Two days after a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, left 19 children and two teachers dead, the WNBA’s Natasha Cloud is determined to keep the focus on things more important than basketball.
“I’m not going to do any basketball,” she said during a Washington Mystics media availability on Thursday afternoon. “How do you talk about basketball? You know, we’re out here preparing for Connecticut and, yes, it’s our jobs, we get paid to do this, but how do you even talk about that with what’s going on in our country?”
While Cloud grew up in suburban Philadelphia, playing for a WNBA team in Washington D.C. has impacted how the 30-year-old sees her platform.
“Being in D.C., we’re in the most powerful city in the world,” she said. “We’re in spitting distance of the Capitol, of all these representatives who need to do their jobs, so a lot falls on our shoulders here to be the voice of the voiceless.”
During Thursday’s availability, she also called on Washington’s D.C.'s men’s sports teams -- namely the Capitals and Nationals -- to do more to carry the conversation forward.
“Whatever I can do, I will continue to do. The Mystics will continue to do, the Wizards will continue to do. As we’ve been doing. Because we’ve been holding our city down,” she said.
“I would like the Caps to step up. I would like other sports teams to step up. I would like the Nationals to step up. It’s time. It’s time that our white counterparts also step up. It’s not just us Black athletes that need to step up and use our voices. It’s also our white counterparts, our white male counterparts, since your voices are heard, mostly.”
Cloud, who also led a media blackout on Tuesday night after the Mystics’ win over the Atlanta Dream, is known for her advocacy work. She has skipped playing abroad during the WNBA offseason to do community outreach, held media blackouts in 2019 to address gun violence, and then she sat out the 2020 WNBA season in order to focus on social justice issues.
And on Thursday, she confirmed how she plans to continue that work once she is done playing basketball.
“It’s at a point now where, after my career, I will go into politics. Cause I’m tired of it. I’m tired of it being a political game. These are people’s lives... We’re talking about 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5-year old kids. We’re talking about elderly folks just trying to go grab groceries. In the only grocery store in their community. Cause why? It’s a lower economic community. It’s a Black community. And this was a minority school, for the most part. It took the police 90 minutes to get inside that school. It’s a f---ing joke.”
