Dispatch #99 White Lesbian Age 70 Considers Black Women Athletes Standing Out for Justice

December 14th 2022

662 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

433 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin 

In stark contrast to men’s major professional sports, the WNBA stands out for the players’ outspoken and action-oriented commitment to using their public platform to advocate for social justice.  

The WNBA is a league of mostly Black women who have taken up major progressive causes: voting rights, stricter gun laws, equality for the LGBT community. “This is what Black women do,” Natasha Cloud of the Washington Mystics says. “We carry the weight in our family, this country, and we always have, whether we get the acknowledgment or not from it.”

In recent years, WNBA members helped flip a Senate seat in Georgia by supporting the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, when Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Republican who owned the Atlanta Dream, spoke against the Black Lives Matter movement. They walked out of games to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man in Wisconsin, and dedicated a season to Breonna Taylor, a Black woman who was killed by Kentucky police. Their latest collective bargaining agreement set new benchmarks in pay and benefits for women in sports. The Washington Mystics, led by star forward Cloud, regularly use post-game press conferences to talk about gun violence instead of basketball.

Authors of New York Times article titled “With End of Griner’s Detention, a New Wave of WNBA Activism Begins” report that with their campaign to free Brittney Griner from prison in Russia over, WNBA players say they will help free others and focus on women’s health and pay equity.  www.nytimes.com/2022/12/09/sports/basketball/wnba-activism-brittney-griner.html 

The plane returning Griner from Russia had not even touched down in the United States before Griner’s agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, pledged that the campaign to free Griner would transition into securing the release of wrongfully detained Americans around the world.

“While I was fighting for BG this year, I was still fighting for sensible gun laws,” Cloud said. “While we were still fighting for BG, we were still fighting for a woman’s right to her body and to the choice to her body and the choice to her life. We were still fighting and trying to get people out to vote, understanding how important these elections were in the trajectory of where our country was headed.”

Seattle Storm’s star Breanna Stewart: “Ever since I came into the WNBA, we’ve always been at the forefront in speaking out against social injustices, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do. As a league full of women and majority Black women, there’s a lot that needs to be fought for, and we’re used to it and we’re used to speaking up on our own account and now for others.” www.nytimes.com/2022/12/09/sports/basketball/wnba-activism-brittney-griner.html 

Yeah, female athletes and especially black female athletes are acutely aware of the intertwined gender and race oppressions.  These women have fought to achieve their professional dreams and understand that women’s human rights are essential to the fight for social justice. These women, who depend on their bodies for their livelihood, live in America where women’s right to control their bodies has been made subservient to (re)production.