Shooting Down Caitlin Clark
Straight, white, Midwestern Clark is “problematic” for the leftist media.
By Mark Tapson
I haven’t been a sports fan for many years, partly because I don’t have time to keep up with the world of sports and partly because I have zero tolerance for the unsportsmanlike conduct that has come to characterize, if not dominate, it. And yet I am fast becoming FrontPageMag’s resident sports reporter: fresh off my defense of NFL kicker Harrison Butker for giving a commencement speech that championed traditional values and sent the media into an apoplectic fit, here I am about to leap to the defense of another athlete who is drawing petty media fire for nothing more than the contemporary sin of being white.
Even I know that 22-year-old Iowan college phenom and now WNBA star Caitlin Clark is an outstanding talent who is helping to draw a whole new generation of fans to women’s basketball. The left-leaning media pay lip service to gratitude about this, but can’t help carping about the fact that Clark belongs to a demographic they openly despise: straight, white Midwesterners.
An editorial in the reliably far-left Los Angeles Times, for example, frets that Clark’s popularity “draws questions of race and equity” – because the L.A. Times puts a race-and-equity spin on every editorial. The piece notes that “approximately 70% of [WNBA] players are Black [sic], nearly a third identify as LGBTQ and most come from urban environments,” but “Clark is white, straight and from Iowa.” The Times doesn’t explicitly state what’s wrong with being a straight white Iowan, but we all know what the problem is: the Left literally worships diversity unless straight white people get in the mix. Then it’s, “There goes the neighborhood.”
The article goes on to cite female critics complaining that Straight White Clark is getting attention, accolades, and endorsements that lesbian black players aren’t (the inconvenient fact that Clark can shoot circles around those other players is largely disregarded).
“Caitlin fits a very comfortable narrative for a lot of people in the United States,” said Nicole Melton, co-director of the Laboratory for Inclusion and Diversity in Sport at the University of Massachusetts (as an aside, why is there such a thing as a “Laboratory for Inclusion and Diversity in Sport”? Sport is naturally diverse and inclusive – it includes everybody who can play well, regardless of skin color). Melton continued: “She comes from the heartland. She’s an amazing talent. She’s also a white, straight woman, right? There’s not a lot of things that would make people feel uncomfortable with that person being successful.”
What is Melton going on about? Is there anyone who is “uncomfortable” with black athletes being successful? Was anybody “uncomfortable” with Serena Williams’ championships and endorsements? The left assumes that everyone is as boringly obsessed with race as they are.
Also among her critics was the perpetually racially aggrieved, former ESPN personality and Atlantic writer Jemele Hill, who wakes every morning wondering how she can racialize the topic of the day. Hill griped that “race and [Clark’s] sexuality played a role in her popularity” and “that is a little problematic because of what it says about the worth and the marketability of the players who are already there.”
Whoopi Goldberg surprisingly took issue with Hill’s perspective. On a recent episode of the inexplicably popular ABC daytime gabfest The View, co-hostess Whoopi, whom I don’t believe I have ever quoted favorably before, pointed out Clark’s extraordinary accomplishments, none of which stemmed from the color of her skin:
She is the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer of men and women. In February she broke the woman’s record, in March she broke Pistol Pete Maravich’s 3,667-point record. She’s had more 30-point games than anyone in the past 25 years. She holds the single season three-point record for men and big ten’s all-time leader in assists…I’m sorry, there are great players, but nobody else has done this.
That wasn’t enough for co-hostess Sunny Hostin, the show’s resident Joy Reid, who brings bitter race-mongering to every topic. She responded to Whoopi, “I’ve been a basketball fan since I can remember. I played basketball with my dad in Harlem when I was five years old. So I remember loving the game, and the game not necessarily loving women back, right?”
Hold it right there. How did basketball “not love women back”? Is she suggesting basketball itself is sexist? Actually, she is; she is claiming that because women’s basketball never achieved the popularity of men’s, it’s because a sexist society conspired to deny women players the money and fame accorded male players. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that vastly more people in the past – as well as today – want to watch professional men’s basketball than women’s.
Anyway, Hostin continued, “The WNBA started in 1996, first games played in 1997. It’s 2024, and we’re just now really talking about it. So if Caitlin Clark is the vehicle that will bring this sport that I have loved so much and so long to little five-year-old girls playing in Harlem, I say, ‘Yes, bravo.’ I have no problem with that.”
Spoiler alert: yes, she does have a problem with it. That problem is that Caitlin Clark is straight and white: “With that being said, I do think that there is a thing called pretty privilege. There is a thing called white privilege. There is a thing called tall privilege.”
Hold it right there. Tall privilege? Well, yes, tall people certainly have an advantage in a field like professional basketball. But how is that relevant to Clark, who is only six feet even? That’s average in the WNBA.
But let’s get back to the “white privilege” part. Hostin went on: “And we have to acknowledge that. So part of it is about race, because if you think about the [black former WNBA star] Brittney Griners of the world, why did [Griner] have to go to play in Russia?”
Griner (who at 6’9” had the tallest “tall privilege” in the league) often played internationally in the off-season, notably in Russia, where she was convicted of drug smuggling but released in a prisoner exchange with notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout. Even Whoopi noted that Griner went to Russia to play not because she was black but because Americans “didn’t believe in the WNBA.”
Hostin glossed over that and simply concluded that Caitlin Clark “is more relatable to more people because she’s white, because she’s attractive, and unfortunately, there still is that stigma against the LGBTQ community.”
This is pure race-baiting, anti-white racism, and frankly, bitter jealousy on Hostin’s part. I have never heard a sports fan say that NBA superstar Michael Jordan, or the NFL’s Jerry Rice, or baseball’s Hank Aaron, would have been more “relatable” had he been white. It’s unthinkable that your average sports fan would say, “That Steph Curry sure is a great shooter. If only he were white, I could appreciate him more.” True sports fans don’t care about skin color, only athletic excellence.
Contrary to what they would likely insist, Jemele Hill and Sunny Hostin are not true sports fans, or at least not sports fans first. First and foremost, they are left-wing media propagandists, and the left is suffused with anti-white racism and anti-heterosexual bigotry; Hill and Hostin are driven first and foremost not by admiration of athletic excellence but the queerification of the culture and the dismantling of what they both believe to be a white supremacist society. That’s why Caitlin Clark is “problematic” for them.
NBA legends Charles Barkley and LeBron James – both black, of course – came to Clark’s defense against the naysayers. Barkley stated that female critics are being “petty” and should be thankful for “all the money and visibility she’s bringing to the WNBA,” and the ordinarily insufferable political activist James, another figure I’ve never quoted favorably, actually offered wise advice: Clark should “put on blinders” about the media and keep her nose focused to the grindstone to hone her craft.
Ignoring the media is a demanding challenge in an environment in which far too many of our bigoted cultural elites are hell-bent on spotlighting your immutable characteristics rather than your world-class talent.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons