Brittney Griner Freed, Fight For Wrongly Incarcerated Black Women Must Continue

Six-time WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner has been released from the Russian penal colony where she was serving a nine-year sentence. Griner, who plays center for the Phoenix Mercury, was detained in the Moscow airport as authorities confiscated two vape cartridges containing 0.7 grams of cannabis oil from her bags in February. While maintaining she had no criminal intent, Griner pled guilty to the charges against her this summer.

The White House will get lots of praise for its efforts to bring Griner home. The WNBA also deserves tremendous credit for consistently and vigorously using its platform to advocate for Griner’s release.

“Today, American citizen Brittney Griner received a prison sentence that is one more reminder of what the world already knew: Russia is wrongfully detaining Brittney,” U.S. President Joe Biden wrote in a statement the White House released in August. “It’s unacceptable, and I call on Russia to release her immediately… my administration will continue to work tirelessly and pursue every possible avenue to bring Brittney and Paul Whelan home safely as soon as possible.”

In a White House press conference Thursday, Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Griner’s wife Cherelle appeared together to announce that Brittney has been released and is expected to be back in the U.S. within 24 hours. The Biden Administration agreed to trade Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout (who’s known as the ‘Merchant of Death’) for Griner’s release.

Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist for Team USA, received an extraordinary level of support from her teammates and others across the WNBA. This is unsurprising, not only because she’s one of the league’s biggest stars, but also because of who the league is. Among professional sports organizations, the WNBA most reliably leverages its platform and influence to call attention to social justice issues. Stepping up for one of its players wasn’t at all unusual. Nonetheless, the league deserves to be applauded for its activism and advocacy over the 294 days Griner was in Russian custody.

“The WNBA is not new to this, we are true to this,” the league’s players association Vice President Chiney Ogwumike said in a televised CNN interview shortly after Griner’s release. “We are always at the forefront of social advocacy because we understand the power of our representation. As a league predominantly of Black women – most of us with college degrees – it is not just a game for us, it is a platform for us to make real, meaningful change, no matter the circumstance, especially for our communities that we represent.” Ogwumike also acknowledged that it was league-wide collective actions that helped bring Griner home.

The WNBA organization, its teams, and individual players wrote hundreds of statements and letters, spoke repeatedly in press conferences, and utilized numerous social and digital media resources to call for justice for Griner. A ‘BG42’ logo was painted on WNBA courtsides in arenas throughout the league (BG are Griner’s initials; she’s #42 on the Mercury team). Perhaps most effectively, the WNBA pushed the Biden Administration to act more swiftly. Their efforts were impressively coordinated and multidimensional. What this league did for Griner hasn’t been done before; it sets a new bar for professional sports organizations that claim to be committed to social justice.

Griner’s advocates insisted that she was wrongfully imprisoned; the White House repeated this perspective in statements released over the past 10 months. Reportedly, Russians don’t typically receive prison sentences for being in possession of small quantities of cannabis. It’s clear that Griner’s detention and ultimate sentencing was more about tensions between U.S. and Russia than it was about her violating the country’s drug possession laws. It was a waste of nine months she’ll never get back and an alarming example of the unnecessary incarceration of too many women around the world.

According to a recent report from Penal Reform International and the Thailand Institute of Justice, more than 740,000 women were serving prison sentences around the world in 2021, which was a 17% increase over a ten-year period. Statistics published by The Sentencing Project in February 2021 show that women serving life without parole in the U.S. increased by 43% between 2008 and 2020, compared to a 29% increase among men during that same time period. Another Sentencing Project report notes that Black Americans across genders are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.

Through her groundbreaking scholarship on intersectionality, UCLA and Columbia University law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw has helped courts, legal scholars and social scientists, and law students understand how racism, sexism, poverty, religious discrimination, homophobia, transphobia, and other social forces co-mingle to place Black women at particular vulnerability for the miscarriage of justice in legal processes. Griner is a Black woman and a lesbian.

Griner’s wrongful imprisonment shines a light on a global issue that has a disproportionately higher impact on Black women in the United States. African American Policy Forum, the organization Crenshaw co-founded and directs, notes that Black women have one of the highest incarceration rates amongst women in the U.S., and that their imprisonment rate is nearly two times higher than that of white American women.

Undoubtedly, the WNBA will continue to generously use its platform to advocate for wrongfully incarcerated women. The league’s efforts inspired many celebrities (Jada Pinkett Smith, 50 Cent, Meek Mill, Justin Bieber, soccer star Megan Rapinoe, and tennis legend Billie Jean King, to name a few) to speak out in support of Griner. Influencers within and beyond the WNBA kept pressure on the White House.

This same level of issue exposure, pressure, coordination, and celebrity influence ought to be replicated in pursuit of justice for other wrongfully imprisoned women and in response to judicial racism that disproportionately ruins Black American women’s lives. Surely, the amazing athletes who comprise the WNBA will lead the way. Others should join and support them.