Caitlin Clark is the best player in women’s college basketball. She’s the biggest television draw in the sport, by far. She’s also white. And that latter point is the one to which Jemele Hill most attributes Clark’s stardom.
Hill participated in an interview with Uproxx over the weekend where she said while she appreciates Clark’s contributions to the game, she thinks Clark receives more credit than she deserves for the growth of women’s basketball.
“Everything about this sport has been trending up for years now. It did not just start with Caitlin Clark,” Hill said.
Specifically, Hill blames the media for covering Clark more than double the rate it covers women of color.
Hill cited A’ja Wilson, a black woman who played for South Carolina from 2014 to 2018:
“A study I cited recently for a piece I wrote in The Atlantic [found that] when you compare [the coverage] of, say, someone like (Paige) Bueckers, Sabrina Ionescu, or Caitlin Clark to A’ja Wilson, who has dominated basketball at every single level. She’s probably the best player in the world right now. And I’m not trying to act like she gets no coverage, but the coverage that sometimes non-white women get, or specifically Black women get, is not even close. It’s two-to-one.”
And then Aliyah Boston, a black woman who played for South Carolina from 2019 to 2023:
“I mean, Aliyah Boston was the best player in college just a couple of years ago. And she did not get even a 10th of this media coverage that Caitlin Clark did. Now, some people would say, “Oh, it’s her game.” But I don’t think it was that. She’s tremendous on television, and I’m thinking, What a missed opportunity for the national media to really elevate who she was as a person. Caitlin Clark seems to be a great personality, but it is not like Caitlin Clark is walking around saying crazy stuff. They’re just covering her excellence, and that’s good enough. Whereas it feels like for Black athletes to get the same amount of coverage or even fair coverage, there has to be something extra [beyond basketball].”
Jemele Hill’s point – that Caitlin Clark is more of a star because she’s white – is not exactly a novel take. USA Today posted an article with a similar thesis last month, arguing that “Women’s basketball needs faces of the future to be black.”
The article credited black women for building the sport of women’s basketball – a factual lie – and thus declaring it their sport in which they should star.
Not white women.
Clark is frequently the subject of blatant racial animus, be it from Hill, USA Today, Sheryl Swoopes or Gilbert Arenas.
However, Clark’s skin color has little to do with the media coverage she receives. Simply put, the media covers players who garner clicks, viewership and listeners.
Caitlin Clark does that. She moves the needle. Other women in basketball, including both college and pro, do not.
“The Caitlin Clark business is booming,” The Athletic found last month. Broadcast networks cater to her because she sets viewership records. Ticket sales for her games are in unprecedented demand for women’s hoops. Internet articles about Clark rival those of LeBron James, per Google Trends.
Let us compare the interest of A’ja Wilson to Clark, based on Google searches:
