CNN political commentator Van Jones said Thursday on “CNN This Morning” that President Joe Biden did not allow Russia to treat WNBA star Brittney Griner like garbage by negotiating her release in a one-for-one prisoner swap for arms dealer Viktor Bout.
Jones said, “This is huge. First of all, that’s a decade-defining image when you saw her wife sitting there, Kamala Harris was there, president is there, such a human image, and yet it just shows this president got it done. He cared enough about this individual person to get her home. It was shocking for young Americans to see an icon like that snatched, locked up, treated like garbage and nine years, ten years for bringing some cannabis oil, medically prescribed.”
He continued, “So these are decade-defining images. I guarantee you there will be young people 10, 20, 30 years from now who will remember this moment because she is an icon. It’s really, really extraordinary. And people are talking about this other guy. He’s so terrible. Look, there’s a lot of terrible people in the world, a lot of terrible people in Russia. What you can’t allow to happen is have a black female icon treated like garbage and America do nothing about it. Something was done about it, and people are going to be proud of that.”
Jones added, “Also, give credit to black women. Black women rallied for this, fought for this. It took some of the male athletes were getting jammed up. ‘If this was LeBron James, you guys would be shutting down everything,’ and the male athletes said you are correct. This was a galvanized grassroots movement led by black women that brought in the White House, the U.S. government to rescue a sister from injustice. You think about other black women who you’ve seen in handcuffs, Angela Davis, like those images, emerging triumphant, that’s this today, a black woman who was chained, shackled, mistreated emerging triumphant. When she lands today, it’s going to have the eyes of planet earth on her.”
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