There Is No Contest: Serena Williams Is SI’s SportsPERSON Of The Year

I’m not always enraged, but when I am, it’s because of something I’ve read on Twitter.

The type of criticism she has endured as a Black child, teenager, and as a woman, has been of the utmost abhorrent prejudice and despicable racism. She is commonly objectified, praised, and equally ridiculed for the power in her physique and the darkness of her skin. She is sculpted onyx greatness and folks who are use to, prefer, or pedestalize, a different ideal are still having trouble with the image that her reflection casts.

Know this: Serena slays, and has been done slayed, the tennis court
And you better learn to deal with it.

After all of this nonsense that put Serena's body and Blackness under a microscope, I find it particularly troubling that Chuck Schilken’s post for the LA Times fuels a poll that puts into competition a Black woman athlete against American Pharaoh — a horse. A horse whose name basically means North American Ruler of Ancient Egypt (an African nation). ← I’ll leave this here.

Due to reaction from Black Twitter, the Women of Twitter, and people who generally have some sense, @latimes responded by changing the headline of the post and removing the Williams-Pharoah image from the article, as seen in the media above.

How often do we see Black folks — especially Black women — talked about, compared to, or treated as animals? If you’re really stuck on an answer for that question, here’s a hint: start with the period of American enslavement then go back a few knots.

Even posting a conjoined image of Williams’ SI cover with American Pharoah was seeding an unsettling and utterly disappointing visual: two dark bodies side-by-side in a standoff that challenge the mind to define the features that separate humans — especially Black women — from the animals.

I find it peculiar that Schilken acknowledges in a quote from Sports Illustrated’s Christian Stone that “We are honoring Serena Williams too for reasons that hang in the grayer, less comfortable ether, where issues such as race and femininity collide with the games,” only to proceed with one embed tweet that expresses fandom within the obvious context — sportsperson of the year should go to a human — and then posts from the Twitterverse expressing what can only be called supreme trolldom at a high degree of hateration. Of the eight posts embedded in Schilken’s piece, only two were in support of Serena Williams receiving the Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of the Year.

Monday, Dec. 14, 2015, 3:56 P.M., ET: The results of the poll show that the majority of voters think the human, Serena Williams, deserves SI’s Sportsperson of the Year. Now, what to do about the minority who think the, horse, American Pharoah, is more deserving?

Schilken’s poll just fuels that highly flammable “ether” that Stone addresses, except this is no longer a gray area: it’s purely black. It’s not less comfortable: it’s straight up burns. Serena Williams is not a beast, a creature, or super-humanoid of John-Henry proportions. She is a woman. She is a force. She’s a champion. She is Black. She is an athlete who earned her greatness despite the world’s criticism and bigotry. Above all else, she is human and deserving of humanity.

American Pharoah can go chill in a nice pasture and eat apples and hay somewhere. He’s earned that.

Update: Chuck Schilken’s post in the L.A. Times has been updated to include an additional poll question: “2. Should a horse even be eligible for SI’s Sportsperson of the Year?”

On Monday, Dec. 14, 2015, 5:55P.M. ET, 21 percent of voters responded “Yes,” 79 percent voted “No.”