Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark deserve better sophomore seasons out of everyone – Andscape

The WNBA should have seen this coming.

Eighteen months ago, forward Angel Reese and the LSU Tigers defeated guard Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes in the NCAA Championship. Reese celebrated by walking across the court and pointing to her ring finger imitates Clark's “You Can’t See Me” celebration. From that moment on, a rivalry arose between the two phenomena. And while Clark and Reese had a compelling on-court rivalry in the WNBA, particularly over the once-heated Rookie of the Year race, the real battle takes place off the court and rarely involves anything the two stars actually do are doing.

They have become the new socio-political and racial battleground, leading to nastiness that has done them and the WNBA a disservice. The noise has overshadowed their brilliant statistical seasons.

Clark entered the WNBA as one of the most popular athletes in the country, and for good reason. She was one of the greatest college basketball players we had ever seen, entering the league with dynamic play and a deep three-pointer that reminded fans of Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry. That would be the formula to make her one of the biggest new stars the league has seen in a long time. However, add the fact that she is a straight white woman and she would become much more: a central figure to parts of the country that despise and rally behind black queer women. So everything Clark did — a triple-double, a 30-point game, setting a record — wasn't just a great basketball performance. Their achievements were used to discredit the women who make up most of the WNBA's players.

Many of Clark's fans also had Reese, a black villain that everyone could compare them to. For a certain segment of fans, all the accolades she received — and to be clear, there were a lot — weren't just about Clark. It was about embarrassing Reese — who also had a record-breaking season, setting a WNBA record for consecutive double-doubles and nearly setting a league record for rebounds — and women like her.

The Reese-Clark rivalry wasn't just about basketball anymore. It was about everything else. Blackness. strangeness. An upcoming election. A divided country. Racism. White supremacy. Ally. Reviews. And not nearly enough people actually showed compassion for the women themselves.

Reese has been subjected to truly violent attacks online, including artificial intelligence depictions of her body spread across social media. Even though Reese had accepted the role of villain that was already thrust upon her, she had not asked for the racist attacks that came with it – everything that supposedly meant Clark's support.

However, the attacks on Reese weren't really about Clark. Their point was to hate Reese as a confident, outspoken black woman. The Clark phenomenon involved two different groups of people. One group consists of real Clark fans. The people who are passionate about their courtroom vision, their shooting, and their connection to the audience. The WNBA fan who knows a transformative athlete when he sees one. Little girls who look up to the stars of the league and want to shoot 30-foot 3s like Clark as they get older.

Then there is the other group. This group is full of people who see Clark as a way to express their deepest, most hateful thoughts about the black and queer women in the WNBA. Once Clark joined the league, every pushback she received—a hard foul, a comment about the way she covered herself, being ridiculed for her flop—became a referendum on what black queer women should feel about one another straight white woman think, and one way to do this is to repeat harmful stereotypes about the women in the WNBA.

Clark's WNBA campaign left a trail of damaged black women, even though she maintained her neutrality and never harmed the women themselves. There was Reese, who continued to face damaging messages throughout the season, even as she and Clark showed teamwork and camaraderie at the All-Star Game. There was Chennedy Carter, Reese's teammate at the Chicago Sky, who committed a blatant foul on Clark and was viciously harassed and harassed online by a “fan” outside the team hotel. Sun protection woman DiJonai Carrington received death threats and racial slurs after she accidentally hit Clark in the eye during a playoff game, resulting in a swollen eye. There was Sheryl Swoopes, the all-time great, whose flawed and sometimes ill-informed sports portrayals of Clark led to online harassment. Even Clark's teammate Aliyah Boston had to shut down her social media after fans blamed her for the team's early struggles.

But this isn't just about the series of black queer WNBA players who have been brutalized by misogyny. Again, Clark is a victim. Her rookie season was marked by the same racism and misogyny directed at the women in her WNBA community. Instead of being supported for her brilliance on the court, Clark is dehumanized and a caricature of hateful idolatry is created in her name, even though all she wants to do is play basketball.

Many straight white women have spoken out about their own privilege and tried to curb the nastiness their black counterparts face. And how could they not? How could anyone want to remain silent when their teammates, colleagues and friends are constantly bombarded with hate speech? It's only human decency to want to stand up for the people you share a locker room with. Las Vegas Aces guard Kelsey Plum, UConn guard Paige Bueckers and others have done so. It is a reasonable expectation that everyone has a responsibility to work together.

To Clark's credit, she spoke up for the black women who came before her and continued to do so SNL before she was even in the league. And she fielded questions about fans at press conferences before finally fully condemning the racism WNBA players have faced. But here’s the problem: racism won’t stop. Anti-gay bias will continue unabated. And the misogyny will only continue. And as long as this is done in Clark's name, she will always be expected to stand up for them and expected to suppress a movement she did not start.

Imagine the pressure that is put on someone. Imagine the distraction from on-field achievements when the people who claim to support you don't care about those awards either and the people who want to support you, the player and the person, are the same, who are inundated with insults at every turn. Clark doesn't experience the kind of violent, radicalized hatred that comes from centuries of oppression, but she does experience what it's like to be at the center of a struggle so much bigger than herself, in which her actions are lightning rods for backlash, including one from a fan that had to be removed while playing the Connecticut Sun in the playoffs.

Clark's presence was a boon for ratings and revenue for the WNBA. Her natural popularity with fans would always prove this. For this reason, she is a unique figure in the history of the league. However, the benefits of ratings and revenue should not come at the expense of player well-being. That was something WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert didn't realize when she commented on the harassment players faced weeks ago: “But the one thing I know about sports is that you need rivalry,” she said. “That’s what keeps people watching. They want to see important games between rivals. They don’t want everyone to be nice to each other.”

It's not just about rivalries and revenue. It's about a league that has worked hard to create a safe space for a community that is often unsafe in far too many places across this country. And that safe space has become unstable because far too many people have seen and used Clark as an entry point to invade that space with bigotry.

It will still be about eight months before Clark and Reese step before a WNBA court again. It's time for the league, the fans, the media and everyone in between to figure out how to support these women and not make them targets for a hateful crusade for racist or symbolic reasons.

Their size on the court demands more respect. This also applies to their humanity.