top of page
Writer's pictureArchuleta A. Chisolm

We Know Better. Deep Down, So Does The WNBA.

WSJ

Seeing A’ja Wilson and Angel Reese on the cover of WSJ Magazine says volumes about the future of women’s sports. It’s not just about their impressive stats; it’s about how two Black women are changing the game in a major way, drawing in new fans, and showing that the WNBA is more than just a league. 

 

This cover represents the respect that women’s sports have been fighting for, and A’ja and Angel are right at the forefront of it all. The WNBA Finals may be over, but the New York Liberty's win (Congratulations, by the way) feels like a win for the for the entire league. Young girls finally have strong, visible stars to look up to, and it’s about time. Women’s sports are in the spotlight, and we’re all here for it.

 

Looking back on the 2023 WNBA season, all-star center Brittney Griner needed security to intervene between her and a troublemaker in public. She had just resumed her basketball career with the Phoenix Mercury after being wrongfully detained in Russia for 10 months, when a man in the Dallas airport confronted her to suggest she hated America. Why? Because at the peak of the George Floyd protests, Brittney suggested it was no longer appropriate for the WNBA to play the national anthem.

 

Over the summer, it was Chicago guard Chennedy Carter, runner-up for the rookie of the year award in 2020. As Chennedy and her teammates left a Washington hotel, a man aimed his phone’s camera at her and asked whether she would apologize to rookie Caitlin Clark for bum-rushing her in a previous game. It was an act that caused Republican congressman, Jim Banks from Indiana — where Caitlin plays for the Indiana Fever — to take time out of his busy schedule of denying the 2020 election results to write a letter to WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert demanding she devise a plan to protect Caitlin.

 

But somehow, some way, it is Caitlin Clark who needs safeguarding in this workplace of professional women’s basketball, a contact sport policed by on and off-court referees. It isn’t, instead, Black women like Brittney Griner and Chennedy Carter, who are villainized to the extent that they are accosted just trying to get to their basketball-playing jobs.

 

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. It spotlights truths about the dissimilar experiences of Black and white women in workplaces everywhere and to stereotypes about Black women. It perpetuates the "Angry Black Woman" trope that gets smeared across our faces on the daily. It is a chokehold that never quite loosens up.

 

It reminds me of the Kansas City neighborhood I grew up in which was once predominantly Black but has been heavily gentrified by young white millennials and families. I’ve been gone for almost 10 years, and coming back has been disheartening. I was born and raised in Kansas City, yet I don't recognize most of it anymore. And why does it take an influx of white people from 31st & Linwood all the way Downtown for things to get better? And have they really?

 

Although Caitlin is being fouled nearly 5 times per game while averaging about 30 minutes, Aaliyah Edwards, from the Washington Mystics, who is Black, gets fouled about 4 times per game while averaging about 10 fewer minutes, and no one has jumped to her defense with a letter to the league commissioner.


No one is coming to save us; we know this all too well. The life line is never there for us, so we have always resorted to saving ourselves.


When Black players on the Las Vegas Aces led a strike in 2018 over health and safety concerns after delayed commercial flights left them with no rest and only a few hours of prep time before a game, the league responded by ruling the canceled game a forfeit. Upon Caitlin’s arrival in the league this year, the WNBA for the first time ever approved charter flights for its teams. Coincidence? I'll let you be the judge.


It really doesn't matter, and almost has been ignored, that Caitlin Clark has embraced the opposition she has encountered as mere competition. Instead, the media's narrative says her opponents are bad and she's good. But we know how this goes.


Comments


bottom of page