Jemele Hill on Controversial Trump Tweet & Why She Left ESPN

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Now, to a woman who is not afraid of speaking her mind. Sports and cultural journalist Jemele Hill, she is no stranger to the challenges that come with being opinionated, black and female. From taking on President Trump to the NFL, she hasn’t not shied away from controversy. And she candidly relieves those experiences in a new memoir called “Uphill.” Here she tells Michel Martin about her difficult upbringing and the comments that nearly ended her career.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Jemele Hill, thank you so much for talking with us.

JEMELE HILL, AUTHOR, “UPHILL”: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

MARTIN: You became a household name, at least among people who follow politics and sports, because of your outspokenness and I guess what we will probably call politics, OK? But this memoir is very personal. You describe some truly painful episodes, not just in your life, but in the lives of the people closest to you like, your mother and your dad’s year’s long struggles with substance abuse disorder. Your grandma and some of the ways in which she clearly stood up for you, and some of the ways when she frankly, you know, failed your mom, and by extension, failed you. And so, I’m wondering, for you, like, what was it like to sort of cross that bridge and decide, I’m not just going to just tell it, but I’m going to tell it all?

HILL: I’ve always been able to have a level of vulnerability and honesty in my writing that, frankly, it was hard for me to have in — you know, sort of in speaking to people, if you will. And so, you know, writing was always this place that was very safe for me. And I thought it was important, especially with very — with certain, like, very serious issues that you take the layer of shame off of it. As you know, there’s a lot of shame in families, especially where sexual abuse has been pervasive or has occurred in these families. There’s a lot of shame, a lot of hiding, a lot of secrecy. And as we have seen, that does no one any good. It is hard to heal when you can’t even speak to it or speak about it or speak honestly about it, any of those things. And, you know, the reason I disclosed I had an abortion is not just about the moment that we are in here in America, in this country, when it comes to how we discuss abortion, but because I knew that there were a lot of women who were like me, who made the decision simply because it was just best for our lives. It wasn’t associated with any trauma. It wasn’t associated to a medical emergency. Made the decision because this is why that access is important and this is what they felt like was best for their lives. And even when it comes to, you know, navigating addiction within your own family or even people who have even suffered from addiction, there are people who, you know, really feel as if they have disappointed themselves, their families and, you know, really have been unable to recover psychologically from what this abuse has done. And so, my way of talking about how my mother and father’s drug abuse has impacted me was to talk about it in such an honest way that those people who have been through those situations, they can relate to them and they understand not only just the mental space that I was in, it helps them understand this space that they’re in, whether they’re trying to figure out how to heal, whether they’re still carrying resentment and anger. And I just think it’s important to bring those issues to the surface because that is the only way that we can communally heal. And so, for me, it was just about, you know, showing people where the transparency and the honesty, just that how it could get you to a such a much, much better place than you are in or think you are in.

MARTIN: A lot of people seem to want to think about sports as this kind of world unto itself. In fact, a lot of people will say it, look this is my escape. But your work, whether you knowingly intentionally chose that or not has always been identified with bringing those worlds together. The things that people are experiencing in their real lives become part of their sporting life. And similarly, sports, and the way as a commentary on the rest of life. Was there a line that you sort of felt you had to cross yourself to give yourself permission or was it just you couldn’t think of any other way to do it?

HILL: I think it became a point where you just sort of can’t think of any other way to have the conversation in sports. And your right, is that, people act like sports in the world are happening in two different universes and they are in the same universe. And so, therefore, everything that is going on in the world impacts what has happened in sports or what does happen in sports. And so, the more I saw these collisions between race, politics, gender, with sports, the more I understood that part of my mission was to write about these messy intersections because it was actually a way of getting people to understand those issues much differently. We are a very segregated country. We do not do a lot of things together. We do not intermix a lot of times. But the one place we do is in sports. Because you can have people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, different nationalities, different genders, all be Laker fans. OK? And they are not a lot of things in this country that force us into that bubble with one another. And so, why not use that opportunity to speak about issues a little differently or to write about them with that sense of awareness? It is why in some — in many cases, sports has been ahead of the rest of society in terms of seeing advancement. Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball in 1947. That was almost 20 years before there was a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act, before, you know, we saw the crumbling of segregation in certain parts of our country, that had already started to happen in sports. And because people saw it in sports, I’m not saying it made them more open to it necessarily, but it had least provided a model that it could be done.

MARTIN: There was a saying, you can’t be what you can’t see. You have often been one of the few, if not, the only, black women in the position that you have been in covering the sports the way you do. Did you always feel conspicuous?

HILL: Yes. I mean, I was always aware. And I think when I was younger in my career and breaking certain barriers then, it felt more like a burden as opposed to a responsibility. My very first college job I got when I was 28 years old at the Orlando Sentinel. I was the only black female sports columnist at the daily newspaper in North America. There are 405 daily newspapers in the USA, Canada and Mexico, and I was the only one. And that was a lot for me to take in. I felt a lot of pressure. I felt a lot of scrutiny. And it — I think it showed up in my writing, like the first — I write about this in the memoir, the first few months I did the job, I wasn’t very good because I was thinking too much about what other people were thinking about the fact that I had this job. And once I was able to kind of get rid of that, it allowed me to, you know, find my voice and write to my standard. Once I got into broadcasting and saw that I was one of the few black women in a visible position, and the distinction of, by the way, being a black woman in commentary, I was not an anchor. So, that means I was driving shows with my actual opinion. And that was not seen hardly anywhere. And, yes, I also was aware it then too, like this comes with a lot of responsibility, but it was a responsibility I embraced, because in my presence, being on ESPN, inspired other women that they could be in the same place and to do it in the way that I was doing it, they did not have to follow my exact career path, but they knew there was more value to them than just being a sideline reporter or being a host and teeing up other people and us hearing their opinions, that there was a place for their actual voice.

MARTIN: You know, you talk a lot about — you’ve kind of alluded to this, but I want to kind of go right at this. Let’s sort of fast forward to this idea of what happened when you criticize the former president, Donald Trump, in a series of tweets in 2017 where you referred to him as a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself with other white supremacists. Now, people think of this as a situation where you were suspended, but that was actually only a couple of hours and you went on the air that day as per usual. What actually got you suspended were some comments that you made about the NFL, you know, subsequently, that’s kind of what led to your leaving ESPN. On the one hand, these kind of major media outlets offer a lot of money, a big platform. On the other hand, it does come with, you know, guardrails. And they get to decide what the guardrails are. And so, when you think about that, like how do you think about this now that you’ve got some distance from it?

HILL: I do think that when you are in traditional media, you understand the assignment and you understand what you’ve signed up for. And ESPN is very visible, it’s the most dominant sports media brand in America, but some version of that had been happening throughout my whole career. I don’t mean just their response to it or, you know, me finding out there are guardrails, they — traditional media has always those throughout my career. You know, if you work at a newspaper, they tell you, you can’t put up any political science on your yard, whether you are covering politics or not, right? There are certain rules you have to abide by in order to work for this place. And that is the trade-off that you make because you feel as if it’s worth it, because you get to tell stories, you get to cover things, you get to impact the world with the content that you are creating. And eventually, you get to a point where you have more lived experience, more leverage, more savvy, where that trade-off is no longer worth it. And they — one of the biggest lessons that I learned from leaving ESPN, which, by the way, is the best job I’ve ever had. I mean, I was there 12 years. It’s the longest job that I have ever had. And for 90 percent of it, that relationship was good and it was fruitful, but it taught me a very important lesson about networks and about working in traditional media in general. And that is, is a conditional relationship. There will come a moment where you are going to need a level of support, a level of bravery and courageousness from the employers that you worked for. Especially if you are in my line of work where you give your opinion and sometimes that opinion is going to rub certain people in power the wrong way. And you hope that you have their support to count on. In my case, I didn’t. And so, I learned a very important lesson in that, like regardless of how good that you think you may have it somewhere, the bottom line is always the bottom line. And the fact is what I said about the NFL was going to impact the bottom line. They are in a billion-dollar partnership with the NFL, and me suggesting that if the fans were so upset at the NFL for how they treated Colin Kaepernick, that they should think about maybe not watching the NFL instead of putting all the onus on the players and activist and other people. Like you have the power to change this yourself. You realize this, right? Instead of — I understood what comes with that statement. And I never complained about being suspended. I knew what it was. I’ve been in the business long enough to know you don’t hit them. You don’t mess around with the church’s money.

MARTIN: There are some prominent African American women in media who have lost their jobs because they said things that their employers did not appreciate or that they felt went too far. But they felt they had to say it or they felt that it was important for them to say. And I just — I don’t know. I’m wondering kind of what — is there some overarching lesson here about people like yourself who feel like you are acting out of conviction, there’s something you feel is truthful and correct and needs to be said, but you are saying it in a place that — where the audience doesn’t want to hear it?

HILL: The lesson is not necessarily for me. The lesson is for a lot of the corporations who say they want black people, you know, as in commentators. They want the faces. They don’t want the voices. And the lesson, to me, is for them. And, you know, just recently, we’ve seen this example with a friend of mine, Tiffany Cross, who is no longer at MSNBC. She had the highest rated show on the weekend. And they unceremoniously showed her the door because she responded to a text by Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly. And they felt like her response was not up to standard. Meanwhile, Megyn Kelly is allowed to call Tiffany Cross out by name. Tucker Carlson is allowed to put together a complete races monologue for several minutes on his air, and it’s totally fine. But when Tiffany responds to these attacks, which are not the first time, she has had to face them, suddenly, she’s held to a different standard.

MARTIN: But they work for different networks. I mean, Tucker Carlson —

HILL: They do. So, you can’t —

MARTIN: — works for a conservative — which is identified with the conservative movement. And Megyn Kelly used to work there, is identified with, you know, the most conservative audiences and political affiliations in the United States today. They were work for different people.

HILL: Yes. And they work for different people and different networks have different standards. All fine and well. But what I find to be the case is that on the same breath, if we go back just a few years ago, to 2020, and these same corporations are talking to black people about what could we do to better support you? What could we do to, you know, strengthen the relationship? How can we amplify black creators and black commentators and hopes and all of this? And we are all telling the same thing, which is, that support means that when I go after an establishment, a hierarchy, people who are clearly in the wrong but who might, as I said, mess up the church’s money, are you going to be there or not? Because that’s what it comes down to. Like, they are fine with, you know, sort of attacking things where there could be a great swell of public support behind, where they feel, you know, it’s the only reason why in 2020 so many of these corporations who wouldn’t say black lives matter at the Ferguson suddenly were saying it in statements, nothing changed about the condition of black people in America. What changed was they felt more empowered to take that stance because they saw other people on the same bus with them. If the only time you are going to be with me is if when you feel comfortable and the level of support that is around, then you are not really with me. You know what I’m saying? You are doing this because it’s popular. You are not doing this because it’s right. Because sometimes what is right is not popular.

MARTIN: As we are speaking now, we are in the closing days of the midterm elections. What strikes you about this election season? What are you noticing?

HILL: What strikes me most is how many people are comfortable voting for cruelty. Comfortable voting just because they don’t want other people to have something. I’m aware that Herschel Walker is one of the greatest college football players in history, and just a tremendous athlete overall, but probably the most unqualified political candidate I’ve ever seen. And so, to think that it would be that many people that would consider him to be a qualified, competent candidate, you know, you’re asking yourself, well, why? You know, why would you subject yourself to voting for somebody like him who has right with this many issues? And then, you realize what it is. It’s that, oh, as long as he has pledged to go after these specific people who they don’t like, or vote against these people that they don’t like, then it’s perfectly acceptable to have a certain amount of incompetence. So, unlike a lot of times where I went to vote where there was a sense of optimism and, you know, hope and, like, oh, OK, let’s see where this lands us, you know, I was kind of depressed going to the voting booth this time around because I realized that some of the staining of our democracy that has occurred in the last seven or eight years is permanent. It’s not going away. And, you know, that every time that we go to the ballot box, I don’t think this is for everybody, but I think it certainly applies to a lot of people in marginalized communities, we are going to be voting for our life the rest of our lifetimes. Every single time. And that is very difficult to take.

MARTIN: So, I want to conclude where we started. Is there something that you wish you could say to that girl who started this book, that high school girl who saw her mom with crack her hand or whose dad couldn’t take care of her when she needed someplace else to go? Is there something you would tell that girl?

HILL: Well, I would tell her something that is simplistic in nature, but it turned out to be really, really true, and that was to keep fighting for the life that you feel like you deserve. Because I know that was one of the main things that kept me going during those very tumultuous times, is that I always thought I deserved better, even my mother, in the worst throws of her addiction, always told me I deserved better. And I fought for better. And I got better. And that’s why it’s — I’m really blessed and fortunate to have broken some really awful legacies of trauma in my family because I just — I knew there was something else out there. I may not have been able to define it, but I knew it was there. And as long as I knew it was there, then it was going to be all the engine I needed to keep going.

MARTIN: Jemele Hill, thank you so much for talking with us today.

HILL: Thank you. I appreciate you having me.