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Caitlin Clark’s Story is Being Coopted by Race Trolls
Photo from Indiana Fever web page.
One of Larry Bird’s nicknames was “The Great White Hope.” The Celtics legend, one of the greatest players in the history of the NBA, hated the nickname. It was part pejorative, a sarcastic title meant to dismiss the white player as fraud, and part racist savior narrative.
Venessa Marie Perry, an organizational psychologist, wrote last year in her Linked In newsletter, that the nickname’s long history was tied to racial resentment, to anger at the success of African American athletes. “Fans were so resentful of (the boxer Jack Johnson’s) success inside the ring that they searched for a white boxer, a great white hope, to defeat him,” she says.
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Bird did not want to be a white hope. His job was to win games and help the Celtics. The same can be said about Caitlin Clark, the heralded rookie who has become a lightning rod in the WNBA — not because of her play, which has been good if not yet great, but because of what she means for the league’s ratings and to a cohort of new fans who see her as a rejoinder, a way of pushing against modernity.Clark is potentially a generational talent. Watch this clip of her catching a pass near the three-point line. The ball gets slapped away. She grabs it, recovers, fakes, then steps back at the edge of the logo and lets it fly. Boom. Three points.
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Hank Kalet 