Victor Davis Hanson: The WNBA’s Obsession With ‘White Privilege’

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve talked about the Women’s National Basketball Association on prior occasions. There’d be no real reason to talk about it any longer, but these incidents keep popping up. In the past, the sensational star Caitlin Clark was attacked by Alyssa Thomas.

That was that vicious fist to her neck when she was on the ground that caused an uproar and had racial and sexual overtones, and then reflected on the status itself of the Women’s National Basketball Association. Now we’ve got a kind of replay, but with different actors. We have Sophie Cunningham, who’s on the same Indiana team as Caitlin Clark, and she was recently dribbling with a clear, easy layup at the basket, and she was being chased by DiJonai Carrington from the opposite team.

And instead of just fouling her to prevent an easy layup by maybe pushing her hips, as often happens, she chose to clothesline her. She took her entire arm and hit her neck and flattened her. Flagrant foul. She was kicked out of the game, and then she almost immediately racialized the episode by texting or posting on social media, “White privilege.”

I thought that was kind of ironic for an African American young woman to complain about white people when she’s wearing a blond wig, and according to the DEI parlance, she’s culturally appropriating the appearance of a different race, and we’re not supposed to do that. I know that if Sophie Cunningham had been dribbling and she had dreadlocks, people would be very critical of her.

So it was kind of a weird thing, and it got even weirder because it exposed the problem of the Women’s National Basketball Association. Again, because nobody really stuck up for Sophie Cunningham. In fact, some members faulted her for previously remarking in an interview that she thought transgender women should not be allowed to, if they were biological males, to play in female sports where their height and weight and muscular advantage, i.e., their DNA, gave them enormous advantages that could hurt women, and the same would be true of hurting women that were underage in high school or junior high who were showering and dressing with biological men.

So that commentary by Sophie Cunningham may have been the subtext of this attack on her because we’ve had coaches in the Women’s National Basketball Association wear jackets promoting the trans issue. We had a co-owner of the Seattle team harass two young girl fans, and all they had were signs to the effect of “Support Sophie,” and the co-owner went over and swore at them and abused them and was given a suspension herself.

We’ve had referees who’ve obviously ignored flagrant fouls against both Sophie Cunningham and Caitlin Clark. And so this is an ongoing angry league. And now with the trans issue, they really stepped into it because they have been on record–they being the commissioner and the owners–that they cannot define what a male is or a woman is.

That, in other words, if you say that you’re a transgender female and somebody says, well, you’re not because your muscular, skeletal DNA suggests otherwise, and you have the sexual characteristics of a male, but you say you’re female, that doesn’t work. You can’t just declare what your gender is.

And they kind of brushed that off. And now two former NBA players who retired, they have pensions, but of course, given Caitlin Clark has enriched this league and brought in, according to some economists, a billion dollars in aggregate new revenue, whether defined by increased fan attendance, which has soared, or media contracts, which have soared, lucrative contracts, or merchandising opportunities, which have soared.

A once near-bankrupt, subsidized, very isolated and unknown league is now on everybody’s imagination, and there are people who want to get in on it. So two men think, well, if they’re paying suddenly $500,000 a year, I can just say that I’m a woman. I’ll put on a wig or something, and then maybe I’ll wear a dress that day. And because you can now create your own gender and the league is on record that they don’t have a definition of what actually a transgender person is vis-a-vis a biological male or female, they have no right to tell me I can’t play. And of course, they won’t believe that I can dominate the league, and they won’t stop me from showering with some very attractive women.

And so now the league is in a dilemma because their own politically correct DEI rhetoric has put them on the horns of a dilemma. Do they sound like Sophie Cunningham and say, “No, you men, you cannot play because you can’t declare your sexuality contrary to your biological DNA nature”? You can’t do that. Or do they stick to their guns and destroy the league by inviting biological males, as Sophie Cunningham has warned they would destroy the league with their greater advantages in size and strength and endurance?

But what’s behind all this? Why do we even talk about this? Nobody cared about the Women’s National Basketball Association. I don’t mean to denigrate it, but nobody knew it existed. If you asked the average American to name two teams, they could not name them prior to 2024.

So from 1997 to 2024, nobody knew what this league was about. It was perpetually losing money, somewhere around $20 million to $40 million a year, that had to be either subsidized by the owners themselves, who maybe believed in women’s basketball, or they believed that they wanted a different demographic. Who knows what they believed, but they were willing to lose money because they never made any money for 20 years.

And then the National Basketball Association thought it was a good PR outreach to have a women’s version, a female version, and they were willing to subsidize that $20 million, $30 million, $40 million loss. Then Caitlin Clark comes along. As I said, she brings in a billion dollars of revenue. All of a sudden, there’s all of this drama about Caitlin Clark, her people trying to hurt her, Sophie Cunningham trying to protect her, people going after Sophie Cunningham, and people know about the WNBA.

And the result is the players are flying private to their practices and games. They’re paid $500,000 on average. Many of them are making several million dollars, $5 million, $10 million a year in merchandising and media appearances, etc., etc. In other words, Caitlin Clark single-handedly put the WNBA on the map, and that’s what the problem is, because the WNBA was sort of a little unknown league that was 65% Black.

People had suggested it was 35% to 40% gay, and they sort of had their own little atmosphere, their own culture, and they weren’t really being rewarded, but they controlled the ownership, the coaches, the referees, the players, all were on this DEI left-wing page. And suddenly, the great benefactors of all of them happened to be white heterosexuals like Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham, and they didn’t want that.

In other words, they were willing to commit violence against them, and the league was either going to condone it or plead ignorance rather than all benefit. And there was one subtext that no one talks about, but it’s right there staring us in the face, that Caitlin Clark is probably the best player, and that’s not supposed to happen in a predominantly gay, Black female league.

Doesn’t mean that other players are not nearly as good, but we haven’t seen anybody like her in women’s national basketball. And in the case of Sophie Cunningham, she’s tall, she’s beautiful, she’s blond, she’s white, and people resent that as well. You put those two figures together, they create all this controversy and hostility, and they remind America that something is definitely wrong with this league.

It encourages racism, it encourages sexual prejudice, it encourages violence, and nobody wants to touch it. And if it continues, maybe they’ll lose Sophie Cunningham, and they would lose Caitlin Clark, and if they lost both of them, they would go back to their preferred obscurity and poverty.

Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.