Even for a topic as grim as the potential for the coronavirus to kill a professional athlete, the WNBA and its players are left out of the conversation. A report by Will Fleitch in New York Magazine on Friday discussed the matter in reference to the NBA, NFL and MLB and omitted the WNBA, a league also returning action.
Fleitch is not alone.
In a NBC Nightly News segment on Saturday, Sam Brock, reporting from Miami on how rising coronavirus cases in Florida could impact the return of basketball, also failed to mention the WNBA in keeping what has become the industry standard regarding the longest running professional women’s sports league in the country.
Also on Saturday, Chicago Sky guard Sydney Colson announced on Twitter that she has tested positive for the coronavirus.
“I do the least and tested positive so I’m tryna see how folks who do the mooost are out here partying and feelin grand,” she tweeted.
Fleitch did name-drop a women’s league in his reporting: the NWSL, a league made up mostly of white players. The WNBA, a league boasting approximately 80% Black women with an original 2020 season start date of May 15, was not. If Fleitch saw fit to mention the NWSL concerning the stoppage of sports in March, he was remiss not to discuss that Sydney Wiese of the Los Angeles Sparks had the coronavirus and recovered; she caught it while playing in Spain during the WNBA offseason and announced it on Twitter on March 27.
And, so it goes in the world of mainstream media — controlled predominantly by white men who historically allot ample budgets toward the coverage of men’s sports leagues and athletes and systematically marginalize, diminish and reject coverage of women’s sports, and especially those featuring many Black athletes.
Society has been more willing to embrace women in individual sports, especially if they are petite and cute like the gymnasts who made up the “Magnificent Seven” at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and Simone Biles of today, or tennis players of slight build, like teen phenom Coco Gauff, or whose appearance suits the heteronormative male gaze like, Maria Sharapova’s. But a special vileness is reserved for women athletes who carry larger, more muscular physiques, identify as LGBTQ or shirk heteronormative beauty standards.
People did not rumor that Lolo Jones, Sharapova or Elena Delle Donne were born men.
They did suggest that Caster Semenya, Serena Williams and Brittney Griner had been.
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With the WNBA made up of 80% Black women, including many who identify as LGBTQ, society not only has struggled to embrace the league, it has in some ways abjectly rejected it, just as it has marginalized and discriminated against Black women and LGBTQ people across time.
Soccer star and activist Megan Rapinoe may be gay, but she’s also palatable to the American public because she presents as anyone’s quirky pal in a similar way that Ellen DeGeneres does. With the women’s national soccer team rising to prominence during its whirlwind World Cup win, Rapinoe has now captured the attention of brands and advertisers. For all that she has accomplished in her sport, the endorsement deals are hard-earned and long overdue. But the likes of the WNBA’s Courtney Williams probably would not enjoy a similar mainstream embrace.
Rapinoe, a 5-foot-6 midfielder, is deemed worthy of commercial deals but, say, Courtney Williams, a 5-foot-8 guard known for her charisma is not. The difference between them physically is two inches in height, race (Rapinoe is White and Williams is Black) and gender presentation. Rapinoe presents in a style that does not conform to feminine ideals, but is feminine enough — for example, she wears makeup — to not be threatening. Williams, however, is covered in tattoos, doesn’t wear makeup and dresses in what the more binarily conditioned among us would call “boys’ clothes.”
If Williams’ 2019 Finals appearance isn’t enough to convince those in the BUT RAPINOE IS A CHAMPION camp, why not Seimone Augustus, who is of similar age and winning hardware?
For advertisers and brands to get on board, mainstream media must.
Now that we’re at a moment of reckoning in America, media enterprises that historically have shunned the voices of people of color, especially those of Black women, must be held to account, even as they now clamor for the insights of Black journalists after rejecting pitch after pitch on topics of race and relegating those story concepts to NICHE (not catering to the White middle class) or CONTROVERSIAL (likely to make White people uncomfortable.
They also must be held to account for failing — no, refusing (because it is not hard given the abundance of diverse talent out there) — to make newsrooms inclusive in the first place and now treating Black journalists like puppets.
So, when these companies and editors pay lip service to women mattering, to Black lives mattering, to queer people mattering, it is incumbent upon us all — especially White people, and doubly so for White people with decision-making powers — to examine if the talk is being backed with action, and then take action if it is not. Tweeting the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag or changing a profile or background photo to an image with similar messaging is a performative gesture. The real work requires identifying ways to right historical wrongs, one action at a time.
Journalists, especially those in mainstream media who discuss U.S. professional sports broadly and omit the WNBA, should know their work comes off as exclusionary — anti-Black, anti-woman and anti-queer. Also, their work smacks of journalistic inaccuracy and erases the WNBA from the recorded history of humanity. Omitting specific groups in a society as diverse as ours is never innocuous; it always erases the contributions of the people in those groups and communicates very specific messages about inequality — which lives are valued and which lives are not valued.
So, as America fumbles through attempts at rectifying its legacy of racial injustice, mainstream media must reckon with the role they have played in fortifying this injustice take actionable steps to ensure inclusivity in reporting. Otherwise, women of the WNBA will be relegated to the Hidden Figures status of NASA engineers Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary W. Jackson that the world will learn about on a fifty-year delay. This is no longer acceptable.
Inclusive reporting is required in a diverse society and media companies can take these actions to produce it:
#1. End the practice of defaulting male.
Men do not have ownership over sports and, more likely than not, any men’s league has a women’s equivalent. So, when broadly referring to “the return of basketball” in a headline, the story should discuss both the NBA and WNBA because both leagues are preparing to return. Writers must specify that the story is about men’s basketball if the story is about men’s basketball alone. Otherwise, readers assume the articles are about men’s sports (and search engine algorithms do too). When reporting on NCAA underdogs for CBS Sports, for example, these writers needed to specify NCAA Men’s Tournament. From the same outlet, the authors this article needed to specify that their work is about the top NCAA men’s coaches of tomorrow.
#2. Have a WNBA reporter on standby. With the WNBA season played during the summer months, traditional thinking holds that there’s nothing for a reporter to write about during the long autumn and winter of the offseason. Yet, many players compete in leagues overseas during this time and those who stay stateside engage in various off-court endeavors. Thus, the stories are there, and by maintaining coverage in the offseason, an audience already will be engaged when the WNBA season returns. Financially, online media as an industry is in the toilet, so if a staff position can’t be opened right away, at least keep a WNBA freelance journalist around who can report on an as-needed basis. It is no longer acceptable for mainstream sports media companies to not at least have a freelancer on standby.
#3. Stop omitting the Houston Comets from discussions of pro sports dynasties. When sportswriters mention the dearth of championships for the city of Houston, it is hard not to secretly hope an asteroid plummets to Earth and lands on their heads. Sure, there are the problematic Astros and their 2017 World Series “win,” plus the Rockets’ NBA titles in 1994 and 1995. But Houston should consider itself lucky to have been home to the WNBA’s first dynasty, the Comets, who won four straight championships between 1997 and 2000. Not only should the Comets be in all the conversations concerning Houston and sports dynasties, they should be recognized as the gold standard for dynastic athletic reign. Fragile male egos do not change the Comets’ achievements and if pro men’s leagues want to dominate this conversation, they’d better get busy winning four titles in a row.
If current writers and editors can’t or won’t rise to the demands of their profession, media managers must tap into the pool of overqualified Black women who have stacked degrees and experience while being passed over repeatedly by lesser qualified white colleagues. Unlike their white counterparts, Black women don’t need to be coached on the culture; they are the culture. And by living and working in a white supremacist social structure, they are also fluent in whiteness.