Dear readers,
First off, happy Easter and/or Passover to those who celebrate.
Careful readers of the newsletter may remember that on a few occasions now, we’ve alluded to the situation involving the WNBA star Brittney Griner. Since mid-February, Griner has been detained in Russia, where she plays during the WNBA offseason, for allegedly attempting to transport hashish cartridges through Russian airport security—a crime that carries a 10-year prison sentence in Russia. Last month, Russian authorities announced that they were extending Griner’s pretrial detainment until at least mid-May.
As news of Griner’s detainment spread in the U.S., voices behind the scenes began cautioning against drawing too much attention to her case. According to these whispers, widespread public agitation for Griner’s release—coming at the same as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—could prompt Russian President Vladimir Putin to use her as a bargaining chip in his wartime negotiations with the U.S., harming the U.S. government’s chances of securing her release through diplomatic backchannels. We—like many in the media—followed this advice.
But now, several months into Griner’s detainment and with no signs that a negotiated settlement is on the horizon, a growing number of voices are beginning to question the wisdom of this approach. One of those voices is Maya Goldberg-Safir, a lifelong women’s basketball fan who has been documenting the public response to Griner’s detainment. Maya isn’t a sports journalist or professional activist—she has a day job at an audio media production company—but she is arguably one of the leading experts on Brittney Griner’s career, having written her thesis on Griner while at Middlebury College. This week, Maya published a long and thoughtful piece in Jacobin exploring the silence around Griner’s detainment and calling for a new approach to securing her release.
We spoke with Maya about her piece and the shifting tone of the public discussion about Griner’s detainment. You’ll find a lightly-edited and condensed transcript of our conversation below.
Southpaw: So you went down to the Women's March Madness tournament last month to find out what people were saying about Griner. What did you find?
Maya Goldberg-Safir: I decided that I wanted to go because I got much more into women's basketball during COVID, and I was particularly excited about the political changes [that are happening in the sport] and the way that the WNBA is in a lot of ways leading sports in activism and [in creating] a culture of speaking out about oppression. And so I got this press pass, and then Brittney Griner was detained. So I was excited to look at how much more progressive women's basketball is, and then once I learned about her detainment, I thought, “This is the only thing I care about. I have to talk to people about it.”
And nobody was talking about it. So when I went, I was torn between wanting to do more of an investigation into the conversation around her and also feeling called to say something to make sure that there was some record of conversation about her. So I made these buttons that said, “Bring Brittney Home.” What I found was that there were a couple of fans who I ran into who had Brittney Griner t-shirts on—and those people were older WNBA fans. And they were the sort of subsection of people that were excited to take the pins. And then the closer that I got to the industry itself—such as administrators, coaches, players—the more the conversation felt sort of conspiratorial or transgressive or like something to cover up or be quiet about. There was more fear … I felt like I was saying something illegal.
Southpaw: Do you chalk up that fear mostly to the suggestion that bringing too much attention to the situation might hinder the government’s ability to negotiate her release through backchannels? Why are people so afraid to talk about it?
Maya Goldberg-Safir: I am still trying to figure that out. It's very confusing, I think, to figure out who knows what, and then who is telling who what to do. Like, what does the WNBA know and who are they talking to and how do the WNBA’s interests as an institution align with or perhaps collide with the interests of whoever is working on her case to try to get her out? And then how does that collide with the reasons and the motivations of folks who might be interested in her remaining detained for political reasons? It’s a constellation of confusion, and this is [part] of the conversation that's hard to make explicit.
Southpaw: The premise of the “don't talk too much about it” strategy seems to be that she’s just a normal prisoner and that by bringing her into the political discussion, we risk turning her into a political pawn. But as you point out in your piece, it seems like her arrest was politically motivated to begin with. Could talk a bit about some of the evidence that she is, in fact, a political prisoner, and how that would change the calculus about securing her release?
Maya Goldberg-Safir: I think her visibility in the country—she is a black, queer American basketball player. That’s one significant thing. There's also [that] the Russian government is keeping close tabs on everyone and is doing a lot of surveillance. So I think there’s the potential that they had watched her or that they knew a lot about her. She has a clear value. And then, I mean, there's the timing. [She was detained] a week before they invaded Ukraine. And there’s also the playbook—how does this typically work? There’s the striking detail that it took the U.S. embassy five weeks to gain consular access to her [and] to have a representative from the embassy make sure that she is mentally and physically OK. It took them five weeks to be granted access and to be able to go see her in person.
Southpaw: Could you give us a bit of an overview of why you think the basketball world is wrong to be ignoring the story or to be playing it down in the way that they have been?
Maya Goldberg-Safir: Oh, God, I’m gonna, I’m gonna—there's gonna be a hot take.
Southpaw: Go for it.
Maya Goldberg-Safir: I think the WNBA is still figuring out its politics and what it means to be politically outspoken. And I think that this [situation] pushes beyond anything that they've experienced before or had to face. I think that politically, this is asking questions that are really challenging and that are challenging the women’s basketball world beyond the sort of risks that it’s been willing to take in the past.
I think you can also be more critical of how risky those risks really are. You know, how progressive or how radical is the WNBA? I think this is a question that is still up for discussion and debate—and [it will have to] be answered especially by its own players. And so I think that, as with all sports, women's basketball players are still figuring out how to be political and what that looks like and what it means and the risks that come along with it.
I think that the fact that sport is inherently a right-wing institution, and that the institution of sport is, a lot of the time, interested in maintaining conservative values and patriotic values—you know, to be successful in sports historically is to champion values of white supremacy and patriarchy, or at least to know how to navigate a system that values those things without getting in trouble. And this is beyond the scope of what people know how to talk about. So the trend in sports media is to not question official narratives and to have this sort of implicit sense that athletes don’t know anything about this—people in politics do know, and they’ll handle it, and we shouldn’t mess it up. And the more complicated questions—Who is in power in this situation? What are the motivations around this? Who is silence serving?—those aren’t asked. The sort of leftist political analysis of how the bureaucracy of the State Department, for example, might benefit institutions more than it does individuals—I don’t think WNBA players are used to talking about that.
Southpaw: One of the questions we've been paying a lot of attention to is when do athletes reach the limits of their political engagement? Because the bar for political engagement among athletes is so low, even very minor engagement can seem like a huge step forward. But at a certain point, they’re going to reach the end of the rope, or they’re going to run up against systems that are more complicated than they’re equipped to deal with. So I think you’re right to point out that we’re seeing a bit of that friction happening here.
Maya Goldberg-Safir: In particular to women’s basketball, too, it's important to think about how the scarcity of resources affects these players and how that may affect their decision-making around a situation like this. Like, there are not enough spots in the WNBA for the people who are qualified to play professionally. We know that nearly half the league plays abroad to supplement their wages because of how little they’re paid here. So just thinking about that calculus—what is at risk for these players given how [few resources] they already have access to?
Part of why I’m interested in a leftist perspective in women’s basketball is because I think that oftentimes the leftist perspective challenges the liberal perspective. And I think that women’s basketball has sort of now become the NPR of sports, or the liberal arts college of sports, or like the “good liberal” of sports. And I think that can sometimes make it harder to challenge it from the inside.
Southpaw: We’re seeing the growth of the WNBA and the growth of women's basketball on the college level. Do you think that growth can also hinder the development of real radicalism within the league? Because on the one hand, you have the scarcity of resources, which makes it much harder for female athletes, and particularly female basketball players, [to take] political risks than it is for someone like LeBron James. But on the other hand, as the WNBA comes into its own and becomes a viable financial product, the players are going to be bound by the rules of capital in a more serious way.
Maya Goldberg-Safir: That’s a really good question. The WNBA perhaps has the reputation of being an unsuccessful commercial entity, but it is still a commercial entity. I think you're totally right to note that it’s still bound by the rules of capital. And a lot of what WNBA players and WNBA advocates have been calling for is an increase in capital investment in the league, and you are seeing that in terms of brand deals and their contracts with ESPN. So we have to take these things into account—the progress of commercial broadcasting or the progressivism that is possible within Adidas as a brand, for example.
Southpaw: Just one final question. Clearly, the strategy that the league, its players and the sports media are employing right now is not really working. There are no signs, for instance, that Griner’s release is more imminent than it was a couple of months ago, and she's facing up to 10 years in prison at a sentencing hearing next month. At this point, what sort of movement would actually help her case? Should fans be taking to the streets or players shutting down games or what?
Maya Goldberg-Safir: It's time to get an organizer in on the conversation! I’ve heard Dave [Zirin] say that [the decision to stay silent] is both tactical and political. I think, in some ways, it’s impossible to know which tactics are most effective in this case. I think if we look at what makes this political, we have to then look at what the relationship between the U.S. and Russia is right now, what Russia might want from the U.S. and what the U.S. wants from Russia. Because while the decision around her fate is in part in the hands of the Russian government, I think there could be and probably are people in Washington, D.C. who are determining her fate, or who have the power to affect the outcome of this. So I think that we need to look at what kind of pressure points there are around that relationship.
. . . So the advocacy is going to be contentious because of this mandate of silence and the de-politicization of the issue in women’s basketball. It will take dissent within women’s basketball as well. I think that, for the people who are closest to her and for her family, I can imagine that they are hearing this advice from experts, and they are horrified by what’s happening and are hoping that these people have [Brittney’s] best interests at heart. So they are following the advice that they are given. I think it’s up to other people to push back against the official narratives and ask these challenging questions and launch protests and apply pressure.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about. . .
. . . the ongoing sale of Chelsea FC by its Russian oligarch owner? “No Chelsea for the Rickettses” by Ray Ratto in Defector (April 15, 2022).
. . . why animal rights activists are gluing themselves to the floor and chaining themselves to the baskets at NBA games? “Woman chains herself to basket stanchion during Grizzlies vs. Timberwolves playoff game,” by Isabel Gonzalez in CBS Sports (April 16, 2021).
. . . Cleveland baseball fans’ refusal to let go of their racist mascot, even as the team caves? “In Cleveland, Some Fans Are Guardians Only of the Past” by David Waldstein in The New York Times (April 16, 2022).
. . . UFC Fighters’ ties to Ramzan Kadyrov, the brutal leader of Chechnya and Putin ally? “Some U.F.C. Fighters Have Ties to a Chechen Leader Loyal to Putin” by Karim Zidan and Kevin Draper in The New York Times (April 15, 2022).
Great questions. Great answers.