|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE]
I haven’t been a sports fan for many years, partly because I don’t have time to keep up with the world of sports and partly because I have zero tolerance for the unsportsmanlike conduct that has come to characterize, if not dominate, it. And yet I am fast becoming FrontPageMag’s resident sports reporter: fresh off my defense of NFL kicker Harrison Butker for giving a commencement speech that championed traditional values and sent the media into an apoplectic fit, here I am about to leap to the defense of another athlete who is drawing petty media fire for nothing more than the contemporary sin of being white.
Even I know that 22-year-old Iowan college phenom and now WNBA star Caitlin Clark is an outstanding talent who is helping to draw a whole new generation of fans to women’s basketball. The left-leaning media pay lip service to gratitude about this, but can’t help carping about the fact that Clark belongs to a demographic they openly despise: straight, white Midwesterners.
An editorial in the reliably far-left Los Angeles Times, for example, frets that Clark’s popularity “draws questions of race and equity” – because the L.A. Times puts a race-and-equity spin on every editorial. The piece notes that “approximately 70% of [WNBA] players are Black [sic], nearly a third identify as LGBTQ and most come from urban environments,” but “Clark is white, straight and from Iowa.” The Times doesn’t explicitly state what’s wrong with being a straight white Iowan, but we all know what the problem is: the Left literally worships diversity unless straight white people get in the mix. Then it’s, “There goes the neighborhood.”
The article goes on to cite female critics complaining that Straight White Clark is getting attention, accolades, and endorsements that lesbian black players aren’t (the inconvenient fact that Clark can shoot circles around those other players is largely disregarded).
“Caitlin fits a very comfortable narrative for a lot of people in the United States,” said Nicole Melton, co-director of the Laboratory for Inclusion and Diversity in Sport at the University of Massachusetts (as an aside, why is there such a thing as a “Laboratory for Inclusion and Diversity in Sport”? Sport is naturally diverse and inclusive – it includes everybody who can play well, regardless of skin color). Melton continued: “She comes from the heartland. She’s an amazing talent. She’s also a white, straight woman, right? There’s not a lot of things that would make people feel uncomfortable with that person being successful.”
What is Melton going on about? Is there anyone who is “uncomfortable” with black athletes being successful? Was anybody “uncomfortable” with Serena Williams’ championships and endorsements? The left assumes that everyone is as boringly obsessed with race as they are.
Also among her critics was the perpetually racially aggrieved, former ESPN personality and Atlantic writer Jemele Hill, who wakes every morning wondering how she can racialize the topic of the day. Hill griped that “race and [Clark’s] sexuality played a role in her popularity” and “that is a little problematic because of what it says about the worth and the marketability of the players who are already there.”
Whoopi Goldberg surprisingly took issue with Hill’s perspective. On a recent episode of the inexplicably popular ABC daytime gabfest The View, co-hostess Whoopi, whom I don’t believe I have ever quoted favorably before, pointed out Clark’s extraordinary accomplishments, none of which stemmed from the color of her skin:
She is the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer of men and women. In February she broke the woman’s record, in March she broke Pistol Pete Maravich’s 3,667-point record. She’s had more 30-point games than anyone in the past 25 years. She holds the single season three-point record for men and big ten’s all-time leader in assists… I’m sorry, there are great players, but nobody else has done this.
That wasn’t enough for co-hostess Sunny Hostin, the show’s resident Joy Reid, who brings bitter race-mongering to every topic. She responded to Whoopi, “I’ve been a basketball fan since I can remember. I played basketball with my dad in Harlem when I was five years old. So I remember loving the game, and the game not necessarily loving women back, right?”
Hold it right there. How did basketball “not love women back”? Is she suggesting basketball itself is sexist? Actually, she is; she is claiming that because women’s basketball never achieved the popularity of men’s, it’s because a sexist society conspired to deny women players the money and fame accorded male players. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that vastly more people in the past – as well as today – want to watch professional men’s basketball than women’s.
Anyway, Hostin continued, “The WNBA started in 1996, first games played in 1997. It’s 2024, and we’re just now really talking about it. So if Caitlin Clark is the vehicle that will bring this sport that I have loved so much and so long to little five-year-old girls playing in Harlem, I say, ‘Yes, bravo.’ I have no problem with that.”
Spoiler alert: yes, she does have a problem with it. That problem is that Caitlin Clark is straight and white: “With that being said, I do think that there is a thing called pretty privilege. There is a thing called white privilege. There is a thing called tall privilege.”
Hold it right there. Tall privilege? Well, yes, tall people certainly have an advantage in a field like professional basketball. But how is that relevant to Clark, who is only six feet even? That’s average in the WNBA.
But let’s get back to the “white privilege” part. Hostin went on: “And we have to acknowledge that. So part of it is about race, because if you think about the [black former WNBA star] Brittney Griners of the world, why did [Griner] have to go to play in Russia?”
Griner (who at 6’9” had the tallest “tall privilege” in the league) often played internationally in the off-season, notably in Russia, where she was convicted of drug smuggling but released in a prisoner exchange with notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout. Even Whoopi noted that Griner went to Russia to play not because she was black but because Americans “didn’t believe in the WNBA.”
Hostin glossed over that and simply concluded that Caitlin Clark “is more relatable to more people because she’s white, because she’s attractive, and unfortunately, there still is that stigma against the LGBTQ community.”
This is pure race-baiting, anti-white racism, and frankly, bitter jealousy on Hostin’s part. I have never heard a sports fan say that NBA superstar Michael Jordan, or the NFL’s Jerry Rice, or baseball’s Hank Aaron, would have been more “relatable” had he been white. It’s unthinkable that your average sports fan would say, “That Steph Curry sure is a great shooter. If only he were white, I could appreciate him more.” True sports fans don’t care about skin color, only athletic excellence.
Contrary to what they would likely insist, Jemele Hill and Sunny Hostin are not true sports fans, or at least not sports fans first. First and foremost, they are left-wing media propagandists, and the left is suffused with anti-white racism and anti-heterosexual bigotry; Hill and Hostin are driven first and foremost not by admiration of athletic excellence but the queerification of the culture and the dismantling of what they both believe to be a white supremacist society. That’s why Caitlin Clark is “problematic” for them.
NBA legends Charles Barkley and LeBron James – both black, of course – came to Clark’s defense against the naysayers. Barkley stated that female critics are being “petty” and should be thankful for “all the money and visibility she’s bringing to the WNBA,” and the ordinarily insufferable political activist James, another figure I’ve never quoted favorably, actually offered wise advice: Clark should “put on blinders” about the media and keep her nose focused to the grindstone to hone her craft.
Ignoring the media is a demanding challenge in an environment in which far too many of our bigoted cultural elites are hell-bent on spotlighting your immutable characteristics rather than your world-class talent.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
If you don’t live by the rules set down by the left you must to outsized from the American People and Bannish to The Village where you’ll wear a Number and if you try to escape a big balloon comes after you
“I am not a number! I am a free man!” (Laughter)
Caitlin is the Jackie Robinson of the WNBA. The woke judge her not on the quality of her play, but on her sexuuality and the color of her skin. If she was gay OR black they would be singing her praises.
She is a real life day Harrison Bergeron, except that the restraints placed on her are not only physical (not giving her the ball) but verbal and mental.
Well said every word. Thank you.
Polemicist George Will, the limp-wristed neo-con sissy, has condemned football as too violent for civilized society. What Will is really condemning is his own football incompetence. His vituperation is the revenge of the nerds. Likewise with hoops star Caitlan Clark’s DEI detractors. Their real beef with “CC” is that she plays circles around the whole non-white lot of them. Like Larry Bird before her, “CC” will eventually shut all of their carping mouths with her stellar play. In the meantime, here’s some advice for the naysayers: Go play with your pronouns.
It is too violent for civilized society. Along with boxing and the worst of all that cage, no holds barred, kick boxing. The violence is no less obscene or degrading than hardcore pornography.
And guess who has to deliver the medical care and modern medical technology to the brutes beating each other’s brains to a pulp? The limp wristed, sissy, NERDS who become doctors and research scientists instead of brutes beating each other’s brains out.
What a surprise. You are a colossal weakling. You just can’t leave anyone alone to do what they like.
So lets review:
You hate rock and roll…especially the “earsplitting” Jimi Hendrix. Beatle and Elvis ballads are OK but that’s not really rock. (I saved your music reviews) So we should just listen to Ayn Rands Tiddlywink Music.
You won’t lift a finger for your country. “I don’t recognize any such absurdity as service to my country. I recognize a moral responsibility to my freedom and liberty and the freedom and liberty of those I love.”
Not big on self defense or firearms either. No wonder you live in NYC. One is not allowed to own a gun there.
You actually said “Kill them all” re: Hamas, as long as someone else does the fighting for you. You might get some dirt under those manicured fingernails.
You always prattle on about those Medieval religious wars that we can’t do anything about now, but not much about the ideological wars of the 20th C.
You do like to spread your own version of totalitarianism, Objectivism, which fortunately exists only books that no one reads.
And if we say something mean about Rand you always come to her defense as if we pee’d in your Cherrios. But you always feel it’s perfectly appropriate to bag on Christianity and Judaism.
Mr. Tough Guy in action.
“MILLIONS are still watching Black and White TV’s so they only see the World as Black and White. Those same millions are constantly playing with the knobs trying to take the WHITE PART OUT!” sc
THE WHOLE TRUTH… It’s all about the rise of BLACK SUPREMACY and they just can’t stand that a Whitey has taken over their spotlight, and that’s not just in basketball! They are openly ranting against Whites as the trouble in the world and even wanting to eliminate them.
When most of us heard of a female player was about to break an NCAA scoring record, I bet 99% of us thought she was a Black. I was excited to see that. Then, it happened, I almost fainted…. “COMO?”
Many of my heroes are Black… Michael Jordan, Willie Mays, Tiger Woods, Louie Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzie Gillespie, both who I performed with, Buddy Rich… oops he’s White, sorry.
What ever happened to today’s narrative that you must follow or else: DIVERSITY, EQUITY, INCLUSION!
In the last Olympics, a Black NBA player demanded that they send an ALL-BLACK team. How much more evidence does one need to prove it’s Black Supremacy and yet, NO FOUL against that person, and his supporters. A “token” White was put on the team.
WHAT IF: “Lebron…. sorry man but we’re cutting you from the team to add more Diversity. We have an Hispanic, 5’9″, a little chubby, a little old too but you’ve even ranted that other areas of our society have Diversity so I just assume that you mean the NBA too.” Lebron: “But I’m qualified. I can dunk the ball without even jumping. I score three’s with ease.” Coach: “Sorry, qualifications aren’t important today… just the Color of their Skin, their LGBTQ-WXYZ status, being a First, gender, and political agenda and NOT the Content of their Qualifications! Yes, MLK’s Dream turned into his worst Nightmare. Clean out your locker. Senor Chavez, you’re on and guess what, you’ll make what he made. Fair right?”
“THANKS OBAMA!”
Just one thing, is there really such a thing as an LGBT community? I believe the word homosexual was invented in the 1950s. From there, the people who practiced same sex acts were believed to have a unique or special identity. Other ‘identities’ followed.
What if the world is wrong? What if these “LGBTs” are not members of an identity group? What if they and others are just caught up in or trapped in one form of eroticism or another?
What if Caitlin is just an ordinary girl who is not caught up in one of these behaviors? Why should that be a problem?
If something is good and beneficial to America, WOKE hates it. May the fleas of Mohammed’s particular herd of love goats infest the short hairs of WOKEs every where.
Dear Sunny,
You need to stop your cultural appropriation. Basketball was invented by a white, male, heterosexual, Christian minister. Time for you to give basketball back to the white man and for people of color to invent their own sports.
And Sunny, stop talking in English it’s a white man’s language, the language of the oppressor. Stop wearing white fashion and white technology fabrics like those polyester blends you wear.
Stop living in the white man’s world Sunny.
Or at least Thank the Patriarchy (TM)
You always go after the unreachable. I don’t think she will see your little letter
By gosh, it’s time professional sports DEI. After all, we can’t have one demographic dominating anything, right?
A white, Christian, heterosexual man invented basketball. Why does this not taint the sport with the permanent stain of racism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Naismith
It’s my understanding ticket sales for the WNBA have increased due to Caitlin Clark. In addition, more people will be watching the WNBA. Thus, she is the best thing to happen to the WNBA.
Please don’t shout. Is Griner female?
The only pro sports I watch are men’s and women’s golf. I watch because after 68 years of playing I still enjoy the challenge and its the ONLY pro sport where sportsmanship still matters the players still call penalties on themselves ..
“There’s not a lot of things that would make people feel uncomfortable with that person being successful” – except people like Melton
“…Clark belongs to a demographic they openly despise: straight, white Midwesterners.”
One reason the Left continues to win small and large arguments and battles across the years is because the Average Joe in the Middle and Right quickly and easily adopts the Left’s language, terms for everything.
Would it kill Mr. Tapson to refer to Miss Clark as heterosexual?