How the WNBA’s biggest star became its biggest embarrassment
There are moments when an entire ideology reveals itself to the American public — not in a faculty seminar, not in a university land acknowledgment, not in a mandatory “inclusive excellence” module administered by a deputy assistant associate vice provost of DEI, but on a basketball court.
Caitlin Clark being struck in the throat by Alyssa Thomas was one of those moments.
DEI, whether it appears as decolonizing, social justice, critical race theory, BLM activism, or ‘inclusive excellence,’ is not a path to justice. It is a catechism of resentment.
The WNBA later decided the incident was a “non-basketball act,” a useful clarification for those of us who had not noticed that punching a player in the throat is not among the standard fundamentals of the game. Dribbling, passing, shooting, rebounding — yes. Throat strikes — apparently, no.
The referees, however, seemed to be conducting an advanced seminar in nonintervention. They saw nothing. Or more precisely, they saw what everyone else saw and did not think it required interruption.
The WNBA reviewed the play and assessed Thomas a Flagrant Foul 2 with a one-game suspension. Fever guard Sophie Cunningham has publicly said Clark is being targeted and that the league and refs are not protecting her. Meanwhile, Clark’s presence has coincided with major WNBA attendance and ratings growth.
This is where the Caitlin Clark story becomes larger than basketball.
For years, America’s universities have devoted themselves to replacing character formation with grievance formation. Students are taught, with all the solemnity of medieval theologians but none of the metaphysical seriousness, that the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed, privileged and marginalized, white and non-white.
Every inequality of outcome receives the same explanation: whiteness. Every frustration becomes resentment. Every failure gets assigned a villain.
This curriculum does not produce justice. It produces vice.
It teaches envy and calls it “equity.” It teaches resentment and calls it “consciousness.” It teaches contempt for one’s neighbor and calls it “liberation.” It tells young people that the chief moral fact about another person is skin color, then professes shock when people begin treating one another accordingly.
Enter Caitlin Clark.
The WNBA has long existed less as a product of overwhelming public demand than as an institutional cause. It was the league America was instructed to support. Like many progressive projects, it was sustained not by market interest but by moral instruction: Watch this. Celebrate this. Subsidize this. Affirm this.
Then, something embarrassing happened.
RELATED: The latest violent attack on Caitlin Clark exposes the WNBA’s real problem
A player arrived whom the public actually wanted to see.
Clark did not require an ideological sales pitch. She did not need a campus office to explain her importance. She did not need a seminar on representation and patriarchy. She could shoot from the logo. She could pass as if she had seen the play unfold three seconds before everyone else. She brought eyes to the league, filled arenas, moved merchandise, and made casual fans care.
That is precisely the problem.
The DEI imagination can handle excellence only when it can be absorbed into its preferred categories. If Clark’s success could be explained as “white privilege,” the story would be safe. But basketball is a cruelly empirical game. The ball either goes in or it does not. The pass either arrives or it does not. The defense either stops her or it does not. No diversity consultant can revise the box score.
Clark’s excellence is infuriating because it is visible. It is not a theory, a grant proposal, or a paragraph in a strategic plan. It is the fruit of natural ability disciplined by relentless work.
Even family support, private schooling, and access to good coaching do not manufacture Caitlin Clark. They may provide opportunity. They do not produce logo threes, court vision, and competitive fire. Many athletes have access to lessons. Few can do what Clark does.
That fact is intolerable to a culture that has taught itself to scoff at diligence, fortitude, self-control, patience, hope, faith, and love. The old virtues are too demanding because they require personal responsibility. DEI prefers a more comforting doctrine: Your failures are someone else’s fault, your anger is moral insight, and your neighbor’s success is evidence of systemic injustice.
We have seen this moral theater before.
After George Floyd died under the knee of Derek Chauvin, the image played endlessly across America. Universities made it the centerpiece of institutional repentance. Faculty meetings became revival services for Black Lives Matter. Professors who had never shown much interest in moral absolutes suddenly discovered original sin, provided it could be located in “whiteness” rather than in the human heart.
The radicals had their icon. They had their liturgy. They had their marches. They had their administrative decrees.
But what happens when the image does not serve the approved narrative? What happens when the visible act is not a white officer restraining a black man but a black WNBA player striking a white superstar in the throat?
Suddenly, the moral machinery becomes less efficient. The referees miss it. The league responds later. The commentators explain. The defenders contextualize. The public is asked not to notice too much.
But we do notice.
We notice that Clark is not merely guarded. She is battered. We notice that punishment often comes after public outrage rather than during the game. We notice that the league seems oddly embarrassed by the very player who has made it more relevant than ever. We notice that when excellence appears in the wrong demographic package, the apostles of equity become strangely tolerant of abuse.
This does not mean every foul against Clark is a racial incident. Basketball is physical. Stars get hit. Great players attract aggressive defense.
But the pattern surrounding Clark has become hard to ignore, and so has the ideological atmosphere in which it is interpreted. When a society is trained to see whiteness as a moral defect, it should not be surprised when white excellence is treated as something to be punished rather than admired.
DEI has trained institutions to cultivate suspicion, bitterness, and selective compassion based on skin color and sexuality. It has trained people to blame their problems on abstractions rather than repent of their vices. It has trained the public to redistribute honor and resentment according to race.
Its hope is not in virtue but in power, not in truth but in control, not in love of neighbor but in the forced rearrangement of social goods around resentment.
Caitlin Clark has become the face of DEI abuse because she exposes the lie. She shows that excellence is not reducible to privilege. She shows that work counts. She shows that talent must be disciplined. She shows that the public will still respond to greatness when it sees it.
And for that, she must be punished.
The throat strike was not merely a foul. It was a parable. It showed what resentment does when it cannot refute excellence. It tries to silence it, intimidate it, and make it pay for existing.
We should learn the lesson. DEI, whether it appears as decolonizing, social justice, critical race theory, BLM activism, or “inclusive excellence,” is not a path to justice. It is a catechism of resentment.
It does not teach us to love our neighbor. It teaches us to hate by skin color.
The answer is public rejection of DEI in all its forms.
Marvin Joseph/Washington Post/Getty Images
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) ended a Biden administration policy that required racial considerations be made to determine who was eligible to get a kidney transplant. CMS published a final rule Monday governing the Increasing Organ Transplant Access (IOTA) Model, a mandatory, six-year program that ostensibly sought to “increase access to kidney […]
Lipscomb Academy officials vehemently deny claims that the private school's leadership has injected DEI into the Church of Christ school.
Canada lost to the United States on the largest stage and in the one domain in which its superiority felt metaphysically guaranteed.
Douglas Rissing / Getty Images
Deagreez via iStock/Getty Images
Blaze Media Illustration
www.theblaze.com
thefederalist.com
www.theblaze.com
www.theblaze.com