Women’s sports and politics mix in our favor
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
If you are not one of the over 1.3 million viewers watching Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) games, or one of the 400,000 fans attending them, you may not be aware of the fact that the players in this professional sports league have been and continue to be advocates for social justice and are engaged in community and political activities beyond superbly playing the game of basketball.
The League’s player demographics are approximately 70% Black, and close to 30% openly identify as LBGTQ. This is not true of any other major sports league. I’ve written about their political activities here in the past, most recently in Black Kos: Don't ignore the political power of the women of the WNBA, which included their role in getting Senator Warnock elected in Georgia, and discussed some disturbing racist and homophobic trends from new fans, encouraged by click-bait media.
Today, I’m delighted to see many players openly endorsing VP Kamala Harris for President.
WNBA players are ready and willing to help Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. Jackie Powell reported for TheNext: New York Liberty players show support for Kamala Harris in 2024 presidential campaign
NEW YORK — The pregame tunnel outfits have become a visual point of intersection in the WNBA. They’re a place where players express themselves and show us who they are, and also, what they believe in. The outfits demonstrate communication without words and instead with gestures, images and facial expressions. This nonverbal yet powerful communication is exactly what took place outside the Liberty’s locker room on Thursday night.
Wing Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, forward Kennedy Burke and guard Courtney Vandersloot all showed up for work — and for the cameras — with a white tee that included a black-and-white photo of Vice President Kamala Harris. The shirt also contained the word, emblazoned in a goldish peach script, “Pres.”
When Burke walked to the locker room, she flashed a smile and peace sign for the cameras, looked down at her shirt and put her hands beneath Harris’ face to draw attention to the message. Laney-Hamilton, while holding her phone, placed her hands in a similar way to emphasize the current Vice President and the current Democratic candidate for President of the United States in the upcoming 2024 general election.
New York Liberty forward, Betnijah Laney-Hamilton
New York Liberty guard Courtney Vandersloot:
NY Liberty guard Kennedy Burke:
Love the “Vote” tee-shirts:
Here’s the Phoenix Mercury’s star center Brittney Griner, rocking her “Kamala Harris for the Culture” tee:
Her teammate, six times Olympic gold medalist Diana Taurasi, and coach Cheryl Reeve talk about why they have endorsed Harris:
Chicago Sky center Brianna Turner reminds folks to check on their voter registration:
Mike Freeman posted this story to USA Today, back in July:
A'ja Wilson and the WNBA could be powerful allies for Kamala Harris
It was August of 2023 when a basketball star and a possible future president of the United States had a moment that was heartfelt and also a possible indication of what's to come. The Las Vegas Aces were at the White House celebrating their championship win with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris came to the podium to speak but before beginning, she turned to forward A'ja Wilson and said: "My soror."
Wilson and Harris are members of the historic Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., a Black service organization and sorority founded at Howard University in 1908. After Harris spoke to Wilson, it was Wilson who responded with "Skee Wee," which can mean many things but it's mostly a form of acknowledgement, care and love.
[...]
It's not exactly known how many WNBA players support Harris and it's important to note that Black voters aren't a monolith. But if the majority-Black league follows the general pattern of Black women voters, Harris could have a potent force fighting for her. An NBC News exit poll showed that 90% of Black women voted for Biden in 2020.
The The Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) is a force to be reckoned with. Here is part of the WNBPA’s mission statement:
Diversity: To celebrate our differences as our power. We champion our members, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion or spirituality, political or ideological viewpoints, to build consensus and promote a high sense of loyalty among all members.
Social Justice: To answer the call. We engage in educational, legislative, civic, social welfare, community or other activities that will advance and safeguard the economic security and general welfare of WNBA players past, present, and future, and that of our communities.
Amplification: To turn up the volume. We use our platform to make our collective voices heard and speak truth to power on our own terms.
Endurance: To sustain ourselves and our communities in the effort to achieve lasting change. We recognize our work as part of a movement rather than a moment.
Shamira Ibrahim wrote, for Harper's Bazaar:
How the WNBA’s Unrelenting Activism Changed Women’s Basketball
WNBA players have consistently banded together to lead displays of collective activism addressing racism, policing, gender equality, and more—and the league has never been more popular
“Our league is made up of the people that require more rights in this world and our society,” explains Nneka Ogwumike, power forward for the Los Angeles Sparks and president of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, the trade union for the league and the first-ever trade union for female pro athletes. “Because we understand our platform—and honestly, I think too, because of the narrative around how quickly it can disappear—I think that we take those moments to take advantage of, you know, the platforms that we do have and us being able to speak out and reach more than people would normally expect.”
I’ll close with this ad:
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The stereotypes the GOP is harping on, however, have been around for much longer.
In fact, as experts tell Vox, these types of ugly attacks are the byproduct of centuries of anti-Black racism and xenophobic sentiment, which have been used over and over to justify restrictive immigration policies that single out Haitian people. The decision to resurface them in 2024 is, once again, creating a palpably dangerous environment, and adding to this legacy.
People watch as Springfield Police Department officers investigate the Springfield City Hall after bomb threats were made against buildings earlier in the day in Springfield, Ohio on September 12, 2024. A government building and school were evacuated after an alleged bomb threat Thursday in Springfield, Ohio, local media reported, rattling the small city at the heart of an anti-migrant conspiracy theory amplified by Donald Trump. Springfield has been thrust into the spotlight in recent days after an unfounded story of Haitian migrants eating pets went viral on social media, with the Republican ex-president and current White House candidate pushing the narrative despite it being debunked. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP) (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)
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School presidents — usually key in galvanizing local communities to vote — have stayed uncharacteristically quiet this election due in part to the candidates’ thin policy agendas and concerns about how their historically underfunded institutions will benefit. Their silence risks the loss of an influential force in Black communities just two months before the election.
“As a president, we should say who is speaking to our issues, and then we should tell our constituents to say, ‘We need to vote for people who will work with our issues,’” said Walter Kimbrough, interim president at Talladega College in Alabama. “We do understand the symbolism and the historical significance of what is happening. But we still have real policy issues and items that we want to have addressed.”
Harris may seem like a shoo-in for HBCU support. She’s a Howard University alumna and member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority founded at the school. A sprawling network of HBCU students, alumni and fraternal societies are lining up people and money to put her in the White House.
And yet Democrats have a tangled history with the institutions’ leaders, who don't formally endorse candidates but whose schools rely heavily on federal funds. The Obama administration initially suggested cutting funding to Black colleges and House Democrats declined to meet some Biden administration requests to direct more money to HBCUs. These actions stung.
Trump, as president, vowed to make HBCUs a top priority. He authorized millions in funding, including for scholarships and research. He also returned a Black colleges initiative from the Education Department to the White House, an HBCU demand. President Joe Biden surpassed that funding with billions in additional investment. But HBCU leaders want guarantees Harris will continue on that track and prioritize issues like college affordability and student debt, which affects a majority of their students.
“By this time in 2020, we'd had all the discussions and we knew what they agreed with and what we didn't agree with,” said Lodriguez Murray, senior vice president of government affairs at the United Negro College Fund, the nonprofit that represents private HBCUs. “Because this campaign has been much more personality focused than policy-focused, you don't have that galvanizing force of, ‘I have talked to them about this substantively, and I know that they are invested.‘“
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The Republican ticket’s foray into inciting ethnic hatred in a single municipality cannot be understood as unthinking or impulsive. Sure, Trump routinely makes demagogic statements that are inspired less by political calculation than whatever he happened to just witness on Fox News.
But Vance is nothing if not a ruthless and self-disciplined striver. One does not rise from his humble origins to Yale Law School without some ability to filter one’s thoughts or rationally pursue one’s goals. And a person capable of likening Trump to an opiate in 2016, and then becoming an apologist for his insurrection just a few years later, when that posture became politically useful, is plainly willing to do most anything in a calculated bid for power.
Vance did not smear the Haitian community of Springfield just once. He chose to double and triple down on that smear, reiterating it again in an X post on Friday morning, in which he blamed Haitian immigrants for bringing “communicable diseases” to Ohio (without presenting any evidence to substantiate that timeless nativist trope).
So why would a ticket with strong incentives to project moderation and reassure swing voters choose to direct hatred against a small community, even after their words have already yielded bomb threats?
I suspect the ugliness is the point.
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Amnesty International has urged authorities in Angola to free four activists who were detained a year ago for planning a peaceful protest, and an influencer who criticised the president in a TikTok video.
The four activists were arrested in September last year before a protest against restrictions on motorcycle taxi drivers. They were sentenced to two years and five months in prison for “disobedience and resisting orders”. The health of three of the four activists has deteriorated sharply in prison, Amnesty said.
The southern African country’s government regularly clamps down on dissent. In August, the president, João Lourenço, signed into law two sweeping bills that extended security forces’ control over the media and permitted prison sentences of up to 25 years for protests that cause “vandalism” or service disruptions.
Vongai Chikwanda, Amnesty International’s deputy director for east and southern Africa, said: “One year in prison simply for peacefully protesting is a travesty of justice. We see a troubling pattern of Angolan authorities withholding medical care as a means of punishing peaceful dissent, amounting to torture.”
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Voices & Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Editor
As many know, I have had a fairly rough year losing both elderly parents a few months of each other, nursing pets to their final days and handling all the legal matters for the family. Appointments and sorrow have kept me from here a bit, but I hope to make it up to everyone. I thought back to what I hoped to accomplish with this series, way, way back when I first was invited to share. I hoped to not only entertain one's sense of how Art and Poetics intersect with Politics and The Human Condition, but also to share the voices that so deftly make that intersection known.
Bob Dylan wrote in the liner notes of Bringing It All Back Home that,
"A poem is a naked person."
And it's true, it is the proverbial mirror of the soul dynamic. But it is not just the mirror of the poet's soul, it is also a mirror of the culture, the nation's soul, and in the process of giving voice, poetry becomes alive. In life, Poetry is not a noun, it is not a description or name of something. In life, Poetry is an adverb, it's an Action Word.
I've often been asked what makes a particular Poem, Art and another poem, not? A Poem for me becomes Art when it can attain that state of Timelessness, when in any age, it can have relevance to the reader of the Poem, even when the reader is unaware of the time and conditions the poet wrote the Poem, (that relevance becomes even more so if the reader does know), when the reader can identify with the poet's point of view on the most visceral of levels, and most importantly, when the Poem has and communicates, Soul.
Maryland State Correctional Facility for Women,
Baltimore County Branch, has undergone a facelift.
Cells are white and un-graffitied, room-like, surprisingly airy.
This is where I must spend the next year, eating slop from tin trays,
facing women much tougher than I am, finding out if I am brave.
Though I do not know what I took, I know I took something.
On Exercise Day, walk the streets of the city you grew up in,
in my case, D.C., from pillar to post, Adams-Morgan to Anacostia,
Shaw to Southwest., Logan to Chevy Chase Circles,
recalling every misbegotten everything, lamenting, repenting.
How my parents keen and weep, scheme to spring me,
intercept me at corners with bus tokens, pass keys, files baked in cakes.
Komunyakaa the poet says, don't write what you know,
write what you are willing to discover, so I will
spend this year, these long days, meditating on what I am accused of
in the white rooms, city streets, communal showers, mess hall,
where all around me sin and not sin is scraped off tin trays
into oversized sinks, all that excess, scraped off and rinsed away.
- Elizabeth Alexander
Peccant
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