Caitlin Clark Sue Bird Megan Rapinoe WNBA racism Screengrab via X
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Now that Caitlin Clark’s rookie season is over, the post-mortems are rolling out in full force. But because of all of the social and cultural drama that followed Clark throughout the WNBA season, there’s almost as much focus as what happened off the court as what happened on it. If there’s anyone who’s able to comment on both sides of the debate, it’s Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe, who were not only world class athletes but very socially conscious as well.

And they addressed the multitude of issues on a recent episode of their podcast, A Touch More.

For her part, Rapinoe echoed some of the WNBA players’ criticism of journalist Christine Brennan for her questions of DiJonai Carrington of the Connecticut Sun that developed into a full blown controversy.

When Bird addressed the issue, she touched on the subject of the racial tensions that are the elephant in the room when looking at how culturally divided society was in following Clark’s rookie campaign. She bluntly said that racism has been in the WNBA for a long time, but that Clark was being used as a pawn and bringing it front and center. Bird also noted that she would love to focus on basketball, but that combating these divisions were part and parcel of being a WNBA player.

“Can we just call a spade a spade? Racism has been impacting the WNBA well before this year. This is not a new thing. In that way I do think Caitlin is being used as a pawn. Caitlin didn’t bring racism into the WNBA. This has been happening. And that I think is what has been such a shock for all of us. That other people are surprised by this. We’ve been trying to tell you,” Bird said.

“And once again, for so long, as a player I would almost joke, I’d be like ‘I would have loved to have shut up and dribble.’ In so many ways I would have loved to been valued as a basketball player. I would have loved to have been spoken about just for my play. I think everybody in the league would say that. But nobody ever let us do that. So what happened? We started to build a backbone, a little bit of an identity. We understood that in order to push our league forward we were going to have to combat these things,” she added.

Sue Bird also made clear to note that it wasn’t all Indiana Fever or Caitlin Clark fans that were the problem in causing so much disruption and division during this WNBA season. Rather, it was a small group “pushing hate and creating divisiveness online” that was to blame.

“That has to go. Because it’s not the Fever fans. It’s not Caitlin fans. That is a large group of people… we’re talking about the faction of that group that is pushing racist agendas and is pushing hate and creating divisiveness online acting as fans, acting as Fever fans, acting as Caitlin fans. Now whether or not they like basketball, I don’t know. But that’s the group of people we’re talking about. Not all Fever fans, not all new fans, just the ones that are out there pushing this —-. That is what we’re talking about,” Bird said.

It’s one thing to hear this kind of commentary from pundits like Nick Wright, it’s another thing to hear it from someone in Sue Bird was a Hall of Fame player herself. It’s sad that the larger social divides poisoned the well during Caitlin Clark’s rookie season with the Fever and that so-called fans tried to use everyday basketball plays to build harmful narratives. But it does no good to ignore it and not call it out.

And it’s always worth noting that neither Clark, nor anybody else in the WNBA asked for this. Instead, people with ulterior motives are using the increasing popularity of women’s sports to further drive wedge issues and score political points. Hopefully this year is a lesson that the WNBA and sports media as a whole can tune out the noise and next year becomes more about basketball.

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