Anyone who watches sports knows that’s an immediate “nah.” Winning is the point.
A week of bad headlines, Twitter takes, a “Saturday Night Live” sketch and harsh media commentary have followed, including a five-minute April 6 segment on “The Daily Show,” in which guest host Roy Wood Jr. and correspondent Desi Lydic debated whether the issue with Biden’s comment was racism or sexism. LSU’s star forward, Angel Reese, who is Black, has fantastic eyelashes and is known as the “Bayou Barbie,” had called the first lady’s suggestion, “A JOKE” on Twitter. In interviews she said she felt hurt by the comment, would not accept Biden’s apology (the first lady hasn’t apologized) and would rather meet a different president and first lady. “We’ll go to the Obamas. We’ll see Michelle. We’ll see Barack,” Reese told the podcast “Paper Route.”
On Friday, in a move of seeming damage control, President Biden made congratulatory phone calls not just to LSU head coach Kim Mulkey, but to Reese as well. Since the initial outcry, both the team and Reese have said they’ll accept a White House invitation, although no date has been set.
How did a mildly tone deaf, off-the-cuff, kind of grandmotherly comment about “sportsmanship” turn into one of the worst weeks and longest-enduring missteps of Jill Biden’s tenure first lady?
“If both teams’ starting five were all White or all Black, that is not a story,” says Theodore R. Johnson, a senior fellow at New America focusing on race, democracy and American identity. “The subtext of the game was an LSU squad that had only Black players in their starting five and an Iowa squad that had only White players and it was a Black version of basketball versus a White version of basketball. That was not explicitly at play, but a lot of people saw it that way.”
As Reese added confidently in her podcast interview: “I just know that if the roles were reversed, we would not be going to the White House.”
To understand what happened, first look at the context. That NCAA final wasn’t just any game. It was the most-watched women’s basketball game in the history of television, with almost ten million viewers tuning in. Many sports commentators see this year’s tournament as the moment that vaulted the sport into the national mainstream. When LSU won, it was the first championship in the program’s history, after being considered underdogs all season. Reese, a sophomore, was named most outstanding player of the Final Four.
Biden’s comment the next morning immediately diminished that, as LSU was still celebrating and before they’d even managed to get back to Baton Rouge — even if it wasn’t intentional. As “The Daily Show’s” Lydic pointed out, the first lady was proposing that the country “honor White losers the same as Black winners.”
“She turned the White House into a participation trophy,” said Woods. “Dr. Jill Biden treated these adult women like a bunch of high-schoolers who had to be invited to the slumber party no matter what.”
It is, in many ways, a perfect storm of a gaffe, fueled by the converging outrage machines of politics, feminism and sports, the Bidens’ frequent both-sides stances, and 400 years of racial history in America. For the very careful Biden, this is a top-three controversy, alongside likening the diversity of Latinos to breakfast tacos, and the one time she wore fishnet tights.
All of this, too, was happening as conservative media and conservative Twitter users were piling onto Reese for taunting Iowa’s (White) star player, Caitlin Clark. Reese had pointed to the finger where her championship ring would go and waved her hand in front of her own face — a “You Can’t See Me” taunt that comes from Black rap culture and was popularized by the White pro wrestler John Cena, meaning Reese is so fast she’s practically invisible. For this, Barstool Sports owner Dave Portnoy called her “a classless piece of s—” and sports commentator Keith Olbermann called her “a f—ing idiot,” while others called her a “thug” and “ghetto.” Many Reese defenders pointed out that when Clark — a well-known trash talker who came to Reese’s defense — had made the same gesture, to the entire court, one game earlier, she’d been called a “queen” and praised for her competitive spirit. Both of these women being attacked by middle-aged men, it should be noted, are barely out of their teens. Reese is 20 and Clark is 21.
To put Biden in context, too, she only saw half the game, and left before Reese taunted Clark. Biden’s press secretary, Vanessa Valdivia, said the first lady talked excitedly about the game on the plane. Unlike former president Donald Trump, she is not a big Twitter user; her suggestion likely had nothing to do with feeling sorry for Clark, as many commentators have suggested. (Although it does raise questions of unconscious bias and whether her advisers had briefed her.) And Biden made her gaffe in the course of praising the athleticism she’d witnessed. “I’m old enough to remember when we got Title IX and we fought so hard. We fought so hard, and look at where women’s sports has come today,” she said.
When the outcry poured in, Valdivia tweeted a clarification: “Her comments in Colorado were intended to applaud the historic game and all women athletes. She looks forward to celebrating the LSU Tigers on their championship win at the White House.”
Reese said on the podcast that she didn’t accept the apology: “You said what you said.”
Sports has long been Biden’s safe zone. Her gleeful support of the Philadelphia Phillies as they went to the World Series became the pride of her hometown and the talk of White House briefings. She went to the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 as the sole U.S. representative to cheer on athletes in the middle of the pandemic when even their families couldn’t be in the stands. Being a sports enthusiast has had zero downside, until now.
Underlying the outcry is the not-insignificant role that Black voters, and in particular Black women, played in getting Joe Biden elected in 2020. “Dr. Biden … did you forget who helped put your husband in the White House? You’re going to find out a very serious, hard lesson in 2024. You’ll be like a Kentucky or Duke freshman. You’ll be one and done!” said sports commentator Shannon Sharpe. He also posited that the “dumb scenario” she’d proposed was misguided attempt to appeal to White voters who will never get behind a Biden presidency.
“Honestly I think that a lot of this has to do with how politicized sports teams visiting the White House became under Trump,” says Johnson. While president, Trump used his platform to repeatedly condemn Colin Kaepernick’s protest of kneeling during the national anthem. Through selective invitations and teams declining to come, Trump broke a tradition of sports teams visiting the White House that dates back to 1865.
In Trump’s first two years, out of 20 major league title winners, only 10 teams visited, with many players refusing to come. Notably, Trump didn’t extend invites to several women’s championship teams from the WNBA or college basketball. Baylor University’s women’s basketball team, in 2019, was the first women’s sports team to get an invite to the Trump White House. Mulkey, the winning LSU coach, was Baylor’s head coach then. She was a prominent critic of mask mandates and coronavirus tests during the pandemic, and was roundly criticized in the sports world for refusing to speak out when her former star player, Brittney Griner, was arrested and sentenced to prison in Russia.
Jill Biden just happened to make her gaffe as conservatives were attacking the incredibly outspoken Reese, who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram. The attacks, says Johnson, were already creating “a fatigue,” and a feeling that White people were robbing LSU from celebrating their win. Biden’s remark just added to that fatigue.
When LSU does come to the White House, Biden’s initial remarks will likely loom over the visit. “Everybody’s going to be tuned in to see if there are side eyes or little elbows touching each other,” Johnson says. “People are waiting for the spectacle of when the team meets the Bidens.”
