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One of the few culture war tropes that has actually dimmed during the Biden era is the controversy over the championship sports team White House visit. This is in large part because the sensibilities of the big leagues, their corporate partners and the media that covers them skews left — meaning a pressure campaign to condemn visiting Joe Biden, for example, just won’t register in those circles.
So it was kind of by accident that the women’s college basketball national championship game between Iowa and LSU became a tempest in a teapot. (It’s worth recalling that the media poring over which athletes would visit the Trump White House became such a belabored point that CBS Sports, in an effort to differentiate itself from the often histrionic ESPN, put out commercials marketing itself as concentrating solely on the games themselves rather than the culture war surrounding them.)
The theater was back this month — and this time it was stoked by two players’ use of a popular taunt. Iowa guard Caitlin Clark punctuated a dominant 41-point performance in the Hawkeyes’ Elite Eight round win over Louisville back on March 26 by doing the “you can’t see me” hand gesture following her sixth three-pointer of the game. Though the gesture was first used in a music video by G-Unit rapper Tony Yayo, most associate it with actor and WWE wrestler John Cena, who popularized it in the ring. For what it’s worth, Cena later shouted out Clark on social media.
Fast-forward to the national championship game between Iowa and LSU on April 2. In the closing moments of LSU’s decisive 102-85 victory over Iowa, Tigers forward Angel Reese multiple times returned the favor to Clark, as well as made a taunting gesture that mimicked putting a championship ring on her finger. Throwing celebrations back at an opponent is a tried and true part of sports. It’s not a nice thing to do, but it’s generally embraced as acceptable trash talk.
Where Reese ran afoul of popular sentiment is a matter of context and degree. For sure, turnabout is fair play, though the response was a dialed-up version of the original where, unlike with Clark’s taunt against Louisville, Reese followed the player she was taunting and kept it up. It also came at a time when most would assume a player would be concentrating more on glorying in her program’s first national championship win rather than showing up another player with whom she does not have a longstanding case of bad blood.
So the term “classless” trended on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the national championship, leaving the race-baiting liberal sports media to do a bit of damage control. ESPN’s Jay Williams suggested that anyone criticizing Angel Reese is racist while in the same breath acknowledging that the refs would have been well within their right to give her a technical foul. SB Nation alleged that calling Reese classless is “dog whistling at its worst.” Dave Zirin at The Nation hailed Reese for “standing up for herself with raw, explicitly anti-racist confidence,” though in the same piece knocked Charles Barkley for describing the scene as unfortunate and suggesting the Hall of Famer had “lost the plot.” As always, sanctimonious white liberals love black people until they disagree with them. Yahoo Sports framed it this way: “Reese caught a lot of flack for being so competitive while Clark got pretty much zero, once again illustrating how black people — black women especially — are criticized for doing what white people do freely.”
In the press conference after the victory, Reese threw gas on the fire by framing the taunt as a defiant act of self-expression. “All year, I was critiqued for who I was. I don’t fit the narrative. I don’t fit the box that y’all want me to be in. I’m too hood. I’m too ghetto. Y’all told me that all year. But when other people do it, and y’all don’t say nothing. So this is for the girls that look like me. For those that want to speak up for what they believe in. It’s unapologetically you. And that’s what I did it for tonight. It was bigger than me tonight. And Twitter is going to go into a rage every time.”
It’s true that Clark’s earlier taunt garnered less criticism, though it’s hard to imagine Clark ever claiming her achievements on the court were for “girls that look like [her]” and the kind of response that might have received. Perhaps we should take note of the cultural privilege that someone like Angel Reese might have that someone like Caitlin Clark does not.
Removing all nuance from conflicts and flattening people into rigid identity categories is just what liberals do nowadays, and with this story, they couldn’t get out of their own way. First Lady Jill Biden made a further mess of things by proposing the day after the title game that both Iowa and LSU should visit the White House, a gesture aimed at promoting peace and sportsmanship that only served to further crack the racial fault lines.
Angel Reese did not like that idea one bit. She called the idea a joke on social media. The next day in a podcast appearance, Reese rejected the first lady’s apology for making the proposal. “You can’t go back on certain things that you say,” Reese said. “I mean, you felt like [Iowa] should’ve came because of sportsmanship, right? They can have that spotlight. We’ll go to the Obamas. We’ll see Michelle.”
(It’s curious that Reese wanted to schmooze with Obama, given that one of the former president’s most noteworthy acts of late was convincing NBA players not to strike in 2020 for more tangible commitments from the league on social justice issues.)
Jill Biden’s gaffe calls to mind former Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison’s much-maligned statement in 2009 that he would not visit the Obama White House because he (correctly) surmised that the president would have invited the Arizona Cardinals had that team prevailed in Super Bowl XLIII and he did not care for that realization one bit. Wow — Obama: fake friend confirmed. Had Harrison waited another decade and a half, he would have discovered that the Democrats will just invite everybody. That means — gasp — the White House visit is now almost like a participation trophy, and we know how Harrison feels about those.
The week closed out with President Joe Biden giving a congratulatory phone call to Reese and the LSU forward on Friday, saying she would in fact join the rest of her team in visiting the White House at a yet-to-be-determined date. All’s well that ends well, unless she drops another “you can’t see me” on Sleepy Joe.
