The reaction to the announcement of Caitlin Clark as Time Magazine’s 2024 Athlete of the Year is, in many ways, a microcosm of the years, if not decades, of left-wing indoctrination on the country’s culture regarding race. What should have been a festive occasion was ruined by the contemporary radical left-wing sociopolitical desire to taint any athletic accomplishment by a white person as an auxiliary of the made-up phenomenon known as white privilege. Unfortunately, she went along with it rather than stand up against this nonsense.
“I want to say I’ve earned every single thing, but as a white person, there is privilege,” Clark said.
But, in reality, Clark doesn’t have white privilege. She has white guilt.
White guilt can be described as an exploitative technique used by social justice activists and left-wing political ideologues to shame white people into feeling guilty over current achievements and accomplishments by illogically linking them to societal racial discrimination of the past. It’s predicated on bullying white people into believing they all owe people of color, primarily black people, a compensatory societal obligation due to the sins of yesteryear — sins for which the white people being bullied today were not responsible. It necessitates judging people by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.
Consider two studies conducted on white guilt. A 1999 study, “White Guilt: Its Antecedents and Consequences for Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action,” revealed that white guilt resulted in “more negative personal evaluations” of white people and “stronger beliefs in the existence of white privilege.” In a 2003 study, “White Guilt and Racial Compensation: The Benefits and Limits of Self-Focus,” researchers found that white guilt resulted from “self-focused beliefs in racial inequality” that were “associated with belief in white privilege.” This stemmed from a belief that people of European descent were the “perpetrators of racial discrimination.”
These studies offer an explanation for Clark’s mentality and comments in her interview with Time. Browbeating people into white guilt directly relates to an acceptance of white privilege. It is a sociological and ideological weaponization that has proven quite effective in shaping contemporary culture regarding race.
Basketball teams want good players so they can win games. Fans in attendance want to watch these players perform astonishing acts of athleticism that the everyday person cannot achieve but wishes they could. That is the root of Clark’s success. It is the same reason why NBA players such as Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, Steph Curry, and LeBron James were successful and popular and took the game of basketball to new heights. She would be a star if she were black, Latino, Asian, Native American, or Middle Eastern. However, she wouldn’t receive the same kind of criticism or negativity.
Clark’s detractors believe that she is only famous because she is white. They regularly claim she excels in a black woman’s sport, and a supposedly biased country loves her for that. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. For example, consider the fame and success of Simone Biles — a black female gymnast who dominates in what has traditionally been a white woman’s sport. Biles was Time’s Athlete of the Year in 2021.
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Soaring to stardom with her performance in the 2016 Olympics, Biles has blossomed into arguably one of, if not the, greatest women’s gymnast of all time. Yet, gymnastics is arguably considered a white woman’s sport, with many top gymnasts typically coming from Eastern Europe. However, Biles never acknowledged the race of the women who competed before her and built gymnastics the way Clark did. Nor was she asked to do so. Unlike Clark, many considered Biles a pioneer for being a black woman in a white woman’s sport.
Privilege didn’t make Clark a star. Her talent did. Her work ethic did. Her skill did. Her ability to successfully shoot 3-point shots from all over the basketball court did. Her playmaking ability did. Clark was right when she said she earned every single thing. She was wrong when she associated any of that with so-called privilege because of her skin color. Instead, she should have called out her detractors for bullying her and trying to make her feel guilty about her fame and success because of her being white.