How the WNBA Plays a Key Role in Supporting Human and Civil Rights

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While the January 6 hearings revealed just how fragile — and under persistent assault — democracy is in America, it always helps to identify the sources of hope where we see counter-forces at work to sustain, protect, and expand a truly democratic culture committed to challenging white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, and all forms of hate that seek to deny people civil and human rights.

The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) needs to be recognized as an important force in America seeking to defend and promote equal rights for all.

If you’re not familiar, let me explain what I mean.

As a season ticket-holder of the WNBA’s Chicago Sky, let me start by talking about a game I attended in 2022 when the Sky took on the Atlanta Dream in Wintrust Arena in the downtown of my fair city of Chicago.

This night in the arena featured a celebration of Juneteenth, the federal holiday approved by the U.S. Senate in June 2021, marking the day of June 19, 1865 when the last enslaved African Americans in Texas learned of their emancipation and also commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation overall.

As June is also LGBTQ Pride month, many fans were also waving rainbow flags.

Fans experienced two great flavors of civil rights that go great together and that are also necessary ingredients in making a genuinely democratic culture and society: LGBTQ and racial liberation in America.

And it isn’t just that the quests for civil rights for LBGTQ people and African Americans align with or complement one another; it’s more that they are, indeed, very much inextricably intertwined.

When we talk about white supremacy in America, we have to recognize we’re really talking about white male heterosexist supremacy, as we saw exemplified with the arrest of 31 men of the extremist white supremacist group the Patriot Front who were preparing to riotously assault a gay pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in 2022. Indeed, as Erik Ortiz reported for NBC, this group had a history of targeting “Black Americans, Jews, nonwhite immigrants and LGBTQ people, all of whom they consider a threat to the preservation of their European ancestors and the white race in the United States.” And they’ve made public displays to disrupt anti-abortion rallies, underscoring their hatred of women and opposition to women’s civil rights as well.

These hatreds go together, work cooperatively, in upholding rigid and oppressive social, cultural, and economic hierarchies in America. Just think about the name of Donald Trump’s favorite white supremacist group the Proud Boys.

The WNBA exists — and acts — in stark opposition to supremacist politics and culture in America, standing out as an incredibly important, if often under-recognized (or — as to be expected in a still predominantly patriarchal, misogynistic, and homophobic culture — over-ignored and dismissed) organization that has a been a standard-bearer for human and civil rights, for social and political equality, and most fundamentally for people’s basic humanity.

That Friday night at the Sky game, frankly, was not unusual. The dual celebrations of Juneteenth and the ongoing LBGTQ Pride Month did not really distinguish this game night sharply from others.

In addition to the “Star-Spangled Banner,” we sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a song written by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson in 1900 that is considered the Black national anthem. But the Sky typically feature that song just before the game starts, playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” well before tip-off while players remain off the court. Players, if not whole teams, tend to sport Black Lives Matter shirts, as the spirit of Colin Kaepernick’s original if lonely protests is not matter of controversy but a matter of course in the culture of the WNBA, again standing apart from the dominant U.S. culture, including the dominant U.S. sports culture, characterized by toxic masculinity, heterosexism, and, yes, white supremacy. Don’t be fooled, as I’ve written elsewhere, by the NFL’s “End Racism” tags painted in the end zones of their fields last year.

And a positive LGBTQ culture and presence has always been visible, as a matter of course, not controversy. During Sky games, Wintrust Arena is a safe and democratic space and culture, as is the WNBA overall. The WNBA normalizes a culture of human and civil rights for women, LGBTQ people, and people of color — and for all, really.

If you watched Sky games on television during their championship run in the playoffs in 2021, you would have noticed not infrequently that when Sky point guard Courtney Vandersloot passed to teammate Allie Quigley, broadcasters would say, “Vandersloot passes to her wife.” Indeed, the two are married, and the culture of the league celebrates that love and relationship.

Can you imagine watching an NBA game on television and hearing the broadcaster say something like, “And Lebron passes the ball to his husband…”? And let’s face it, statistics and common sense dictate that some percentage of NBA players are gay. It’s just not talked about; it’s invisible. And protests by players, let’s face it, are still matters of controversy.

In the WNBA, a full-fledged, unabashed support for civil and human rights is just mainstream culture and politics.

Indeed, in 2020 former WNBA and Atlanta Dream player Rene Montgomery sat out the season to devote herself to political activism and ended up actually working with other investors to buy the Dream from now-former Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler and become a co-owner. The Dream players had been politically, indeed humanly, at odds with Loeffler, particularly over Black Lives Matter issues. Loeffler publicly rebuked the players for being part of a “divisive organization” acting on “Marxist principles.”

To really create a democratic world and culture devoted to civil rights for all, it really helps to own and be able to control that world.

We can see the WNBA working as an organizational force to mainstream democratic values of human and civil rights, of equality, and of democracy.

My own two sons, now 18 and 20, have grown up going to WNBA games, and I believe that experience has helped cultivate in them a resistance to patriarchy, homophobia, and racism — and a common sense devotion to equal rights.

In the arena at Sky games, it always encourages me when I see the many young boys as well as men of all ages wearing the jerseys of Sky players, not even questioning why they idolize or identify with a female superstar.

Indeed, at a moment when we see such backlash to racial justice, to LGBTQ rights, to women’s civil rights and right to control their bodies, we need to see the WNBA as a powerful organization trying to mainstream the values of equality and democracy for all.

Check it out. I think Americans will love the WNBA, just as I think they’d love a full-fledged democracy with civil rights for all, if they’d ever be willing to give it a chance.