Brittney Griner is echoing claims from other black WNBA players that they’ve been the subject of “racist” slurs by new fans showing up to women’s professional basketball games – many of whom have been drawn by the Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark.
Who, notably, is white.
And, also quite notably, there seems to be a pretty gaping lack of evidence of this supposed racism epidemic, aside from black players claiming it’s happening.
Clark, who skyrocketed to a household name as one of the greatest collegiate female basketball players in history when she played for the Iowa Hawkeyes, has been the target of more than a few blatant fouls on the court over the past year, which some have suggested is because she’s a white girl whose talent has been almost singlehandedly responsible for the recent rise in the WNBA’s popularity. (It’s still no NBA but hey, now more people care.)
Those concerns only grew earlier this week when Connecticut Sun shooting guard DiJonai Carrington, who is black, appeared to take a long-nailed stab at Clark’s eye during a game last Sunday, leaving Clark with a noticeable bruise. Clark said later that she doesn’t believe the eye-gouge was intentional. Even still, Carrington’s girlfriend, NaLyssa Smith (who also plays for the Fever alongside Clark), claimed in a social media post that Carrington had started getting “death threats” and was “called all type of sh*t” online following the incident – without offering any proof, of course.
The Sun’s forward Alyssa Thomas, who is also black, then told reporters this week that “in my 11-year career I’ve never experienced the racial comments from the Indiana Fever fan base.”
“I’ve never been called the things that I’ve been called on social media and there’s no place for it,” Thomas said, without providing any specifics.
Enter Griner.
The Phoenix Mercury center, who’s probably better known by more people for getting busted for illegally carting weed into Russia than for her athletic career, took those claims of rampant racism and stepped it up a level in an interview on Thursday, alleging that people are actually yelling racial slurs at her and other black players from the stands during games.
“I don’t appreciate the new fans that sit there and yell racial slurs at myself, my teammates, and the people that I play against because, yeah, those might be opponents but those are friends too. They don’t deserve that. So, I don’t appreciate the new fans who think it’s okay to do that,” she said.
There’s just one small, glaring problem: there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of fans yelling racist insults at WNBA players during games….anywhere. If there were, there’s absolutely no doubt that it would be headlining ESPN and going viral all over social media. CNN would be hosting “expert” panels on it, and Kamala Harris would somehow be blaming Trump. I’m not saying you couldn’t find a few trolls on the internet who’ve said nasty things in an X post – that pretty much exists everywhere, aimed at everyone.
And the internet was pretty quick to point out the notable lack of proof to support these claims.
The demand for racism always seems to exceed the supply.
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