Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark deserve better sophomore seasons from everyone

The WNBA should have seen this coming. 

Eighteen months ago, forward Angel Reese and the LSU Tigers beat guard Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes in the NCAA championship. Reese celebrated by walking around the court pointing at her ring finger and mimicking Clark’s “you can’t see me” celebration. From that moment on, a rivalry between the two phenoms was born. And as much as Clark and Reese have had a compelling on-the-court rivalry in the WNBA, mostly about the once-heated Rookie of the Year race, the real battle is off the court, and rarely involves anything the two stars are actually doing.

They’ve become the new sociopolitical and racial battlefield, spilling over into nastiness that has done a disservice to them and the WNBA. The noise has overshadowed their brilliant statistical seasons.

Clark entered the WNBA as one of the most popular athletes in the country, and with good reason. She was one of the greatest college basketball players we’d ever seen and entered the league equipped with a dynamic game and a deep 3-pointer that reminds fans of Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry. That enough would be the formula to make her one of the biggest new stars the league has seen in a long time. But when you add in the fact that she is a straight white woman, she would become much more: a central figure for segments of the country who have disdain for Black queer women to rally behind. So anything that Clark did – a triple-double, a 30-point game, setting a record – wasn’t just a great basketball performance. Her achievements were used to cast aspersions on the women who make up most of the WNBA’s players.

Many of Clark’s fans also had Reese, a Black female villain who everyone could pit her against. To a certain segment of fans, any accolade she accumulated — and, to be clear, there have been multitudes — was not just about Clark. It was about embarrassing Reese — who was also having a record-breaking season, setting a WNBA record for consecutive double-doubles and nearly setting a league record for rebounds — and women like her.

The Reese-Clark rivalry stopped being about basketball. It was about everything else. Blackness. Queerness. An impending election. A divided country. Racism. White supremacy. Allyship. Ratings. And not nearly enough people actually showed compassion to the women themselves.

Reese would be subjected to truly violent attacks online, including artificial intelligence renderings of her body spread across social media. Even though Reese had embraced a villain role that was already pressed upon her, she hadn’t asked for the racist attacks that came with it – all over what was ostensibly support of Clark.

However, the attacks on Reese weren’t really about Clark. They were about hating Reese as a confident, outspoken Black woman. The Clark phenomenon was about two distinct groups of people. One group is full of genuine Clark fans. The people who are enamored with her court vision, shooting and connection with the audience. The WNBA fan who knows a transformative athlete when they see one. Little girls who look up to the league’s stars and who want to toss 30-foot 3s like Clark when they get older.

Then there’s the other group. That group is full of people who see Clark as a way to express their most deep-seated, hateful thoughts about the Black and queer women in the WNBA. As soon as Clark entered the league, any resistance she received — a hard foul, a comment about the way she’s covered, her being mocked for flopping — became a referendum on how Black queer women feel about a straight white woman, and a way to repeat harmful stereotypes about the women in the WNBA.

Clark’s campaign through the WNBA left a trail of harmed Black women in her wake even as she maintained her neutrality and never harmed the women herself. There was Reese, who continued to face harmful messages throughout the season, even as she and Clark demonstrated teamwork and camaraderie at the All-Star Game. There was Chennedy Carter, Reese’s teammate on the Chicago Sky, who committed a flagrant foul on Clark and was subjected to vitriol online and harassed by a “fan” outside of the team hotel. Sun guard DiJonai Carrington received death threats and was called racial slurs after she accidentally hit Clark’s eye during a playoff game that left her with a swollen eye. There was Sheryl Swoopes, the all-time great, whose flawed and sometimes ill-informed sports takes about Clark have attracted online harassment. Even Clark’s teammate Aliyah Boston had to shut down her social media after fans blamed her for the team’s early struggles.

But this isn’t just about the string of Black queer WNBA players who have been brutalized by misogynoir. Clark is a victim here, too. Her rookie season has been tainted by the same racism and misogyny that has targeted the women in her WNBA community. Instead of being supported because of her on-court brilliance, Clark is being dehumanized, having a caricature of hateful idolatry erected in her name when all she wants to do is play basketball.

Plenty of straight white women have spoken up about their own privilege and tried to tamp down the vitriol their Black peers face. And how could they not? How could anyone want to stay silent when their teammates, peers and friends are constantly bombarded with hate speech? It’s just human decency to want to stand up for the people you share locker rooms with. Las Vegas Aces guard Kelsey Plum, UConn guard Paige Bueckers and others have done so. It’s a reasonable expectation for everyone to share the responsibility to band together.

Clark, to her credit, has spoken up in support of the Black women who came before her, doing so on SNL before she was even in the league. And she’s answered questions about fans in news conferences before finally delivering a full condemnation of racism WNBA players have faced. But here’s the problem: The racism won’t stop. The anti-gay bias will carry on unabated. And the misogyny will only persist. And as long as this is done in Clark’s name, she will always be expected to answer for them and be looked at to quell a movement that she didn’t create.

Imagine the kind of pressure that places on someone. Imagine the distraction from on-the-court accomplishments that come when the people who claim to support you don’t care about those accolades either and the people who want to support you, the player and person, are the same ones inundated with abuse at every turn. Clark isn’t experiencing the type of violent radicalized hatred that comes from centuries of oppression but she is experiencing what it’s like to be at the center of a fight that’s so much larger than herself, where her actions are lightning rods for backlash, including one from a fan who had to be removed when she played against Connecticut Sun in the playoffs.

Clark’s presence has been a ratings and revenue boon for the WNBA. Her natural popularity among fans was always going to make that the case. She is a singular figure in the history of the league for that reason. But the benefits of ratings and revenue should not come at the expense of players’ well-being. That’s something WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert failed to realize when she commented on the harassment players were receiving weeks ago: “But the one thing I know about sports, you need rivalry,” she said. “That’s what makes people watch. They want to watch games of consequence between rivals. They don’t want everybody being nice to one another.”

This isn’t simply about rivalries and revenue. It’s about a league that has worked hard to create a safe space for a community that is often unsafe in far too many spaces in this country. And that safe space has become volatile because far too many people have seen and used Clark as an entryway to invade that space with bigotry. 

There are about eight months until Clark and Reese take to a WNBA court again. That’s time for the league, fans, the media and everyone in between to figure out how to support these women and not use them as targets for racism or symbolic reasons to engage in a hateful crusade.

Their on-court greatness demands more respect than that. So does their humanity.