01x04 - The Assist

[bunniefuu]

As a defensive player,

I like getting stopped.

I love blocking shots.

It's the gritty stuff

that people don't necessarily

go to games to watch.

Everybody likes the offense,

but the defense is

what wins you games.

I just don't consider myself

an activist

or super politically involved,

but felt like

the world was kind of falling apart.

Hands up! Don't sh**t!

Black Lives Matter!

There's no state

more consequential than Georgia.

We win Georgia,

we win everything.

That's what's at stake

right now.

The future of the country is

on the ballot right here in Georgia.

Reverend Warnock's campaign

got a boost

from some people

close to his opponents,

Kelly Loeffler,

namely the WNBA.

Politics, race, gender,

all these messy issues

that we have to deal with

in our society,

have always been very present

in sports.

They were a part of a long tradition

of athletes

who have had the courage

to use their platform.

When the point guard

of a national basketball team

starts talking about politics,

we start to listen.

The entire world is looking at us

right now. But you take that risk.

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

THE ASSIS

In 2020, there was a lot of tension

politically and personally

for pretty much everybody

across the country.

There's too many efforts here

to take away our rights.

Take away your rights

and destroy our way of life.

Then we will shut the country down.

For the first time in decades,

Georgia is a battleground state.

And in the Georgia elections,

you had two Senate seats up for grabs.

One of those was

Senator Kelly Loeffler,

co-owner of the WNBA team

in Atlanta.

She was Republican.

She was openly supporting Trump.

And Warnock was

one of the opponents.

He was a Reverend

at the church

that Martin Luther king grew up

preaching at.

Reverend Raphael Warnock

had all the makings of somebody

who could be a great representative,

but he didn't have the platform.

Why might 2020 be different?

The first place we will look is

African-American turnout,

Fulton county, home of Atlanta.

ATLANTA, GA

Atlanta is the cradle

of the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King Jr.

is Georgia's greatest son.

And it is the place where

the dreamer and the dream was born.

I remember the pride

that many of us felt

that we were getting

a WNBA team.

The spirit of all of that is embodied

in the team's name, The Dream.

In the course of the campaign,

I got word about the ways in which

they were making good use

of their platform

to get into some good trouble.

Kelsey going up.

And rejected by Elizabeth Williams!

My name's Elizabeth Williams.

I play in the WNBA

for the Atlanta Dream.

Having more of a veteran role

is interesting

because you understand what

your leadership style looks like.

Elizabeth Williams is quiet,

but she's brilliant.

She's the type of leader

that every single organization

that's successful must have in order

to really push things forward.

When we've had

the killings of Breonna Taylor,

George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery,

kind of back to back to back,

it felt like it was important

to go to a protest.

It was my first ever protest.

It was important to be in that space

because so much of the language

and the news around protests

was the violence

and how dangerous it was

when in reality,

it was just raw emotion

and people that were upset.

It's like, okay, this is about

people's lives, people's families.

Seeing how many people

were coming out to physically chant

and yell and share

and express their emotions

behind the whole movement

was really powerful and important.

And so the chance to come out and

to be part of that, I think was huge.

If this were my friend or my sister

or my parent,

I would be so enraged.

You're just reminded of how close

to home all of this really hits.

I'm always grateful that

I was actually at the protest

and could feel and experience

all those feelings.

And then heading

into the bubble.

You kind of put all of that together.

The bubble season.

It's a pretty artificial environment

for a sport to take place in.

But there was no way to completely

shut out the rest of the world.

In preparation of kicking off

their 2020 season,

the WNBA players decided to dedicate

their season to Black Lives Matter

and, specifically, Say Her Name

to raise awareness of black women

who are also victims

of state-sanctioned violence

and police brutality.

From its inception,

women in the WNBA were already

pushing back at the tiny box

that people wanted

to put women athletes in.

It was a lead

that was threatening to change

the face of how

we understood women's sports

and push the boundaries

of what people understood it to be.

Standing up for social justice

has been so much more

than a talking point

for WNBA players.

It's really been a call to action.

This year, the league

developed a council and platform

dedicated to advancing social justice

and societal and racial issues.

And we want to make sure that

in addition to having the passion

and the voices out there

we're strategic,

and we're intentional

about how we move forward.

Being one of the longest standing

Dream players,

I felt like I had to kind of step up

and take the lead.

The consensus is to not play

in tonight's slate of games

and to kneel, lock arms and raise

fists during the national anthem.

You can't control

how people perceive you,

but we want to speak up for people

that don't always have a voice.

The Atlanta Dream co-owner,

Kelly Loeffler,

is not in favor of the WNBA

social justice plans.

She asked the commissioner

to scrap plans for players

to wear warm-up jerseys reading

Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name.

In a letter to the league

commissioner, Loeffler wrote,

we should be united in our goal

to remove politics from sports.

For our team owner to say that

to a league of majority black woman

was tough.

That really hit home

for a lot of people.

Because we're in this election year,

that she was obviously trying

to stir something up.

As a Republican candidate that needed

to lean into the right

she's drumming up support

by demonstrating to her base

The WNBA has embraced the Black

Lives Matter political organization

and I had to draw the line.

I had to speak out for those

that disagree with this movement.

The black women who played

in the WNBA became objects to her.

They became something

to use as political pawns.

She had no idea the type of fight

she was about to pick.

And for that matter,

who she was picking this fight with.

The one thing about WNBA players

is that the majority of them

have been fighting for respect their

entire career. They are used to this.

And that's when the Dream

and the larger WNBA community

decided they needed

to change the narrative

and they needed

to do something different.

In the United States, sports plays

a very dominant role.

That central location of sports

in our society

infuses it

with a lot of cultural power.

Athletes have taken

that cultural power

to build a platform

on which to speak out.

But there has been

messages everywhere

about the consequences and

repercussions athletes might face

for using their voice.

We can see historically,

there's been athletes

who've been blackballed,

athletes who protest

experienced threats, job precarity,

just not being able

to find employment.

Players don't have nearly as much

power as we often think they do.

Contracts are short. There is so

much competition to get these jobs.

So when you are using your voice

and saying things

that some people

view controversial,

it puts you

in a much more tenuous position.

More often than that, it's usually

black athletes that are told,

"don't you dare remind us

of the fact

that many of the ideals

we have espoused in this country,

we have not exactly lived up to."

Before the 1968 Olympics,

there was this effort

to mobilize black athletes

to speak out

against racial injustice.

After a series of talks,

the athletes decide

that they're all going to protest

racial injustice in their own way.

Tommy Smith

and John Carlos said,

"we're going to have

the eyes of the world on us

for this one moment on the medal

stand, what can we do with it?"

The Black Power disciples

Tommy Smith and John Carlos

had been suspended by

the United States Olympic committee

and given 48 hours

to leave Mexico.

We see multiple periods of time where

black athletes attempted to mobilize,

but perhaps did not have the power

or the leverage to do so.

It's also disheartening

because they left women

completely out of the conversation.

There was some really

tremendous politically-aware women

who were supportive of the protests

at the 1968 Olympic games.

Wyomia Tyus won

the 100 meter Olympic event in 1964

and she repeated in 1968, which was

unprecedented for women at the time.

Like Tommy Smith

and John Carlos,

she also raised her fist,

but that never gets talked about.

She's left out of most narratives

concerning protests

at the 1968 Olympic games.

Women's participation has always

been devalued and so it's no surprise

that we see a lot of their activist

efforts being widely ignored.

Women are still vastly

underrepresented in sport media.

If you look at SportsCenter

and what's on television,

women get only about 5%

of all coverage in sport media.

There's so much coverage

devoted to men.

It makes it seem as though this

athlete activism is a man's thing.

That constant invisibility typifies

the experience of women athletes,

particularly women athletes of color,

throughout the 20th century.

The story of the WNBA's involvement

in this current civil rights movement,

it actually doesn't start last

summer, it started right around 2016,

the summer where Alton Sterling

was k*lled and Philando Castile.

The WNBA players started

discussing police brutality

and bringing that issue

before the media base

that doesn't even cover them

that often,

but they felt like it was worth it.

What is happening now is not new.

We have decided is important

to take a stand and raise our voices.

We're highlighting a long time

problem of racial profiling

and unjust violence against blacks

in our country.

This is when it was

the most unpopular to do it.

It's not as if corporations

are lining up

making all the pretty little

Black Lives Matter statements

that they're making now.

The league really tried

to hush them.

The league fined them for dress code

violation for wearing these shirts.

It's unfortunate

that the WNBA has fined us

and not supported its players.

They did not back down when

they stood against those actions.

Teams across the league

held media blackouts,

and they wouldn't talk

about anything

other than police brutality

and systemic racism.

Once they realized

that teams across the league

were going to continue this,

the league got scared.

Today,

the WNBA has rescinded that fine.

And those communication strategies,

the solidarity that they formed,

it carried on.

And that directly led to

the collective action we saw in 2020.

When we think

about the WNBA today,

we think about it

as a gritty, tenacious league

that doesn't take no

for an answer

and continues to push boundaries.

And we think about it

as a league

that's always been

about collective action.

Anytime the W does something,

we do it together.

But there's a lot of risk

when you think about the fact

that this is against

our team owner.

We can't necessarily do

anything about our ownership,

but we're eligible to vote

and so why don't we think

about something we can control,

which is being voters.

And we can control like

let's look at her Senate seat.

As the tension

in the country escalated,

that tension between Kelly Loeffler

and the league intensified.

Black Lives Matters!

Get the hell out!

Get the hell out!

But there was no clear front runner

for a democratic candidate

who could possibly take her out.

Stacey Abrams on our board

of advocates was like,

"oh yeah, this guy, his name's

Raphael Warnock, he's great."

I'm voting for Reverend

Raphael Warnock for US Senate

because he's spent his entire life

fighting for healthcare,

voting rights, and an economy

that works for everyone.

We must raise the standard.

We must try to embody

in our speech the kind of world

we want to see

for our children.

I think my first impression was how

stoic, but also confident he was.

He was very adamant

that social justice was a priority

and fight for people

who are marginalized.

And that spoke to all of the players

because, as a group of black women,

we're not typically the people

that the world seeks first.

I think a lot of them think about

the fact that this is something

they've been working for their whole

lives as professional athletes,

that they have spent

countless hours

trying to be

the very best at this job.

And they have to have honest

conversations with themselves.

Is me speaking out worth risking

all of this that I have built?

They knew what was at stake.

We wanted to make sure

that we were organized

and we were strategic

in the conversations

that we had as players about,

okay, how are we going to

support Reverend Warnock?

And what does this mean?

We've all made it known voting

is that actual item.

We've got to take

that energy to the polls.

The WNBA took the brand-new step

of not just telling people to vote,

but telling people who to vote for.

They wore Vote Warnock shirts.

That kind of collective endorsement

was new territory.

Every time they are

photographed coming off the bus,

warming up before a game,

after a game,

they're drawing attention

to the race.

Nobody knew who he was before

they start wearing the T-shirts

and speaking his name

on a regular basis.

It was a concrete thing that

they could do in an election year

to help get people engaged,

to help fuel progress

that could really impact change.

It moves things from a symbol

into something very substantive.

We wanted to come in

and wear Vote Warnock shirts.

He's currently running

for US Senate right now

and he supports everything that

all the players in the WNBA support.

It was a proud moment

when I looked up one evening

and they were getting off a bus

with a black T-shirt

with the simplest and most sublime

message: Vote Warnock.

It had my name on it, but I think

they were saying much more than that.

I think they were saying vote

for truth-telling, vote for justice,

stand up for what's right

no matter what it costs.

And it rang with a kind of power

in spaces

that don't often pay

that much attention to politics.

But in reality, do athletes

have an effect on the ballot box?

There's so much partisan animosity

in the country right now.

When you speak in favor

of one of the major political parties,

you're alienating

maybe half of the country.

When the point guard

of a national basketball team

starts talking about politics,

that's not very typical

so we start to listen.

When you start endorsing

particular people,

there's a tremendous

amount of power in that.

A lot of responsibility,

but a tremendous amount of power.

Today's fan is learning

so much more

about their favorite

players' sensibilities

than was the case

in previous generations.

The way that fans think

about athletes,

they're looking for

a little bit more substance.

They want to know that the person

whose shoes they're buying,

whose games they're going to see,

who they're watching on TV,

they need to know that they're real

and they're authentic,

and that they get them.

Athletes, they can just get

on social media and say,

"you know what?

I feel this about this issue."

It's a huge opportunity

to not just say "vote",

but say like, "here's why we vote.

And here's how we vote."

After years of erasure

of the league,

a window opened up

where all of a sudden the WNBA

seemed to be everywhere.

There was new attention on

what this league was doing.

What we fought for

in the last month using our voices,

we just want to continue to do that

with voting.

And so this was just

a natural segue for us.

So while it's really hard

to figure out

what exactly influenced

the rise of Raphael Warnock,

what we do know is

the campaign itself says

that after the WNBA got involved,

they saw their polls jump

from 9% to 17%.

But also, on August 4th,

the day the WNBA came out

with their Vote Warnock shirts

for the first time,

there was a boost in the Warnock

campaign in terms of donations.

50% of that boost

was from individual donors.

The Warnock campaign said

that the WNBA was instrumental

in turning the tide

of their campaign.

The Dream, in particular,

did a few things really differently.

Having a really specific message

and call to action

was one of those things.

So typically what you'll see

is celebrities saying,

"you should go vote"

or "support democracy."

The dream comes out and says,

"vote for this particular candidate."

They didn't make it

about Kelly Loeffler.

They made it

about Reverend Raphael Warnock,

and they made it

about his agenda,

what he was bringing to the table,

his ideals, his politics.

And then as players

were leaving the bubble,

people volunteered as poll workers,

did robocalls to make sure

that people don't lose sight

of the end goal of what we're doing.

We didn't have a lot of time so

we started focusing on pop culture.

We were also still

in the middle of a pandemic.

And so recruiting athletes

to shout us out,

shout out work out,

tell people to follow us.

They care about Georgia.

They care about moving young people.

They care about moving

black people to vote.

And so the WNBA linking up

with these grassroots activists

and taking their own platform

and saying,

"how can we use our platform

to work alongside the efforts

that are happening?"

is one of the most striking features

about the WNBA action

and what makes it really stand apart.

Because it's their collective

matching up with other collectives,

and the force of that together

really moving the needle.

In Georgia today,

as final frenzy of campaigning,

just five days before next week's

crucial Senate runoff elections.

We saw long lines of voters

in the weeks before election day.

Some waited 11 hours in Georgia,

but they still broke

the voting record for turnout.

We had to stay vigilant

and we had to stay really hopeful

that all of the work that we'd done

and the conversations that we had,

weren't going to go in vain.

By the time the runoff came around,

it was like,

if Warnock and Ossoff win

these seats, the Senate flips.

We are coming on the air

with breaking news out of Georgia.

NBC News now projects

that Democrat Raphael Warnock

has won the Senate runoff.

Raphael Warnock has defeated

incumbent Senator Kelly Loeffler.

Warnock will become

the first black Senator from Georgia.

We were told

that we couldn't win this election,

but tonight we've proved

that with hope, hard work

and the people by our side,

anything is possible.

A bunch of women

who play basketball

just helped get

a black man elected to the Senate

in the most important election

maybe for the Senate in my lifetime.

The reality is that this was

an incredibly close election.

These are razor thin margins.

So obviously

you're not going to be able to say,

"it's just one thing", right?

The WNBA's impact in that election

is not singular, but it's undeniable.

The level of visibility

and attention

that they were able to bring to him

wound up changing history.

After Reverend Warnock won the

election and the Senate was flipped,

Kelly Loeffler said that she was

going to sell her stake in the team.

And we got

new ownership as well.

The Atlanta Dream is waking up

to new ownership this morning.

Former Dream player,

Renee Montgomery

is the first former player

to become

both an owner and an executive

of a WNBA franchise.

It was also a fresh start: new

President, new Senate, new control.

And then for Atlanta,

it was like just a new change.

Like we can move forward now.

The dream has shown

it's not necessarily the case

that you'll be penalized

for doing this sort of activism work.

Viewership went up and they were able

to take control of their team

from a co-owner that they didn't want

to be affiliated with them anymore.

It was one of the great checkmates

I've ever seen

from a sports

and political standpoint.

The WNBA really gave a blueprint

about what it means to organize.

And now it feels like a great time

for athletes to really understand

how their voices have legitimate

and true power.

I think that the rest of us

can learn a lot from WNBA players

versus the power of collective

action and solidarity.

The second is to take

that breath, to be patient,

to react in a purposeful way

that will push the conversation

beyond emotion

and into something productive.

The W will continue to stay

at the forefront of this.

And I think people started to

appreciate the effort that we put in

and see like, wow,

when these players are saying

that they're fighting for social

justice, they really mean it.