Serena Williams is right: a white man would’ve been treated differently

Tennis Made
Sep 9, 2018 · 5 min read
At Saturday’s US Open Final, Williams’ again was held to a higher standard than white male players.

Serena Williams got an ovation at the end of her post-game press conference Saturday. But, online, the Twittersphere was debating.

When asked if she could change one thing about the match, Serena didn’t back down.

“I’m here fighting for women’s rights…and I’m going to keep fighting.”

Osaka played amazing. She beat her hero and deserved to win. And, sure, the hoopla over umpire Carlos Ramos offering 3 court violations to Williams (the final a game penalty that put Osaka four points away from the championship) has shadowed her experience.

But, what happened with Serena can’t be disregarded, and as a woman of color, could affect Osaka in the future.

Why didn’t Carlos Ramos give Williams a warning — if you continue, Serena, I’m going to have to give a game to Osaka?

Doesn’t any player, let alone the greatest of all-time, deserve that much in a US Open Final? Especially down a set and 3–4? Wouldn’t Roger Federer be granted some grace?

“He was probably feeling very uncomfortable,” said Mary Jo Fernandez, during the post-game analysis on ESPN. And I’m sure he was.

I wonder, though: would he have felt more comfortable if the same was being done to him by a white man?

Ramos has a nearly spotless reputation — Chris Evert and Serena both said it.

But, racism and sexism are subconscious, and blind to those with the privilege: white men (I’m one). As Peggy McIntosh popularized in her foundational essay, privilege is an invisible bag that white people must actively unpack to understand is there, at all.

Fair-skinned, eurocentric men (like Ramos) are fish that swim in a water of privilege. That is our default experience.

Imagine Roger Federer not getting the benefit of a doubt from an umpire and the internet.

Some opponents may assert that Osaka, a woman of color, wasn’t treated the same as Serena. Sure, but that’s not the point: if Serena were Roger Federer, how would it have happened?

Serena and her camp have faced constant micro-aggressions and a litany of overt racism and sexism both in tennis and out. Whether it’s because she’s winning or losing, being too emotional, or too stoic: the list of incidents is exhaustive and without any traceable pattern other than the obvious:

Serena is a black woman.

In 2007 in Miami a heckler was ejected after Serena showed frustration, hitting the net:

“That’s the way to do it! Hit the net like any Negro would!”

The president of the Russian Tennis Federation in 2014 called her and her sister the “Williams brothers…It’s scary when you really look at them.”

In 2001 at Indian Wells her father Richard and sister Venus were threatened in the stands of the stadium:

“When Venus and I were walking down the stairs to our seats, people kept calling me nigger,” Williams said. “One guy said, ‘I wish it was ’75; we’d skin you alive.’

We could be here all day, analyzing how many people look at Serena as little more than a black, female body (also now a mother — she almost fielded as many questions about her as a mom than about tennis on Sunday, something that has always only been a footnote to the Roger Federer as a dad narrative).

But, why is this important, opponents might ask? What does this have to do with her behavior, with tennis?

What’s usually missed in the conversation on acts of racism and sexism — asserted poetically by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his rapturous bestseller Between the World and Me — is that they can be literal attacks on the body:

“But all our phrasing — race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy — serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. ”

In a white-dominant sport, with a majority of umpires and lines judges being white men, I can only imagine the stress that has built.

Granted, tne of the violations was warranted — Serena smashing her racquet was penalized as it should have been. This is etiquette. But, the other two were madness.

Serena’s coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, admitted he was coaching live directly after the match:

“I’m honest, I was coaching. I don’t think [Serena] looked at me, so that’s why she didn’t think I was (coaching). But I was, like 100 percent of the coaches on 100 percent of the matches. So we have to stop this hypocrite thing. “[Osaka’s coach] was coaching every point too.”

Mouratoglou added he’d never gotten a coaching violation in the history of his career.

Sure, it’s a rule. But so is jaywalking (something black people get killed for). The enforcement of it, or lackthereof, dictates the cultural willingness of someone to follow or reject what’s written.

Why today? Why in a US Open with Serena Williams?

Why, amidst a tournament of hot-headed players like Coric and Kyrgios who berate the umpire with expletives, is it commonly ignored?

Why in the 2009 US Open Final, wasn’t Roger Federer’s outburst given a court violation?

Garner who appeared to tell the world No 1 to stop complaining.

This warning was met with further wrath when the 15-time major champion said: “Don’t tell me to be quiet, OK? When I want to talk, I talk. I don’t give a s*** what he said.”

The answer is apparent. Serena is always on stage, expected to live to the script of how a black woman should, as poet and essayist Claudia Rankine paints in her NY Times’ piece on Williams:

“For black people, there is an unspoken script that demands the humble absorption of racist assaults, no matter the scale, because whites need to believe that it’s no big deal. But Serena refuses to keep to that script. Somehow, along the way, she made a decision to be excellent while still being Serena”

Serena is the greatest tennis player of all-time.

And that shouldn’t excuse how others, who aren’t elite athlete activist media celebrities, are treated. If anything, it highlights that the work hard, keep your head down narrative is a myth—Serena has reached the pinnacle.

And still, to many, she’s merely just what shouldn’t be: a black woman.

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