Co-opted

 The Indiana Fever lost to the Connecticut Sun again last night, which means the Fever's season is over, which means Caitlin Clark's season is over. Now maybe everyone can stop using her as a fulcrum for their various agendas/theories/twisted worldviews.

Clark never asked to be co-opted like that, never asked to be held up as some sort of persecuted martyr to reverse racism. That this was a construct as phony as a three-dollar bill didn't matter. The goal was to absolve those who advanced it, even as they engaged in their usual look-at-those-black-animals-picking-on-our-Caitlin narrative. 

All of that got out in the open again after the first playoff game between the Sun and the Fever, when the Sun's Dijonai Carrington, who is black, lunged to block a Clark pass and poked her in the eye on the follow-through. The not-racist racists immediately swore Carrington did it on purpose ("Look at that black animal deliberately poking Clark in the eye!") and flooded social media with the usual gusher of vileness. Some of them even showed up for Game 2 to mock Carrington in person.

This despite the fact Clark herself, once again the only grownup in the room, said the eye-poke was not intentional and frankly no big deal.

This despite the fact you have to slow the video waaay down to even halfway make it look intentional.

In any event, here Clark was again, a lightning rod for knuckle-dragging lowlifes indulging all the worst instincts in American society. For someone who's only ever wanted to play basketball -- and who did it amazingly, even stunningly, well in her record-shattering rookie season in the WNBA -- it was a disgusting way for her season to end.

And when the evening was done, pretty much everyone said as much.

"In my 11-year career, I've never experienced the racial comments from the Indiana Fever fan base. It's unacceptable, honestly," the Sun's Alyssa Thomas said. "There's no place for it. We've been professional throughout the whole entire thing, but I've never been called the things I've been called on social media.

"Basketball is headed in a great direction, but we don't want fans that are just going to degrade us and call us racial names ... We don't want to go to work every day and have social media blown up over things like that. It's uncalled for."

Amen, said Fever coach Christy Sides.

"It's a lot of hurtful, hateful speech out there that's happening, and it's unacceptable," she said.

Indeed.