Intersectional Privilege

In the movie, 42, which chronicles the story of Jackie Robinson as he breaks the color barrier in Major League baseball, we get a glimpse of how horribly he was treated as the first black baseball player in the MLB. He was booed continuously; he was called all sorts of racists names; he was not allowed to stay at the team’s hotel; he received death threats. He risked his life every game just by stepping out on the field. That was a dark time in American sports history. But it happened in 1947 – 79 years ago. A lot has changed in our country since 1947. 90% of the people alive back then are no longer with us. We have come to agree that that type of treatment of players simply because they are of a different race is absolutely wrong. That never should have happened, and it should never happen again.

Our country has gone to great lengths to move past that type of bigotry. For a time, it appeared that racism, bigotry and prejudice had been flushed out of sports. The judgments that fans apply to players are strictly performance-based, whether they can get the job done or they can’t. Look at Major league baseball. Not only are there both white and black players, but there are players from many different countries – Canada, Central and South America, Asia. Anybody can play in the Major Leagues if they can throw the ball hard enough and hit the ball far enough. And if you do it well enough, people of all races will be fans of players of all races.

The bigotry of our past has been rooted out of American sports, except when it comes to the WNBA. After DiJonai Carrington was ejected from a game for committing a flagrant foul against Sophie Cunningham which sent her sprawling to the hardwood and bloodied her mouth, Carrington went into her locker room and immediately posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” on her Threads account and tagged the Indiana Fever. It is right to assume that because she posted that minutes after being ejected for her flagrant foul against Cunningham, she was commenting on that play. Most people interpreted her cryptic message as claiming that the foul was only upgraded to a flagrant 2 and she was ejected because Sophie Cunningham is white and she is black.

Many people have rightfully pointed out the total hypocrisy of Carrington calling out “white privilege” against Cunningham because if we compare the lives of Carrington and Cunningham growing up, Carrington lived a much more privileged life. She is the daughter of a professional athlete. She went to an elite private high school, and went on to an elite college – Stanford University. Whereas, Cunningham grew up on a farm in Missouri, she went to a public high school, and attended the University of Missouri. The level of privilege that Carrington enjoyed throughout her life has been much greater than anything that Cunningham experienced. But that is not the biggest hypocrisy of Carrington pulling the “white privilege” card out against Cunningham, her biggest hypocrisy is being a black lesbian claiming to be a victim of others’ privilege while playing in a league that is governed by intersectionality.

Intersectionality is a made-up social justice credit system which attempts to quantify the level of discrimination, disadvantage, oppression, or privilege each person experiences based on their race, gender and sexuality. The more oppressed you are, the higher your social credit score and the more favorable treatment you deserve. Blacks receive a higher social credit score than whites because they are more oppressed. Likewise, women receive a higher social credit score than men, and members of the LGBTQ community receive a higher social credit score then straight people. So according to intersectionality, black lesbian women are the most oppressed in our society, so they deserve the most favorable treatment. The WNBA is run by black lesbians, and the league goes to great lengths to cater to the black lesbians. As a result, we have witnessed the ongoing attacks on straight white players like Caitlin Clark and Cunningham because according to intersectionality, they are deemed second class citizens in the WNBA because they have not experienced the oppression that black people and members of the LGBTQ community have.

To be a black lesbian in the WNBA is to receive all of the privilege, and all of the special treatment. We saw that in the way Sophie Cunningham’s Coach, Stephanie White handled her press conference immediately after the game in which Carrington committed the flagrant foul against her player, Cunningham. After an incident like that on the court, most respectable coaches would stand up and support their player, Stephanie White did the exact opposite. She defended Carrington, the opposing player who committed the flagrant foul, and showed little care and support for her own injured player.

Stephanie White did not support Cunningham and did not call out Carrington because it would be career suicide to criticize a black lesbian woman in the WNBA while supporting a straight white woman. It was less of a risk for her job to not support her own player than it would have been to criticize a black lesbian. Stephanie White, herself, is a lesbian, and she is in a 10-year relationship with, you guessed it, a black woman, Lisa Salters. So, her immediate reaction to that play was not to defend Cunningham because Cunningham is a lowly straight white woman but to defend Carrington, the black lesbian. That is right out of the intersectionality rulebook.

In a league full of women, straight white women cannot claim oppression, and therefore, have absolutely no social credit. This is why Caitlin Clark has been attacked so viciously since she entered the WNBA three years ago. She is a threat to the intersectionality crowd. They keep claiming that they built the league, but what they mean is black lesbians built the league. Not women built the league, specifically black lesbians built the league and they don’t like the idea of a straight white girl coming in and benefiting from what they built. They have no problem with a black player, A’ja Wilson winning the MVP or a young white lesbian, like Paige Bueckers, becoming a superstar, they have credit on the intersectionality scoring system. They are only threatened by the straight white women.

Intersectionality is screwing up the league on many levels. This week the WNBA league officials held a meeting to determine what a woman is in order to determine who can play in their league, and after days of meetings, they released a statement, “we are going to have ongoing talks, over the coming months so we can arrive at some type of conclusion.” It is the same type of non-answer that Stephanie White gave when she was asked if biological men should play in the WNBA, she said that she is "not educated enough from a scientific standpoint" to determine what a woman is.

The fact of the matter is, they fully know what a woman is, and they do not want to play against biological males, either. The problem that the WNBA is facing is that the vast majority of the players in the league are part of the protected and favored class of the LGBTQ community, most of them are in the L-category, but since the T is part of that community, they did not want to ban T women from playing in the WNBA because then they would feel like they are discriminating against their own community. They see T women as part of the intersectionality hierarchy that they are benefitting from, so they would rather play against men pretending to be women, than risk losing some of their intersectionality social credit power.

The interesting part about this whole situation is that the black people living today, in the year 2026, are receiving a credit score, not based on the discrimination and oppression that they personally have faced in their lives, but based on the discrimination and oppression that people like Jackie Robinson experienced in his life. USA Today columnist, Nancy Armour, compared Caitlin Clark’s fans to the people who lynched Emmett Till back in the 1950’s, claiming that they are just as much of a threat to black and queer WNBA players. The reality is that Jackie Robinson did not want special treatment when he went to the Major Leagues in 1947, he wanted equal treatment, even though in his life, he had been treated extremely unfairly. These people in the WNBA who have been treated equally their whole lives, do not want equal treatment, they want special treatment. The reason why DiJonai Carrington posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” after being ejected from the game is because she is so used to get the favorable treatment that when her egregious foul was called fairly, she saw it as unfair against her. To the intersectionality crowd, equal equals oppression.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.