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It’s been a world-changing month since Russian police detained WNBA Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner.
Yet we heard radio silence from the two-time Olympic gold medalist over the crucial weeks when Russia invaded Ukraine.
At the time of Brittney’s arrest, Russian President Vladimir Putin was amassing Russian troops on the borders of neighboring sovereign country Ukraine. The United States had already sent troops to NATO members Poland and Romania.
Griner becomes a Russian pawn
As diplomatic relations between our two countries plummeted, Griner’s value as a political pawn increased.
Russian police stopped basketball star Brittney Griner allegedly for possessing a vaping device and hashish oil. I say allegedly because I write about wrongful arrests of women, and I represent women who have been wrongly convicted.
Queer women of color are more likely to be wrongly arrested, and bias against them justifies disgraceful treatment. They are targeted.
Brittney Griner is a proud, openly queer Black woman. Her Instagram account, followed by over 350,000 people, shows loving pictures with her partner, a Black woman.
In Russia, simply speaking about same-sex relationships as socially acceptable is against the law.
Griner is highly paid star in Russia
But Brittney is a superstar in Russia. While the WNBA maximum base salary pales in comparison to NBA salaries, Russia will pay WNBA players 10 times their home salary. Brittney led UMMC Ekaterinburg, her team in Russia, to win the last three EuroLeague Women championships.
That super-stardom is a double-edged sword.
While many All-Star WNBA players are on that team, Brittney is one of only two Black players, and the only Black American. It is no accident that Russia is allegedly charging an American Black gay woman with marijuana possession.
Perhaps Putin’s government thought that Americans would believe that Griner had marijuana, and is rightfully being incarcerated in Russia. Perhaps they thought that the racism embedded in our American War on Drugs would justify their detention of a Black American woman on a trumped up drug charge.
In our own country, Black people are almost three times as likely to be arrested for drug possession, despite using controlled substances, particularly marijuana, at the same rate as white people.
These stereotypes set Brittney Griner up to be wrongly arrested, and potentially even wrongly convicted.
What happened to Griner in Russia?
In the United States, there is a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. We don’t know what happened in Russia, but we do know that some Russian police have a history of planting drugs on high-profile targets.
Russia has strict laws criminalizing drug possession, and over a third of people in Russian prisons are serving time for non-violent drug offenses.
The possession charge is so common, and so commonly used against activists, that the statute is twistedly called “the people’s article.”
In the same time period that Griner has been detained against her will in Russia, Putin has referred to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as a “drug-addled Nazi,” again, playing the lines of an old War on Drugs.
As long as the U.S. government fails to fight for Brittney Griner’s release, and allows other countries to call an arrest a “drug case” and seemingly justify detention of Americans, we are all in danger when abroad.
In 2009, Sarah Shourd was hiking in an American tourist friendly destination in Kurdistan, when she and her two companions were arrested by Iranian soldiers and accused of illegally crossing into Iran. She was detained in solitary confinement in prison in Iran for 410 days until an international brokering for her release.
We can’t let the same happen to Brittney Griner, particularly by Russia at this crucial moment in history.
