I’ll never forget the first time I saw a white person be the “only one” in the room.
I was 19 at the time, just starting my second year at the University of Chicago. She was a first-year in my house, hailing from a suburb in Texas. We hung out for house events and at ultimate frisbee nights on the Museum of Science lawn. Years later, she attended my wedding. We were friends. Maybe still would be, if we lived closer.
So when she approached me to ask if I would go to the post office down on 77th and Cottage Grove with her, I agreed.
I understood exactly why she asked me, but I did it anyway.
From the moment we hopped on the No. 4 bus and headed south out of Hyde Park, I clocked it right away. The side-to-side glances. The tense facial expression. The way she shrunk into her seat as I stood next to her.
She was terrified.
She’d probably never—or at best, rarely—been in this situation before in her life. Yet that was almost my entire life up to that point: living in spaces where no one looked like or came from the same space as I did.
What she didn’t realize is that she, as the only white person, was the safest person on that bus, with or without me.
Yet if the situations had been reversed, I couldn’t have said the same.
That’s why the conversation around Caitlin Clark, especially in this current environment, has lost any pretense about being about basketball.
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This week, as Black people around the country relive the trauma and threat of being “the only one” in light of 18-year-old Nolan Wells’ untimely, mysterious death in the company of an all-white friend group, U.S. House Republicans are addressing their own tragedy.
Hard fouls on Clark.
“Clark has been hip-checked, poked in the eye, and struck in the throat during games. These incidents go far beyond routine physical play, yet the WNBA and its officiating have too often failed to address these unacceptable incidents and hold players accountable,” wrote Texas Representative August Pfluger in a letter, signed by 11 Republican lawmakers, to WNBA commissioner Cathy Englebert.
“Caitlin Clark has transformed women’s basketball and inspired a new generation, while getting hammered for it with no accountability,” Alford, one of the undersigned lawmakers, said in a statement. “That’s not competition, that’s failure. Protect your players, enforce your rules, or don’t be surprised when it raises serious federal civil rights questions.”
I recently wrote about the singularity around Clark and how it reflects white America’s need to use Clark’s popularity to colonize women’s basketball, after which I received comments to the effect of: “I agree with most of what you’re saying, but why don’t you talk about the clear bias and mistreatment of Clark by the WNBA and its players?”
At the time, I responded by noting that the conversation is already oversaturated but if you wanted to read one of them, please do so.
I wanted to discuss the Clark phenomenon from a broader, more existential view around why America has chosen Clark as the savior of women’s basketball and not the Black women who built the league and the other straight, white stars who, after having gone through their own phase being called a “Great White Hope”, no longer carry that distinction.
As I watch conservative commentators and lawmakers, and even basketball legends like Dick Vitale, continue to harp on the notion of Clark being “targeted” by jealous, embittered WNBA players, my patience with these narratives about Clark has thinned.
And Wells’ death, coupled with the myriad stories of similar stories happening to countless Black people, has made it disappear.
What they don’t understand—or want to admit—is that Clark is in no real danger.
Yes, she’s taken hard fouls, including a few completely unnecessary ones—I don’t include the completely accidental Alyssa Thomas play in that category, by the way. But she punches opponents in the face and throat plenty without penalty, without anyone rushing to her opponents’ defense (ask Kiana Williams about being hit the neck by Clark), so “protect the players” is beginning to sound suspiciously like “let Clark do whatever she wants and lie down on the court so she can win and we can feel like we won, too.”
Sure, plenty of players probably don’t like her because of the obvious favoritism shown to her by the WNBA and sports media. Call it jealousy if you want, but not liking someone isn’t the same as being a threat to them.
Clark is not under threat because she plays in a league full of Black women; she is the safest one in the room because of that.
Unlike for Thomas, a Black woman who has faced increased death threats and racial abuse, or someone like Angel Reese, who continues to experience hatred for daring to let Clark know she beat her in the 2023 NCAA National Championship, white America has invested itself in Clark’s safety to the point where the Department of Justice is threatening to look into “violations” of Clark’s civil rights.
Because no matter what she does on the basketball court, people will demand she is treated like “royalty” and protected more than any other player simply because she inspired white people to start watching the WNBA.
And anyone perceived to have hurt or wronged her in any way instantly becomes Public Enemy No. 1.
She’s not even the only one in the room.
There are plenty of other white players in the league who are universally liked and there’s not a single logical argument for the idea that she is discriminated against due to her race, gender, or sexual orientation.
But as Dr. Ibram X. Kendi recently said, “Racist ideas aren’t meant to make sense. They’re made to be believed.”
The idea that Black people are inherently dangerous to white people, especially white women, is a trope as old as time. Emmett Till famously died on that lie and many others unnamed have, as well. If Clark played in Europe among nothing but white Europeans, as many pundits seem to be advocating for, these narratives would not exist for the concept of Clark as a damsel in distress requires the presence of Black people to work.
And yet, every time the situation has been reversed, including in professional sports, the opposite be true.
Black people have never been safe when surrounded by nothing but white people, (I won’t even bother listing my own life experience from the age of five to now confirming this) and they are seldom believed or protected when something happens to them.
Because, to put it very bluntly, they don’t deserve protection in America’s eyes. They never did.
From the time of the Enlightenment, philosophers and Founding Fathers alike made it very clear that Black people were not “rational” beings on the same level as their white counterparts and, therefore, were not “people”—human, yes, but not worthy of full inclusion in society.
It’s how America justified calling itself a place where “All men are created equal” and endowed with “inalienable rights” while owning slaves. It’s how Chief Justice Roger Taney could come to the conclusion that Black people, slave or free, could never truly be citizens in his odious Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. It’s how former Confederate states could look at you with a straight face and claim “separate” could be “equal” and gaslight people into believing the murderous apartheid of Jim Crow segregation was acceptable.
Even now, when Black and Brown people die, they can never truly be the victim. There must be a reason they deserved to die—something they did that justified their fate.
George Floyd’s murder wasn’t due to the asphyxiation we all witnessed; it was the drugs.
Sonya Massey shouldn’t have tried to “throw” hot water at a police officer if she wanted to live.
Cyrus Carmack-Belton shouldn’t have run from the armed store owners threatening him for suspected shoplifting he didn’t do.
But when the victim is white and the perpetrator is even expected to be Black, there is no due process. No “innocent until proven guilty.”
There is only swift judgment and punishment because Black people deserve to be hurt.
They deserve to be hounded and mistreated by white people when in their presence. They deserve to die when they make the slightest of mistakes or go where they’re not supposed to be.
That’s just the way it is, and they just have to accept it without complaint because in America’s eyes, they’re still not really people.
They have no inherent value, and everything Black people accomplish, sometimes through constant adversity, is discredited and/or taken from them.
They’ve never known peace and safety in white America, and they never will. Not on boats or on vacation. Not in traffic or in schools. Not at work or at home.
And certainly not on basketball courts.
This is why it’s categorically insulting to pretend Caitlin Clark is anything close to being targeted, abused, or disrespected in the WNBA—a league that nationally televises every one of her games, plasters her face on every other commercial, and refuses to counter the horrid racism being perpetrated in her name.
Because she’s the safest one in the room. It’s everyone else that’s in danger.
