Black girls’ musical play — embodied percussion passed down through generations — is rarely seen as sport. But it is. The 1980 Fantastic Four Double Dutch Champswho joined the first international rap tour in ’82, are proof. But because these games are songs — and center girls — they’re rarely taken seriously. A new Nike ad campaign starring A’ja Wilson and directed by Malia Obama makes us take them seriously. In her pink A’One signature shoe, Wilson and Black girls take center court.

Because these games are songs — and center girls — they’re rarely taken seriously.

One of the two commercials shows Wilson, a two-time WNBA champion and three-time league MVP with the Las Vegas Aces, sitting on the steps of a front porch with a girl of about 10 who’s teaching a handclapping game-song to the tune of “Miss Mary Mack” — correcting the 28-year-old athletic genius when she messes up:

♪ A’ja Wilson’s on top, top, top / Can’t take her spot, spot, spot / She’s a real one through, through, through / Always does what she’ll do, do, do. ♪

Another ad, featuring the same rhymed chants, is a montage of HBCU cheer formations, sashays, stomps and hair politics, too. It opens with jump cuts of beads and braids that spell out A’ja’s name as two young Black girls clap and sing. It’s a cinematic mashup that nods to Beyoncé’s “Formation” music video. It’s intercut with scenes from “Black Girls Play: A Story of Hand Games,” the Oscar-shortlisted doc selected for the 2025 American Film Showcase. The NAACP Image Award-winning film was produced by Marsha Cooke, vice president of ESPN Films and “30 for 30,” and directed by the innovative, Oscar-winning Rada Studio team out of Brooklyn. I’m a global envoy for that documentary as an esteemed scholar of Black girlhood studies.

Under Obama’s direction, Black feminist layering is everywhere: sound and visual interplay ping-ponging between body percussion and cinematic bombast. The sound of a basketball hitting hardwood is sampled and pitched down under “through, through, through” — pulling us deeper into A’ja’s signature flow: hooping, passing, jooking and dunking. All this fun and “fan”-fare rides the familiar melody of “Mary Mack.”

The ads, rich with deliberate joy and reverence for Black girls’ play, center a Black woman who knows what it means to be excluded — and what it takes for a Black girl to rise above it.

In her 2024 book, “Dear Black Girls,” Wilson recounts being in fourth grade at a predominantly white school in the Confederate flag-waving town of Hopkins, South Carolina, thrilled about attending a bestie’s birthday celebration. “You know it’s a slumber party, right?!? You might have to sleep outside,” the friend said. “My dad doesn’t really like Black people.”

The ads, rich with deliberate joy and reverence for Black girls’ play, center a Black woman who knows what it means to be excluded.

Wilson wrote, “It felt like I aged 10 years in one moment.”

The first time Black girls are made to see they’re “different” often marks the beginning of a lifelong denial of loving their bodies. Maya Angelou, in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” wrote, “If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.”

But Wilson’s mom helped fourth-grade A’ja avoid letting other people reduce her to her skin color or size.

♪ She won M-V-P, P, P / 1, 2 and 3, 3, 3 / Her game is tea, tea, tea / She made history, -ry, -ry. ♪

In my book “The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double Dutch to Hip-Hop,” I show how girls’ oral communication and embodied lessons in musical blackness operate like algorithms. Those patterns seed creative fluency, which is also necessary in elite play.

Obama’s ads brilliantly use Contract – putting new words to an old tune, in this case “Miss Mary Mack.” This compositional method primes listeners to sing the rhyme about A’ja Wilson like a victory lap, celebrating her top-tier basketball prowess. We say her name, see her image and name-check the likeness in the campaign while imagining ourselves in her shoes.

In the book that’s her personal love letter to Black girls, Wilson writes, “No matter how well you think you know the game, there will always be those little moments when you’re reminded about the way people see Black women in our society. And I can’t lie to you. It will take your breath away every time.”

♪ They said she wasn’t enough, ’nuff, ’nuff / So she did it for us, us, us / And if you talk smack, smack, smack/ She’s gonna clap back, back, back. ♪

Wilson is a two-time Olympic gold medalist and the first WNBA player to score 1,000 points in a season. Her six-year Nike extension deal, including her A’One signature shoe, is among the most lucrative in women’s basketball.

Wilson’s biography reminds us that excellence won’t shield Black girls from the pain of being excluded. Her story and Obama’s narrative direction reveal how much the world still needs to make room for Black girls’ joy and brilliance, and power.

College athletes couldn’t profit from their names, images and likenesses when Wilson starred for the South Carolina Gamecocks. As the WNBA’s No. 1 pick in 2018, Wilson earned a rookie salary of around $52,000 — less than I earned that year as a professor with a Ph.D. And don’t forget that Black Women’s Equal Pay Day falls on July 27 — marking how far into the year Black women in all occupations must work to earn what white men earned the year before. Last year, the rookie salary for the NBA’s No. 1 pick was $12.6 million. Little things like a shoe can open doors for other girls and women.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t make a life or a career out of something once thought small and insignificant, like a girls’ handclapping game song. Play is a fundamental human activity and a right for children — and adults.

Malia envisioned it. A’ja lives it.

Kyra D. Gaunt

Kyra D. Gaunt(Ph.D. 1997 University of Michigan, M.M. SUNY BInghamton, 1988), an esteemed ethnomusicologist, continues to make waves in arts and culture with her 2007 Merriam prize-winning book, “The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop.” In 2015, it was a catalyst for choreographer Camille A. Brown and Dancers’ Bessie Award-nominated performance, “BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play.” In 2020, The New York Times Parenting Section commissioned “The Magic of Black Girls Play,” which was selected as Editor’s Pick of the Day. She is featured in the ESPN-produced documentary short, “Black Girls Play,” directed by Rada Studio, which won at the Tribeca Film Festival. 

President Donald Trump’s recent insistence that protesters during the FIFA World Cup need to be “reasonable” or risk getting into trouble with the law is yet another demonstration of Trump acting as if he presides over a kingdom instead of a democracy. And it’s certainly not going to help reverse the plunge in tourism tied to his treatment of immigrants.

At a meeting of the World Cup task force at the White House on Tuesday, a reporter asked Trump, “Should people who have taken part in, for example, pro-Palestinian protests across the world, be concerned about being able to join the World Cup and watch it here in the U.S.?”

In the U.S., the government is not endowed with the authority to declare protests ‘reasonable’ or not.

While the reporter seemed to be asking whether visitors might be vetted based on their political views, Trump appeared to respond with a comment about allowing protests at the global soccer tournament, which will take place in summer 2026 in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

“Well, I don’t know what you mean by that. … I think people are allowed to protest,” Trump said. “You have to do it in a reasonable manner. Not necessarily friendly, but reasonable. Otherwise [Attorney General] Pam [Bondi] will come after you and you’re gonna have a big problem.”

First, in the U.S., the government is not endowed with the authority to declare protests “reasonable” or not. Free speech in the U.S. is not absolute — you can get in trouble, for example, for threatening someone’s life or calling for imminent violence. But a “reasonable” speech criterion would be incompatible with democratic speech since “reasonable” is highly subjective and would serve as a dangerously capacious pretext for restricting speech. It’s a critical democratic norm that people are rightly entitled to hold “unreasonable” views and express themselves in ways that some might consider “unreasonable.”

The prospect of Trump as an arbiter of “reasonable” speech is particularly disturbing. While Trump has dubiously tried to claim the mantle of free speech defenderhis second term has been defined by an extraordinary crackdown on speech, including expelling immigrants for First Amendment-protected speech and trying to muzzle universities and regulate their research. The Trump administration has exploited obscure immigration law and civil rights law as a means of censoring pro-Palestinian speech.

It would be a fool’s errand for Americans (or non-Americans) inclined to protest during the World Cup — or any other time — to anticipate what Trump considers “reasonable,” since he clearly considers the content of speech he opposes to be unreasonable.

The World Cup, whose final match is by far the most widely watched sporting event in the worldis a natural site for protests. Players will often use gestures and attire to express solidarity with marginalized communities, alignment with social movements or criticism of governments. The tournament itself can also become a natural stage for protests to express grievances about the host country — like the anti-World Cup protests in Brazil during the run-up to the tournament and during the tournament itself that were in part about grievances tied to poor social services.

It’s reasonable to ask: Will Trump use the pretext of security to try to quash dissent, pre-emptively or in real time, based on whether he deems it “reasonable”? Would he try to pressure FIFA to similarly regulate players’ and teams’ expression?

When I attended the World Cup in Russia in 2018, local Russians told me they believed the authorities were unusually accommodating of the often disorderly atmosphere on the streets, which they attributed to the Russian government’s desire to project a more friendly image of the country than is typically accorded to it around the world.

It’s a form of “sportswashing” — when governments try to divert attention from their misdeeds through hosting lavish sporting events. These tournaments, which draw millions of visitors, are pivotal opportunities for host countries to project “soft power” and make an impression on tourists and journalists that might disrupt previous narratives about a country.

Trump appears to be positioning the U.S. in just the opposite fashion. In anticipation of the tournament, Trump is floating vague, undemocratic criteria for what speech he will “allow.”

To be sure, the vast majority of people who are looking to attend the World Cup — whether American or foreign — aren’t going to be interested in protests. But this kind of language isn’t going to encourage tourism, particularly as reports circulate of tourists being detained and treated harshly while trying to enter the U.S. and foreign governments issuing travel advisories regarding travel to the U.S., including advice to delete social media on phones. And it still introduces a variable that could, if the atmosphere turns repressive, conceivably accelerate the global perception that the U.S. is sliding toward authoritarianism. That growing perception wouldn’t be good for the United States’ global credibility or its economy. But it would be accurate.

Zeeshan aleem

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.

On Saturday night, a Temple University student at a sports bar owned by Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoyuploaded a video of a personalized sign he and his friends allegedly ordered with their drinks. The waitstaff delivered the sign, which read: “F— the Jews.” The videowhich quickly went viral, clearly showed the sign and plenty of laughter — and no visible intervention from staff or patrons. The president of Temple University issued a statementcondemning antisemitism and suspending one of the students. Portnoy, who is Jewish, took to Instagram to first rage against the perpetrators and to promise to “ruin them,” but later announced he would make this ugly incident a “teaching moment” and pay for the two perpetrators to visit the Auschwitz death camp in an effort to turn the ugly action into a teachable moment.

After more than a year of circular conversations and hand-wringing about whether this or that action is antisemitic — and whether campus antisemitism merits attention, despite its documented rise — the clarity of this chain of events was almost refreshing. A “F— the Jews” sign is obviously antisemitic, and Temple’s response was decisive and ethical. I’m no Barstool Sports fanbut Portnoy acted honorably and honestly: understandably enraged by this act of hatred and ignorance, yet reflective enough to commit to more than vengeance to attempt to make things right.

Portnoy’s offer to send the perpetrators on an educational trip to Auschwitz is a more lavishly funded version of a common educational response to incidents of Jew hatred.

Portnoy’s offer to send the perpetrators on an educational trip to Auschwitz is a more lavishly funded version of a common educational response to incidents of Jew hatred: some type of antisemitism training, which might be the only time students in secular schools discuss Jews or antisemitism, save for a Holocaust unit, which is required in about half of the states. These hard-won initiatives are hugely important, but they are insufficient to avoid, or address, this kind of incident.

This ugly case makes clear that we need a new approach to educating about antisemitism and Jewish identity in the United States. As a Jewish professor working on a campus under federal investigationfor antisemitic discrimination and the lead scholar on the New York City Board of Education’s forthcoming Jewish American Hidden Voices curricular initiative, I am observing this Barstool debacle unfold with sadness. But it’s also giving us some sense of what a solution might look like.

The reaction of the Temple University student who uploaded the video, Mohammed Adnan Khan, makes abundantly clear why we must address the antisemitism that festers on both the political left and right. After admitting responsibility and accepting Portnoy’s offer to go to Auschwitz, according to Portnoy, Khan “did a total 180,” Portnoy said. In a separate video posted to social media, Khan said he had nothing to do with the sign or spreading hatred, but was acting as a “citizen journalist” and was documenting anti-Jewish animus based on Israel’s actions. In the video, Khan offered his own explanation of the eventand its larger stakes, invoking racialized violence by likening Portnoy’s campaign against him to “a lynching.”

Khan had only admitted responsibility to Portnoy “under duress,” he said, due to an “asymmetrical power dynamic” in which Portnoy, who is older and wealthier, “and well connected to these institutions that are very elite,” intimidated him. The outcry over the sign, Khan asserts, was only a result of his bringing attention to the “unjust things Israel is doing around the world,” referring to Israel’s ongoing retaliatory strikes in Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, in which Israel has killed more than 52,000 Palestiniansaccording to the Gaza Health Ministry.

These talking points will sound familiar to anyone who has often heard brazen antisemitism dismissed as “just criticizing Israel,” as if such speech operates in a category of its own. Regardless, Khan’s message, shared with a fundraising link for “restitution,” is clear: “… The larger Jewish community is acting like they are the victims … I am the victim.”

Amid this garbled mess of self-righteousness exhibited in Khan’s video is a sentiment that sounds a lot like what we hear in conservative media. The sign was just “an edgy joke,” Khan comments, and well within his right to “free speech.” “Triggered,” hypersensitive scolds were weaponizing “cancel culture” to “sensationalize” these barroom antics, and costing Khan his reputation, a prestigious internship, and even his physical safety.

Khan then appeared to make his case on “The Stew Peters Show,” which Temple University then “condemned in the strongest possible terms.” Peters is an unabashed antisemite and right-wing provocateur: flanked by a mug that reads “Mein Coffee” and a hat emblazoned with “Bad Goy,” he referred to Portnoy as “a disgusting Jew” and presented the case as an example of nefarious “Jewish supremacy” in action as Khan nodded along. While Khan at first hesitated to articulate these words himself, by the end of the conversation, he enthusiastically responded, “Absolutely!” to Peters’ invitation to “humanity” — which implicitly excludes Jews — to “join forces against Jewish supremacy.”

The media angle underscores how unremittingly this antisemitism courses through both left and right. Khan repeatedly invokes the idea that Portnoy’s network of powerful Jews is using their media influence to target him; Peters happily amplifies this age-old trope.

An interview Portnoy did with a local ABC affiliate Philadelphia reporterdiminishes the severity of this antisemitic act more subtly. Citing an academic paper, the reporter asks whether a “culture of harassment” perpetrated by Barstool itself helped enable this antisemitic incident. Portnoy flies into a tirade at this “media scumbag” and “liberal college professors” blaming Barstool and “white men” for the incident, which distracts from the fact that itisentirely inappropriate for a journalist to suggest to a member of a group victimized by a hate crime that they might be to blame for this behavior.

Portnoy concedes one point to Khan; that the sign was probably intended as a joke. This only makes the casualness of perpetuating hate even more alarming. “It shows how increasingly normalized antisemitism has become in public spaces,” one museum official commented. Indeed, just a few weeks after the Oct. 7 terror attacks, Tom Nichols in The Atlanticworried about the moral cost of college students defending antisemitism merely as protected speech: “After enough time serving the insidious impulse to defend the indefensible, they will find themselves changed people.”

While educational solutions might seem like Band-Aids on a gaping wound, classrooms can be crucial in combating this ugly environment.

Comedian Daniel Ryan Spaulding made a similar point around the same time, parodying a 2040 college reunionat which alumni bond over memories of ripping down posters of Israeli hostages and cyberbullying Jews. A year and a half after these observations, a college student ordering bottle service with a “F— the Jews” sign on the side, posting it on social media and declaring himself a victim, seems to bear out their predictions.

So what do we do? While educational solutions might seem like Band-Aids on a gaping wound, classrooms can be crucial in combating this ugly environment. Students should learn about Jewish history and identity as an important part of their study of the United States. Social studies curricula should teach about Jews as immigrants, Americans, athletes, artists, entrepreneurs, and as members of a diverse community from many national and ethnic backgrounds who hold a range of views on any given topic, including Israel, and most importantly, as everyday people deserving of respect and full civil rights.

Understanding antisemitism is of paramount importance, but it should not be addressed only in response to incidences of Jew hatred, or uniquely in relation to the Holocaust. Rather, antisemitism should be explained as a centuries-old hatred that shape-shifts depending on the historical moment, to be about religion, biology or culture, and as still very much with us. Teaching about Jewish identities and experiences, both of perseverance and success and of facing persistent discrimination, is important to understanding, and improving, our pluralistic society.

There are many reasons Jewish identity has not been a focus in the teaching of American history. For one, Jewish Americans have largely relied on religious education to impart this knowledge, and have not been as vocal in advocating for inclusion in secular curricula. Furthermore, to the extent that many Jews in the United States benefit from some degree of white privilege, the experience of Jews has not been the main focus in anti-racist lessons that focus more on a Black-white binary, insufficient to encompass the complexity of the Jewish experience.

But this narrow vision, applied to Jews or any identity group, dangerously constrains our ability to understand each other and to fight ignorance and hatred of the sort on display in that barroom, and beyond.

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is Professor of History at The New School in New York City. She is the author of two books, most recently “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession,”and is currently a Carnegie Fellow, working on a new book about education and political polarization.