Black girls’ musical play — embodied percussion passed down through generations — is rarely seen as sport. But it is. The 1980 Fantastic Four Double Dutch Champs, who joined the first international rap tour in ’82, are proof. But because these games are songs — and center girls — they’re rarely taken seriously. A new Nike ad campaign starring A’ja Wilson that includes Malia Obama as a director makes us take them seriously.
Because these games are songs — and center girls — they’re rarely taken seriously.
Obama directed the ad for Wilson’s pink A’One signature shoe that shows Wilson, a two-time WNBA champion and three-time league MVP with the Las Vegas Aces, sitting on the steps of a front porch with a girl of about 10 who’s teaching a handclapping game-song to the tune of “Miss Mary Mack” — correcting the 28-year-old athletic genius when she messes up:
♪ A’ja Wilson’s on top, top, top / Can’t take her spot, spot, spot / She’s a real one through, through, through / Always does what she’ll do, do, do. ♪
Another ad, directed by Jenn Nkiru and featuring the same rhymed chants, is a montage of HBCU cheer formations, sashays, stomps and hair politics, too. It opens with jump cuts of beads and braids that spell out A’ja’s name as two young Black girls clap and sing. It’s a cinematic mashup that nods to Beyoncé’s “Formation” music video. It’s intercut with scenes from “Black Girls Play: A Story of Hand Games,” the Oscar-shortlisted doc selected for the 2025 American Film Showcase. The NAACP Image Award-winning film was produced by Marsha Cooke, vice president of ESPN Films and “30 for 30,” and directed by the innovative, Oscar-winning Rada Studio team out of Brooklyn. I’m a global envoy for that documentary as an esteemed scholar of Black girlhood studies.
Under Nkiru’s direction, Black feminist layering is everywhere: sound and visual interplay ping-ponging between body percussion and cinematic bombast. The sound of a basketball hitting hardwood is sampled and pitched down under “through, through, through” — pulling us deeper into A’ja’s signature flow: hooping, passing, jooking and dunking. All this fun and “fan”-fare rides the familiar melody of “Mary Mack.”
Both ads, rich with deliberate joy and reverence for Black girls’ play, center a Black woman who knows what it means to be excluded — and what it takes for a Black girl to rise above it.
In her 2024 book, “Dear Black Girls,” Wilson recounts being in fourth grade at a predominantly white school in the Confederate flag-waving town of Hopkins, South Carolina, thrilled about attending a bestie’s birthday celebration. “You know it’s a slumber party, right?!? You might have to sleep outside,” the friend said. “My dad doesn’t really like Black people.”
The ads, rich with deliberate joy and reverence for Black girls’ play, center a Black woman who knows what it means to be excluded.
Wilson wrote, “It felt like I aged 10 years in one moment.”
The first time Black girls are made to see they’re “different” often marks the beginning of a lifelong denial of loving their bodies. Maya Angelou, in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” wrote, “If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.”
But Wilson’s mom helped fourth-grade A’ja avoid letting other people reduce her to her skin color or size.
♪ She won M-V-P, P, P / 1, 2 and 3, 3, 3 / Her game is tea, tea, tea / She made history, -ry, -ry. ♪
In my book “The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double Dutch to Hip-Hop,” I show how girls’ oral communication and embodied lessons in musical blackness operate like algorithms. Those patterns seed creative fluency, which is also necessary in elite play.
The ads brilliantly use contrafactum — putting new words to an old tune, in this case “Miss Mary Mack.” This compositional method primes listeners to sing the rhyme about A’ja Wilson like a victory lap, celebrating her top-tier basketball prowess. We say her name, see her image and name-check the likeness in the campaign while imagining ourselves in her shoes.
In the book that’s her personal love letter to Black girls, Wilson writes, “No matter how well you think you know the game, there will always be those little moments when you’re reminded about the way people see Black women in our society. And I can’t lie to you. It will take your breath away every time.”
♪ They said she wasn’t enough, ’nuff, ’nuff / So she did it for us, us, us / And if you talk smack, smack, smack/ She’s gonna clap back, back, back. ♪
No matter how well you think you know the game, there will always be those little moments when you’re reminded about the way people see Black women in our society. Wilson is a two-time Olympic gold medalist and the first WNBA player to score 1,000 points in a season. Her six-year Nike extension deal, including her A’One signature shoe, is among the most lucrative in women’s basketball. Wilson’s biography reminds us that excellence won’t shield Black girls from the pain of being excluded. Her story and Obama’s narrative direction reveal how much the world still needs to make room for Black girls’ joy and brilliance, and power. College athletes couldn’t profit from their names, images and likenesses when Wilson starred for the South Carolina Gamecocks. As the WNBA’s No. 1 pick in 2018, Wilson earned a rookie salary of around $52,000 — less than I earned that year as a professor with a Ph.D. And don’t forget that Black Women’s Equal Pay Day falls on July 27 — marking how far into the year Black women in all occupations must work to earn what white men earned the year before. Last year, the rookie salary for the NBA’s No. 1 pick was $12.6 million. Little things like a shoe can open doors for other girls and women. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t make a life or a career out of something once thought small and insignificant, like a girls’ handclapping game song. Play is a fundamental human activity and a right for children — and adults. Malia Obama and Jenn Nkiru envisioned it. A’ja Wilson lives it. CORRECTION (May 11, 2025, 11:50 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misattributed the director of one of Nike’s new A’ja Wilson ads. The director of the ad featuring multiple young girls and women is Jenn Nkiru. . ♪ They said she wasn’t enough, ’nuff, ’nuff / So she did it for us, us, us / And if you talk smack, smack, smack/ She’s gonna clap back, back, back. ♪
Kyra D. Gaunt
Kyra D. Gaunt (Ph.D. 1997 University of Michigan, M.M. SUNY BInghamton, 1988), an esteemed ethnomusicologist, continues to make waves in arts and culture with her 2007 Merriam prize-winning book, "The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop." In 2015, it was a catalyst for choreographer Camille A. Brown and Dancers' Bessie Award-nominated performance, "BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play." In 2020, The New York Times Parenting Section commissioned "The Magic of Black Girls Play," which was selected as Editor's Pick of the Day. She is featured in the ESPN-produced documentary short, "Black Girls Play," directed by Rada Studio, which won at the Tribeca Film Festival. 
