INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) - Tamika Catchings is one of the greatest basketball players of all time. She has four Olympic gold medals and a professional championship. She is now the general manager of the Indiana Fever. She also is a downtown business owner.
As a wife, an aunt and a black woman, she says racism does exist and she wants to help create meaningful change.
Tamika Catchings now hosts weekly public meetings to spark action.
“For so long, we've had conversations, but you talk about it as something happens. Everybody gets enough or we have conversation, and then nothing to be done. And then something else happens another chilling happens and we fight for justice again and the conversation. and then nothing gets done,” said Catchings.
Catchings is comfortable taking the lead, and there are people worldwide who know her from basketball.
“But there is a lot of people that don't,” she said. “And then don't know. And then don't know that I play basketball. And so automatically, you get judged by the color of your skin. And it's the reality of our life, not just me, but the reality of a lot of our lives. And the thing that you have to be careful of doing, the words you have to use, the way that you have to do your hair, the way that you have to dress almost to the extent of creating a perfect person that you know you're not. But when you go out into the world and you step out, you have to fit a frame you have to fit an image, so that you don't look scary.
And it's not right.
Catchings joined Black Women in Charge with protestors at the Indiana Statehouse.
“It was amazing to be a part of it, it won't be my last time,” said Catchings.
The diverse crowd fueled her hope that there is now an audience listening.
The title for this week is racism exists,” Catchings said. “How do we talk to our kids about it? And even though we're kids, it's really, how do I talk about it in general?”
Catchings owns Teas Me Café downtown, which switched to curbside service due to COVID-19. When protestors took the streets, someone put this note on her store's front door.
“I thought one or two things,” she said. “One, obviously, the first thing like okay, from a protection standpoint, being a black business, somebody felt like they need to put that on there and, you know, then the second part is off limits as far as what was going on downtown is a couple miles down the road. Either way, I looked at it, I said ‘man, I have to have gotten this point where that has to be something that posted on an AMA outside’ you know, take me back to, way back, when, you know, when you're dealing with, colored people or white people and like that's what it kind of, my mind kind of took me back to, and I don't really know how I feel about it even to this day, you know. What I do know is that I want to be 100 of change.”
“I think the first thing, the most important thing right now in this moment is we all are uncomfortable, but it's okay to be uncomfortable. And sometimes you have to be uncomfortable, you have to get through uncomfortable feeling to be able to create change, and that's what, hopefully, that would majority of us want to do. And if we do it together, we can make change and that's the most important thing,” said Catchings.