In a game that seemed to shout “I’m back!” from the rafters, Brittney Griner, the star center for the Phoenix Mercury, scored 27 points and grabbed 10 rebounds before a raucous Arizona crowd Sunday in what was the Mercury’s second regular-season game and its home opener against the Chicago Sky. Though her play was stellar in her team’s 75-69 loss, the crowd’s cheers and standing ovations for Griner had more to do with her dramatic return from a Russian penal colony where she had become the unwilling pawn of geopolitical giants.
In a game that seemed to shout “I’m back!,” Brittney Griner scored 27 points and grabbed 10 rebounds before a raucous Arizona crowd Sunday.
A week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Griner was arrested at a Moscow airport for possession of two vape cartridges. She was later sentenced to nine years and transferred to a horrific Mordovian prison colony. Almost 300 days later, Russia released Griner in exchange for the United States releasing Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, known as “The Merchant of Death.”
It was hard to imagine Griner surviving nine years in a freezing Russian penal colony as a famous Black, lesbian woman from America. A 2021 State Department report on Russian human rights abuses said, “Conditions in prisons and detention centers varied but were often harsh and life threatening.” Even so, her capture inspired neither national unity nor a universal resolve to see her freed. Instead, Griner became yet another red state versus blue state culture war fight. And even though she notably stood for the playing of the national anthem before Sunday’s game, her conservative antagonists are still at it. Now they’re calling out her standing.
By my count, conservatives had three main responses to Griner’s capture, all of them also voiced by former President Donald Trump. There was the argument that because she carried vape cartridges into Russia, she deserved to be arrested, convicted and sentenced.
There was the argument that because she was among the Black athletes who had kneeled during the anthem in opposition to police brutality and had worn shirts with phrases such as “Justice for Breonna Taylor,” she had renounced any claim to Americanness (whatever that means) and should be left to rot.
The third argument was that her release wasn’t enough of a reward for our release of Bout. Some disgruntled Americans argued that we should have held out for the release of former Marine Paul Whelan, even though the Biden administration said that Russia said it would either release Griner or nobody, and Whelan’s family supported Griner’s release. Those critics saw the trade for Bout as an absolute swindle, even though Bout was due to be released in a few years and, I cannot stress this enough, Griner’s very survival was an open question.
But now, even in the context of her remarkable return, Griner is once again being put through the wringer. This time for showing an appreciation for the United States that conservatives accused her of not having.
Griner, who had already said that she’d no longer play internationally unless it was playing for the U.S. in the Olympics, said she began to think differently about the United States when she was locked in a cell too short for her 6 foot 8 inch frame and given a bed that was too short. When The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill asked her why she’d changed her stance on the anthem, she said, “One thing that’s good about this country is our right to protest. …You have a right to be able to speak out, question, to challenge, and do all these things. [After] what I went through, it just means a little bit more to me now. I was literally in a cage and could not stand the way I wanted to … and a lot of other situations. Just being able to hear my national anthem, see my flag, I definitely wanted to stand.”
That should make conservatives cheer. Many are smirking and criticizing her instead. It’s reminiscent of a reporter telling a lieutenant of Malcolm X that by expressing his new belief in brotherhood, the leader had “backtracked a little from the position that all white men are devils.” He responded, “When you say that he has backtracked, it seems as though that you imply you would prefer that he call white people devils.”
That’s how critics of Griner sound. For example, the headline of an Arizona Republic column about her new stance negatively referred to it as a “flip-flop.” Such critics act as if they’d really prefer that Griner didn’t stand for the anthem, even though they expressed such anger and outrage when she didn’t.
Damned if you don’t. Damned if you do. Griner is expressing her appreciation for the freedom she was denied in Russia, and the right sees it as another opportunity to attack her.
Griner stressed to Hill that her standing for the anthem does not mean she has stopped believing that we all must fight for social justice. We should pay attention to Griner’s political thoughts in the coming months. The liberties she cherishes — as a Black woman in the LGBTQ community — are under a sustained attack by many of the same people who demand her unqualified appreciation for this country. The irony is that some of her critics have more in common politically with the authoritarian Putin than any aspirations toward a working, multi-racial democracy.
CORRECTION: (May 22, 10:36 p.m. ET) A previous version of this article misstated when Brittney Griner stood for the national anthem. It was Sunday, not Saturday.
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