Joy Reid, Jemele Hill Smear America as Racist for Caitlin Clark Popularity

Reid: You know, somebody very smart said to me recently the challenge with women’s basketball is that most of the stars are black, but — I mean, most of the great players are black, but most of the stars are white. Whether it’s who’s getting awarded by the ESPN, whether who is getting noticed by the magazines. And like you said, if there were charter flights, Brittney Griner would not have ended up in a gulag, right? These ladies are flying commercial and they’re not treated like the men are. How much of this do you think, though, is the marketing potential of a Caitlin Clark? Because quite frankly, this is a league that is largely, as you said, largely black women. It’s also largely LGBTQ. She’s a white heterosexual woman. And so if you’re trying to get white dads to go spend their money and buy season tickets, she seems like a marketing opportunity. How much of it is that?”
HILL: “I don’t know why people find that to be controversial, to think about that. We know that marketing is about ability, talent, all those things. And nobody is saying that Caitlin Clark doesn’t have those things. She’s incredibly talented. She’s broken records, she’s playing a playing style that people love, that is very representative of what we see today, particularly on the men’s side. But yes, it helps that she’s white, straight, and from Iowa in a league that has faced marketing challenges throughout the history over the last three decades that it’s been in existence. It’s faced marketing challenges because of the things that you mention, because seventy percent of the players are black women, because a third of them identify as LGBTQ+. Yes, it has faced challenges. And by the way, the NBA went through the same thing. You know, before Magic and Bird arrived and took the NBA finals off tape delay, the NBA was in a very vulnerable spot. It was a black-led league, there were drug problems, there were a lot of issues, and then you fast forward to the 90s and the 2000s where there was the merge with hip-hop. That’s how you got the dress code, because you had the same issue. You had a predominantly black league that had white fans, or, more importantly, white people who wanted to invest in that league, so they had to ‘clean it up’ by making the players look a certain way so they could market and appeal to everyone. So when you say that Caitlin Clark’s whiteness and the fact that she’s straight plays a role — underline ‘a role’ — in her popularity, that’s not a diss to Caitlin Clark, it’s just simply America.”