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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
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Arwa Mahdawi

Caitlin Clark’s name has been used to push bigotry – and she finally pushed back

A tall white woman wearing a white, yellow and green basketball jersey throws her very long arms into the air and grimaces, in a stadium filled with people.
‘On Thursday, Clark addressed the issue more directly when a writer from the Athletic asked her how she feels about her name being weaponized.’ Photograph: Doug McSchooler/AP

Caitlin Clark v ‘angry lesbians’

You don’t need to know anything about basketball to have heard of Caitlin Clark. She’s a record-breaking superstar who has helped take women’s basketball to new heights. Unfortunately, she’s also been shoved into a starring role in the culture wars. An awful lot of conservative men, who don’t ordinarily give a damn about women’s sports, have decided that she provides a very convenient excuse for them to be racist and misogynistic on main. Although, to be fair, they don’t normally need an excuse.

Here’s the situation: Clark is one of the most fouled players in the WNBA. Some of her fans have claimed that this is the result of a vendetta, that the Indiana Fever rookie is being bullied by players who are jealous of her fame. It’s certainly possible some of Clark’s peers don’t like her, but she’s also not the most fouled player. At the time of writing, she was sitting at No 6 with 67 personal fouls drawn, while A’ja Wilson had the top spot with 88. It’s also true that basketball is a physical sport and so what might look like aggression to some new fans might simply be business as usual. “I’m just taken aback that the new fans are so shocked,” Candace Buckner, a sports columnist with the Washington Post, told the BBC. “It’s a contact sport. It’s almost as if you were a new opera fan and you were surprised there was music.”

While some of Clark’s fans are accusing her fellow players of jealousy, a certain group of galaxy-brains has decided that the star is actually a victim of reverse discrimination. Conservative commentator Clay Travis, who is the founder of OutKick, is one of the loudest of these voices.

“Caitlin Clark is a white heterosexual woman in a Black lesbian league and they resent and are jealous of all of the attention and the [alleged $28m Nike] deal that she got,” Travis said on Fox News earlier this month.

Internet personality Stew Peters (who has more than 600,000 followers on X) is fond of the same talking point; he’s just added a little more overt racism. “White WNBA player Caitlin Clark is being physically assaulted EVERY GAME by Shaq-looking black lesbians but nobody wants to talk about,” Peters tweeted on Thursday.

Actually, Mr Peters, your compatriots can’t stop talking about it.

Sports journalist Jason Whitlock has also chimed in on the matter. “The WNBA for 25-26 years has basically been a traveling lesbian sex cult,” Whitlock told Fox Sports Radio recently. “They’re upset that Caitlin Clark is bringing heterosexual people into their arena.”

Golly, if I’d known that the WNBA was a “traveling lesbian sex cult”, I would have tried out for the basketball team at university. As it was, I did my best to avoid balls.

I’ll spare you more hot takes from the Conservative Men Who Are Suddenly Very Interested in Women’s Sports brigade. The upshot of all this messy discourse is this: Clark’s name is being used to push racist, homophobic and misogynistic talking points and being weaponized in the targeted abuse of Black players like Angel Reese.

So how has Clark responded to this? Well, until recently, with little more than a shrug. She’s said she tries to stay off social media and focus on basketball. She’s also said social media is “not something I can control”. Which, in some ways, is fair enough. It’s not the 22-year-old’s job to try to make social media less toxic. But not speaking out when her name is being used to push vile agendas does feel like a cop-out. Silence is never neutral, after all. Silence is complicity.

Earlier this month, the Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington called Clark out on this: “How one can not be bothered by their name being used to justify racism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia & the intersectionalities of them all is nuts,” Carrington tweeted. “We all see the s—. We all have a platform.”

It seems like Carrington’s feedback might have resonated. On Thursday, Clark addressed the issue more directly when a writer from the Athletic asked her how she feels about her name being weaponized. “It’s disappointing,” Clark said. “The women in our league deserve the same amount of respect, so people should not be using my name to push those agendas.” It’s a bit of a wishy-washy statement, but it’s something. Clark should be applauded for finally speaking up.

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