‘No place for it’: Aces respond to WNBA statement on racism, threats

“There’s days when I hate being A’ja Wilson. I hate it,” she said, sobbing. “But when I come into work and I see y’all smiling and I see y’all just happy, it makes me who I am. And I am so grateful to have teammates like y’all.”

Following Thursday’s practice for Sunday’s Game 1 against the New York Liberty, Wilson said that her statement after her milestone in the Aces’ 84-71 win over the Connecticut Sun last week was “100 percent” influenced by the racist vitriol that has accompanied the league’s exponential growth this season.

“It’s tough,” the unanimously crowned three-time MVP said. “It really is tough to just navigate in a world that doesn’t necessarily want to see you succeed or constantly has to nitpick on why you’re succeeding. And that gets exhausting because, literally, I’m just here to do my job. I’m here to play basketball. I’m here to have fun and bring people together while watching me play. And so when you have the passive-aggressiveness, the racial things that go on behind it, it’s tough to navigate that sometimes.”

League statement

Wilson’s comments came after the WNBA released a statement Wednesday denouncing “racist, derogatory, or threatening comments made about players, teams and anyone affiliated with the league.”

The league’s statement arrived shortly after Sun All-Star Alyssa Thomas discussed “racial comments from the Indiana Fever fan base,” following Connecticut’s 87-81 victory Wednesday, which eliminated the Fever from the first round of the playoffs.

“We’ve been professional throughout the whole entire thing,” Thomas said. “But I’ve never been called the things that I’ve been called on social media, and there’s no place for it.”

The league has benefited from the arrival of superstar Fever rookie Caitlin Clark, reporting all-time records for viewership, digital consumption and merchandise sales Wednesday. However, with the support for Clark, has come racism and homophobia that Clark herself has spoken out against on multiple occasions.

Wilson spoke during training camp about fans of Clark’s, saying that Wilson didn’t have a signature shoe with Nike because she wasn’t “marketable.” Then when fans and national media accused WNBA veterans of playing too rough against Clark in her early games out of jealousy, Aces coach Becky Hammon pushed back.

“It’s construed as some of our minority Black and brown women are hating on her because she’s white, and that is not the case,” she said in May. “But what it does is, it has highlighted how Black and brown greatness has not been celebrated or valued as much.”

Hammon noted Thursday that the WNBA hasn’t “done a great job of addressing” the racial issues facing its players, an issue she said has been present since the inception of the league.

“There’s just absolutely no place for it in sports, especially in our sport,” Hammon said. “I just make sure (my players are) OK. They’re humans at the end of the day. And you really see the ugly of society come out in some not so great ways, and it’s also cowardice, because people that say that stuff, they never say it to your face.”

Columnist under fire

But an in-person exchange led to another recent statement.

USA Today columnist Christine Brennan asked Sun guard DiJonai Carrington on Tuesday whether she intentionally poked Clark in the eye in Game 1 of the Sun-Fever series. When Carrington said she would never do such a thing and explained that she didn’t even know it happened, Brennan followed up by saying it appeared Carrington had laughed about the incident.

On Friday, the WNBA Players’ Association called on USA Today to address Brennan’s line of questioning, which the union described as “designed to fuel racism.”

Carrington had previously shared a screenshot of an email she received from a so-called Clark fan calling her a racist slur and threatening sexual assault after Carrington’s impact with Clark’s eye, which Clark said she didn’t believe was intentional.

It was the type of incident Wilson thinks about during games.

“You’re on the court, and you’re thinking about a million things, because you’re like, ‘I don’t want to be a headline,’” she said. “We shouldn’t be like that. You should play free. And so hopefully we can clean that up soon.”

Wilson added that while she’s seen discourse surrounding rivalries like the one between herself and Liberty forward Breanna Stewart, she’s never seen so many “non-basketball” attacks.

Even though Wilson has been limiting her time on Twitter and Instagram, she said the negative comments have been hard to avoid.

“If I could sit here and tell you the amount of things that I’ve seen in my inbox, the amount of things that I’ve seen in my mentions, it would be crazy to think that you’re talking to an athlete that’s just really trying to do their job,” she said.

Contact Callie Fin at clawsonfreeman@reviewjournal.com. Follow @CallieJLaw on X.