Evening, Meteor readers,

Remember a few newsletters ago when I promised I’d stop hammering everyone with my basketball opinions? I lied!

In today’s newsletter, we’re giving Angel Reese her flowers. Plus Rebecca Carroll talks to model Cameron Russell about her new book and impossible beauty standards.

Untruthfully yours,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

Bigger than basketball: Watkins. Clark. Bueckers. Reese. Over the last month, these women have been at the center of conversation about the future of women’s basketball and just how bright and exciting it is. They’ve been called icons, broken scoring records, and, in the case of Angel Reese and her LSU Tigers teammates, derided as villains.

Reese, a 21-year-old Black woman from Baltimore, Maryland, announced in Vogue yesterday—after LSU’s exit from the tournament Monday—that she’s entering the 2024 WNBA draft. Reese is one of college basketball’s best players, but despite that, she has been made out to be this year’s Big Bad, partly due to her media-invented rivalry with Caitlin Clark. (Monday’s rematch between Clark and Reese brought in over 12.3 million viewers)

Reese has been subject to scrutiny that goes beyond her in-game performance—every word she utters is overanalyzed—and sometimes overshadows her role in LSU’s climb to the Elite 8. There is a palpable hatred that follows her—one that she says has resulted in death threats that began in 2023 when the Tigers won the NCAA Championship.

Why are so many people hostile towards this young basketball player? I’ll explain it in the simplest terms possible: They hate her ’cause they ain’t her.

Angel Reese is talented; she’s a workhorse; and pardon my French, but she is so fucking entertaining to watch. She is an artist. She is a showman. But Reese is not hated for those traits. People hate her because she knows she is good and is unapologetic about it. Ahead of the Iowa game, Reese placed her signature crown on the bench for all to see and crowned herself when stepped on the court. Boss shit. She is a Black woman who does not dull her shine and people simply cannot abide by that energy.

ICONIC. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

The day after LSU’s loss, sportscaster Emmanuel Acho delivered an entire monologue about Reese crying at the post-game conference, saying on air, “In sports, you can’t act like the big bad wolf, then cry like Courage the Cowardly Dog.” He followed it up with a tweet saying his analysis was meant to be “gender neutral and racially indifferent.”

But the premise of that argument is that Reese is a “self-proclaimed” villain who switched up her persona because she lost. It’s an argument without legs. Her villain persona was entirely invented by the media—specifically the LA Times article that referred to LSU as “dirty debutantes” and America’s “basketball villains.” (The reporter has since apologized for the article.) Once that article came out and Reese was being peppered with questions about it she said, “If that’s what you want me to be, I guess I’ll take that.” Acquiescence is not self-proclamation. Moreover, Acho willfully ignored everything behind Reese’s tears: The loss, the year of death threats, the end of her college career—all of that had to be bottled up simply because “villains don’t get empathy.”

The hatred and language aimed at Angel Reese cannot be divorced from her race or gender simply because it’s more convenient to view her as a character. Especially because sports media wouldn’t apply that same language to Caitlin Clark who is just as brash and unapologetically talented as Reese. Black women have always been subject to a different degree of scrutiny than white women playing the same sport. Reese already explained this to us last year: “I don’t fit the box that y’all want me to be in. I’m too hood. I’m too ghetto. Y’all told me that all year…So this is for the girls that look like me. For those that want to speak up for what they believe in. It’s unapologetically you.” And two years before that, even Paige Bueckers (who is white) spoke up about the mistreatment of Black women by sports media.

Sports villains are not uncommon or inherently evil, it’s normally just part of the storytelling. Kobe, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan—they all had a villain era. But Reese’s treatment goes beyond just Villain of the Day. It is shaped by the same assumptions that are made about Black women and women of color in any field they excel in—constantly having people belittle your greatness to make you easier to stomach.

Despite the racism and misogynoir they’ve faced, though, the women of this year’s NCAA Tournament have given us an incredible month and I’m sure this weekend’s Final Four and Championship games will be appointment television. And when it’s all over, and the confetti clears, we’ll be turning our eyes to the WNBA draft (April 15th!), where Angel Reese is projected to be a top-ten pick. I hope when she’s chosen she brings her crown and that million-dollar smile.

AND:

• A new lawsuit has been filed against Kanye West by a former employee at the California school he opened, Donda Academy. The employee alleges that West told two students at Donda he wanted to lock them in cages and shave their heads; the suit also accuses West of racial discrimination and spouting homophobic rhetoric in earshot of young students.

• Palestinian photojournalist Samar Abu Elouf has been awarded the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award for her work in Gaza. As the IWMF’s executive director said of Elouf, “Samar was separated from her children, her relatives were killed, and she slept in cars and on floors to keep reporting. Battling a lung infection and surviving on one meal a day, all to bring us the truth, Samar is the epitome of dedication, professionalism and courage.” You can view some of her work here.

• The Washington Post debuted a new tracker this morning that shows which states are “restricting or requiring lessons on race, sex, and gender.” So far, Texas, Florida, and Tennessee are in a heated battle for first.

• For the first time in its history, the U.S. Census will offer “Latino” as an option in the race category. I guess I can finally stop checking “Other.”

IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Reclaiming Our Beauty

One model’s coming of age in a broken system

BY REBECCA CARROLL

CAMERON RUSSELL (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

We live in a beauty-obsessed culture—and nowhere has that been made more clear than in the modeling industry, which for decades promoted the image of thin, white women as the definitive standard. But behind every image is an actual person navigating a workplace where objectification is a part of the job.

Cameron Russell started modeling when she was a teenager. After a few years, she saw tremendous success—booking campaigns with Victoria’s Secret and H&M and doing runway work for Prada and Chanel. She began to use her voice early on with a widely publicized TED talk in 2013. Then, in 2016, Russell and Chinese-English model Áine Rose Campbell co-founded the Model Mafia, a collective of models whose unifying mission is to create “a more equitable, just and sustainable fashion industry and world.” Russell’s work with the collective would prove to be preparation for her role in the #MeToo movement. After allegations of sexual assault emerged against Harvey Weinstein in 2017, a model friend texted Russell about her own experience of sexual abuse on the job. Russell offered to post her friend’s text on Instagram without identifying details—and that post launched a domino effect, as hundreds of similar stories from fellow models flooded Russell’s DMs and inbox. She posted many of them under the hashtag #MyJobShouldNotIncludeAbuse, and, almost overnight, became an outfacing public envoy for a reckoning in fashion.

Soon after, she resolved to write her own story.  In her new memoir, How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone, Russell reflects on her deeply personal evolution in the industry and her choice to get loud about its all too often seedy underbelly.

Rebecca Carroll: I want to start with an experience you write about after one of your first modeling jobs as a teen. Your mom asks you how it went and then says, “Were you your charismatic, confident self?” I wonder what that meant to you then and what it means to you now?

Cameron Russell: I grew up feeling—and I only identified this retroactively as a feminine labor—that being charismatic and likable was a necessary skill that [my mom] wanted me to have. As a child, I felt very much connected to voice—my ability to tell stories and to be in conversation with people. When I started modeling, no one really wanted to hear me talk. You go to a casting and they’re like, “No, actually, we don’t really want to hear about your day.” A lot of women’s work—which I include charisma, agreeability, and grace—is supposed to be something that we are and not something that we do.

Your story is also very much about a social consciousness awakening. In your TED Talk, you talk about how hard it was to unpack “a legacy of gender and racial oppression.” When did that unpacking begin for you?

I was a fairly thoughtful, politicized, and aware teenager when I arrived in this industry. The awakening or the consciousness shift that happened was to come into an understanding of how change is made and also move away from being heavily invested in certain ideas of success.

In the book, you talk about reading memoirs by other models because you wanted to see what happens when a model finds herself and is no longer “a doe-eyed teen.” As a transracial adoptee, this reminded me of what we call “the fog,” which is the moment we realize for the first time that we have been deprived of our origin culture and community. It’s both enraging and freeing and a call to action. What were the most liberating and intentional actions you took after finding yourself?

One piece that felt so liberating was reading Iman’s memoir and just finding this very clear, concise, and complex read of her own position in fashion as complicit, as harmed, as racialized, as colonized—all these really complex things that she articulates very simply. The narrative that I had been fed for many years was that every casting agent and every media outlet would say, “Oh, you’re so exceptional. You have beauty and brains,” which actually serves to make you very lonely and reinforces a winner-take-all system that is reliant upon gendered exploitation of labor from top to bottom. In reading Iman’s memoir, I was able to see I’m not alone.

Your husband is Black, and so your children are Black. One of your kids is a daughter who is going to grow up to become a Black woman, and she will face the white standard of beauty, and the white gaze that was and is so pervasive in the modeling industry. How do you hope to help her think about these things?

Femininity, as I have experienced it, [is] complicated. It has been so commercialized, I always [think], “Ugh, that performance of gender feels so yucky to me.” But actually, why? It can be beautiful. It can be beautiful to be adorned; it can be beautiful to be all the different things that we associate with feminine beauty when they’re not in the context that I learned them. And so I hold that for her. She’s only two and a half. We were at Target the other day, and all she wanted to do was to be in the bow aisle. So she wanted the beads for her hair, she wanted the rainbow elastics. We got home, and she said, “I want 10 bows. I want four blue beads.” And so, I am adoring her adoration of her own body, beauty, and expression.

That’s really lovely. And finally, towards the end of the book, you say that you need to believe that you are better than the conditions that made your success possible. What does that belief look and feel like for you on a daily basis?

The question is how we can be in a trusted community with each other at this moment. We need to make decisions to move with less urgency, to move with community, with care, and to put attention, focus, and resources on projects and relationships that feel generative and that are present solutions.

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