Anyone with an ounce of consciousness and a fundamental understanding of history has the wherewithal to know that sports and politics are by no means separate. For good, bad and indifferent, they are forever intertwined, and there is just no getting around that.<\/p>\n
And anyone who tries to say otherwise is na\u00efve at best and ignorant at worst.<\/p>\n
So, when the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus put out a call for Black athletes to boycott SEC schools following the recent Supreme Court decision that guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the ongoing redistricting efforts in the South that are leading to the dilution Black political power and the erasure of majority minority districts in Louisiana and Memphis, TN, it shouldn\u2019t be all that surprising.<\/p>\n
Sports were inevitably going to be brought into the conversation, given their stronghold not only on American society but particularly in the South with college football.<\/p>\n
That being said, while the focus has been on encouraging young athletes in the revenue-generating sports of football and men\u2019s basketball to take their talents elsewhere, women\u2019s basketball players and coaches need a voice in this conversation.<\/p>\n
After all, some of the top-tier women\u2019s basketball programs reside in the South and are part of the SEC. South Carolina, Texas, Vanderbilt, LSU and Tennessee.<\/p>\n
South Carolina under Dawn Staley has been one of the most dominant programs in the last decade, winning three national championships (2017, 2022 and 2024) and producing some of the best talent women\u2019s basketball has seen, headlined by A\u2019ja Wilson.<\/p>\n
Texas has appeared in back-to-back Final Fours and has developed players like Madison Booker into All-Americans. Vanderbilt is coming off an historic 29-5 season, in which they went 18-0 at home and reached the Sweet 16.<\/p>\n
LSU, under Kim Mulkey, has raised the program\u2019s profile by winning the 2023 national championship and fostering talents such as Angel Reese and Flau\u2019jae Johnson. The program has also introduced the world to legends Sylvia Fowles and Seimone Augustus.<\/p>\n
Tennessee is a longtime women\u2019s basketball powerhouse, dating back to the days of Pat Summit and producing Chamique Holdsclaw and Candace Parker, to name just a few.<\/p>\n
Given the SEC\u2019s rich tradition in women\u2019s basketball, why isn\u2019t the role the sport, its players and its coaches could play in a proposed boycott being considered?<\/p>\n
Given that women\u2019s basketball is dominated by majority black players (70 percent in the WNBA and 28 percent in the NCAA), shouldn\u2019t their voices be elevated?<\/p>\n
After all, Black women and girls were central to all the movements for racial and gender justice, from abolition to civil rights to Black Power to Black Lives Matter to #MeToo.<\/p>\n
After all, it was the players in the WNBA who have always led the charge on racial and social justice.<\/p>\n
In 2016, they stood up one month before Colin Kaepernick when Maya Moore, Tina Charles and others created Change Starts with Us. In 2020, they organized in the Wubble to address the plight of Black women killed in acts of police violence and helped change the course of political history by sending Rev. Raphael Warnock to the US Senate over former Atlanta Dream owner Kelly Loeffler.<\/p>\n
It was also their ability to organize that led them to achieve a landmark CBA agreement back in March.<\/p>\n
So women\u2019s basketball has a way of showing what democracy and justice look like in practice.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, Black women in sports, politics and activist movements have had to unnecessarily shoulder an incredible burden to ensure equality\u2014only to get little to nothing in return, and often become completely overlooked by mainstream history. It is horrifically unfair for Black women to be superwomen while everyone else does very little or sits on the sidelines when democracy is at stake.<\/p>\n
Therefore, their voices should be heard. They should be asked about the task at hand and they should be given space to articulate for themselves, however they may feel.<\/p>\n
Above all, they shouldn\u2019t be left out.<\/p>\n
As for the boycott, the intentions are good, but it\u2019s important that this debate doesn\u2019t get misunderstood. It is a heavy burden to place on young athletes to do the work that adults aren\u2019t doing.<\/p>\n
There needs to be an all-hands-on-deck effort from players, coaches, universities, activists and lawmakers of sound mind and goodwill, as well as fans. There here has to be strength in numbers. They should also carve out space to determine what can be achieved and explore other avenues to make a statement.<\/p>\n
Grace should be extended to those who aren\u2019t in favor of the boycott, given that they may have a life-changing opportunity ahead of them that they don\u2019t want to sacrifice.<\/p>\n
Either way, the women\u2019s basketball world should have a say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anyone with an ounce of consciousness and a fundamental understanding of history has the wherewithal to know that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":695696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,8612,704,85,339304],"class_list":["post-695695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-commentary","tag-ncaa","tag-sports","tag-sports-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/695696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}