Robin Burrow remembers the night after her son, Joe Burrow, gave his Heisman Trophy speech in December 2019, a middle-aged Black man stopped her on the way to the bathroom at a dinner gala in New York City.
"He told me, 'I just wanted to tell you, the thing I'm so proud of about Joe's speech is that as a white athlete he stood up there and talked about the poverty where he's from in his white culture,'" she recalled. "And he said, 'People will respond differently because, finally, a white athlete is talking about poverty.