T o hear prominent Democrats and their allies tell it — and they’ve been telling it for well over a decade — America’s failure to provide the WNBA and its players with the same financial and cultural benefits as their male counterparts represented a kind of collective moral failing.
“I am for equal pay for equal work,” Barack Obama said while celebrating the 2015 Minnesota Lynx’s WNBA championship. Although the president’s remark advanced his administration’s effort at the time to promulgate the existence of a “gender pay gap,” a concept his own Bureau of Labor Statistics disputed, Obama made promoting the WNBA, and women’s sports broadly, a priority.
Joe Biden at least appeared to understand the basic economic obstacles before those who sought to flatten the pay scales across men’s and women’s basketball. “As a nation, we need to support women’s sports by showing up in person and watching on TV — with more sponsorships and programming,” the president hectored the nation. Biden was right here. The disparity between the two leagues isn’t in the quality of labor but the deliverables both produce in terms of viewership and profit.
Rich Lowry did the math. The 2023 WNBA championships pulled in just 13 percent of the viewership the NBA championships drew, and women’s basketball generated just 2 percent of the revenue as did their male counterparts that same year. Still, it has never been hard to find acolytes of both presidents who attribute America’s coolness toward women’s basketball to its rampant racism, sexism, and homophobia.
Recently, however, industry experts and WNBA fans alike have hope that the Caitlin Clark phenomenon could upend projections about the league’s future and its players’ financial prospects. “More than 2.4 million people tuned in to the WNBA draft, beating the previous record by more than 300 percent,” the New York Times reported of the event in which Clark was the No. 1 draft. As much as the WNBA’s success would be a multi-causal phenomenon, the Times confessed, “Industry executives say it’s especially hard to ignore this stat.” Indeed, a “transformational moment” may be upon the league — one that would benefit the industry as a whole in ways its advocates have long sought.
The WNBA’s prospects seem bright. Astonishingly enough, some of the WNBA’s most indefatigable champions are utterly miserable over the league’s good fortune.
One of the downsides associated with a product’s commercial success is it punctures the sense of exclusivity among its early adopters. Writing in the Atlantic, Jemele Hill confessed that she had “long dreamed of the day when female athletes would demand” — by which, she means “receive” — “the level of media attention traditionally reserved for men.” But now that this day has arrived, “it’s a lot less satisfying than I imagined.” Too many amateurs have encroached on her turf, Hill complained. Worse, she believes these novices were drawn to the sport in part because its new star player’s “race and her sexuality played a role in her popularity.”
While some on the left who filter popular culture through political prisms saw Clark’s success as an outgrowth of the fact that she “resisted MAGA’s siren song,” others view it as a byproduct of America’s latent bigotries.
“I think that people have a problem with basketball-playing women that are lesbians,” The View’s Sunny Hostin posited. The Athletic’s Jim Trotter inveighed against the temptation to “delude ourselves into believing her appeal as an influencer is based solely on basketball, because it’s not.” To fail to acknowledge the obvious “is an affront to history and reality.” With mock dispassion, the Tennessean’s Andrea Williams attributed Clark’s star power to “the enduring marketability of whiteness.” “In America — a predominantly white society with a very long record of white supremacist ideologies — whiteness becomes the primary standard by which all is measured and, in business, the primary market to which all products are targeted,” Williams averred.
Upon Clark’s ascension, some unremarkable but politically salient rivalries within the WNBA soon emerged. Thus, its spectators were provided with a blood sport to enjoy along with the athletic exhibition.
“I think a lot of people may say it’s not about black and white, but to me, it is,” said Las Vegas Aces center A’ja Wilson in contrasting the buzz around Clark with her own comparatively moribund circumstances. “It doesn’t matter what we all do as Black women, we’re still going to be swept underneath the rug. That’s why it boils my blood when people say it’s not about race because it is.” Thus, a thousand takes bloomed, many of which aimed to steal from Clark the authorship of her own success.
“I don’t know how many times I read and heard her described as generational talent,” Arizona State University professor Victoria Jackson said of Clark. “I think too often the athletes could be placed in that category who have been Black women have not had that sort of gushing attention.” These simmering resentments found their way onto the court soon enough when Clark’s onetime NCAA rival, Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese, applauded after her teammate shoulder-checked Clark and sent her reeling. “The reason why we’re watching women’s basketball is not just because of one person,” an embittered Reese later explained. “It’s because of me, too. I want y’all to realize that.”
With that, the members of the commentary class whose interest in the WNBA can be found in the degree to which it serves as an indictment of the American social and civic compact once again found their voice.
“We should all protect Caitlin Clark,” Washington Post columnist Candace Buckner’s resentful missive began. “She is the white knight galloping in to save the Dark Continent known as the WNBA, the singular star uplifting an entire women’s sports movement that only now matters because men are watching.” The checking incident, Buckner alleged, “is being magnified as incriminating evidence that brutish Black women are jealous of the league’s supposed savior and therefore would rather manhandle her than show appreciation.”
Keen readers sensitive to even the subtlest notes of acrimony might detect a hint of jealousy in Buckner’s copy. Her sentiments mirror Williams’s hostility toward “the market” for whiteness and the consumers to whom it caters. The ubiquity of this sort of anxiety doesn’t render it any less bizarre.
Has there ever been a fandom that has reacted with such revulsion to its own success? The outsize reaction to Clark’s rise lends itself to broader theories that might better explain it. Among them, perhaps, the perforation of their cliquish club and the decline of the influence their select associations once provided. But more than that, we’re witness to the corruption at the heart of the “equity” movement.
“Equity,” as indicated by its proponents’ policy preferences, is as comfortable with positive discrimination as negative. The goal is not to lift up the deserving but to bring low those whose accidents of birth convey a subjectively defined “privilege.” It’s a spiteful philosophy, and it yields to spite in its supporters.
Commercial success does not level the cosmic scales, which renders it incompatible with the tenets of “equity.” A product or service for which its purveyors are well compensated brings pleasure and satisfaction to its purchasers, too. Everyone is happy with the exchange. That’s not what those with the biggest chips on their shoulders about the WNBA’s status wanted. They sought a comeuppance — some grand karmic recompense meted out against those whose economic gains they imagined came at the expense of their own. For them, there’s nothing satisfying in the emergence of the WNBA as a popular phenomenon if their adversaries get to enjoy this moment as well. Someone should have to suffer.
But no one is suffering right now. At least, not to the satisfaction of the WNBA’s self-styled boosters, many of whom seem more enlivened by the victimization narrative around the league than the league itself. Sports fans are watching and paying for the pleasure. The players are getting their due with even brighter prospects on the horizon. If those who said this is what they always wanted are unenthused by their victory, maybe that’s because they were not being honest with us or themselves.