January 1, Netflix Anchor Meltdown: Claims Black Women Are Real WNBA Victims

Wyatt’s Take

• Elle Duncan tries to paint Black women as helpless victims in WNBA drama while ignoring the league’s real problems.
• Her own record shows plenty of protection at ESPN and Netflix despite past arrests and political stunts on air.
• The real poison in women’s basketball came from players and pundits who attacked Caitlin Clark’s success instead of celebrating it.

Former ESPN anchor Elle Duncan called the discourse surrounding the WNBA “toxic as hell” and claimed that Black women are the target.

“It feels like open season to dunk on Black women because we do not have protection. Because no one cares. Because we are low-hanging fruit,” Duncan said of the WNBA discourse during a discussion with Front Office Sports on Tuesday.

“It is very easy to dunk on us since we are, I would say, outside of transgender people, the most marginalized of the marginalized groups.”

Duncan, a highly peculiar individual, then accused “opportunists” of latching on to Caitlin Clark as a means of diminishing Black and queer women.

“It’s twofold for them—so you get to lift this one person up, and you get to, ultimately, reduce everybody else that isn’t her to nothing,” Duncan said.

At this point, you probably expect us to respond to the examples Duncan provided to support her claims about Black women in America and the WNBA. Unfortunately, we cannot. Duncan didn’t provide any.

On the surface, I reject her premise.

She says Black women lack protection, yet her own career suggests otherwise.

ESPN hired Duncan after she was arrested for driving under the influence (DUI) in April 2013. She then repeatedly used ESPN’s sports programming to make personal political statements.

She reportedly lobbied behind the scenes to have the company remove Sage Steele from a social justice special in 2020 over concerns about Steele’s “Blackness,” whatever that means. Steele was removed.

On at least two occasions, Duncan interrupted the network’s sports coverage to protest legislation.

She first called for a moment of silence in response to Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. She later used the SportsCenter set to condemn the Supreme Court’s decision to return abortion policy to the states, calling on fathers to support their daughters’ ability to obtain abortions.

Last year, she again ventured into political commentary on ESPN, declaring that “everyone” should adore and love former first lady Michelle Obama. Imagine the reaction if an ESPN anchor had instructed viewers that “everyone” should adore and love first lady Melania Trump.

Yet ESPN did not discipline Duncan or distance itself from her commentary, as it did Steele after she discussed political and social issues in 2021.

By that standard, Duncan appeared quite protected at ESPN.

Despite all of that, Netflix has since hired her to anchor its sports coverage. Talk about privilege.

I also reject the notion that Black women lack protection in the WNBA, a league composed predominantly of black women.

Recently, A’ja Wilson charged aggressively toward a fan in the stands and avoided a suspension. DiJonai Carrington also avoided discipline after clotheslining Sophie Cunningham this summer and later accusing the WNBA of racism on social media from the locker room.

Black women are also routinely afforded the benefit of the doubt by the media during WNBA controversies. ESPN’s primary WNBA studio show features an all-black female panel and has often drawn criticism for holding Clark to a different standard than black players.

Further, it’s difficult to take Duncan seriously when she laments the toxicity surrounding WNBA coverage. Duncan was among the media figures who helped politicize the league when Clark arrived.

She was initially ESPN’s lead WNBA host, but was hardly a neutral observer. Duncan repeatedly shamed Clark over the supposed racism of anonymous online trolls, as if Clark were somehow responsible for them.

She has continued to stoke the same divisions since joining Netflix.

This summer, Duncan suggested Clark bore some responsibility for a wildly inappropriate USA Today column in which the author invoked Emmett Till while warning that Clark’s silence in the face of online criticism could endanger black women.

The racialization of the WNBA has never been particularly difficult to trace. Most people have been afraid to say where much of it originated.

Clark is a straight White woman from Iowa who entered a predominantly black league with a level of fame no WNBA player had ever possessed. Players and media figures, many of whom were Black women, met her arrival with unmistakable resentment.

Some explicitly attributed her popularity to white privilege. Others invoked the “great White hope” trope to explain her appeal.

Elle Duncan, A’ja Wilson, DiJonai Carrington, Angel Reese, Monica McNutt, Cindy Brunson, Chiney Ogwumike, Sheryl Swoopes, and others are not innocent bystanders to the toxic WNBA discourse they now condemn. They have been among its most prominent participants.

In many of the controversies that have defined the league’s culture war, they have been the aggressors, not the targets.

Duncan and others now want to reverse that sequence of events. They want the backlash against their own divisive rhetoric and behavior to serve as proof that black women were the victims all along.

That’s a convenient revision of what actually happened.

WNBA discourse is “toxic as hell” in large part because a straight white woman from Iowa transcended the league, and too many people around the sport could not accept her success without filtering it through race, sexuality, and privilege.

Rather than treat Clark’s popularity as a historic opportunity for women’s basketball, they treated it as a grievance. They framed her fame as “white privilege.” They called her fans “racists” for defending her.

Such dishonest framework guaranteed resentment. It also guaranteed backlash.

Rinse and repeat.

The likes of Elle Duncan have done far more to poison the conversation surrounding the WNBA than Clark or her fans have.

She did so again by describing the very people stirring the resentment as the victims.

Wyatt Matters

Heartland families know that success should be celebrated, not torn down by grievance politics. When hardworking Americans see honest achievement punished by identity games, they recognize the same divisive tactics that hurt their own communities and values.