Angel McCoughtry: "One of the best things I've done in my career is helping raise awareness for social justice"

Angel McCoughtry has a basketball career for the ages.

A two-time Olympic champion, two-time world champion, former No.1 Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) draft pick, five-time WNBA All-Star, four-time WNBA finalist and a top 25 most influential player in WNBA history, there's little the 36-year-old hasn't touched.

Yet the Maryland-native maintains that the greatest thing she has done is stand-up against discrimination:

"One of the best things I’ve done in my career is helping raise awareness for social injustice," McCoughtry told Olympics.com ahead of United Nations' International Day of Peace.

In the middle of 2020, not long after the COVID-19 pandemic began to tighten its grip, America began dealing with a reckoning of its own.

The killing of unarmed black man George Floyd in late May, captured on video, sparked nationwide anti-racism protests. They would garner so much momentum a would tide swell and eventually engulf countries across the world as they all grappled with questions of racial inequality and police brutality.

In a world away from those city streets, a delayed WNBA season was about to get underway inside a ‘bubble.’

It was then, McCoughtry had an idea.

“I remember people were saying ‘We shouldn't play basketball; we shouldn't play basketball. Let's stop the league.' I was like, are you guys kidding me?

“I said, you think racism and social injustice started just this year? It's been going on forever and you still played basketball all these years leading up to this. Now, you're just seeing it more being filmed, and now it's like coming to light, as it should have been years ago. But you don't stop doing what you love.

“I said, we use our platform for these causes. That's what you do. I said, I'm not going to stop playing ball. I'm going to play and I'm going to use my platform. And that's what I did.”

Having participated in the protests McCoughtry didn’t want her activism to end as the league started.

Instead, recognising the force of the platform afforded to her by basketball, she petitioned the WNBA to allow players to use their jerseys to display the first and last names of those of who had been injured or killed at the hands of police brutality.

Just days later the league agreed to add the name of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician who was killed in her own home back by plainclothes police back in March 2020, to uniforms in a bid to seek justice for the women and girl victims of police brutality racial violence.

And for the entirety of the three-month season social justice remained at the heart of the league. From jerseys and t-shirts recalling names and demanding justice, to the postponement of games in late August to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake, players never stopped drawing attention to causes that mattered to them.

“I never expected social injustice to be a part of my career. It’s been there for many years, I just never thought I would play a role in it.

“But that was just one of the best things I’ve done in my career being able to talk with Breonna Taylor’s mom and any other people affected by police brutality and things of that nature”.

Angel McCoughtry: “Our sport is like evolution”

McCoughtry’s idea, so simple in its execution but so effective in its scope, then captured the imagination of the NBA who subsequently followed suit.

The former No.1 draft pick feels that she should have received more credit for her role in its inception.

“Women - we do amazing things - but obviously sometimes we don't get the platform we deserve for things,” reflected the five-time WNBA All-Star. “I was like, can I get some credit around here?”

The two-time FIBA world champion’s experience of not receiving recognition for her activism is not a new phenomenon to players within the WNBA.

Back in 2016, before National Football League (NFL) player Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem in a preseason game in protest racial inequality and oppression of Black people in America, WNBA players were already taking individual and collective action for the same cause.

In the wake of police shootings that year, four members of the Minnesota Lynx – Maya Moore, Seimone Augustus, Lindsay Whalen and Rebekkah Brunson – wore black T-shirts with the words “Change Starts With Us: Justice & Accountability” printed on them to a pre-game news conference.

The next day players from three other franchises, New York Liberty, Indiana Fever and Phoenix Mercury, wore warm-up T-shirts with the hashtag ‘BlackLivesMatter’.

Each organisation was subsequently fined $5,000 by the league and players issued $500 penalties for violating the league’s uniform guidelines before the WNBA later rescinded their punishment.

“I think that it’s just men have bigger platforms,” McCoughtry reflected on why there is a disparity when it comes to coverage of activism between men and women in sports.

“So, I could say something and then LeBron [James] could saying something right after and everyone is probably going to be like, “Oh my god great idea. LeBron did this and then it’ll be in all the papers.”

“It's just a stigma, you know? Men are more popular.”

Subverting expectations and social activism have always been at the core of the WNBA.

For some players, just the existence of the league is an act of defiance: “We are a walking protest at all times as a WNBA athlete,” 2014 championship winner Mistie Bass told the New York Times. “I don’t think we have ever not been in a fight for equality, for justice.”

McCoughtry is in agreement:

“Here’s what’s special about women. I said, in ten years you’re going to see more girls dunking. What are girls doing more now? More of them are dunking. I was before my time in saying that. The beauty of women’s sports compared to men, men are pretty much set, but our sport is like evolution. That’s the beauty of it. It just keeps growing and growing more things are happening and more surprises. That’s the beauty of our sports.”

Though the imbalance might be frustrating at times, for McCoughtry, it isn’t a reason to relent. All it means is switching tack to ensure that work can still be done and recognised the way it should be:

“We have Megan Rapinoe. We have Serena Williams. We have those kinds of women that are in the spotlight. I think that’s where we can stick together with those kind of women to really get our ideas out. I think that can be something that we can definitely get done.”

Angel McCoughtry: "We're going to get justice now"

When it comes to sports’ role in the fight against racism McCoughtry is clear that it, and the players, must embrace their part.

The basketball star has often drawn on the analogy of a seed and how players can ‘sew’ change when talking about the power of on-court activism:

“Everybody wants a championship, right? I haven't got a championship yet. But am I going to start working hard and planting the seeds each year to get there one day? No. Even though I don't have it. But I'm not going to stop working hard to get it. That's the same thing with social injustice. Because one day I'm working for the championships, one day I'm going to get the championship.

“You know, I'm going to get the change one day. I'm going to get this change. I'm not going to stop working for it. That's how I look at it. The cops just got charged when nobody thought they would. So, some things do work, and I hope people can see that when they doubt.”

McCoughtry also underlines the precedent that has been set within sports when it comes to standing up to injustice and how choice actions by certain sporting icons have been the foundation that she, and others, have later stood on:

“If you look at the sixties, Muhammad Ali, he stood up; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. You have these groups. But it was just men. You didn't have the woman involved yet. So, you had the men back then who stood up. From their era they started it because the sixties were really, really bad.

“Then I think kind of it died out a little bit. We brought it back to life like, 'Hey, it still hasn't ended, but we're not tolerating it anymore where it's unfairly justified. We're going to get justice now'.

“If you ask Black athletes, we all have a story in life and we all have a story in our sports. We get mistreated in sports, too. Not getting treated right or, you know, the light-skinned or lighter skinned girl gets the deal or the commercial, "added the four-time WNBA finalist.

“I don't know why I get mistreated. Because I have a little bit more colour. What's the big deal? A piece of skin? We all have a story, so it's up to us to continue to fight.”

Completely eliminating racism is something McCoughtry doesn’t believe will ever be possible but arriving at a collective place where we can push it to the margins is what we should be driving towards, and with ally-ship, that can be achieved:

“We want to reach the maximum potential of how great it can be, where if this person wants to be racist, they can go over there and be in their miserable world. It doesn't have to exist in our world. Because it [racism] won't disappear from some people but it doesn't have to be in our common world. Let's shun those people out.

“I just think that we also need our allies. We need our friends, our Caucasian friends and athletes to be right there by our side. You know, we need those allies.

“Hopefully we can continue to speak out and keep changing those things. You know, people are just people. That's my fellow American over there. It doesn't matter what colour. Dark or light.”