Caitlin Clark Is About To Face A Whole Lot of Racial Resentment
Caitlin Clark is 66 points away from becoming the leading scorer in NCAA women's basketball history. Clark averages a nation-leading 32.4 points per game. She will break the record in the coming weeks, barring injury.
Her skills and achievements helped elevate women’s college basketball into a more national light, recently topping an NBA game in head-to-head viewership.
You’d think her success would be met with overwhelming positivity from supporters of women’s hoops. But it hasn’t.
Last week, former WNBA player Sheryl Swoopes sought to undermine Clark’s success with a series of lies.
Swoopes claimed we ought to take Clark’s record-breaking career with a grain of salt because she played an extra year of collegiate basketball because of the Covid-19 pandemic, is not a true senior, shoots 40 times a game, and is 25 years old playing against teenagers.
In actuality, Clark has played four seasons of college basketball. She is a true senior. She shoots 20 times per game. And just turned 22 years old.
Swoopes’ commentary seemed personal, reeking of resentment – racial resentment.
Swoopes made her point while donning a "Female, Fearless, and Black" T-shirt on Gilbert Arenas’ podcast, where he recently spoke about how white players were trying to "take" the NBA away from black players.
Go figure.
Caitlin Clark is a white woman dominating a sport primarily dominated by black athletes. She is months away from entering the WNBA where over 70% of players are black.
Clark is about to, and is already starting to, receive the same backlash as Nikola Jokic and Luka Doncic face in the NBA.
Jason Whitlock and Steve Kim spoke about what awaits Clark on the next level as a straight white woman.
"She's going to face a level of racism from black players, and she's going to face a level of hostility from lesbian players because she's not on team LGBTQ. She's a Catholic [and] she's got some boyfriend," which means "she's going to walk into an extremely hostile environment," said Whitlock.
"The endorsement deals are going to be with Caitlin Clark; all the appearances you have to make for the team in the league [will be for] Caitlin Clark. … The locker-room politics and the derision she is going to face over time is going to be really interesting," added Kim.
"Clark will likely be painted as "the Great White Hope, the savior of the WNBA."
Of course, she will.
Last summer, ESPN posted, sans any cited evidence, blaming the popularity of Jokic on "the Great White Hope," a reference to the 1967 film of the same name in which the nation cheers on white boxers to defeat their black opponents.
The idea stems from the hypothesis that white basketball players need and receive assistance to compete at the same level as black players.
Former college basketball player and Fox Sports Radio host Doug Gottlieb contextualized last year that "most black [people] (and a lot of white guys) think white guys can’t hoop & need special treatment in order to be viewed on the same level."
Hence, the resentment toward today's white players from Arenas to Kendrick Perkins, from Stephen A. Smith to Michael Wilbon, from Montrezl Harrell to Draymond Green.
Clark is particularly vulnerable to racial hostility, having been cast as the villainous white girl last March in a feud with LSU forward Angel Reese.
Reese, a black woman, waved "You can’t see me" in Clark’s face after LSU defeated Iowa in the women’s national championship game. Some fans called the move classless. It was.
But the media turned the response into proof of a "double standard" because Clark used the gesture previously.
The difference was, of course, that Reese made the gesture in Clark’s face and to a far more egregious degree. Nonetheless, journalists push the following statements:
"LSU’s Angel Reese, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and the double standards of race in sports," said the ESPN-owned Andscape.
"But we’re not really talking about talking trash, are we? We’re talking about double standards: Black players are vilified for doing the same things white players are praised for doing," said Andscape writer William C. Rhoden.
"Chickens were merely coming home to roost for Clark," another ESPN article claimed.
"Reaction to Angel Reese taunting Caitlin Clark shows the double standard for Black athletes," added USA Today.
"If you praised Caitlin Clark as competitive, fiery, and passionate for doing the ‘You can’t See me’ celebration and are criticizing Angel Reese for the same we already know!!" posted Ryan Clark, insulating white privilege.
"When Caitlin Clark did it, it was swag, but when Angel Reese does it, it’s classless. It's very clear: this is not about anything else but race," said Shannon Sharpe at the time.
Iowa Hawkeyes guard Caitlin Clark is a star. (Photo by Ben Solomon/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
It's always refreshing to see men in their 50s try to diminish college students down to the color of their skin for clout.
What ghouls they are.
Hardly any star athlete today can avoid the racial lens through which the media and former athletes so badly want to view them.
The easiest, and laziest, way to cover athletes in 2024 is by bucketing them into categories based on their race, and thus defining them by their skin color and what that skin color has historically represented.
See the coverage of Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson, for notable examples. Like Allen, the media portrayed Clark as the lead villain in her respective sports.
It's all a ploy to divide us and keep the media relevant. Unfortunately, it's effective.
So, unless Caitlin Clark comes out in favor of progressive social causes – i.e. BLM, abortion, or trans athletes – she will be unable to escape her casting as the privileged white girl from Iowa.