Culture
WNBA players say the troubling side of its rise is racism and threats
As the WNBA has reached wildly successful highs this season in viewership and attendance, players say the boom long coveted throughout women’s basketball has come with unfortunate consequences. During these playoffs, athletes who would normally be focused on winning have instead shared a swell of complaints of being targeted with racist, misogynistic, homophobic and threatening attacks.
The rise in harassment, players say, has taken a mental toll. Some question how the league has considered their well-being as it has managed an influx of attention that followed the college stardom of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese into the pros.
A few players have made more drastic moves, deactivating some of their social media accounts or heavily limiting their engagement, despite the clear and often critical income potential that comes from marketing directly to fans.
Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner said fans have voiced racist taunts at her and others. Reese said AI-generated nude images of her have circulated online.
Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington shared on Instagram a graphic email sent to her with threats of violence and a racist slur, following a moment during the first game of the playoffs in which Carrington inadvertently poked one of Clark’s eyes. Carrington’s partner, NaLyssa Smith, who plays with Clark on the Indiana Fever, wrote on X that Carrington has even been followed.
Alyssa Thomas said she and her Sun teammates had faced the most intense racist bullying she has encountered in 11 WNBA seasons as they faced the Fever and ended Clark’s rookie season.
“With more exposure, we’re seeing more of those people come out and say their words online,” Sky forward Brianna Turner said. “They talk their talk, but I highly doubt they’re watching any games or any content. They’re just there to spread hate and be messy online when they couldn’t care less about what happens in the WNBA or about any players, either.”
Yall can clown me all you want im never gonna stop advocating for respecting players. Respectfully, feel free mute or block if that’s a trigger for you. Please protect your peace
— Brianna Turner (@_Breezy_Briii) September 22, 2024
The troubling messages have been at odds with the welcoming environment the league and its players — the majority of whom are Black and many in the LGBTQ+ community — sought to create over the past three decades. As it fought for financial stability and credibility with media and fans since its 1996 inception, the WNBA has increasingly considered itself a haven for inclusivity.
Some players say that environment has been stained by new factions of fans bringing toxicity to the sport, treating the WNBA and its players as fodder for culture-war arguments during a polarizing period in American society.
“I appreciate the new eyes,” Sky forward Isabelle Harrison said. “But if this comes with hate and bigotry and racism and even people who look like me bashing me, keep it offline because it’s so hurtful, and you don’t know how that affects people.”
That dimension has added a complexity to the developing play and rivalry of Clark, who is White, and Reese, who is Black. Clark won Rookie of the Year honors and guided the Fever to the playoffs. Reese’s season ended in early September with a wrist injury, but not until she had already set WNBA records for consecutive double-doubles and rebounds in a season.
Fever forward Aliyah Boston said some people are simply being opportunistic. “It’s easy to attach yourself to the Fever because we have a lot of attention around us right now, and it’s so easy to say, ‘Well, I’m a Fever fan, I’m an A.B. fan, I’m a Caitlin fan and just (spew) hate off of that — and that’s never OK,” she said.
Tension bubbled early this season as some fans and sports commentators accused veteran WNBA players of feeling jealous of Clark’s stardom and claimed she was being targeted in games. Even though that notion was widely dismissed by players, fouls on Clark quickly became hot topics to debate — with conversations devolving into personal insults or worse.
A Chicago Tribune op-ed likened a hard foul on Clark by Sky guard Chennedy Carter to “assault,” and an Indiana congressman wrote an open letter to the WNBA commissioner airing his grievances about the foul. Charles Barkley lambasted WNBA players for being “petty” and “jealous” of Clark’s popularity, while Sheryl Swoopes, on multiple occasions, seemed to downplay Clark’s accolades. ESPN personality Pat McAfee apologized for calling Clark a “White b—-” on his show during a segment in which he mused about her stardom and her race.
“It is discouraging that we’re losing the conversation around the skill of these players and it’s being overshadowed by the politicized nature of their presence,” said Ajhanai Keaton, an assistant professor of sports management at UMass Amherst.
The scrutiny of Clark throughout the season frequently went beyond her play and her comments about games.
Her social media presence is mostly limited to retweets of Iowa and Fever posts, with some sharing of content from her commercial sponsors. She recently created a buzz by liking a Taylor Swift Instagram post that endorsed Kamala Harris for president, although Clark did not formally endorse Harris herself and simply encouraged voting in the November presidential election when asked to explain her action.
She denounced the use of her name to push divisive agendas online, calling it “disappointing” and “unacceptable.” “Those aren’t fans,” she said Friday. “Those are trolls, and it’s a real disservice to the people in our league, the organization, the WNBA.”
Still, much of the conversation carries on regardless of her participation.
“She’s trying to get her bearings and develop her game and take her game to the next level and be on this bigger stage,” New York Liberty forward Jonquel Jones said earlier this season. “And she’s really handling it well. It’s the fan base that’s going crazy and making it a race war and all this other stuff.”
The league released a statement last week condemning online harassment of players. But commissioner Cathy Engelbert previously faced criticism, including from the players association, for lauding the league’s rivalries when asked in a CNBC interview about “menacing” comments players receive.
“The league should have taken a stance a long time ago, and not waited for it to get this kind of deep, and this far on what’s tolerated and what’s not,” Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu said.
Sun guard DiJonai Carrington said she’s been targeted with threatening messages this season. (Elsa / Getty)
Las Vegas Aces guard Chelsea Gray, when asked how the league could have protected players throughout the season, said: “Probably make a statement earlier than what they did.”
The WNBA’s recent statement mentioned involving law enforcement when necessary to protect players. The league monitors online threats and works with teams and arenas on safety issues, and with local law enforcement, when necessary. It employs security in each market to help players. All 12 teams also have dedicated security who travel with them to games.
The Chicago Sky introduced a partnership this season with an app company that uses AI to shield players from directly seeing negative posts about them on their phones. Before the start of the season, the WNBA provided information and resources to players about mental health as part of a routine annual meeting.
Liberty forward Breanna Stewart, who said she has reported some messages to team officials, wants the league to host more sessions focused on dealing with internet harassment. “There could be probably more training,” she said. “What should you do if you get those messages?”
Some players said they have removed social media apps — especially X — to avoid attacks, but that can come at a cost. Endorsement deals often hinge on engagement with fans online. A robust following on social media can become a key source of income. That’s especially important in a league with a mean player salary of about $110,000 this season, according to HerHoopStats — a figure well below what most male professional athletes make in top North American leagues.
Sparks guard Zia Cooke said she deactivated her X account earlier this season to avoid negative comments but remained on TikTok and Instagram because of potential additional earnings. “If it were really up to me, I would deactivate all of my accounts just because I’m trying to stay mentally locked in as far as basketball and finding my way in this game,” she said.
Boston said she deleted some of her social media accounts to avoid vitriolic criticism as the Fever got off to a 1-8 start this season.
The spread of legalized sports betting in the United States has also become a prompt for fans sending angry messages to WNBA players. Dream wing Rhyne Howard said she has received threatening messages about her “messing up random parlays” after poor performances, a complaint similarly heard in men’s leagues.
But often, WNBA players said, attacks against them feel much more personal, focused on their racial and sexual identities rather than their basketball abilities.
“Our world is so polarized based on race,” said professor Ketra Armstrong, the University of Michigan’s director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity in Sport. “When people talk about race, oftentimes it privileges whiteness, and when they talk about gender, it privileges maleness. This is not unique to sport, this is not unique to Caitlin Clark. It’s the way of the world and it’s been that way in every domain, be it in politics, be it in business, be it in social movements and civil rights.”
Reese, who has more than 4 million followers on Instagram and more than 600,000 on X, has kept a steady stream of engagement even as she has been frequently criticized. She said she occasionally needs to take breaks from social media to avoid vitriol and that she leans on robust support from people around her.
“We’re still human,” Reese said, adding: “Sometimes we do have to take some time away.”
— The Athletic’s Grace Raynor and Sabreena Merchant contributed to this report.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photo: iStock)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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