Despite decades of racist and sexist attacks, Serena Williams keeps winning
She just claimed her 23rd Grand Slam singles title.
Jan 28, 2017, 7:40 PM GMT+1
Serena Williams of the United States poses with the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup after winning the 2017 Women's Singles Australian Open Championship at Melbourne Park on January 28, 2017 in Melbourne, Australia.
Serena Williams of the United States poses with the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup after winning the 2017 Women’s Singles Australian Open Championship at Melbourne Park on January 28, 2017 in Melbourne, Australia.
Michael Dodge/Getty Images
Serena Williams, who’s widely considered the greatest woman tennis player ever, has made history again.
When she beat her sister Venus to win Saturday’s Australian Open final, she won her seventh Australian title and her 23rd Grand Slam singles title, moving ahead of Steffi Graf for the most major titles in the Open era, the Associated Press reported.
Breaking records is nothing new for Williams. As recently as September of last year, she defeated Kazakhstan’s Yaroslava Shvedova in the fourth round of the US Open, giving her more Grand Slam victories (308) than any other tennis player.
But longtime fans know that along with celebrating, they should brace for more of the expressions of bigotry that have threatened to tarnish nearly every victory, magazine cover, and interview of Williams’s entire incredible career. All too often, at the same time she’s being celebrated, she’s targeted with outrageous racist and sexist comments.
For example, in the moments surrounding her win at the French Open in June 2015, Williams was compared to an animal, likened to a man, and deemed frightening and horrifyingly unattractive. One Twitter user wrote that Williams “looks like a gorilla, and sounds like a gorilla when she grunts while hitting the ball. In conclusion, she is a gorilla.” And another described her as “so unbelievably dominant … and manly.” ESPN sports commentator Bomani Jones responded to those reactions — as well as to the ones that dismissed them as subjective commentary — with a series of tweets.
This time, while hordes of fans celebrated her Australian Open win with tweets complimenting her for her athleticism, the predictable reactions were still there. One user joked that the Sydney suburb, Manly, was “named after her.”
What people who try to insist that comments like this one are merely innocent individual assessments of Williams’s looks don’t understand was that none of this was new, and none of it was random.
Indian Wells and beyond
Serena Williams at the 2001 BNP Paribas Open.
Serena Williams at the 2001 BNP Paribas Open.
(Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
At the 2001 BNP Paribas Open tournament in Indian Wells, California, Serena and Venus Williams were booed by fans who accused them of match fixing when Venus withdrew from a scheduled semifinal match. And then, according to the Williams family, things got worse:
“When Venus and I were walking down the stairs to our seats, people kept calling me ‘nigger,” her father and coach Richard Williams told USA Today at the time. One man, he said, threatened, “‘I wish it was ’75; we’d skin you alive.'”
Serena boycotted the event for more than a decade, only returning in 2015.
But the more recent commentary is a reminder that that didn’t mark an end to the racialized, sexualized, dehumanizing comments about her. It’s nearly impossible to imagine these comments being made about any of her peers; they’re a genre unto themselves, offering a case study in how biases make their way into media coverage. As James McKay and Helen Johnson write in a 2008 article published in Social Identities, about what they called the “pornographic eroticism and sexual grotesquerie in representations of African American sportswomen,” even so-called complimentary commentary about Williams’s athleticism is often grounded in stereotypes about black people (animalistic and aggressive) and black women specifically (masculine, unattractive, and overly sexual at once).
These remarks don’t always take the form of explicit racial slurs or threats of bodily harm, like the ones reported at Indian Wells did. But if Williams were to boycott every tennis event at which someone made an offensive, dehumanizing reference to her body’s size and shape, she’d have to quit the sport altogether.
Shameless, explicit racial stereotypes
It’s true: Williams is black, she’s very muscular, and she’s a skilled player. But breathless commentators sometimes talk about these qualities in a way that buys into what sociologist Delia Douglas, in an article on the Williams sisters published in 2004 by the Sociology of Sport Online, called “the essentialist logic of racial difference, which has long sought to mark the black body as inherently different from other bodies.” The result is that Williams’s athleticism is attributed to her ethnicity.
Dr. Peter Larkins, in an apparent attempt to compliment Williams, contributed his medical opinion in an interview with Australia’s Herald Sun for a 2006 piece that compared her fitness to a competitor’s. “It is the African-American race,” he explained. “They just have this huge gluteal strength. … Jennifer Capriati was clearly out of shape and overweight. With Serena, that’s her physique and genetics.”
This thinking is part of a tradition Douglas dubbed the “ancient grammar of black physicality.”
Ironically, Williams’s mistakes have also been attributed to her race. At the 2007 Sony Ericsson Championship in Miami, a heckler was ejected from the stands after yelling at Williams, “That’s the way to do it! Hit the net like any Negro would!”
But most of the racialized comments about Williams have been more carefully coded, rarely mentioning her ethnicity outright.
Inappropriate scrutiny and sexualization of her body’s size and shape
There’s no way around it: The fascination with the size and shape of parts of Williams’s body that have nothing to do with her tennis skills is creepy. It’s also unsurprising. Ms. Magazine’s Anita Little, writing in 2012, linked the sexualization of Williams’s physique to the legacy of the “Hottentot Venus,” an African woman whose real name was Saartjie Baartman, who was displayed before European audiences as a freak show attraction in the 1800s. “No matter how insanely successful black women like Serena become, the legacy of the Hottentot Venus will always be ready to rear its ugly head at an opportune moment,” she wrote.
Reading some of the remarks made about Williams’s curves, it would be easy to think you were privy to the observations of circus attendees gawking at an unfamiliar body, as opposed to journalists and sports commentators.
In 2002, after Williams competed at the US Open wearing a black spandex catsuit, Sunday Telegraph columnist Otis Gibson, seemingly struggling to find appropriate language in his critique of her outfit, wrote, “On some women [the catsuit] might look good. Unfortunately, some women aren’t wearing it. On Serena, it only serves to accentuate a superstructure that is already bordering on the digitally enhanced and a rear end that I will attempt to sum up as discreetly as possible by simply referring to it as ‘formidable.'”
In 2003, the satirical website Sportspickle published a piece that leveraged the preoccupation with this particular part of her body, in a piece starring Williams’s butt as the winner of the Australian Open:
Tennis star Serena Williams cruised to a victory in the finals of Australian Open women’s singles on Saturday and then dispatched her buttocks on Sunday to secure the doubles title. Serena beat her sister … to win her fourth-straight major. On Sunday, her butt muscled its way to a 6-2, 6-1 title victory over the doubles pair of Virginia Ruano Pascual and Paola Suarez. The feat is the first-known occurrence of a body part winning a professional athletic contest.
It’s not all white observers who make these types of comments. Jason Whitlock, a black sportswriter, slammed Williams in a 2009 Fox Sports column for having “chosen to smother” her beauty “in an unsightly layer of thick, muscled blubber.” His main gripe, unsurprisingly, was about what he called her “oversized back pack.” He explained, “I am not fundamentally opposed to junk in the trunk, although my preference is a stuffed onion over an oozing pumpkin.”
This type of disgusted scrutiny has targeted Williams’s breasts, too. In commentary that was demonstrably wrong, given her astronomical success in tennis, the Telegraph’s Matthew Norman wrote in 2006 that they were likely to hinder her career.
Generally, I’m all for chunky sports stars … but tennis requires a mobility Serena cannot hope to achieve while lugging around breasts that are registered to vote in a different US state from the rest of her.
In 2012, Williams’s friend the Danish tennis player Caroline Wozniacki brought to life all the scrutiny of Williams’s body, mocking her curves by stuffing her own top and tennis skirt with towels at an exhibition match. Williams responded to those who thought the joke was in bad taste by saying, “I don’t think she meant anything racist by it,” but added, “If people feel [that it seems racist], she should take reason and do something different next time.”
Just a silly stunt without any intent to harm
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