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. 

Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s leadership, the State Department appears to have become a tool to serve Elon Musk’s business interests.

Rubio has overseen the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the closure of an office that’s been crucial to the fight against foreign disinformationwhich is to say: He has taken a sledgehammer to some of the department’s crucial missions worldwide.

Meanwhile, a new report from The Washington Post suggests his State Department has launched a new project of sorts: getting foreign nations — particularly, nations who may want to curry favor with the U.S. amid Trump’s destructive tariff war — to adopt Musk’s Starlink internet service.

The Post obtained an internal State Department memo suggesting that the country of Lesotho, which Trump mocked at this year’s joint address to Congress by saying no one has ever heard of it, was hoping that its recent Starlink deal would lead to tariff relief.

The Post quotes the memo as saying:

The report says Lesotho is one of several countries that have granted Starlink access while trying to navigate Trump’s tariffs. And it details how the administration has pushed for nations to reach such deals amid the tariff talks, though they haven’t demanded it. According to the Post:

It’s easy to see how other nations might conclude that reaching agreements to do business with a company run by Musk, the president’s top campaign donor in 2024, might earn them some tariff relief. And for the record, the State Department didn’t even deny that it’s hawking Musk’s service, telling the Post:

No acknowledgment there of the obvious conflict of interest in this case.

It would be one thing if Starlink were simply the best internet service available, but I’ve written about the federal government’s previous determinations about Starlink’s shortcomingsso the fact that the State Department seems to have a specific interest in promoting the service to foreign nations feels like a favor to Musk over all else.

Keep in mind: This is all being carried out by the same conservative movement that accused Hunter Biden of unethically using his father’s name to prop up his art business. The same Republican Party that portrayed itself as a defender of free market capitalism as it complained about the Obama administration picking winners and losers in certain industries.

This movement is now led by someone who turned the White House lawn into a showroom to promote Musk’s Tesla company, whose administration is quickly implementing Starlink across federal agenciesand whose State Department is urging foreign countries to adopt the service, as well.

Republicans seem to know how unethical this all is, even if they won’t admit it. Last month, I wrote about Republicans changing House rules to prevent Democrats from forcing votes on whether to investigate various Trump administration scandals — including Musk’s conflicts of interests.

It looks like Republicans would rather turn a blind eye to this obvious issue.

Ja’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is an BLN opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. He is a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”

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.