{"id":36063,"date":"2024-05-26T13:00:22","date_gmt":"2024-05-26T17:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/idolchatter\/?p=36063"},"modified":"2024-05-24T14:47:22","modified_gmt":"2024-05-24T18:47:22","slug":"jemele-hill-claims-caitlin-clarks-popularity-is-due-to-being-white-and-straight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/idolchatter\/2024\/05\/jemele-hill-claims-caitlin-clarks-popularity-is-due-to-being-white-and-straight.html","title":{"rendered":"Jemele Hill Claims Caitlin Clark\u2019s Popularity is Due to Being White and Straight"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_36075\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-36075\" style=\"width: 1200px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/87\/2024\/05\/Jemele-Hill-Caitlin-Clark_credit-John-Mac-Flickr-Inset-Public-Domain.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-36075\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/87\/2024\/05\/Jemele-Hill-Caitlin-Clark_credit-John-Mac-Flickr-Inset-Public-Domain.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"900\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-36075\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">John Mac \/ Flickr.com | Inset: Public Domain<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Caitlin Clark is becoming more and more of a household name. The 22-year-old\u2019s star began to rise after <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/sport\/basketball\/why-the-hottest-basketball-player-in-the-world-is-a-22-year-old-university-student-20240403-p5fgyf.html\">breaking Pete Maravich\u2019s<\/a> record of 3667 lifetime points, the highest of any college basketball player, male or female. Her first week at the professional level, playing for the WNBA\u2019s Indiana Fever saw sellouts as her fans scrambled to watch Clark\u2019s transition into the big leagues. Despite the Fever\u2019s disappointing start this season, optimism for Clark\u2019s career remains high as she scored 50 points in her first three games.<\/p>\n<p>Yet not everyone is as enthusiastic about Clark\u2019s popularity. While admitting to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/sports\/story\/2024-05-20\/caitlin-clark-marketing-boom-questions-race-equity\"><em>The Los Angeles Times<\/em><\/a> that Clark had an \u201ceveryman\u201d relatability, former ESPN personality Jemele Hill questioned whether Clark\u2019s race and sexuality also played a role in her popularity. \u201cWe would all be very naive if we didn\u2019t say race and her sexuality played a role in her popularity. While so many people are happy for Caitlin\u2019s success \u2014 including the players; this has had such an enormous impact on the game \u2014 there is a part of it that is a little problematic because of what it says about the worth and the marketability of the players who are already there,\u201d said Hill. Unlike 70% of the players in the WNBA who are black, Clark is white. She is also straight, in a league that has nearly a third of its players identifying as LGBTQ+. Clark pointed out that other black players who have played well in the league for years are not getting the same kind of exposure that Clark is getting. \u201cIt\u2019s not jealousy. It\u2019s just the fact that in our society, Black women are often erased from the picture. While Caitlin Clark\u2019s success should be widely celebrated, there are various points where we have seen dynamic phenoms and how they have been able to popularize the game,\u201d she said. She later added, \u201cThere\u2019s plenty of room to highlight and celebrate Caitlin Clark\u2019s popularity while also discussing ways in which to not erase Black women from a league that they have built and continue to build.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.outkick.com\/sports\/jemele-hill-caitlin-clark-popularity-white-straight\"><em>Outkick\u2019s<\/em><\/a> David Hookstead slammed Hill for making Clark\u2019s race and sexuality an issue. \u201cHow is Clark being a straight white woman &#8211; the same as millions of other women in America &#8211; a problem for the WNBA? Not everything is about race. In fact, I&#8217;d argue in sports that it matters very little.\u201d <em>The View\u2019s <\/em>Whoopi Goldberg pushed back at Hill\u2019s comments as well. \u201cWhen people say stuff like [Hill\u2019s comment], that\u2019s like people saying, \u2018Oh, you only got into this Ivy League college because you\u2019re Black,\u2019 or you only got this because of this,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/decider.com\/2024\/05\/22\/the-view-whoopi-goldberg-caitlin-clark-success-white-straight-ivy-league-college-black\/\">she said<\/a> after noting some of Clark\u2019s impressive stats. \u201cThis girl earned this! I\u2019m sorry, there are great players, but nobody else has done this.\u201d Hill defended herself on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jemelehill\/status\/1793366005697466565\">X<\/a>, stating she had been \u201cmisrepresented\u201d by Goldberg. \u201cI said Caitlin Clark being straight, white and from Iowa \u2018played a role\u2019 in her popularity, It\u2019s a factor, not THEE factor,\u201d she wrote, adding that more black people watched golf and tennis because of players like Tiger Woods and Serena Williams. \u201cAnd I was speaking to her popularity, not her success. She didn\u2019t become the NCAA all-time leading scorer because she\u2019s white. She accomplished that because she\u2019s good.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Caitlin Clark is becoming more and more of a household name. The 22-year-old\u2019s star began to rise after breaking Pete Maravich\u2019s record of 3667 lifetime points, the highest of any college basketball player, male or female. Her first week at the professional level, playing for the WNBA\u2019s Indiana Fever saw sellouts as her fans scrambled&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":36075,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-television"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Jemele Hill Claims Caitlin Clark\u2019s Popularity is Due to Being White and Straight<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Not everyone is as enthusiastic about Clark\u2019s popularity.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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