, race. And they're race ladies, people who bring pride to the race. And one of the first things that help market them as respectable is she's a cheerleader, right? And so you have a racial politics for sure, but intra-racially, there starts being status attached to cheerleading that enforces ideas about colorism and racial hierarchy in terms of proximity to whiteness, in terms of skin tone. You see less policing of body type. So curves are, are not as big of a deal because Black girls are, you know, have a lot of different body diversity, but you still have ideas about how bodies should look, how hair should be worn. And then certainly again, about what kind of character you are. So you're wholesome, you're still the girl next door. And one of the reasons why is because that use of the symbol of cheerleader as all American girl meant that in many Black girls, you're still the girl next door. And one of the reasons why Black high schools and in universities, getting a Black girl to be a cheerleader, right, was a way of saying she is also all American girl. And certainly around this time, you also see a lot of cases as integration is slowly happening, right, in some spaces where this becomes a huge area of focus. Well, yeah, I mean, I mean, your chapter really dives into like how cheerleading overlapped with the movement to desegregate schools up to and following, you know, Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954, which formally desegregated the public school system. How did students use cheerleading as a vehicle to gain equality? Yeah, cheerleading to me is so interesting, because it lets us get a window into integration in three very important ways. One, it centers on Black girls who identified this as what they really wanted out of this moment in time. And so often when we talk about histories of school desegregation, we're talking at like a pretty zoomed out political level about what's happening politically, and lost in it are what students actually wanted, or why they would put themselves on the front lines to integrate a school or anything like that. And what you see here is that they wanted to have high school experiences that they understood to be things that American high schoolers got. And the gap between what they wanted and what they received in terms of these desegregated schools for them was exactly how they knew integration was not all it was cracked up to be or working in the way that it was promised. One of the ways that they identified this was simply how difficult it was to actually get on to white cheerleading squads if they were going to schools that were desegregated to like had large white populations. One of the cheerleaders that I quote a lot says, you want our boys to play for you, but you don't want us to cheer. And what they're doing is they're extracting black male athletic labor to help your football team, right? But the threat of having black cheerleaders on the sideline in highly visible places, right? That's not labor you're extracting from. That's a symbol that you're attaching to your institution. And the fact that they couldn't get on to the sideline for them was a marker of the fact that these new institutions were happy to extract from the black community, but not embrace it or put them anywhere where they would be visible representations of these schools. So that fight for the sideline actually reveals a lot about the process and the limits of school desegregation through the eyes of teenage girls. Coming up after the break, you can be girly, girly and be an athlete, right? You can be confident and assertive and, you know, still be feminine. And I think cheerleading really offers this space. Stick around. Going on these stories. I mean, you're touching on athleticism, gender, race, colorism, gosh, civil rights. But also, I mean, at the end of the day, like, these are really foundational experiences that young people are having as they're starting to build their self-concept. I mean, it's kind of devastating to hear about, but also, how do I put this? Unsurprising when you talk about the limits of integrating schools to begin with. So one of the things that I like, the flip side of the conversation we just had about the limits of integration, is that this was a place where we see cheerleaders on the front lines of a lot of activists organizing because they are positioned as leaders and they can control crowds and they can get everybody in line. And I just want to say that part of this history that really surprised me, I was asked to write about the history of black cheer protests. And literally, when I went back to my archive, it was everywhere. And all of these walkouts that I knew had happened, when I went through the archives, I realized they had started over a cheerleader or a cheerleader agitating for a spot. Paulina writes about the Crystal City walkout, which is a huge organizing walkout as part of the Chicano movement. And it starts with claims about getting Chicana girls access to be cheerleaders. And once I was able to understand that, not only was it being dismissed as frivolous at the time, but that we had inherited that historically to dismiss it as frivolous. Saying what happens if we view this history from this vantage point of the sidelines, what do we uncover? And at the heart of this is that we uncover how teenage girls in the mid-century were articulating their own desires of what it meant to be a citizen, what it meant to be becoming women in this society, what it meant to be athletic, what it meant to be integrating schools. It's right there if we go to what they cared about. And they didn't care about it because it was frivolous, but because they understood precisely what social capital it could afford them and because they liked to do it. What we're really getting at here too is that now cheerleading is so legitimized and so flourishing as a sport. I remember being a kid and watching cheerleading competitions, I think come on ESPN sometimes, and just being totally wowed. Everything that they were able to do. I was like, they're not doing this at my local high school. There's so much about cheer that has become professionalized as a sport, almost like football or basketball or any of these other sports that people look at and think, oh my gosh, there's so much athleticism here. We recently had an episode where we talked about the NFL and the cultural lessons that young boys learn about masculinity via participation in football. What are some of the lessons that young girls learn about femininity that come via cheerleading? Well, I think that because cheerleading has changed so much as a reflection of changing ideas about gender for girls and women and the big significant change in cheerleading occurred after Title IX was passed and the cheer industry recognized that the sports that were open to girls, this is going to take them away from cheerleading. And so Jeff Webb, who had just created this new company called Varsity, which is now the largest cheerleading company in the world, he was smart. He was young. He was in tune with what was going on. He was like, we got to change cheerleading. And so they very intentionally introduced gymnastics and acrobatics and introduced the championship. All that to say is that cheerleading changes as gender norms change. And I think cheerleading today is very much reflective in a lot of ways of third wave feminism or post-feminism, whatever you want to say. And I think that's a big part of it. So I think that that's the lesson that for a lot of girls, it's a great space to be able to be this kind of you know whatever you want to call it today this the alpha girl the new girl the you know whatever the post-feminist girl that you don't have to make choices right I do think that there are some lingering racial politics too that still enforce the status symbol that comes with cheerleading I think all of that has made it certainly legitimized as a sport as athletic thing but also that hasn't necessarily disrupted some of the things that we associate with cheer in terms of how bodies should look in terms of this interplay between being wholesome and being sexy and and being perceived being seen representing these schools or these you know these teams or whatever and I think that you see that with even shows like cheer my friend has a daughter in cheer competitions and the hotel the uniforms all of these spaces that you're going to the the competitions means that it's also a middle class upper middle class wealthy sport which confers status on it as well but also means that the access points that we're talking about to what this sport is and what it's become is still something that is very out of reach for many many girls because the the entry fee is too high we're in a moment where we see that kind of being wrestled with and I think that's a really important thing to be aware of and I think that's something that we're going to be able to see as well I wonder we've talked about cheerleaders as symbols and icons and also talked about like the real life experiences that many people have had as cheerleaders and all of the ways in which our ideas about cheerleaders and how they actually are in real life don't necessarily line up what does that say about how our society views women well first I do want to make one point about because I think it's important for people who listen to this we call cheerleading a sport but the NCAA has yet to declare it a sport what but you know that that doesn't surprise me because when I did pom-pon we were an activity uh even though we we practiced like nine months out of the year ten months out of the year but we were an activity and not a sport yes yes I just want to make that point because there will be people calling in and and you know telling you if we say cheerleading is a sport that well actually it's not so just to say that um I think it's yes but you know I will say that the difference between the ways in which cheerleading is represented and the realities of cheerleaders lives I think cheerleaders themselves would tell you they love it it is their passion it brings them great joy and they will set make sacrifices for it even sacrifices on their bodies which was very much emphasized in that about how many you know cheerleading is is you know has a high rate of injuries and so I think for cheerleaders they just the the cheerleaders and I've interviewed you know hundreds of cheerleaders over the years they all just want respect and that is why actually having the official designation as a sport because the that in and of itself brings status and legitimacy and so for a lot of cheerleaders it's this idea that we just want to be treated with respect and to be appreciated for the hard work with that we do but you know Brittany you asked why we cling to this iconic image of cheerleading and the gap between that and these real experiences it's because what does it mean to be as a woman not a silent smiling symbol right but an actualized human with nuance and attitude and ideas and a voice right and I think the the durability of the iconic image of cheerleader tells us absolutely a lot about how our society understands women and how they're able to be a part of the community and how they're able to and ideas about femininity and the pedestal on which it's placed but also the prison in which it's placed I write about symbols a lot the gap between what we know about somebody like Rosa Parks who's a symbol and her real lived experience is another place where we can see that what you can do with a symbol and what you can make a symbol do for you gets really complicated if you hear like the nuanced experiences of those people and I think that's a really important part of the participants which is one of the reasons why telling stories about cheer and centering voices of cheerleaders are so essential because it is a way that we can challenge symbols that would otherwise be fixed and I will end by just saying we've seen this as a really important battleground for labor rights for professional cheerleaders right because they are not they're paid dust compared to the men's professional sports teams and it's not only the pay it's the way that they have been treated it's the harm sexual abuse and harm that's been experienced it's really arcane rules that are still on the books and there's been a series of lawsuits in the last decade from professional cheerleaders who've brought in lawsuits labor lawsuits against their employers for the way that they were treated for some really sketchy you know media events that they were flown out to do for bodily autonomy for health care provisions and protections for all of these things so the professionalization of cheerleading also gives us a way to center as a labor issue the lawsuits that the cheerleaders brought the professional cheerleaders brought in 2017 preceded the me too movement wow and they are not included in the me too movement so for my you know when I have to sometimes fight about cheerleading with some of my fellow feminists I'm like you know what quit trivializing cheerleading because these women were coming forth not only about labor disputes but about the fact that they were not included in the me too movement so for my you know sexual assault about toxic work environments and you look up the history of the me too movement you don't see the cheerleader so it's just a further indication of how cheerleaders are in this liminal space that you know they they don't get any respect from you know the even academic scholars which is the reason why I've you know wanted to bring academic scholars together to write this book because and they have so much respect for the me too movement so I think it's so much to offer but and you know I'm like telling my friends my feminist friends well you know how about including cheerleading in in your history of of the me too movement right because they they were there wow wow this conversation is really going to stay with me I I really appreciate this chat so much Natalie Amira Rose thank you both so much thank you thanks for having us that was Dr. Natalie Geis Adams and Dr. Amira Rose Davis contributors to the cheer reader this episode of it's been a minute was produced by Corey Antonio Rose this episode was edited by Nina Potok our supervising producer is Cher Vincent our executive producer is Barton Girdwood our VP of programming is Yolanda Sanguini all right that's all for this episode of it's been a minute from NPR I'm Brittany Luce talk soon you