“Thug,” “Classless,” and the Policing of Black Womanhood in Sports: A Case Study of Racialized Language and Angel Reese

Social Media and Sports

Social media platforms now connect more than five billion users across networked publics, creating dynamic spaces where audiences not only consume but also co-produce meaning around live events in real time (Castells, 2010; Lee & Na, 2024; Montag & Hegelich, 2020). Platforms such as TikTok and X facilitate multidirectional engagement among fans, teams, and athletes, sustaining virtual communities that extend beyond the temporal boundaries of a game (Litchfield et al., 2018; Smith & Smith, 2012). However, the same affordances that enable connection and participation also amplify harm. The minimal gatekeeping and weak moderation characteristic of X allow abusive and hateful content to circulate widely, especially during high-profile moments like the NCAA Women’s National Championship Game (Kavanagh et al., 2023; Litchfield et al., 2018; Stempel, 2005). In this sense, online fan cultures often reproduce broader social hierarchies, reflecting and reinforcing racism, and hostility toward those marked as “other,” including Black sportswomen (Kearns et al., 2023; MacPherson & Kerr, 2020; Nakamura, 2015; Oshiro et al., 2021).

X outsizes other platforms’ influence in sports discourse because of its users and algorithms which facilitate sports commentary (Harrington et al., 2013). For instance, its user base is disproportionately composed of journalists, editors, broadcasters, athletes, agents and league or team accounts. These elite users act as agenda setters, surfacing clips and framing on-court incidents. They transmit talking points that are quickly picked up by mainstream outlets and highlight shows (Kim et al., 2022; Litchfield et al., 2018). The platform is also optimized for liveness and visibility. Public-by-default posts, frictionless retweets/reposts and quote-tweets, mentions and event-specific hashtags enable rapid circulation and alignment around a few canonical interpretations of a moment (e.g., a gesture, foul, or post-game comment) (Smith & Smith, 2012; Yang et al., 2014) that ‘trend’ or ‘go viral,’ which occurs when a piece of media is shared rapidly and widely. X’s asymmetric follower networks and trending mechanisms amplify content from high-reach accounts, so a small number of influential posts can set the discursive agenda for millions (Robertson, n.d).

These affordances also accelerate harassment. Quote-tweets and replies make ‘call-outs’ and pile-ons highly visible, while searchability and hashtags collapse multiple audiences into a single thread where targets, often Black sportswomen, are subjected to the racialized policing of their behavior under the language of class, sportsmanship, and respectability (Kavanagh et al., 2023; MacPherson & Kerr, 2020). In short, X often functions as a sports newswire, commentary booth and public square all at once. Because our interest was in the immediate, high-attention window of the 2023 NCAA women’s championship game, we turned to X as a site to examine how online voices began to frame Angel Reese’s on-court gestures.

Digital Sports Discourse Through Black Feminist, Misogynoir and Intersectional Frameworks

Black Feminist thought, intersectionality and the concept of misogynoir offer a critical framework for understanding how online discourse reproduces racialized hierarchies. Applying an intersectional lens highlights the distinct ways Black sportswomen are situated within online spaces. Kimberlé (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) coined the term intersectionality to explain how different identities, such as race and gender, structure visibility and vulnerability. In addition, misogynoir helps us make sense of the specifically anti-Black misogyny that frames Black women’s existence as excessive or out of place, particularly in digital spaces (Bailey, 2014, 2021; Bailey & Trudy, 2018; Crenshaw, 1991). So, where does this leave Black sportswomen, who often end up as targets at the intersection of racist ideologies?

Existing scholarship has traced this dynamic across multiple arenas of sports media. Analyses of Serena and Venus Williams’ coverage reveal persistent racialized tropes that mark their bodies and emotions as unruly (Douglas, 2012; Griffin, 2012). Others, like Cooky et al. (2010), have conducted case studies of specific comments, like when former radio host Don Imus called the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hoes.” Cooky et al. (2010) argue that news media framed the controversy largely as a racial issue, reproducing monolithic understandings of inequality while failing to address the intersecting dynamics of race, gender, class and sexuality shaping the treatment of Black women athletes. As a result, dominant media narratives reinforced controlling images of Black femininity while marginalizing more intersectional interpretations of the incident.

Previous research also finds that across social media platforms, users direct disproportionate abuse towards Black sportswomen through recirculate coded language and controlling images. Controlling images are ideological stereotypes, such as the mammy, matriarch, jezebel, and welfare queen, that construct and reinforce specific narratives about Black women to justify their social, economic, and sexual exploitation (Carter-Francique & Michelle Richardson, 2016). These images depict socially sanctioned stereotypes that justify Black women’s subordination and regulate their behavior by policing their appearance (Collins, 2000), emotion and celebration (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Harris-Perry, 2011; Kearns et al., 2023; Litchfield et al., 2018; MacPherson & Kerr, 2020). Recent analyses of WNBA discourse show how judgments about glam and swagger morph into racialized femininity in ways that reward proximity to white respectability and punish Black expressive styles (Hindman et al., 2025; Lavelle, 2022).

These racialized readings are not simply products of audience bias; they are also structured by those who control the production and amplification of sports narratives. Newsroom demographics remain overwhelmingly white and male (Giannoulakis & Drayer, 2009; Griffin, 2012; Leonard, 2006). The Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) Racial and Gender Report Card consistently documents that most sports editors and columnists are white men, shaping which stories gain visibility and how they are framed (Lapchick, 2021). Consequently, digital platforms do not disrupt these hierarchies but extend them: X’s mechanics of virality (retweets, quote-tweets, and algorithmic amplification) ensure that elite interpretations by journalists and broadcasters dominate, reproducing dominant cultural logics.

Serena Williams has long served as the benchmark when discussing the policing of Black sportswomen, especially because of her hypervisibility in a predominantly white sport. Williams’ athleticism, attire, and assertiveness have been persistently filtered through racialized lenses across traditional and digital media (Douglas, 2012; Love & Maxwell, 2020). Similarly, Reese’s confident swagger and glam-forward self-brand of “Bayou Barbie” directly confronts white respectability norms that often buffer white women from similar scrutiny. When Reese and Clark performed comparable competitive gestures, online audiences were quick to code Clark’s actions as intensity and Reese’s as ghetto, evident in the use of terms like “classless” and “thug” found throughout our analysis. Intersectionality and misogynoir thus do more than label this prejudice; they explain why the same act traveled differently through the social media ecosystem when performed by a Black sportswoman.

Research Design

This study employed qualitative content analysis to examine the racialized discourse surrounding Angel Reese on X following the 2023 NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship. More specifically, we took a systematic, interpretive approach to analyze the text in order to find patterns, meaning, representation and framing, as is standard in qualitative content analysis (Schreier, 2012). We began with a structured sampling frame and a systematic coding process to identify and interpret emergent themes across a defined body of texts. Our goal was to understand how users invoke race, stereotypes and controlling images through their online discourse.

X is well suited to capture interpretations of online sporting event discourse because posts are public by default and circulated through hashtags, mentions and quote-tweets that consolidate frames quickly. Following the methodological framework outlined by Smith and Smith (2012) on analyzing X data, we treated hashtags as organizing devices that structure visibility and conversation flow on X. We analyzed posts from April 2 through 4, 2023. Prior research shows that the bulk of event-related discourse on social platforms concentrates during and shortly after the event, when agenda-setting interpretations emerge and stabilize (Piché & Naraine, 2022). A 48-hour window was selected because it corresponded with the period of highest visibility and engagement around the event on X, as indicated by the sustained appearance of related posts across the platform’s Trending and “For You” feeds and the high volume of likes, reposts, and quote tweets attached to those posts. The 48-hour window starts at the first buzzer indicating the start of the game on April 2 through the next 48 hours until April 4. This period was comprised of the peak of first reactions, hot takes, and early media uptake.

Sampling Strategy and Data Collection

Our keyword selection proceeded in two stages. Stage 1 (exploratory scan) involved an analysis immediately after the game of X’s algorithmically curated For You tab. The researchers specifically examined the Trending and News sections to see which clips, headlines, and phrasings X’s algorithm deemed influential. We viewed these tabs across a newly created research account to reduce personalization effects from X’s algorithm. The new research account had minimal following/liking activity to avoid having the For You timeline use recommendation signals (e.g., engagement or network similarity) to curate a personalized feed. This exploratory scan created an appropriate vantage point for identifying the early ‘first-draft’ discourse that circulates most visibly during live sports events (X, 2025a, 2025b). We also reviewed event-related hashtags to follow conversational threads and quote-tweet chains connected to the game. As Smith and Smith (2012) emphasize, hashtags function as infrastructural cues for following real-time meaning-making.

Through our initial analysis of these posts, we quickly noticed that content with racial connotations had the most engagement in terms of likes, reposts and quote tweets, indicating popularity among users. More specifically, we noticed that posts and headlines were referencing Angel Reese’s postgame gestures, often using the phrases “classless” and “thug.” We treated this exploratory pass as a mapping exercise to surface salient evaluative language within discourse.

Stage 2 (purposive sampling): Guided by this scan and by prior scholarship on racialized euphemisms and respectability politics directed at Black athletes (Carrington, 2010), we specified “classless,” “thug,” “piece of shit,” and “race” as purposive entry points for data collection within the 48-hour window. The first three terms function in U.S. sports discourse as well-documented racialized signifiers used to police Black athletes’ expressions, sportsmanlike conduct, attire, and attitudes (Carrington, 2010; Giannoulakis & Drayer, 2009; Griffin, 2012; Leonard, 2006). The fourth term captures posts that engage with racialized terms explicitly. Our procedure aligns with qualitative content analysis: keywords were used to locate discursive repertoires for interpretive coding rather than to count their occurrence. We understand that algorithmic ranking shapes what rises in visibility. Accordingly, our analysis centers on how these terms operate in meaning-making (X, 2025a, 2025b). Posts were captured from public accounts accessible to any user, and we excluded exact duplicates, bot-like spam (e.g., link farms, promotional posts), and non-English posts we could not reliably interpret. The unit of analysis was game-related posts containing at least one keyword, which could include text and any attached visuals (images, GIFs, short clips). We analyzed 500 tweets, at which point no new themes or patterns emerged, indicating that thematic saturation had been achieved. The distribution across the categories included 368 tweets for “thug,” 83 tweets for “classless,” and 49 for “race.” 116 of the tweets were retweets featuring a picture of Angel Reese and the user putting a singular word, such as “classes” and “thug”.

Analytic Approach

Our analysis proceeded in three stages:

1. Open coding: Two researchers independently conducted line-by-line coding of a subset of posts to identify action and evaluation-oriented codes (e.g., policing celebration, respectability talk, racialized invective, equivalence claims with Clark, sportsmanship as morality). We met to compare codebooks, discuss interpretive differences and consolidate a shared set of codes aligned with our intersectional and Black feminist lens.

Classless

Understanding the sociological implications of being called classless requires a nuanced look at how race and class are co-produced in evaluations of Black women’s comportment. As previously discussed, racism is often articulated through coded, moralizing language online. In our review of posts, classless emerged as a salient label for Angel Reese, not as a claim that she lacks class status, but as a classing slur that positions her as low class—akin to calling someone “trash” or, in racialized vernacular, “ghetto.” This aligns with scholarship showing how Black femininity is routinely read through classed scripts that devalue style, speech and affect as markers of moral inferiority (Collins, 2000; Dubrofsky & Hardy, 2008; Harris-Perry, 2011; Lawler, 2005).

“It’s unbelievable that people are comparing Reese’s actions to trash-talking during the heat of competition… Following Caitlin Clark around the court and taunting her… was definitely classless. There is such a thing as winning gracefully.”

This post frames Reese’s conduct as violating unwritten rules about sportsmanship, rules historically tethered to white, middle/upper-class femininity and the expectation that Black women’s emotions be muted, contained, and compliant (Collins, 2000; Lawler, 2005; Messner, 1988). These comments position Reese’s actions not simply as competitive behavior but as a breach of normative expectations about how women, particularly Black women, should perform victory and emotion in public sporting spaces. Our argument is not that “trash talk” is universally acceptable for white athletes and not for Black athletes. Rather, the same performance, gesture, celebration, or taunt is read through racialized frames that grant white women’s expressive competitiveness legibility as intensity or gamesmanship while casting Black women as moral failure or low-class deviance, especially when the supposed victim is a white woman. In other words, evaluation is not rule-neutral; it is calibrated by controlling images, white supremacy, and respectability expectations (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Carrington, 2010; Collins, 2000; Harris-Perry, 2011).

The racialized nature of these evaluations becomes clearer when considering how similar gestures by Caitlin Clark were interpreted during the same tournament. Earlier in the NCAA tournament, Clark performed the same “you can’t see me” hand gesture toward Louisville players while celebrating a three-point shot. Media commentary and online reactions largely framed Clark’s actions as evidence of confidence, swagger, and competitive intensity rather than a violation of sportsmanship norms (Morse, 2023). Within our findings, several users explicitly referenced Clark’s earlier gesture when responding to criticism of Reese, highlighting what they perceived as a double standard.

“It was cute when Caitlin Clark did it… don’t be all outraged now.”

These responses demonstrate that some users themselves recognized the asymmetry in how the gesture was interpreted. While Clark’s action circulated as a marker of intensity or elite competitiveness, Reese’s replication of the same gesture during the championship game was widely reframed as “classless” and disrespectful. The juxtaposition illustrates how identical athletic behaviors become differentially legible in online discourse depending on who performs them. Expressive competitiveness by a white athlete is normalized as gamesmanship, while similar conduct by a Black athlete is cast as deviance.

“It is the definition of classless… Winning with class is not doing that… you need to admit it was the definition of classless.”

Here, “classless,” “ghetto,” and “hood-rat” work together to create the controlling image that is often in conjunction with the welfare queen and a low-class complex. These bundled phrases help solidify the narrative of Black women as uncultured, irresponsible and undeserving regardless of achievement (Collins, 2000; Harris-Perry, 2011). In these posts, the critique of athletic behavior expands into broader judgments about identity, morality, and social belonging. The language collapses athletic critique into social taxonomy, equating Reese’s visible swagger with moral deficiency and poverty-coded identity. In short, classless functions less as a neutral judgment of sportsmanship and more as a regulatory label that polices Black women’s celebration, style, and presence on a national stage by casting them as “low-class” or “ghetto” (Dubrofsky & Hardy, 2008).

Thug

This discourse centers around the word “thug,” a term long analyzed as a racialized euphemism for criminality in U.S. sports discourse (Cunningham, 2017; Giannoulakis & Drayer, 2009; Leonard, 2006; Oshiro et al., 2021). Although thug is typically masculinized and applied to Black men, scholars have documented how the media masculinizes Black women, especially depending on their skin tone (Norwood, 2015). For this discussion, X users mobilized it here to discipline a Black woman, extending the criminality frame across gender to regulate language, aesthetics and affect:

“The thug behavior, Ebonics, poor sportsmanship has destroyed this win.”

These posts braid criminality, speech policing (“Ebonics”), and appearance policing (“weave”), a bundle that channels controlling images of Black women as deviant, unfeminine, or hypervisible problems to be contained (Collins, 2000; Harris-Perry, 2011). The spillover of a masculinized trope (“thug”) onto Reese demonstrates how gendered and racialized stereotypes travel together on X, much like the bundling Nee (2023) documents in political attacks on Black women.

Don’t Make This a Race Thing

We also found race-evasive replies that sought to quarantine the backlash from race:

“It’s classless… nothing to do with race. PLENTY of Black athletes… with class.”

These denials do ideological work: they attempt to detach “classless” and “thug” from their controlling-image histories, rebranding them as neutral descriptors of conduct. Yet, as the quotes above show, users routinely co-invoke classed and racialized cues (“ghetto,” “Ebonics,” “weave”), revealing how the images remain operative even when race is disavowed. The effect aligns with what Harris-Perry (2011) terms the crooked room: Black women are judged against distorted standards, then told race is irrelevant.

Black Twitter as a Counterpublic

Counter-narratives, often from self-identified Black users, called out the double standard and reframed Reese’s gestures as competitive parity with Clark:

“It was cute when Caitlin Clark did it… don’t be all outraged… we’re not doing double standards here.”

In doing so, Black Twitter acted as a counterpublic, highlighting controlling images and refusing their authority (Graham & Smith, 2016). By insisting on symmetrical evaluation, these users denaturalize the welfare queen/low-class and thug complexes and reassert Black women’s right to visible joy, swagger, and celebration in sport.