It will never cease to amaze me how folks on the woke left will blame others for what their constant race-baiting produces. For some reason, WNBA player Caitlin Clark is still in the news and remains a controversial figure.
Ever since she began gaining popularity in college basketball, folks on the hard left have been paying close attention to her career. Now, they are in a constant state of Clark Derangement Syndrome, and it is not hard to guess why.
Caitlin Clark is a white chick who became famous in a sport dominated by black women. This unpardonable sin has inspired high-profile leftists to lambast the athlete, claiming that her success is due to her skin color more than her skill.
Author Andrea Williams wrote a piece for The Tennessean in which she claims Clark’s rise to stardom mirrors that of Elvis Presley, who became famous as a white man playing black music back in the 1950s:
In his early career, [Sam] Phillips made his name and money recording Black blues artists including B.B. King, Little Milton, and Howlin Wolf. The blues were Phillips’ first love, a music that he believed transcended race in its reflections on the trials and triumphs of life that all humans experience. Yet race did matter, this Phillips knew — especially when it came to economics.
“If I could find a white man who had a Negro sound and a Negro feel,” he said, “I could make a million dollars.”
Williams then points out that Phillips “would go on to record Elvis Presley, a white man who achieved dizzying commercial success by molding his singing and dancing styles to the Black artists, both gospel and secular, who’d shaped the soundtrack of his youth” and that Presley’s “adoption/appropriation of Blackness is less critical to his stardom than his whiteness.”
The author argues that if this weren’t the case, the black musicians from whom he got his musical stylings would have “reached similar heights themselves” because 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 then turns her attention to Clark, claiming that the same principle applies to her:
Somehow, however, this reality has been lost in the conversation about Caitlin Clark and her significant impact on women’s basketball. She’s a star, some say, without consideration of the stars who’ve come before. It’s the market, they add, without mentioning how and why the market was built, or who maintains it.
Of course, the author later complains that those fixating on Clark’s ethnicity, “even when mentioning Clark’s significant talent, those people have been denounced as racists or race-baiters.”
Well, if the basketball sneaker fits?
The debate over whether Elvis Presley stole black music to make himself famous has been raging for decades. But it is difficult to argue that had he been a black musician, he still would have achieved the same level of fame, especially back in the 1950s.
The fact of the matter is that white Americans, being nearly 90 percent of the population at a time when the country’s racial dynamics were far different from what they are now, definitely contributed greatly to his success. However, Presley’s fame also elevated black music to the mainstream. It might have taken much longer for black music to become as popular as it is today without Elvis Presley.
However, the impetus behind Presley’s rise to stardom cannot be applied to Clark’s popularity. For starters, Clark is not the first WNBA player to achieve a certain level of fame. The author is not inaccurate in her claims that her popularity is due to her skin color. But she is omitting something that most could see if they took a closer look.
The reality is that race-baiters like Williams are the ones making Clark famous due to their obsession with her “whiteness.” People like podcaster Jemele Hill and other folks on the woke left are the primary culprits who have been hyperfocused on the athletes. Without their incessant whining about her lack of melanin, it is doubtful that many Americans would even know who she is.
To put it simply, the hard left are the ones making Clark famous more than anything she has done. This is not to discount her skill. She likely would have achieved some level of fame – but the left’s fixation on her race has placed her front and center in the national conversation.
Whoopi Goldberg pushed back on this a few weeks ago when she compared those claiming that Clark’s race is responsible for her popularity to people who pretend successful black folks only made their accomplishments because of affirmative action, and she is absolutely correct.
In 2024, it is difficult to find any area of American society in which race and politics have not been injected. The race-obsessed left has found new and innovative ways to center race in almost everything. This is no different. In the end, the only one who has benefitted from this is Clark herself, even if it’s a blessing and a curse. Unfortunately, this is a lesson folks on the lesson might never learn.