This past April, Basketball Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas was a guest on ESPN’s now-canceled Keyshawn, JWill & Max show, and while introducing Thomas, a picture of him scowling flashed on the screen.
Isiah was annoyed and, to his credit, let ESPN know about it.
“By the way, I’m looking at my picture, come on Keyshawn. Y’all doing that to me?” said Thomas.
The hosts were flustered but Thomas didn’t let them off the hook.
“I saw Max Kellerman’s picture up there. I saw your picture up there. Y’all smiling. Y’all just had my man up there doing the football, he was smiling. This is the picture you put up there of me?”
If you know Isiah Thomas, you know that most of the time he has a big smile. Yet ESPN chose an image of him scowling to show their national television audience.
It’s obvious that they didn’t understand, or failed to understand, that imagery shapes perception, especially when it comes to Black people and Black athletes.
We often see it on the news, where pictures of Black people, even victims, show them scowling, angry or in some tough pose instead of showing them as smiling, happy, family-oriented individuals.
Those images, consciously and subconsciously, craft images in people’s minds and contribute to stereotypes that Black people have long endured and fought.
Yet almost six months after being called out by Isiah, ESPN has failed to learn its lesson.
On Tuesday, the network sent out a post on X of the top three finishers in WNBA MVP race.
A smiling Breanna Stewart finished first, followed by Alyssa Thomas and A’Ja Wilson, neither of whom were smiling in the photos ESPN selected for the graphic.
Now, you can debate the MVP results all you want. That’s fine. But what’s not debatable are the images and the immediate feelings they stirred up.
“These photos are a CHOICE and are either intentional or just a lack of care to how things are represented,” posted sportscaster Chris Williamson.
And as Chris mentioned, representation does matter.
This has nothing to do with Breanna but rather the choice ESPN made in creating the image for social media, one of the most powerful forms of distribution and misinformation in today’s society.
If Breanna is smiling in her photo, why can’t Thomas and Wilson be shown doing the same?
Some could argue that maybe the graphic’s creator wanted to show the emotions of winning/not winning the MVP, but that’s more of an excuse than a justification.
This is another example of not understanding the impact of imagery or the history of stereotypes.
Why must Isiah, Alyssa and A’Ja be shown to the world as angry, annoyed or disappointed? I saw plenty of photos of them smiling in the Getty Images library.
This is another example, and another disappointing and frustrating example by ESPN, of the media’s power of portraying an individual and creating a narrative around them. In this case, two Black female athletes.
We know about the media’s use of coded language, which the National Education Association defines as “Substituting terms describing racial identity with seemingly race-neutral terms that disguise explicit and/or implicit racial animus.”
Those can be terms like “thug”, “angry” or “posse.”
In this case, like in Isiah’s, the terms are visual but still maintain the same impact as words and perpetuate the same type of false narratives.
Media companies must be more conscious of both the words and images they use to tell stories, for, as I wrote previously, “while words are powerful, and the pen is mightier than the sword, a picture speaks a thousand words.”
