I won’t read your Grand Slam piece.

I am not an avid tennis watcher. I couldn’t name the competitions that players compete in, much less any of those who have won in the past few years. I follow the sport much in the same way I follow any other game where I have great respect and fondness for a few of the players — I tune in to watch their games then catch up on particulars via the pieces written afterward.
I’m sitting in a bar with my line sisters, actually, where we’re all catching up on the last year because our deuce is in town — which is complicated by the two televisions hanging in the corner with the 2018 Grand Slam. I keep trying to plug into a story about her upcoming interview, but Serena Williams is on tv playing Naomi Osaka, so I finally apologize and disengage.
By the time, I’m more fully tuned in there’s a lot of tension on the court. I can barely hear what’s being said over the rumble at the bar, but the tableau is as uncomfortable as it is confusing. Serena is alight as she speaks to the umpire, first in level tones and then in increasingly defensive ones. Young Naomi’s face is folding into lines meant to hold back any emotion besides endurance. The crowd swallows the tension and gives voice to it, a scattered murmur on the edge of coalescing into something ugly.
It’s an image that is going to sit with me in the weeks to come.
Cleverer wordsmiths than I will try and detail all the ways in which the three people on that court stood for much more than themselves. They will paint a vivid picture of what the world saw yesterday in Queens, with words that I am primed to be sensitive to as a black woman. The greatness of the greatest athlete alive will be reduced to physical descriptions that link her physicality to the threat of her. Her blackness has never been less than dangerous so it will be weaponized, once again, and tied irrevocably to her level of sportsmanship. The budding promise of the first Haitian-Japanese athlete to win a Grand Slam will be tied down, pieced together under words like ‘embarrassment’ and ‘shame.’ They will reduce the bloom of her potential and what was undoubtedly a well-played game to timidity and fear.
They will take this match, and they will make it more.
A game becomes a myth, complete with the requisite exaggerated conceptions and supernatural emotions. They will strip both women of themselves. Naomi becomes the limping victim, powerless under the swell of her opponent’s anger and the crowd’s malice. Serena becomes the tyrant, bloated with power and no cause for righteousness. The 2018 Grand Slam becomes just one more episode in a litany of complex dialogue around what is and isn’t okay for certain bodies to do.
I can practically see the thought pieces already, written by authors who have no conception of what it is like to exist as black women in nations that would rather they…don’t.
This time, I’ll pass.
I have no desire to read anything from anyone who doesn’t have an inkling of all the different powers that were at play yesterday. I have no desire for anyone’s input if they did not see the court as I did, overlayed and shadowed by this same scenario playing out in playgrounds and classrooms and workplaces every day across the world. I want no words from someone who can’t understand how many different identities were at war between sharp whistles and green turf, can’t make out the looming shape of the vastness of a conflict both personal and familiar.
If you don’t get it, then you can’t. You won’t.
And if that’s the case, I’ll pass.
I simply don’t need the commentary from the uninformed.
