{"id":757139,"date":"2026-07-11T18:16:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T18:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/757139\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T18:16:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T18:16:14","slug":"caitlin-clark-never-asked-to-become-a-political-symbol-trumps-allies-have-chosen-her-anyway-caitlin-clark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/757139\/","title":{"rendered":"Caitlin Clark never asked to become a political symbol. Trump\u2019s allies have chosen her anyway | Caitlin Clark"},"content":{"rendered":"

As part of its ongoing belief that the rights of white people are in peril and require government protection, the White House earlier this week released a 162-page report accusing the National Museum of American History of engaging in \u201canti-White activism\u201d, declaring that exhibits at the various Smithsonian museums were prepared by \u201cpeople who don\u2019t want you to love your country\u201d. Two days later, a group of nearly a dozen Republican lawmakers led by Texas representative August Pfluger threatened to send<\/a> the Department of Justice after the WNBA unless it makes itself \u201caccountable\u201d for presumably not protecting embattled Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark against the physicality of game\u2019s Black players. Pfluger implied hard fouls against Clark \u201cmay be racially motivated\u201d, and threatened a civil rights lawsuit against the WNBA on Clark\u2019s behalf could be an option.<\/p>\n

The Pfluger letter represents the third time in less than a month the Trump administration and its loyalists have interfered in sports, twice using it as a front in its ongoing culture war, putting the Justice Department on high alert against anything it considers to be anti-white, anti-straight, anti-Christian. Enlisting Clark is pitting her against her own teammates and the culture of her league, but maybe the government believes she\u2019s already there.<\/p>\n

In a sense, time is running out on Clark. She has spent the last few days centering her public comments on the toxicity of social media, but the entirety of her five years as a national superstar deftly avoiding any direct link between her vague personal politics and the anti-Black portions of her fan base who loudly claim her. The government implying she needs federal protection from her Black opponents further forces her hand to speak declaratively about being positioned as a target by her sport.<\/p>\n

It is yet another step in a dystopian continuum. In June, the Trump DOJ announced it would investigate if Major League Baseball\u2019s Pride Night<\/a> discriminated against Christian players. Trump last week called Fifa head Gianni Infantino to have a one-game suspension against by US national men\u2019s soccer team forward Folarin Balogun rescinded before Team USA\u2019s quarter-final loss to Belgium.<\/p>\n

Clark, a feisty guard who on court gives what she gets and receives physical play not because of her whiteness \u2013 Dallas star Paige Bueckers thrives without controversy \u2013 but because the WNBA<\/a> is a physical league and Clark has not proven as all players must that she can handle it. If time is running out on her, it is also running out on the WNBA in that its simmering conflicts have reached the surface. If she only wants to play basketball \u2013 it is time for her to say so and claim her individual space.<\/p>\n

Clark has always been both a vehicle and an avatar for external motivations far beyond her control, the former being women\u2019s basketball best opportunity to access to the billions of dollars the sports economy generates that have largely been unavailable to female athletes; the latter a symbol of the resentments her supporters (and detractors) carry through her in regards to race, class and gender \u2013 the three most divisive third rails in American life.<\/p>\n

Her impact on the game financially is undeniable, but as the money rises, so too does the pressures on the sport. For years, women\u2019s basketball could gain no traction, largely because unlike tennis where the men\u2019s and women\u2019s games look essentially the same, men\u2019s basketball is an aerial game \u2013 Black guys leaping through the air. The women\u2019s game is not a vertical, above-the-rim game but a horizontal one, ridiculed for decades for being below the rim.<\/p>\n

Once Stephen Curry revolutionized the horizontal game through his remarkable long-range shooting, Clark followed, and suddenly women\u2019s basketball now made sense: it was possible to watch basketball without dunking, and have it still look professional. Suddenly the women\u2019s game became accessible to a new demographic of viewers \u2013 aka men \u2013 who no longer derided the women\u2019s game as belonging in a high-school gym. Clark made the game look familiar to them, and became their champion.<\/p>\n

Clark opened new doors to new dollars, but also represented a threat to its current personality, for if college basketball was accessible as a largely straight, white woman\/ponytail league, the WNBA is a Black\/queer one, with its own deeply held institutional attitude and culture.<\/p>\n

It is not an accident that the arrival of Clark and bigger revenues have muted the league\u2019s political voice, distant from 2020, Maya Moore and Sue Bird, Renee Montgomery and the T-shirt wearing citizen-athletes. The Atlanta Dream was instrumental in Raphael Warnock\u2019s senate election<\/a> in Georgia, but four years later, even with a Black woman running for president, the activist league went silent. Today, it remains so, its political component being the target of a DOJ that believes the most powerful law enforcement agency in America must protect a lone white woman from a moving screen.<\/p>\n

Caitlin Clark has spent her time in the public eye deftly avoiding any direct link between her vague personal politics and the anti-Black portions of her fan base who loudly claim her. Photograph: Emilee Chinn\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

The truth is Clark is being used, by the portion of her fan base who needs her whiteness to reinforce their racism; by the misogynists \u2013 the couch potatoes and Black male NBA players alike who have never liked women\u2019s sports or Black women in general, have always found a way to denigrate them, and now use the guise of supporting her to continue that denigration; by the classists who see Clark as the long-awaited gentrifier who can undo the league\u2019s queer culture and make women\u2019s sports profitable at the heavy cost of absorbing it into the white\/hetero\/male drive-time sports\/noise machine that has never respected it; and now by the most unapologetic, outwardly racist, sexist, and homophobic government this country has seen in a century.<\/p>\n

Whether or not she has asked for such attention, she now has it, and the Republican party and Trump DOJ have decided Clark will be a valuable asset \u2013 or a pawn.<\/p>\n

If there is a historical comp, it can be found in Larry Bird, Indiana\u2019s basketball player. Bird was once treated as a similar avatar. \u201cI just wanted to prove that a white boy who couldn\u2019t run and couldn\u2019t jump could play in this league,\u201d Bird would say early in his career, blithely unaware both that Jerry Lucas, Bob Pettit, Dave DeBusschere and Dave Cowens had already proven it and of the racial trap he was entering. That Bird started his career in Boston in 1979, while the city was still raw from the emotional and physical violence of the school desegregation conflicts and the NBA as a business was routinely considered too Black to be commercially viable made him, nearly a half-century before, a similar Great White Hope to Clark today: a symbol that Black people were ruining the country.<\/p>\n

Clark was born into a time, no differently than Colin Kaepernick was born into a time before her, Michael Jordan and Bird before him, Billie Jean King, and OJ Simpson before all of them. The time is not of their choosing, and like Clark, those athletes did not ask to be a symbol of their generation \u2013 but this is where she has landed, the most recognizable and polarizing star at a time of catastrophic division.<\/p>\n

Now that she has been chosen as the avatar by a government hostile to her sport, what will she do with it? Bird by mid-career did not fall for the racial tropes, redoubled his focus, took the hits, gained respect, built up his teammates, black and white, and rejected the white savior narrative that had been unfairly placed on him, even when years of it exploded following Game 7 of the bitter 1987 NBA Eastern Conference finals, when Dennis Rodman and Isiah Thomas infamously agreed that if Bird were Black, he\u2019d be just another player. Bird didn\u2019t deserve that, and did not encourage it.<\/p>\n

In the postwar era, only the Reagan years \u2013 Bird\u2019s years \u2013 rival Trump\u2019s racism, misogyny and disdain for nonwhite, non-straight citizens, but Reagan\u2019s tactic to appeal to the nation\u2019s capitalistic impulses \u2013 especially those of Black people \u2013 made him appear aspirational while allowing the rich and more fortunate Americans of all persuasions to indulge in a favorite pastime: attacking the poor, reminding them their place in the underclass was their own fault.<\/p>\n

Bird did not take the bait, even though a significant element of Boston fans embraced his era of Celtics precisely because they were often a predominantly white team excelling in a Black sport. They saw themselves in him \u2013 but he did not play along. He symbolized their racism, but he rejected the mantle and did so without ever being mistaken for a political activist. Thirty-four years after playing his last game, he is still respected by the Black game and its culture.<\/p>\n

Clark is in an even more perilous position, for today\u2019s culture is far more invasive and demanding \u2013 people want to know where you stand. Silence is a tacit agreement. Denouncement of the government will earn her the respect of her peers and risk the ire of president and the parts of her fan base hoping she and they are one. The greatest risk Caitlin Clark<\/a> faces is her right to political privacy, courtesy of a blundering government that either erroneously thinks to be acting in her best interest, or is totally comfortable sacrificing her in its continuing attempts to use sports, the one ostensible unifier in a shredded country, to further divide it.<\/p>\n

Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism and Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As part of its ongoing belief that the rights of white people are in peril and require government…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":757140,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[99,434],"class_list":["post-757139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=757139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/757140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=757139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=757139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=757139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}