'They pick and choose when it’s time for us to just be athletes:' WNBA’s Chelsea Gray
“Shut up and do your job!”
The LA Sparks’ Chelsea Gray says that kind of talk regarding athletes speaking up on social issues is “ridiculous.” She spoke to Yahoo Finance from the WNBA bubble in Bradenton, Florida, one day after WNBA players refused to play in protest following the shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who was shot and wounded in the back multiple times by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 23, 2020.
“They pick and choose a time for us just to be athletes,” she said. “Before we’ve even been dribbling a ball, throwing a football, taking a swing, we’re humans ... This is a human issue around this country, and for us to sit back and just ‘do our job’ doesn’t make sense to me.”
The league’s move to strike followed the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks walking after the shooting of Blake.
“We are a league full of black women”
“We decided to take this time, take a day of reflection, a day of informed action and mobilization and recommitting to the justice movement,” Gray said. “It's not necessarily saying we're boycotting the rest of the season, but just taking a stand, taking a breather to really understand what's going on in our world right now.”
For Gray, it’s not about being an all-star athlete who is choosing to speak up. For her, it’s about being a human being who can’t sit by quietly. “We are a league full of Black women. We’ve been used to having people trying to silence our thoughts, trying to silence what we feel, and what we think is important — and it hasn’t stopped us.”
Sports strikes spread quickly
At least five separate sports leagues — the NBA, WNBA, Major League Baseball, National Football League, and Major League Soccer — have postponed games or practices amid athlete walkouts. This week’s walkouts also mark four years since former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat as the national anthem played before an NFL game. He later switched to kneeling, but he never wavered in his protest against police brutality and racial injustice in the U.S., even as he lost his job
Jen Rogers is an anchor for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @JenSaidIt.
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