As part of its ongoing belief that the rights of white people are in peril and require government protection, the White House earlier this week released a 162-page report accusing the National Museum of American History of engaging in “anti-White activism”, declaring that exhibits at the various Smithsonian museums were prepared by “people who don’t want you to love your country”. Two days later, a group of nearly a dozen Republican lawmakers led by Texas representative August Pfluger threatened to send the Department of Justice after the WNBA unless it makes itself “accountable” for presumably not protecting embattled Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark against the physicality of game’s Black players. Pfluger implied hard fouls against Clark “may be racially motivated”, and threatened a civil rights lawsuit against the WNBA on Clark’s behalf could be an option.
The Pfluger letter represents the third time in less than a month the Trump administration and its loyalists have interfered in sports, twice using it as a front in its ongoing culture war, putting the Justice Department on high alert against anything it considers to be anti-white, anti-straight, anti-Christian. Enlisting Clark is pitting her against her own teammates and the culture of her league, but maybe the government believes she’s already there.
In a sense, time is running out on Clark. She has spent the last few days centering her public comments on the toxicity of social media, but the entirety of her five years as a national superstar deftly avoiding any direct link between her vague personal politics and the anti-Black portions of her fan base who loudly claim her. The government implying she needs federal protection from her Black opponents further forces her hand to speak declaratively about being positioned as a target by her sport.
It is yet another step in a dystopian continuum. In June, the Trump DOJ announced it would investigate if Major League Baseball’s Pride Night discriminated against Christian players. Trump last week called Fifa head Gianni Infantino to have a one-game suspension against by US national men’s soccer team forward Folarin Balogun rescinded before Team USA’s quarter-final loss to Belgium.
Clark, a feisty guard who on court gives what she gets, may only want to play basketball, but if time is running out on her, it is also running out on the WNBA in that its simmering conflicts have reached the surface. Clark has always been both a vehicle and an avatar for external motivations far beyond her control, the former being women’s basketball best opportunity to access to the billions of dollars the sports economy generates that have largely been unavailable to female athletes; the latter a symbol of the resentments her supporters (and detractors) carry through her in regards to race, class and gender – the three most divisive third rails in American life.
Her impact on the game financially is undeniable, but as the money rises, so too does the pressures on the sport. For years, women’s basketball could gain no traction, largely because unlike tennis where the men’s and women’s games look essentially the same, men’s basketball is an aerial game – Black guys leaping through the air. The women’s game is not a vertical, above-the-rim game but a horizontal one, ridiculed for decades for being below the rim.
Once Stephen Curry revolutionized the horizontal game through his remarkable long-range shooting, Clark followed, and suddenly women’s basketball now made sense: it was possible to watch basketball without dunking, and have it still look professional. Suddenly the women’s game became accessible to a new demographic of viewers – aka men – who no longer derided the women’s game as belonging in a high-school gym. Clark made the game look familiar to them, and became their champion.
Clark opened new doors to new dollars, but also represented a threat to its current personality, for if college basketball was accessible as a largely straight, white woman/ponytail league, the WNBA is a Black/queer one, with its own deeply held institutional attitude and culture.
It is not an accident that the arrival of Clark and bigger revenues have muted the league’s political voice, distant from 2020, Maya Moore and Sue Bird, Renee Montgomery and the T-shirt wearing citizen-athletes. The Atlanta Dream was instrumental in Raphael Warnock’s senate election in Georgia, but four years later, even with a Black woman running for president, the activist league went silent. Today, it remains so, its political component being the target of a DOJ that believes the most powerful law enforcement agency in America must protect a lone white woman from a moving screen.
The truth is Clark is being used, by the portion of her fan base who needs her whiteness to reinforce their racism; by the misogynists – the couch potatoes and Black male NBA players alike who have never liked women’s sports or Black women in general, have always found a way to denigrate them, and now use the guise of supporting her to continue that denigration; by the classists who see Clark as the long-awaited gentrifier who can undo the league’s queer culture and make women’s sports profitable at the heavy cost of absorbing it into the white/hetero/male drive-time sports/noise machine that has never respected it; and now by the most unapologetic, outwardly racist, sexist, and homophobic government this country has seen in a century.
Whether or not she has asked for such attention, she now has it, and the Republican party and Trump DOJ have decided Clark will be a valuable asset – or a pawn.
If there is a historical comp, it can be found in Larry Bird, Indiana’s basketball player. Bird was once treated as a similar avatar. “I just wanted to prove that a white boy who couldn’t run and couldn’t jump could play in this league,” Bird would say early in his career, blithely unaware both that Jerry Lucas, Bob Pettit, Dave DeBusschere and Dave Cowens had already proven it and of the racial trap he was entering. That Bird started his career in Boston in 1979, while the city was still raw from the emotional and physical violence of the school desegregation conflicts and the NBA as a business was routinely considered too Black to be commercially viable made him, nearly a half-century before, a similar Great White Hope to Clark today: a symbol that Black people were ruining the country.
Clark was born into a time, no differently than Colin Kaepernick was born into a time before her, Michael Jordan and Bird before him, Billie Jean King, and OJ Simpson before all of them. The time is not of their choosing, and like Clark, those athletes did not ask to be a symbol of their generation – but this is where she has landed, the most recognizable and polarizing star at a time of catastrophic division.
Now she has been chosen as the avatar by a government hostile to her sport. What will Clark do with the position in which she now finds herself? Bird by mid-career did not fall for the racial tropes, redoubling his focus on basketball, on pure competition, building up his teammates, black and white, and rejecting the white savior narrative that had been unfairly placed on him, even when years of it exploded following Game 7 of the bitter 1987 NBA Eastern Conference finals, when Dennis Rodman and Isiah Thomas infamously agreed that if Bird were Black, he’d be just another player. Bird didn’t deserve that, and did not encourage it.
Bird did not take the bait, even though a significant element of Boston fans embraced his era of Celtics precisely because they were often a predominantly white team excelling in a Black sport. They saw themselves in him – but he did not play along. He symbolized their racism, but he rejected the mantle and did so without ever being mistaken for a political activist. Thirty-four years after playing his last game, he is still respected by the Black game and its culture.
Clark is in an even more perilous position, for today’s culture is far more invasive and demanding – people want to know where you stand. Silence is a tacit agreement. Denouncement of the government will earn her the respect of her peers and risk the ire of president and the parts of her fan base hoping she and they are one. The greatest risk Caitlin Clark faces is her right to political privacy, courtesy of a blundering government that either erroneously thinks to be acting in her best interest, or is totally comfortable sacrificing her in its continuing attempts to use sports, the one ostensible unifier in a shredded country, to further divide it.
Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism and Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America.
