Support the WNBA players union!
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Over the years I’ve talked about women in sports, and particularly the racism, sexism and homophobia faced by the women who play them. Far too many “political” folks are ignoring the fact that sports is political, and more people here tune in to sporting events than those who eschew them.
Recently, more than 2 million viewers tuned in the the Women’s National Basketball (WNBA) All Star weekend, where the player’s union staged a protest.
They were immediately attacked by a slew of (mostly male) sports journalists and podcasters for daring to stand up for their rights. I won’t post any of that crap here, because it has been so vile.
The inequities faced by the players in a league where most of the men make multi million dollar salaries when some of the women get paid the minimum of 62 thousand dollars a year is unconscionable. The women in the union aren’t demanding millions, but they are fighting for a fair share of the profits from recent tv deals and other income the men’s league and the team owners are garnering.
Here’s a guest link to a recent NYTimes op-ed by Harvard economist Claudia Goldin:
How Underpaid Are W.N.B.A. Players? It’s Embarrassing.
Women’s basketball has rapidly become one of the country’s most popular spectator sports. The Indiana Fever, with its star Caitlin Clark, regularly sells out arenas. Several W.N.B.A. games last year attracted more than two million viewers. The 2024 N.C.A.A. women’s championship game drew a larger television audience than the men’s championship.
Yet players in the W.N.B.A. make far less money than many male athletes in less popular sports leagues — and only a sliver of what the average N.B.A. player does. Nothing can justify this extraordinary pay gap.
[...]
Across the American economy, much of the gender pay gap no longer reflects outright discrimination. It instead reflects the different occupations and industries that men and women choose to enter, as well as other factors. But gender discrimination remains a major problem, and there is now a prominent example for everyone to see: professional basketball.
For the past year, I have worked with the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, the union for W.N.B.A. players, to consider the earnings of basketball players, and I have been surprised by what I found. The average N.B.A. player’s salary is around $10 million in the current season. That is 80 times what the average W.N.B.A. player earned (about $127,000 in salary) in the 2024 season.
A key fact is that the N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. resemble a joint venture in which the league’s individual finances are not transparent to the public. The N.B.A. owns around half of the W.N.B.A. and helps apportion money between the two leagues. Last year the N.B.A. negotiated joint television contracts for the leagues, in which Disney, NBC and Amazon Prime Video agreed to pay the two leagues roughly $77 billion for the right to show their games over 11 years. The gap in player salaries appears to reflect the highly unequal way that N.B.A. owners divide the leagues’ revenue.
[...]
The average W.N.B.A. game recently drew about 77 percent of the eyeballs for the average N.B.A. game. The gap in total eyeballs per player is much larger because the N.B.A. has more games per season and longer games. Taking into account all of these differences shows that the W.N.B.A. attracts about 30 percent, or roughly one-third, as many eyeballs per player as the N.B.A. does. This ratio is a reasonable estimate of the actual relationship between W.N.B.A. and N.B.A. broadcast revenue per player — and, by extension, what W.N.B.A. players should receive in salary relative to N.B.A. players.
Pay a visit to the union website:
The WNBPA
The Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) is the union for current women’s professional basketball players in the WNBA. The WNBPA is the first labor union for professional women athletes. It was created in 1998 to protect the rights of players and assist them in achieving their full potential on and off the court.
Our Mission is to leverage the collective wisdom and vision of WNBA players and fully commit to affirming, defending, and advancing player interests on and off the court.
Through collective bargaining, protest, public service, community engagement, and educational programming, we tirelessly challenge the workplace and societal conditions that stand in the way of our vision of what is possible for our lives and the future of basketball. Moving as one, we prevail.
Sportscaster Jemelle Hill talks about the situation on her podcast.
and also as a guest on the The Dan Le Batard Show.
Don’t underestimate the political power of these players. I wrote about the players role in getting Sen. Warnock here:
Black Kos: Don't ignore the political power of the women of the WNBA
My husband and I are both women’s basketball fans. We not only watch the games, but also follow podcasters, like Cess Talks Sports and her co-host Political Lil who examine the politics of the sport. Just want to point out that the women of the WNBA aren’t only fighting for pay equity — they are concerned about health care, child care, practice facilities and pensions as they renegotiate their Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA).
I’m curious — how many of you watch women’s basketball? If not basketball, what women’s sports do you follow?
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Bubba Wallace climbed out of the No. 23 car Sunday, pumped his fists, found his family and savored every precious moment of a historic Brickyard 400 victory.
He deserved every minute of it.
The 31-year-old Wallace overcame a tenuous 18-minute rain delay, two tantalizing overtimes, fears about running out of fuel late and the hard-charging defending race champ, Kyle Larson, on back-to-back restarts to become the first Black driver to win a major race on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s 2.5-mile oval. No Black driver has won the Indianapolis 500, and Formula 1 raced on the track’s road course.
“This one’s really cool,” Wallace said. “Coming off Turn 4, I knew I was going to get there — unless we ran out of gas. I was surprised I wasn’t crying like a little baby.”
His third career NASCAR Cup victory delivered Wallace’s first victory in the series’ four crown jewel events, the others being the Daytona 500, Coca-Cola 600 and Southern 500. It also snapped a 100-race winless streak that dated to 2022 at Kansas and locked up a playoff spot. His only other win came at Talladega in 2021.
The final gap was 0.222 seconds, but that was no measure of the consternation he faced.
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Apparently, the Texas GOP’s plan to redraw its congressional map to reduce Democratic districts and dilute Black voting power is only popular with MAGA Republicans who don’t mind a little systemic racism so long as it affords them a political advantage.
Also, Texas Republicans would really love it if they could carry out their call-back to Jim Crow in peace without all of the pesky protesting.
On Thursday, District 18 congressional candidate Isaiah Martin, a Black Democrat, was forcibly removed from the Texas Capitol, and now, he faces misdemeanor charges of criminal trespassing, resisting arrest, and disrupting an official meeting, according to CBS Austin.
It’s difficult to make out what Martin is saying when Capitol security sprang into action to remove him, but while Chairman Cody Vasut commanded the “sergeants” to “remove the gentleman from the room,” Martin could be heard shouting, “History will not remember you well”
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Voices & Soul
“… Even now,
if I wake up cold, I open my mouth
and repeat the 23rd Psalm… “
- Marlanda Dekine
“My Grandma Told Stories or Cautionary Tales”
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Editor
Monsters can be lurking every and anywhere when you’re a child. The bogey man in the closet and the plat-eye ghoul roaming the delta were frights that kept a child wary into the late night. The nuns at Catholic school advised us to make the sign of the cross when we were alone, to ward off the Devil and any temptation that might be conjured when left to ourselves. For a few weeks after that ecclesiastical order, I would shower, making the sign of the cross because I was sure the Devil was there and would spirit me to a dark spirit world of no return. Naturally, my parents inquired why everything below my waist was still grimy, why were my feet so dirty after showering? When I told them of the nuns’ advice, they said to make the sign of the cross bigger, so it also included my feet. Sounded like even better cautionary advice. Might not have saved my soul, but it did save my soles.
And now the lurking monsters are roaming the halls of government, issuing snake oil medical advice and One Hundred Year War religious war edicts. The
United States Office of Personnel Management released a statement ordering “during a break, an employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the non-adherent should rethink his religious beliefs.” Looks like there is no separation of their religion and our state of well being. We all know where this is headed. Your Prosperity Gospel manager knows the secret of the universe better than you and will never tire of reminding you of it. It is now their religious right to sway you from your evil, empathetic sins during your fifteen minute coffee break, and resurrect that Devil may care soullessness that God on high imbued each of us in the Prosperity Garden of Excess. It is now an imperative to dismantle not only a national memory, but the very memory of our individual selves. It is imperative our familial experiences are disappeared, along with our sense of community, so it all can be supplanted by the plat-eye monster conjured in the Foundations of Heritage think tank labs to haunt the Great Experiment, our friends, family and neighbors.
Grandma Thelma told me if I slept on my back
a hag would ride me and I’d never return, so I trained
my body to sleep on my stomach. Even now,
if I wake up cold, I open my mouth
and repeat the 23rd Psalm.
Grandma Thelma told me I might see a plat-eye
when I was seven years old. I could imagine
cypress knees growing full bodies
to walk the hungry road, an entire body
of eye nicknamed Plat.
Grandma Thelma told me I’d feel welcomed by the eye.
I’d be made to feel safe and loved,
but if I looked directly into that big white-bodied cornea,
I’d forget where I came from.
I’d be disappeared.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.
