The Hope and Challenge of the WNBA and Women’s Pro Basketball Players for Civil Rights and Democracy in America

The Hope

Over a decade ago, after casually following the WNBA for some years, I actually started attending games with my two boys, then eight and eleven years of age, and my partner who would later become my spouse. What I found in that arena, where my home team the Chicago Sky then played, was an environment and culture that realized what I have always understood to be the aspirational America.

People of all shapes and sizes, sexual orientations, and racial identities, were welcome and free to be themselves. Every night, effectively, was Pride night. Often, before games, we would sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” understood to be the African American national anthem. In the midst of an America still sadly rife with racism, sexism, and homophobia, the WNBA had created a haven for a democratic culture where all were recognized as free and equal. This space gave no oxygen to the discrimination, exclusion, and hate still rampant in an America where white male supremacist values continued to dominate American culture, society, and politics, constituting key obstacles to those struggling to push America toward evolving into a genuine democracy, which it has always pretended to be but has yet to really become. (To be sure, part of the obstacle to achieving democracy in America has been the failure to robustly acknowledge that the nation has fallen far short, that supremacist values informing a society stratified by race, class, and gender are inconsistent with democracy. We need to stop using the language of democracy to characterize our nation and perhaps refer to the United States as an aspirational democracy.)

I credit the WNBA, and the Chicago Sky in particular, with helping me raise my boys into young men vaccinated against the infections of patriarchy, racism, and homophobia that, among other forces, undermine and threaten American democracy and egalitarianism. The league, in my mind, represented a true engine of cultural transformation, pushing the nation to genuinely realize the democratic values of equality and freedom for all it has proudly trumpeted and yet never quite lived up to since its founding. It was wonderful to see young boys as well as men sporting Allie Quigley, Elena Delle Donne, Courtney Vandersloot, or later Candace Parker jerseys, signaling they looked up to these female athletes as role models in some way. In a nation that has yet to ratify an Equal Rights Amendment and has resisted asserting in the most basic language that women are equal to men and deserve equal protection under the law, I tend to see these gestures in which boys and men identify with women and celebrate their talents and abilities as some small steps for men and yet a giant leap for mankind in America when it comes to eroding and beginning to transform the stubbornly persistent male supremacist and heterosexist national culture.

I even remember in 2021 (the Chicago Sky’s championship season!), watching a playoff game on network television in which the male broadcaster, in calling the play-by-play, actually said, “Vandersloot passes to her wife.” If you don’t know, Courtney Vandersloot and Allie Quigly, both players on the 2021 Sky championship team, are married. To have a gay married couple in the WNBA actually acknowledged on network television represented to me, again, a giant leap for American culture toward a democratic culture, especially when for years, as documented in the important documentary Unfinished Business, the WNBA as a league–which we must differentiate from the players–was reticent to acknowledge the prevalence of lesbian players in the league, fearing it might hinder the building of a fan base, itself a powerful acknowledgement of and deferral to America’s homophobic and undemocratic culture and society. (To be clear, any society that creates layers of second-class citizens by denying them the same rights as others can’t really call itself a democratic and egalitarian culture and society.)

In all these respects, the WNBA has emerged as an institution in American culture that heightens the visibility and representation of women, particularly of women of color and lesbians, thus offering a material hope and indeed real engine for democratizing American culture and politics–and indeed our economy, as the league represents a key driver of economic opportunity and participation for women. The WNBA, along with the off-season Unrivaled league the players formed, have indeed become something of a key movement for advancing civil and human rights as well as democracy in America (for some of my additional writings on this topic, see here, here, here and here).

The Unrivaled league, in particular, because it is effectively player-owned and the players share more equitably in the league’s revenues and have been able to control and create workplace conditions that meet the needs of their lives, constitutes an actually existing example of what it means for workers to have a democratic voice in their workplace and to have a real sense of ownership in the world and wealth their work creates.

The Challenge

For those of us who have looked to the WNBA as a progressive cultural force or even just as a haven in a white male supremacist world, we have to recognize that the league’s success has brought with it threats to the league’s culture created in large part by its original and longtime fan base which has featured lesbians of color as a salient component.

Whether or not Caitlin Clark is responsible for bringing racist fans and MAGA politics into WNBA arenas and whether or not she aligns with those politics, it is nonetheless a fact that the national media attention showered on her drew a new audience into WNBA arenas, one more aligned with the white male supremacist and homophobic values of the dominant culture in the United States.

As then Connecticut Sun coach Stephanie White said after a playoff game between the Sun and the Indiana Fever in Indiana in September 2024: 

“We’ve seen a lot of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia throughout the course of our country. Sport is no exception, and it’s unacceptable to be quite honest.”

This comment was motivated by complaints from Sun star Alyssa Thomas that Fever fans had been hurling racial slurs at her throughout the game. While, following White’s comments, sports might not have been a site exempt from the “racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia” virtually omnipresent “throughout the course of our country,” the WNBA largely had been. Indeed, Thomas commented on the unfortunate novelty of being subject to racist speech in a WNBA stadium, stating, “I think in my 11-year career I’ve never experienced the racial comments from the Indiana Fever fan base.” Her point: the WNBA culture had been free of this racist poison before the Caitlin Clark phenomenon.

Angel Reese, of course, perceived as Clark’s rival, has also been the subject of racist harassment and hateful comments from Fever fans and Clark’s MAGA following (see here and here). Clark fans crossed the moat and invaded the alternative and aspirational America we WNBA fans had been enjoying and building for ourselves. Clark became the darling of an invasive MAGA fan base ignorant and, frankly, uninterested in the history and tradition of the league and the many great players, often black and often lesbian, who in fact built the league and cultivated its excellence. They acted like Clark invented the league and women’s basketball itself, like the WNBA was nothing before her arrival.  Of course, erasing and distorting the history of the contributions of people of color to America is standard white supremacist practice. Tellingly, Paige Bueckers, a white lesbian player who has been consistently far more outspoken about recognizing that black women built the league and who put up rookie numbers comparable to Clark’s, really received a fraction of fanfare accompanying Clark’s first year and entrance into the league.

So, that’s one challenge for the WNBA and Unrivaled: continuing to model and advance a non-sexist, anti-racist, LGBTQ-friendly culture as an alternative to the anti-democratic white male supremacist culture and MAGA politics invading WNBA arenas as the league grows in popularity and attracts new fans more representative of the U.S. dominant culture. Indeed, the WNBA has become a target of the MAGA movement.

To be sure, the WNBA and Unrivaled players have played an historic role in the fight against fascism and white male supremacy in America, as documented in the 2024 film Power of the Dream, which in part charts the story of WNBA players organizing to help get Georgia Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff elected to the U.S. Senate in 2020, saving the Senate from Republican rule and America from greater fascist rule.

So, that’s the question: Can the WNBA and Unrivaled players continue to offer a vision and energize efforts to achieve a truly democratic and egalitarian society in the U.S.

Another challenge facing the players and the league which must be confronted honestly if the hopes the WNBA represents as an egalitarian cultural institution are to be kept alive is the threat of corporate influence and the allure of wealth that always threaten to distract people from their core values.

Back in 2022, after a Sky game I attended, the Sky organization hosted a panel celebrating fifty years of Title IX of the 1972 Federal Education Amendments, which are part of the Civil Rights Act. Title IX stated that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

At this celebration, WNBA and Sky star Candace Parker not only spoke to the importance of Title IX but also to the importance of people supporting the WNBA. In particular, I recall her waving her arms around Wintrust Arena and inviting the audience to acknowledge that the league was not one owned by corporate sponsors and influence. The WNBA was the people’s league, and that is truly how it felt in the arena.

Now, however, the league is exploding in popularity, and the money and corporate invasion is following. Yes, the players succeeded in negotiating a much more lucrative collective bargaining agreement, forcing the league to pay them more equitably and share revenues.

The players and the league, though, will need to be careful, again, that with this corporate influence the values of the larger dominant U.S. culture do not erode the values and egalitarian culture vision the league had fostered,

Let’s be honest. In the face of the Trump’s regime assault on women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, immigrant rights, and human and civil rights more broadly, corporate America has largely remained silent, more concerned with its tax breaks and record profits than with hallmark American values of democracy and egalitarianism.

We already see Draft Kings commercials accompanying WNBA games and former players, such as Lisa Leslie, appearing in advertisements. WNBA commentators now talk about gambling odds in their pre-game shows. Let’s be honest about this too. Gambling doesn’t represent opportunity and upward mobility for poor and working-class populations. Rather, these gambling platforms are predatory. They don’t continue to exist because those Americans who gamble are getting rich but rather because they are taking Americans’ money, which is particularly damaging to the nation’s most economically vulnerable. Preying upon, rather than aiding and supporting, America’s most vulnerable is counter to an egalitarian value system, which I’d like to believe the WNBA and Unrivaled have represented.

So, without question the WNBA and Unrivaled have been and can continue to be important cultural institutions for advancing civil and human rights to foster democracy and egalitarianism in America. The commitment to these values and practices, though, will have to be ever-renewed and vigilantly guarded.

2024 Democratic Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris famously cheered in one of her speeches, “We are not going back!”

She uttered this insistent phrase in response to the Republican politics that wanted to roll back women’s rights and control women’s bodies, to deny rights to LGBTQ people and even deny their existence (“Don’t Say Gay”), and to erode the civil rights that people of color in America, particularly, had fought so hard to gain for all Americans.

The expansion of the WNBA and the growing popularity of the WNBA and Unrivaled signal that the values of these leagues and the visibility and representation they give to LGBTQ Americans, women, and people of color are becoming entrenched in American culture. The more entrenched they become, the more they function as a bulwark against the prejudicial, hateful, and anti-democratic politics threatening an egalitarian America.

So, the WNBA and Unrivaled represent cultural institutions that provide hope for our democratic and egalitarian prospects. The challenges, though, are real, reminding us that democracy is a verb and never guaranteed.