Tennessean op-ed likens Caitlin Clark's popularity to Elvis Presley's because of their 'whiteness'

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Caitlin Clark’s rise in the WNBA has sparked a fierce debate about her overwhelming popularity in women’s basketball, specifically from those who argue that her race has played a major role in that success. 

Just last month, The Tennessean published an opinion piece by opinion columnist Andrea Williams that likened Clark’s "marketability" to that of Elvis Presley’s in the 1950s. The op-ed was revived this week when the Indianapolis Star republished the piece on Thursday. 

Elvis Presley performs on stage on the Ed Sullivan Show on January 6, 1957, in New York City. (Photo by Steve Oroz/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) (Steve Oroz/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Williams recalls American record producer Sam Phillips saying, "If I could find a white man who had a Negro sound and a Negro feel, I could make a million dollars."

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Phillips signed popular Black artists, like B.B. King, Little Milton and Howlin Wolf, but Williams said he saw his greatest success when he helped launch Presley’s career in 1954. 

"​​Sam Phillips would go on to record Elvis Presley, a white man who achieved dizzying commercial success by molding his singing and dancing styles to the Black artists, both gospel and secular, who’d shaped the soundtrack of his youth," Williams wrote. 

"But Elvis’s adoption/appropriation of Blackness is less critical to his stardom than his whiteness. If that wasn’t the case, the Black artists he emulated would’ve reached similar heights themselves. Instead, in America — a predominantly white society with a very long record of white supremacist ideologies — whiteness becomes