Kudos to the women of the WNBA for their activism
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
When we think about athletes who have engaged in powerful political protests, we often cite Tommie Smith and John Carlos who raised their fists at the 1968 Olympics, or Muhammad Ali’s anti-war stance, or Colin Kaepernick taking a knee. Much less well-known, but no less significant, was a protest, and voting drive that took place in Georgia which helped secure the slender thread our democracy hangs by, in retaining a Senate majority.
I’m referring to the election of now Senator Rafael Warnock in Georgia, which more than likely would not have happened were it not for the action taken by the women of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) team, The Atlanta Dream, and other women in the WNBA who supported them.
While many of us may have been aware of the Georgia GOTV efforts spearheaded by Stacey Abrams, it’s time to re-visit the key role played by these stalwart women athletes, who risked their livelihood by standing up against the owner of their team, right wing senatorial candidate, multimillionaire Senator Kelly Loeffler.
If you have not yet seen this new documentary, “Power of the Dream” I strongly recommend it! Here’s the trailer:
Power of the Dream is a new documentary film about the empowering and unlikely true story of how a group of professional women's basketball players took on a WNBA team owner and rallied behind now-Senator Raphael Warnock, forever changing the landscape of their sport and the course of U.S. politics.
The documentary doesn’t just cover their role in the Warnock win. Kate Bove wrote a detailed review for Sports Rant
While the WNBA’s league-wide organizing around getting Warnock elected serves as a culmination of the players’ nearly three decades of activism, that story is only a small sliver of what makes Power of the Dream both urgent and compelling. Punctuated by insight from sports journalists and commentators Jemele Hill and Holly Rowe, Power of the Dream gives some of the league’s biggest change-makers another opportunity to speak out.
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The W’s players not only understand their unique position to create change, but are deeply aware of the work that needs to be done to make change actually happen, as exemplified by the WNBA’s 2020 season dedication to #SayHerName, Black Lives Matter, and Breonna Taylor. Before Colin Kaepernick knelt, full WNBA teams, like the Maya Moore-led Minnesota Lynx, were putting their careers on the line to bolster the Black Lives Matter movement, and speak out against police brutality and the murders of Black men like Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
As Hill points out, it was a historic moment — and people still fail to recognize the WNBA’s consistent activism. Reflecting on the league’s Black women, queer players, and genderfluid individuals, sports agent Lindsay Kagawa Colas points out that, “Each one of those players wakes up every day and is inherently political.” Point being, for WNBA players, there’s no separating identity, sports, and political activism, because of the social landscape at large.
From championing Black women and LGBTQ+ folks to becoming role models in the fight for equal pay, the players of the WNBA have long proven those who underestimate them wrong. Despite its vast scope, the intimate and always welcoming Power of the Dream manages to feel both timely and timeless.
Today is the day the Commissioner’s Cup is being played.
The Commissioner’s Cup’s Impact on Social Justice in the W
The Commissioner’s Cup Presented by Coinbase also aims to spotlight the league’s social justice efforts. Bethany Donaphin, head of WNBA league operations, says the League is rooted in bold advocacy, so it was a no-brainer to include it in the platform we built for the Commissioner’s Cup. “The WNBA has long been recognized as the most progressive league in professional sports, and it’s one that continually shows up as a leader in the social justice space,” Donaphin said. “So, really, why wouldn’t we use one of our marquee league events to address important social issues?”
The league prioritizes a player-led agenda in collaboration with the Women’s National Basketball Player’s Association (WNBPA). This season, the focus will be on civic engagement and reproductive health advocacy.
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Los Angeles Sparks guard Layshia Clarendon added that the Commissioner’s Cup is a way to spotlight initiatives that the players care about. The league accumulates donations for each team in Commissioner’s Cup-tagged games for hand-picked non-profit organizations specific to their markets. This puts organizations in the day-to-day community work at the center, allowing the League to localize its efforts.
“We’re not only basketball players,” Clarendon said. “We’re always thinking of ways we can be civically engaged and impact our community.”
In 2020, the WNBA and WNBPA formed the Social Justice Council to be the driving force of timely and important societal issues. This season’s council is led by Clarendon, along with the Sun’s DeWanna Bonner, Aces’ Alysha Clark, Liberty’s Breanna Stewart, and Sky’s Brianna Turner.
“We’re a social justice league because we, frankly, kind of have to be,” said Clarendon. “We’re a league of predominantly Black women who have been at the intersections of race and gender. We inherently have to think about things like ‘double time’ and the way we move through the world.”
“Double time” or “double jeopardy” is a phrase coined to underline the multiple oppressions—race, class, and gender—Black women have to face simultaneously.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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With civil rights education under threat, a preservationist helps Black families save key sites in the South. Washington Post: Public memories. Private struggles.
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A White mob had bombed the vehicle because Thomas was on it. In 1961, Thomas was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders — an interracial group who sat beside one another on Greyhounds to enforce integration laws along the interstate. After Thomas, who is Black, slid out the window of the flaming bus in Anniston, Ala., a White man struck him with a baseball bat. “I’ll never forget that experience,” he told Yvonne. He was 19 years old then.
He is 82 years old now. Deep voice. Good humor. Fading memory. Sometimes, though, when he sits and looks at the blanket, recollections he once suppressed come back to him. He wants those memories to come back, because so few people who are living today experienced them. Only two of the original Freedom Riders are still alive.
“Me, and Charles Person,” he said. “And Charles, he was from Alabama.”
“Atlanta,” Yvonne corrected him gently.
A man named Phillip Howard sat in a chair nearby, hoping to hear a revelation. When he first met Thomas a few years back, Howard was so moved by his bravery that he quit his state government job. Instead, he joined an organization attempting to preserve the history of the civil rights movement. Sifting through the memories of elders such as Thomas helps him identify places that his organization can acquire, secure and restore in Howard’s home state of Alabama.
It’s a precarious time for civil rights conservation in America, and Howard, 47, feels an urgency to discover forgotten places as fast as he can. In courtrooms and in classrooms, in state legislatures and corporate offices, people are reconsidering how the country’s most tortured moments should be presented.
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Bruce Onobrakpeya was unafraid to challenge the conventions of the art world — and was celebrated for it. This giant of African art is basking in the joy of his first Smithsonian solo exhibition. NPR: At 91, Nigerian artist who reimagined the crucifixion is celebrated at Smithsonian
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“I like to use different techniques. I want to show the public what they don't see [but] that I, I think I see. Something below the surface that I perceive and enjoy and bring out,” the 91-year-old says, leading a tour through the compound.
Inside the house, his studio is spread across two floors, cluttered with both recent pieces and other works that span his more than 70-year prestigious career as a painter, sculptor and pioneering printmaker.
Onobrakpeya, born in the oil-rich Niger Delta, is widely regarded as one of the most creative artists and most defining figures in Nigerian modernism. “The Mask and the Cross,” his first major solo exhibition in the U.S., opens at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art this week and celebrates some of his seminal works. The exhibit had its premiere at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta last year.
Onobrakpeya gained renown in the 1950s as a student at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria City, northern Nigeria. He became a founding member of an influential collective of artists later known as the “Zaria Radicals,” committed to decolonizing visual arts and reasserting Nigerian artistic methods and practices in synergy with Western ones. The collective inspired the guiding mission of his work.
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Republicans and conservative activists have increasingly been targeting an executive order issued three years ago by the Biden administration that is intended to boost voter registration, claiming it’s unconstitutional and an attempt to interfere in the November election.
A recent fundraising email sent by a GOP political action committee is an example of how they are framing the order, saying it compels federal agencies “to act as Biden’s personal ‘Get-Out-The-Vote’ machine.” A Republican-led House committee recently issued subpoenas to agency directors and a group of GOP secretaries of state asked the Supreme Court to take up a case challenging the order.
Despite the pushback on the right, there has been no indication the order favors voters of one party over another.
White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson said the administration will continue to protect the voting rights of eligible citizens regardless of political affiliation. Biden issued the order in 2021 as Republican legislatures across the country were debating a wave of state voting restrictions amid the false claims that widespread fraud had cost former President Donald Trump reelection.
“These are baseless claims brought by the very people who spread debunked lies about the 2020 elections and have used those same debunked lies to advance laws across the nation that make it harder to vote and easier to undermine the will of the people,” Patterson said in a statement.
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Namibia’s high court has overturned a law that criminalised gay sex in a victory for LGBTQ+ campaigners after a number of setbacks in the battle for rights in African countries in recent years.
Namibia inherited a law banning “sodomy” and “unnatural offences” when it gained independence from South Africa in 1990. While the ban was rarely enforced, activists said it contributed to discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, including violence by the police.
Friedel Dausab, the Namibian LGBTQ+ activist who brought the case, said: “I feel elated. I’m so happy. This really is a landmark judgment, not just for me, but for our democracy.”
He added: “I’m sitting next to my mum and we’re hoping that this message filters through to all families, so that kids are no longer estranged.”
The judgment, made by three high court judges, said the laws amounted to unfair discrimination under Namibia’s constitution, noting that the same consensual sexual conduct was not criminalised if it was between a man and a woman.
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It may not look like much anymore, but in its heyday La Chaumière was the “premier nightclub in all Saint Louis”, recalls Cheikh Badiane. When the ocean tide was low, the long beach extending far into the distance was wide enough for crowds to gather for football matches on the sand. But in recent years, the ageing fisherman says, “so many catastrophes have happened.” La Chaumière is closed. The Koranic school along the waterfront is no more. A few years ago, during a particularly terrible flood, a small house next to a mosque collapsed, killing the carpenter who lived there. These days, when the storm-surge comes, the waters reach all the way to the war memorial a couple of hundred metres inland. Inch by inch, home by home, Saint Louis is being washed into the sea.
A crowded island city built among waterways, Senegal’s former colonial capital—dubbed the “Venice of Africa”—is especially exposed to a changing climate and rising oceans. The thin peninsula on which fishermen like Mr Badiane live has the Atlantic on its western side and the mouth of the Senegal river on its east. A botched attempt, in 2003, to reduce flooding by digging a canal made things worse, putting a whole neighbourhood under water. A study commissioned by the Senegalese government a decade later found that 80% of the city will be at risk of flooding by 2080. “Saint Louis is a city of water,” says Mr Badiane. “If we’re not careful it will all disappear.”
Saint Louis, Senegal
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While the maternal mortality rate has decreased after rising to alarming new highs early on during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have discovered a new risk for Black pregnant people.
According to a new study, hypertension, also referred to as high blood pressure, among Black and Indigenous pregnant people in the United States doubled between 2007 and 2021. Despite that sharp rise, the study also found that only 60% of those in need received proper treatment.
“These findings are deeply concerning because of the high rate of U.S. maternal mortality, which is linked to chronic hypertension in pregnancy,” said study lead Stephanie Leonard, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, in a release.
Leonard added, “Despite the availability of safe and effective treatments for chronic hypertension, the study speaks to an urgent need for improvement in care for this serious condition.”
The study, which was supported by the National Institutes of Health through grant funding and published in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, analyzed commercial insurance claims of 1.9 million pregnant people, ranging in age from 12 to 55, over a 14-year period. Researchers examined cases of chronic hypertension and the rate at which physicians treated them.
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