As a life-long tennis player and former coach myself, I’ve always been big fans of the Williams sisters and I’ve followed their multitude of tribulations as they navigated their path of dominance in the ranks of women’s tennis. She and Venus changed the nature of women’s tennis the way James Jamerson and Jaco Pastorius changed the nature of electric bass guitar playing in the music world — they changed the landscape of everything that came after.
I’ve seen many tennis players, male and female, completely lose it on the court and have a temper tantrum of the sort Serena had Saturday. Serena has never been able to get away with the kind of shit that John McEnroe did, and you’re right that it had not a damn thing to do with her gender. Serena was so pissed Saturday night because she received the treatment that Black people have always received, and she didn’t know how to deal with it.
She looked foolish trying to claim there was some sexism happening. Her coach admitted he was coaching from the stands, so the umpire was well within his rights to call her on it. On Saturday, Serena forgot that Black players can’t pull off the John McEnroe-spoiled brat play without suffering a harsh, put-you-in-your-place response from the umpire. Her riches and her white husband and friends are never going to prevent white folks’ tendency to feel as if it is their prerogative to put Black people in their place — a white supremacist society grants this unspoken power to all white people, and it is a privilege that many are dedicated to maintaining at any cost.
Serena has had to take a lot of shit off of racist tennis fans for over twenty years, and I’ve defended her pretty much every time. I think if her father (Richard Williams, a person who HAS to go down as one of the best coaches ever in tennis, period) had still been working with her, she wouldn’t have acted out the way she did yesterday.
But Serena has changed over the years and it seems not for the better. She’s had some really bad plastic surgery that has pretty much f-cked up the pretty face she had always had, and worst of all, she seems to have forgotten who she is. Maybe it’s a curse of wealth and fame? I don’t know. Serena needs to realize that she’s going to be a Black woman until she’s a dead woman, and that her Blackness is always going to be the prime factor in determining how others treat her.
That said, congrats to Naomi Osaka! I was very happy that she big-upped her father’s Haitian nationality as being just as important as her mom’s Japanese nationality — the media thus far has been practically ignoring the fact that she is a Black woman. It’s a big win for Haiti AND Japan.
