The right's fury over Caitlin Clark is about everything except Caitlin Clark
Politicians, pundits, and fans from across the right decried the decision. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley took to X, as did the official account for the House Judiciary GOP, further inflaming a conversation around Clark that was already chaotic. ESPN’s Pat McAfee even invoked Clark’s race when he argued that she deserved more credit than the rest of the WNBA’s (mostly Black) rookie class for helping to popularize the sport. “Nah, just call it for what it is – there’s one white bitch for the Indiana team who is a superstar,” he said (and later apologized saying in that manner). McAfee was countering some who argued that Clark’s whiteness makes her a little more marketable than her equally talented Black peers.
And that’s not the first time race contributed to a fraught dialogue around Clark. The optics of her mostly white Iowa team facing off against Reese’s mostly Black LSU team in the 2024 Women’s NCAA basketball tournament lit a fire of racial allegiances, even prompting then-LSU star Hailey Van Lith (who is white) to speak out. “In my opinion, I know for a fact that people see us differently because we do have a lot of Black women on our team who have an attitude and like to talk trash and people feel a way about it,” said Van Lith.
But the striking thing about the strife around Caitlin Clark is that she has done nothing to provoke the controversy herself. An inherently uncontroversial figure, Clark is the personification of far-right pundit Laura Ingraham’s infamous “shut up and dribble” sentiment, which echoes a long-standing belief on the right that athletes – or the ones they disagree with anyway – should leave politics out of sports. And yet, it is those very same people who are attempting to draw Clark away from neutrality. Indiana congressman Jim Banks, for example, sent a letter to WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert asking her to discipline Chicago Sky guard Chennedy Carter for knocking Clark down during a game earlier this month. Like Reese’s hit on Sunday, it was a hard foul, but the idea that it needed to be escalated by an elected official is just as ridiculous as when Louisiana governor Jeff Landry proposed stripping the scholarships of LSU women’s basketball players who were not present during the national anthem at the start of one of their games. As LSU coach Kim Mulkey explained, the players only happened to miss the anthem because of a pre-game routine, but no explanation will ever be good enough for conservatives who weaponize innocuous events to make a name for themselves. Republicans are experts at opposition because it’s kind of the point of their party: to conserve or even regress on the issues that matter most to Americans. Without a sense of progress, they have resorted to self-serving stances that are increasingly desperate........
Gone are the days where such controversies were born out of actual controversy. Clark lives in a country whose conservative party has simply moved on from good faith and open-mindedness. Today, political divisiveness is spread not just by media content that is incentivized to bait its audience, but also by a former President and Republican politicians who employ discord as a means to posture to their constituents and potential voters. But whatever they have to say about Clark should be taken as seriously as their takes on the Fever’s perimeter defense.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jun/17/the-rights-fury-over-caitlin-clark-is-about-everything-except-caitlin-clark
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