DiJonai Carrington’s playing victim with Sophie Cunningham ‘white privilege’ tweet — and the media’s happy to believe her
Another day, another tiring WNBA spectacle.
On Saturday, Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington cleaned Sophie Cunningham’s clock as she went in for a layup on a breakaway.
Carrington’s clothesline looked more like a WWE audition or a “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan tribute than a basketball play.
The Fever guard hit the floor and bounced up with a bloody lip — a mugging that, rightfully, earned Carrington a flagrant 2 foul and an ejection from the game.
Hard fouls happen in the course of play. Especially when Carrington is on the floor. Her highlight reels are chock-full of unnecessary and insane fouls, complete with hair pulling, eye pokes and near decapitations. It’s kind of her thing.
And if you do the crime, then you do the time.
Getting tossed should have been the end of this story, but Carrington used her own bad acts to catapult herself into the victim role, cynically injecting race into what was, unequivocally, a dangerous play.
She marched into the locker room and pathetically tweeted “white privilege,” tagging the Indiana Fever to suggest that she was ejected because she, a black woman, fouled a white chick.
But that kind of racialized trash doesn’t hold up.
Last season, Cunningham was on the other side of the equation when she clobbered Jacy Sheldon after the then Connecticut Sun guard took a cheap shot at lightning rod Caitlin Clark. The 6-foot-1 Cunningham was making a statement: She was Clark’s enforcer now.
But Cunningham knew she warranted an ejection. Like a big girl, she took her medicine.
Unlike Carrington, who indulged in classic crybully behavior. The Sky guard started the fight — then whined about the consequences.
“This has nothing to do with race … ,” Cunningham told reporters after the game. “Last year, I did the same thing, and I got kicked out. And I deserved to be kicked out. There’s no reason even to play that card.”
Carrington might be running for the cheap-shot queen of the league, but she is no fool. The daughter of former NFL player Darren Carrington, she attended a private prep school and has a degree from Stanford.
She knows privilege because she has it.
She also knows the identitarians in the WNBA ecosystem will dish out assists to support her ridiculous narrative that she was the real casualty.
Predictably, the media, fellow players and even Fever head coach Stephanie White participated in Carrington’s defense.
Collectively, they twisted themselves into knots to make Cunningham the villain in this scenario — all for the simple fact that she said men don’t belong in women’s sports. The crime of common sense.
A tweet from The Athletic turned Carrington into a passive player in the whole affair: “Sophie Cunningham absorbed an arm-to-the-neck from DiJonai Carrington on a layup attempt, resulting in Carrington’s ejection.”
It’s like saying Nancy Kerrigan absorbed a metal baton to the leg from a fella.
The Daily Beast tweeted that “Sophie Cunningham was accused of ‘white privilege’ after a messy, physical mid-game altercation.” Huh?
In a stunningly ridiculous NBC segment, athletes-turned-commentators Cheryl Miller, Sue Bird and Maria Taylor griped about outsiders injecting racial narratives into the league — while failing to acknowledge that Carrington had tweeted about white privilege.
It was simply dishonest to kvetch about culture wars and race and not mention that Carrington herself was the one firing the shots.
But Sports Illustrated gave the game away with an insane headline: “Cunningham got a bitter taste of karma after drawing flagrant foul in Fever-Sky.” In other words, this was street justice for Cunningham’s crime of acknowledging biology.
Just ask her former teammate Sydney Colson, who posted “Love a trans foul” on Threads.
This is a league with incredibly weak leadership that lives and dies by the word “inclusivity.” But damn anyone thinking they will be included without bowing down to the progressive agenda. In the W, it’s not about merit but conformity.
Which makes Cunningham even more brave. She has a target on her back but isn’t crying uncle or melting into a puddle of apologies.
Cunningham said that she had never really spoken to Carrington, “But I guess she has some pent up stuff. So get your s–t off. That’s fine. I can take it.”
Carrington and her backers may be in favor of tough play but, compared to Cunningham, they’re thin-skinned crybabies.
She’s one tough broad.