The politics of race and gender are part and parcel of women’s basketball
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Longtime fans of women’s sports, women’s college basketball and professional (WNBA) play, are very familiar with A’ja Wilson, whose statue in South Carolina is depicted above. Wilson, who was born in SC on August 8, 1996, played for the 2017 women’s college championship team, the South Carolina Gamecocks and won the most outstanding player award that year. She was considered to be the best player in women’s college basketball in 2018, winning multiple awards, and was the number one WNBA draft pick, selected by the Las Vegas Aces, who with her teammates won the WNBA championship back to back in 2022, and 2023.
Folks who know, love and follow women’s basketball consider Wilson to be the best player in the league. Here are her recent highlights, where she became the only player in WNBA league history to score 36 points, 12 rebounds, and 6 steals in a game.
Beyond basketball, Wilson is also the author of a new book, “Dear Black Girls, How to Be True to You” which she talked about on this episode of The View:
The WNBA MVP discusses writing her book with dyslexia and making waves for speaking out about the gender pay gap in sports.
You may wonder why I’m discussing sports here today. It’s simple. You cannot separate sports from politics. Here in the USA, athletes are also subject to all the “isms” and ills of a society where Black people are still subject to this countries long history of racism and white supremacy. A country where patriarchy still rules, LGBTQ+ folks are still victims of open hatred, and hard won women’s rights are under attack.
You may also wonder why I opened with a picture and bio of A’ja Wilson. Simple. I’m tired of almost every damn article I read about a sport I love and have followed for years being dominated by a player named Caitlin Clark, from Iowa, who was the first round draft pick this year, and plays on the second worst team in the league (that happens to 1st round picks) A player whose fans, (not all of them, but far too many of them) are spewing hate and racism and homophobia all over social media. She hasn’t stood up and forcefully told them to stop and back off either.
People are screaming that her not being selected to be on the Olympic team is racist (yes the WNBA is 60% Black) However take a look at who made the cut:
I’m with Tim Wise on this:
The laments that no one will watch the Olympics if Clark is not on the team, abound. Clark has suddenly become the “most well-known basketball player in the world” so should be chosen based on that perception, not based on her actual playing record.
A correction was made to the stats:
This is just one sample of what I’ve spent time blocking and reporting all week:
Other tweeters have called the players on the team “men” and worse. Not surprised that Bill Maher has jumped on the Clark wagon.
Not all sportswriters have embraced the Clark was “snubbed”, or deprived of her “rightful” place. Google “Caitlin Clark” and look at the headlines. There have been a few brave exceptions.
Ben Pickman wrote for The Athletic:
Leaving Caitlin Clark off Team USA was reasonable roster move with gold-medal focus
Speaking strictly basketball, the committee focused on selecting the best team for the Paris Games. It’s hard to quibble with the star-powered players they picked. The product on the floor will be elite — a roster stacked with MVPs, All-WNBA honorees and All-Stars. Nine players have Olympic experience (including Olympic 3×3 appearances). It will be favored to win an eighth consecutive gold medal.
Clark has shown flashes of stardom throughout her first month, but at times she has struggled to adjust to opponent physicality and is shooting only 32.7 percent from 3-point range. She leads the WNBA with 67 turnovers and the Indiana Fever now have as many wins (three) as Clark has technical fouls. Find a name to swap Clark for if the focus is the scoreboard. Pretty tough.
Sportswriter Nancy Armour wrote for USA Today “Bypassing Caitlin Clark for Olympics was right for Team USA. And for Clark, too.”
Leaving Caitlin Clark home from the Paris Olympics was the right decision for the U.S. team.
Right decision for Clark, too.
While Clark would no doubt have drawn more eyeballs to the women’s basketball tournament, the Olympics are not meant to be a participation trophy. It should be the best players who go and — hard as it might be for her fans to hear this — Clark is not one of the 12 best U.S. players right now. She is too turnover prone, her total (67) and average (5.6 per game) are well above those of anyone else in the WNBA. Those miscues would likely multiply at the Olympics because she’d be firing passes at players with whom she's not had a chance to develop timing or chemistry.
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So, here’s a challenge to reporters who would have gone to only cover Clark or fans who were planning to tune in only to watch her. Go write about two-time defending champion A’ja Wilson. Watch Breanna Stewart sky over defenders, and take in the uniqueness and physicality of Alyssa Thomas’ game. See Kahleah Copper, a Finals MVP who proved again on Friday night that she can captivate crowds with her late-game heroics. Watch Diana Taurasi, who will be playing for her sixth gold medal. There are plenty of other reasons to watch and stories to dive into.
Like many young players included on past rosters, Clark would have played a limited role off the bench had she made the team. Even then, it’s fair to wonder how she would have fit. The committee took players who know how to play together and have shown it. Four Las Vegas Aces (Wilson, Kelsey Plum, Chelsea Gray and Jackie Young) made the team. Three members of the Phoenix Mercury (Taurasi, Copper and Brittney Griner) did, too. Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu are teammates with the New York Liberty. And more broadly than exclusive WNBA connections, the committee went for a group rich with senior USA Basketball team service who have played games around the world alongside each other.
FYI: Olympic play differs from USA play in that it is much more physical and Clark is not currently able to deal with physical U.S. play very well.
South Carolina Democratic sociologist David Darmofal, made this comment about all the controversy:
His timeline was immediately targeted by Clark fanatics who attacked him for his looks and worse.
Clark supporters have screamed bloody murder about a hard foul Clark took. They’ve been silent about a much harder one taken by A’Ja Wilson.
I’m looking forward to the Olympics, and for the rest of the WNBA season (rooting for my home team the NY Liberty) while appreciating good play across the league — which is chock full of great players, not just Caitlin Clark.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The politically cancerous pattern of using racism for political gain and financial profit dates back to the earliest days of our republic, but now, amplified by Donald Trump, it is again increasingly in our faces.
Black workers at a General Mills plant in Georgia are suing over white management allegedly sanctioning a “Good Ole Boys” club that uses Confederate symbols and open racism to intimidate and cow them.
A producer on The Apprentice show is—now that his nondisclosure agreement has expired—telling the story of Trump’s casual and repeated use of the n-word, and his questioning whether Americans would ever “buy a n— winning” the show’s faux business competition.
The GOP and right-wing hate media have turned racism into both a political weapon and a machine to generate billions in annual profits. Today’s “school choice” movement, racial and anti-immigrant hatred, and the MAGA movement all have the same roots.
America’s media and the GOP try to pretend that the primary animating force of Trump’s MAGA movement isn’t race, but it absolutely is. And it’s been both politically and financially profitable for those willing to join him.
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Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday that more must be done at the federal level to prevent gun violence during a campaign stop in Maryland to support Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat whose U.S. Senate race could determine control of the chamber.
Harris, speaking on the 10th annual National Gun Violence Awareness Day, marked the occasion by underscoring the need to pass more laws to stop gun violence. The vice president also highlighted the experience of her longtime friend who served as state’s attorney as well as the chief executive in Prince George’s County in the suburbs of the nation’s capital.
“Maryland, this November you have the power to elect leaders who have actually kept our communities safe,” Harris said.
Alsobrooks defeated U.S. Rep. David Trone last month, after the congressman spent about $62 million of his personal fortune to self-finance his campaign. Now, she’s running in a competitive race against popular Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan for a Senate seat that is opening with the retirement of Sen. Ben Cardin, a Democrat.
A Republican has not won a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland in more than 40 years in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-1 statewide. But Hogan is running the most competitive Senate race for the GOP in the state in decades.
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Nick Opiyo had just ordered lunch in a Kampala restaurant on the last working day before Christmas when armed, uniformed security forces swarmed his table, handcuffed him, covered his head with a sack he says smelled of blood, and bundled him into an unmarked van. His laptop, phone, documents and car keys were confiscated and he was interrogated for several days, accused of money laundering, not paying taxes or filing returns — allegations he denies. The 43-year-old spent his holiday behind bars, and the government dropped the charges nine months later.
Opiyo, one of Uganda’s top human rights lawyers, believes that there was an ulterior motive for his December 2020 detention: he and his team at the legal nonprofit Chapter Four had been gathering evidence linking state security forces to extrajudicial killings in the run-up to the 2021 general election. The government had officially acknowledged 54 deaths connected to protests, which erupted after the arrest of an opposition leader. But Opiyo says he collected post-mortem reports, photos and family testimony indicating that the number of people killed was almost three times greater.
Months earlier, an incident occurred that Opiyo now sees as a warning. Laptops, phones and external hard drives were stolen from his home in the middle of the night. When Opiyo awoke in the morning, drowsy from what he says was some kind of sedative, he used a geolocation tool to see where they were. The software showed that the devices were at an address in Kampala’s Chwa II Road: the headquarters of Uganda’s military intelligence agency.
As he and his colleagues were dragged from their table that afternoon in December, Opiyo tried to make light of the situation, telling officers he assumed they were there to pick up a terrorist, not a lawyer.
“I outwardly joked about it,” Opiyo reflected to Bloomberg. “But deep down I was afraid. These kinds of arrests never end well.”
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Look beyond the lions and elephants. Resist the cups of coffee and tea. Hail instead Kenya’s latest success story: the firm but luscious avocado pear, now climbing up the list of Kenya’s exports. Already the biggest African avo-exporter, well ahead of South Africa, Kenya has been expanding its sales to Europe and is trying to push into the mass markets of India and China. “We are number five [in the world] in avocado exports and can easily get to number one,” says Simon Chelugui, Kenya’s minister for co-operatives.
Mr Chelugui may be behind the times. According to the latest estimate of the un’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (fao), Kenya reached number three in exports last year. It is still far behind Mexico, the unchallenged giant, and Peru, the runner-up. But the volume of Kenya’s exports shot up last year by 24%, the steepest climb of any big producer.
Kenya is lucky in climate and location. Avocados grow best at altitudes of around 1,500-2,100 metres above the sea. Kenya also scores well in sustainability. Thanks to its heavy rainfall in the highlands (1,000 millimetres a year in some orchards), no extra water is needed, except in the dry season, which lasts around four months. Most farms use less than 100 litres to grow a kilogram of pears, far below the world average. The equatorial sunlight, unchanging through the year, is also beneficial, so “the pears can grow by day and go to sleep at night”, as a jovial bigwig puts it at Sunripe, a leading Kenyan avocado exporter.
Kenya is also well placed as seasons go: it can send its avocados onto the global market before many of its rivals’ pears have ripened. With two rainy seasons in some areas, luckier orchards have a double harvest, stretching the period when Kenya can sell the fruit. And its entrepreneurial smallholders are catching on fast. A well-tended avocado tree can bear a decent crop within a few years.
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Looking across the region, civil servants and government appointees, especially in the security forces and state-controlled media were often former guerrilla fighters, who may have put loyalty to the party before the nation.
"There is no line between state and party. It’s more than a party, it's a system,” said Mr Crespo.
And the legacy of liberation is deeply embedded in the region's culture, with stories of struggle shared across family dinner tables and national media continually reminding citizens of their hard-won freedom.
Liberation songs and war cries are sung in high schools, even at sports matches. For citizens to move away from the liberation party is a big psychological wrench. But over time it does happen.
“People are no longer influenced by history when they vote,” Namibian social scientist Ndumba Kamwanyah told the BBC, reflecting on the declining support for Swapo, which has been in power since 1990.
Many of the parties espoused socialist ideologies, but these have often fallen by the wayside over time and people have questioned whether citizens are benefitting equally.
One of the first independence movements in southern Africa to feel this disdain for history was Zambia’s United National Independence Party (Unip), which came into power in 1964 as British rule ended. Throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s it governed the country as the sole legal party, with founding father Kenneth Kaunda at the helm. But discontent grew and in 1990 there were deadly protests in the capital, Lusaka, and a coup attempt.
The following year, the first multi-party elections for more than two decades saw President Kaunda lose out to Frederick Chiluba. Unip, once all-powerful, has now all but disappeared.
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