The 'Wilder, Fiercer Violence' Faced by Angel Reese
Louisiana State University's victory over the University of Iowa brought out the worst in media and fans
(National Champion Angel Reese)
The women’s NCAA Division I Basketball National Championship tournament came to a head Sunday in thrilling fashion as both stars and supporting cast players alike shone brightly in the Finals game where Louisiana State University (LSU) topped the University of Iowa. Both LSU and Iowa were led by brash, charismatic star players who galvanize their teammates and seem to engender no small amount of love and respect from them; Angel Reese for the Tigers and Caitlin Clark for the Hawkeyes.
Only one of those players have been treated with near universal respect from the corporate media and fans. The other has been derided all year long with racially coded insults that have only intensified in volume and intensity since the season’s end.
Reese is Black, Clark is White. Reese’s team bonds together in the locker room by rapping along with bombastic hip hop songs and Clark’s does so by singing along as soundtracks to High School Musical play.
Other than Reese and LSU surging as Clark and Iowa went quiet at the close of the championship game, both women mirrored one another in many ways this season. Reese and Clark are ridiculously skilled, and unapologetically aggressive, proud, and prone to taunting and trash-talking opponents.
Each carries a warrior’s arrogance - bolstered by humility in practice, then completely ruthless in battle and eager to secure psychological edges over opponents by demeaning them and lording wins over them afterwards. Both women receive close scrutiny from game officials for it and are too often penalized for it all, in-game.
Off the court, however, one young woman is celebrated by fans and media for her arrogance while the other is vilified. In case there’s any suspense in the matter, the White woman is celebrated and the Black woman is vilified.
What’s more, the praise rhetoric around White co-opts Black culture while the actual Black woman receives condemnation for doing the literal exact same thing as the White player. Earlier in the tournament Clark hilariously and viciously used the “You Can’t See Me” hand gesture popularized by pro wrestler John Cena (whose own character is a caricature appropriation of urban aesthetic and swagger usually understood as Black-American) over her face to taunt a losing opponent and their team.
As has been the case for awhile, Clark’s taunt was celebrated and praised by fans and media alike. ESPN even did a segment all about Clark’s taunts last week, celebrating them and asking other players about her favorite ones.
The segment and narrative crowned Clark “The Queen of Clap-Back,” once again using Black-American culture and celebrating it when a White person did it. It was sassy and irreverent and counter-cultural and progressively transgressive and full of moxie and girl-bossery when Clark did it.
Let us be clear - Clark is pretty rad. It’s the double-standard that is the thing.
On the more benign tip it’s reminiscent to this elder millennial of my appreciation for the music of The Beastie Boys and Eminem - White boys with loves for the Black genre of rap - which included being happy for their success, while also being acutely aware that their rap songs were played on Alternative Rock radio stations and seen as acceptable rebel music when their Black counterparts and the overwhelming majority of rap songs were never viewed that way or given said approval and opportunity via that level of platforming. Eminem is the first to acknowledge that he’s benefitted from being White and that he plies in a Black trade and culture.
As the title game concluded Reese took back that gesture and taunted Clark with the same “You Can’t See Me” gesture, mocking her as Clark had mocked so many other opponents. It comes with the territory - just ask Larry Bird, or Michael Jordan, or any other trash-talking court great. You win some, you lose some, you give it, and sometimes you have to take it.
Clark brushed it off. Her fans were not about to take it, however, and the racialized insults against Reese have exploded with both fans and professional journalists condemning the Black warrior in ways they had not her White counter part, for the exact same behavior. While sparing you some of the torrent of hate speech in detail, Reese is -right this very moment - being blasted as “ghetto,” “classless,” “not raised right,” and called an “idiot” by White fanatics - sadly including those employed as professional journalists - who are acting as though their world is falling apart.
It is plain to see for anyone willing to look that the violation isn’t the actual actions or the words or the attitudes of these two women. In one body those actions, words, and attitude are valorized, while in another body they are criminalized.
The valor is Whiteness. The crime is Blackness.
It is helpful to recall great American philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois and his essay, The Souls of White Folks, when he explained the differentiated way American society reacts to the same actions taken by different - White, then Black - people.
“Murder may swagger, theft may rule,” he writes.
“And the nation gives but spasmodic, intermittent & lukewarm attention. But let the murderer be black or the thief brown or the violator of womanhood have a drop of Negro blood, & the righteousness of the indignation sweeps the world.”
Reese has been given grief, unfairly, her entire collegiate career for her audacious displays on the court. Once she pointedly directed her taunts at the White heroine, however, that was a bridge too far, and the ferocity of attacks from all of polite White supremacist American society (with plenty of Black figures carrying the White establishment’s water in this regard to maintain their own standing and in full, sad demonstration of just how much they’d internalized White supremacist values) were ratcheted up.
At this point Reese wasn’t just acting up and out, she was doing so in direct resistance to the White establishment, their norms, and in celebratory retaliation against their abuse of her and - as she said in her post-game press conference remarks - the “girls who look like” her. Reese taunting throughout the season was one thing - there still loomed the possibility of her and her team of largely proud Black women being humbled in defeat by season’s end, ie. a Happy Ending, where justice could prevail and we might raise to the throne a corn queen who learned from and co-opted all the fun, joyous affect of the subaltern’s aesthetic and resistance, but still packaged it in an acceptably White body.
Reese taunting the White darlings in penultimate victory was quite another level of transgression. Reiland Rabaka in their book, Du Bois, discusses the myriad tools White folk have at their disposal in the U.S. with which to attack Black people who so offend them and their sensibilities.
“Any form of black resistance to whiteness - whether intellectual or physical, moderate or militant - makes mechanisms for the maintenance of white supremacy necessary. As a result, whites have a range of devious devices at their disposal to, often literally, whip or beat blacks into submission and make them conform to white supremacy.”
Though part of me can never truly encourage the uninitiated reader to take in and give additional sight to the racist vitriol aimed at Reese after her crowning, if my description of it seems outlandish please do subject yourself to it by reading your local paper, logging onto ESPN, or Twitter. There is no mere politely affronted and measured critique of manners directed at Reese - there is seething anger, lacking even the pretense of self-awareness, and it comes from anonymous fans and professional journalists, both, avowed conservative public figures as well as notorious bleeding heart liberal ones.
The treatment of Reese, LSU, and countless other Black women - including the South Carolina squad - shows that the eagerness with which White American wants to see Black people destroyed, both physically and psychologically, that Du Bois wrote about a century ago is still in place. “Up through the foam of green and weltering waters wells this great mass of hatred, in wilder, fiercer violence, until I look down and know that today to the millions of my people no misfortune could happen, - of death and pestilence, failure and defeat - that would not make the hearts of millions of their fellows beat with fierce, vindictive joy! Do you doubt it? Ask your own soul what it would say if the next census were to report that half of black America was dead and the other half dying.”