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Serena Williams Is Today’s Muhammad Ali As a political symbol and an athletic powerhouse, Serena Williams is “the greatest” in her sport.
by Dave Zirin July 14, 2015 The Nation
Serena Williams wins the women's singles final at the All England Lawn Tennis Championships in Wimbledon, London, Saturday July 11, 2015. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth) There are numerous articles—terrific articles—defending Serena Williams against the racism and sexism that have long stalked her career. This will not be one of those articles. As long as gutter invective is hurled at Serena, there will always be a need to defend her—and by extension stand up for everyone who feels the primary sting of these attacks. (J.K. Rowling is even standing up for Serena, adding a new dimension to her #blackgirlmagic.) But, just as I wrote last week about not merely “defending” women’s sports but actually going on “offense,” we need to be similarly aggressive in stating factually just who Serena is becoming before our very eyes. If our eyes remain narrowed in a defensive stance, we could be missing a transcendent chapter in sports and social history beginning to coalesce.
Serena Williams just won her 21st Grand Slam. That’s the same number every other active women’s player has collected combined. In her last 28 matches she is 28-0, and at the US Open this August, Ms. Williams will be favored to win the sport’s first calendar Grand Slam since Steffi Graf did it 27 years ago. At 33, Williams actually seems to be gaining strength, and as John McEnroe said to ESPNW’s Jane McManus, among women, “she could arguably be the greatest athlete of the last 100 years.” I think this even understates her case. She is our Jordan. She is our Jim Brown. She is our Babe Ruth, calling his shots. She is no longer content to dodge bullets, but understands how to stop them. Serena is that rare athlete who has not only mastered her sport. She’s harnessed it.
But Serena Williams is more than just our 21st-century Michael Jordan. If we take a break from defending her, which her detractors do not make easy, it becomes increasingly clear that she is also perhaps our Muhammad Ali. That’s sacrilege in some circles, and understandably so. Ali risked years in federal prison to stand up to an unjust war, becoming the most famous draft resister in history. His very presence at different points inspired the first Pan-Africanist stirrings of Malcolm X, the anti-war evocations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the very mental survival of a prisoner half-way around the world named Nelson Mandela. There is and never will be anyone like Ali, without question. But this is also not the 1960s, and there will also never be anyone like Serena.
Serena Williams is our Ali, and before defending that statement, I want to break down what, in my view, makes Ali “Ali.” To be in Muhammad Ali’s tradition of athletes, there are three basic boxes one would need to check: The first is that the sportsperson in question would need to be amongst “the greatest” in their field. As mentioned above, Serena more than checks that box. Secondly, one would have to be polarizing in a way that speaks to issues beyond the field: thrilling some people politically and enraging others with every triumph. Similarly, a loss would feel like more than “just a game” to their fans: more like a punch to the gut. Lastly, to even be in this conversation, one would have to not just “represent” or symbolize a political yearning but actually stand for something, and risk their commercial appeal by taking such stands. Serena doesn’t only check these boxes. She has, I would argue, confronted—and overcome—more obstacles than even the great Muhammad ever had to face. Her political powers of representation, every time she emerges victorious, is off the meter.
Symbolically, the very audacity of Serena Williams—a black woman from Compton who has owned a country-club sport with style, flair, and the occasional leopard suit, is without comparison. She is “peak Tiger Woods” in skill, but cut with Ali’s transgressive style: the equivalent of the Champ telling the craggy, macho world of boxing that he was “so very pretty.” But not even Ali had to achieve in an atmosphere as inhospitable as Serena’s athletic setting. This is about the very particular intersectional oppression she has faced as a black woman. This iconic body she proudly inhabits—her shape, her curves, her musculatur—has been the subject of scorn, regardless of the results. Even at his most denigrated, Ali’s loudest detractors conceded that his physical body was a work of athletic sculpture. As a man—a black man—he was objectified with a mix of admiration, longing, and envy, in the ways black male athletes have always been seen since the days of plantation sports. It was his mind and mouth that truly made him threatening. People wanted Ali to “shut up and box” for years before finally stripping him of his title. But as that phrase implies, they still wanted him to box. Not Serena. Instead, she has had to face a tennis world that has made it clear in tones polite and vulgar that it would be so nice if she wasn’t there. But she has shut them all up with the same wicked power that defines her game. She, like Martina Navratilova before her, has forced sportswriters and fans to confront what a female athlete’s body can look like, and they have often responded as terribly as we would both expect and fear. While overwhelmingly male sports media and many tennis fans mocked and continue to belittle her appearance, Williams brushes them off—at least publicly—like so much shoulder dust. The greater her stature, the more pathetic they look. The higher her profile, the lower they seem. In Ali’s day, William F. Buckley saw it as his “white man’s burden” to tear him down. Serena has Buckley’s media spawn attempting the same and they look just as small, just as pathetic.
Then there are her explicit politics. This is not the 1960s and there isn’t a mass movement to deify Serena Williams the way there was one to lift Ali, when the world was insistent upon his destruction. But that only makes the stands she has chosen to take all the more remarkable. In 2000, Serena Williams pulled out of the Family Circle Cup in South Carolina in solidarity with the NAACP’s call to boycott over the flying of the Confederate flag atop the state house. After her Wimbledon victory Saturday, she spoke about the recent “Mother Emmanuel” Church murders in Charleston, calling it a “tragedy yet again,” and an “unspeakably sad” moment that takes its “toll.” However, she pledged to “continue to have faith, continue to believe, continue to be positive, continue to help people to the best of [my] ability.”
She has been a voice for women’s pay equity in the sport, backing her sister Venus’s powerful push for economic gender justice in a sport that at one time paid women with bouquets of flowers. Most compellingly, as the Black Lives Matter movement has attempted to focus the nation on both police violence and the injustices that surround our system of mass incarceration, Serena has chosen to partner with the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that fights for prisoners’ rights amid the racism that pervades our criminal-justicve system. In a move as audacious as it was affecting, she even tied her return to Indian Wells, a tournament she had boycotted after being showered with racist catcalls in 2001, to the raising of money for the organization. Using boxing as a platform for these kinds of politics amidst the 1960s was certainly legendary. But doing it in 2015 in the world of tennis? It’s simply above and beyond, like clearing a hurdle while wearing cement shoes.
If anything, the greatest difference between Serena and Ali is the absence of that mass social movement to elevate her presence and push the non-believers to see what we have in front of us. Muhammad Ali went from despised to beloved because a mass black-freedom struggle and anti-war movement took him as their own. He became more than an athlete: He became a social question. Similarly, a movement fighting for #BlackLivesMatter and gender justice, a movement of struggle that includes the young women of Ferguson, Bree Newsome, and everyone fighting fiercely to reshape this country, has the potential to deliver Serena Williams to even greater heights. She is also becoming a social question, because she represents in so many ways the questions that people are facing in their daily lives. In other words, she poses this very sharp interrogation to the viewer: When you see her serve, her volley, and her physical self; when you hear her words, her concerns, her causes, which side are you on? This remarkable athletic force of nature, or those trying—and failing—to tear her down?
After her Wimbledon victory, Serena Williams was asked which athlete she admired the most. She said that it was Muhammad Ali. Not for his boxing but for “what he stood for” outside the ring. For years people have asked who would be “the next Muhammad Ali.” If we dare to lift our heads, it will be clear that she is right in front of us. In the years to come, we may need to change the question and ask who will be “the next Serena Williams.”
Dave Zirin is the sports editor of The Nation.
Serena Williams: Wimbledon ladies’ final: July 11, 2015
Serena Williams speaks to the media following her 6-4, 6-4 victory over Garbine Muguruza. Q. Must be an unbelievable feeling right now. Can you describe the emotions getting to this point from the start of the day? What do you think of the term 'Serena Slam' now?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Man, it is really a great feeling. Just the moment is still setting in a little bit. I'm just really excited about it because I didn't want to talk about the Serena Slam. I honestly wouldn't have thought last year after winning the US Open I would win the Serena Slam at all. It's super exciting. I just knew I wanted to win Wimbledon this year. Of all the Grand Slams, it was the one I hadn't won in a while. It was like, I really want to win Wimbledon. It happened. Just amazing. It feels really, really good.
Q. How can you make the mental switch after a tough Roland Garros?
SERENA WILLIAMS: I definitely think the extra week helped. I took a week off after Roland Garros because I wasn't feeling that great. I just kind of trained and practiced and practiced. You know, then the moment happened. Yeah, I really think that week in between helped me a lot.
Q. You come across to us as kind of ageless.
SERENA WILLIAMS: That's a good thing (smiling).
Q. Do you notice any difference in your body or your ability, work ethic, from years ago?
SERENA WILLIAMS: I mean, I feel almost better now. I mean, I do have some aches and pains. But overall physically I feel like I'm better. I feel like I'm more fit. I feel like I can do more than I did 10, 12, whatever years ago. Yeah, I just think, you know, like I said, I just keep reinventing myself in terms of working out, in terms of my game. It's been working.
Q. Can you give us a word on Garbine Muguruza and what you see for her future?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Oh, my gosh. I think she's such a great player. Like I said, she's beaten me before. I think she really stepped up to the plate today. She was determined to do well and to win. She came out there to win. She wasn't out there just to play a final. I think that says a lot about her and her future. She never gave up literally ever.
Q. You've won 88% in the first five rounds, 87% in the last five rounds. You're basically just as good against the best players in semis and finals as earlier. Why do you think that is?
SERENA WILLIAMS: I feel like I'm in the semis, only one more match to go. That's how I think. I may as well give it my all. Obviously, I don't want to lose in the first round or early. I have a lot, but I never really want to. I always try my best. I don't think there's any reason in particular. I just think it kind of happens. I just try to do the best I can for every single match.
Q. I know you stay in the present or do your best to stay in the present...
SERENA WILLIAMS: Oh, gosh.
Q. When did you first think of New York or have you not maybe?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Oh, c'mon (smiling). You know, it took me a little while. I think when I did my interview for BBC after the match, I did the whole presentation, I did the whole walk around the court. I was peaceful, feeling really good. Maybe a little after that I started thinking about New York.
Q. Could you give us a bit of detail? When you said you reinvented your workouts? I've been reinventing mine for a long time.
SERENA WILLIAMS: You got to get on the Serena plan (laughter). No, because I've never loved working out. When I first started, I would always ride the bike, work on my legs. Then I started doing more running. Then I started doing more sprint work. At one point I was boxing. Every few years I'm always doing something physically wise.
I mean, there's so many sports you can do to stay physically fit. Like if I was still running, I think I would just not want to do it anymore. I wouldn't want to stay fit. There's so many things you can do to stay fit and it works.
Q. What's the latest you've done?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Right now I'm dancing a lot, so...
Q. Any particular style?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Contemporary.
Q. Describe that a bit to me. I don't do that, I'm too old.
SERENA WILLIAMS: Well, contemporary is like, I don't know how to describe it. It's just lots of movements. It's not like super fast. It's slow, not too slow. Sometimes a lot of floor work, so... Yeah, I'm serious (smiling).
Q. When you were dancing around Centre Court after you won, you thought of New York, what were you thinking?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Well, actually I didn't think about it till the interview. Then I just thought, Oh, man, I've won New York three times in a row. I hope this isn't the year that I go down. I want to do well there. We'll see. I mean, I've won three, so that's not bad.
Q. What's been the key of winning four majors in a row?
SERENA WILLIAMS: I don't know. I know just last year I was just so down because I lost so early in three of the Grand Slams. By the time New York came around, I was like, I just want to get to the quarterfinal of a Grand Slam. When I won my fourth round match, I was elated. I was like, Yeah, finally. I've just been super relaxed. I've been taking time every match. I didn't have an easy go this tournament, but I still just take it one match at a time.
Q. What has this process of the Serena Slam, what has it taught you about yourself?
SERENA WILLIAMS: I've learned a lot. That I'm able to do anything. Anyone's able to do anything they really set their mind to. I also learned it takes teamwork. By the way, it's not me. It's a lot of people behind me, from my coach, who I think does a wonderful job keeping me consistent in not only all the Grand Slams, but all the tournaments in between as well, which I think helps me for the slams. The physical work, the training. So it's a lot of work. You know, I think nowadays, more than anytime before, it's really a team effort.
Q. After the last point of the match, there was a pause. It seemed like there was a little bit of confusion as to what was happening. What did you think was happening in that moment? What did it feel like?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Well, I wasn't sure, 'cause I won the point, but I was looking at the umpire, I was so focused. She had started playing really well. I wasn't sure if I was going to serve again. I was so focused. I was like, Okay, is that the match? Is that it? Plus she didn't say, Game, set, match really loud, so I wasn't sure if there was some type of call or something. I didn't hear her at all say, Game, set, match. So I was just really confused.
Q. There's a lot of aspects to this victory, history made. 21, six Wimbledons, Serena Slam. What speaks loudest to you?
SERENA WILLIAMS: For sure the Serena Slam. I mean, I've been trying to win four in a row for 12 years, and it hasn't happened. I've had a couple injuries. You know, it's been an up and down process. I honestly can't say that last year or two years ago or even five years ago I would have thought that I would have won four in a row. So just starting this journey, having all four trophies at home, is incredible. You know, that for me stands out the most.
Q. With all that you've achieved, with what you might achieve in the future, what do you consider the toughest thing to accomplish?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Uhm, the toughest thing to accomplish is just to stay in the moment. It's easy to go out there and say, I want to win, then try to win. But you have to win seven matches. You have to win each match, you have to win each set, you have to win each point. It's not anything that's super easy, but, you know, you just have to stay in the moment and do your best.
Q. How do you do it?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Just do it (laughter).
Q. Throughout the match today, at any stage did you feel or think, I'm going to lose this?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Yeah, she started out playing really well. But then I knew, okay, I started to understand what she was doing better. I thought, I need to do this. I had to problem solve. My thing was just get up two breaks, just do the best you can. That's all.
Q. Which one was the toughest, this one or Watson?
SERENA WILLIAMS: I don't think you can compare 'em. You know, I think both matches were definitely very interesting. I think one was a third round and one is a final. You really can't compare a final to a third round match.
Q. It's been a long time in tennis, 27 years, since we've had someone going to New York with a chance to win the Grand Slam. A lot of attention and hype. What are you expecting from that?
SERENA WILLIAMS: You know what, I feel like I'll be okay. I feel like if I can do the Serena Slam, I will be okay heading into the Grand Slam. Like I always say, there's 127 other people that don't want to see me win. Nothing personal, they just want to win. So it's just, you know, going to go in there. I had a really tough draw. This gives me confidence that if I had this draw, I can do it again. I'll just do the best I can. You know, I really don't feel like I have anything to lose. I've kind of solidified my place at No. 1. My goal is always to end the year at No. 1. I just want to make sure when I play Australia, I don't have pressure going into that. Yeah, I feel like I've kind of knocked all that out and we'll just go from there.
Q. In terms of all time great sporting accomplishments, how much are you able to put into perspective what you're in the midst of?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Yeah, it's huge. It's really, really huge. But I haven't done it. I have the Serena Slam now, which is amazing. But, you know, it's different to actually have something and then try to accomplish it. Of course I'm going to try to do the best I can, but I don't have the Grand Slam in my hands. I can't really feel that if it's not there. You know, hopefully I'll do well at the Open and then I can answer that question.
Q. You mentioned your coach. What has he brought to everything that you do that you didn't have before?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Well, obviously something's working. You can't argue with results. I think he does a really great job with keeping me focused. I have really great strategies when I go out there on the court. I kind of know what to expect, I know what to do. You know, for every match, I'm in it. I'm not halfway there or halfway not there. So I think it's just been consistency and just keeping that for every single match.
Q. Is it difficult to get to that position? Easy to say. How difficult is it to keep that focus all year round?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Yeah, it's actually easier than one would think. Well, it's easier for me because it doesn't matter where I go, I don't necessarily like the loss. But sometimes losses do help me. But, yeah, so it definitely keeps me motivated. But I've always been like that my whole career. I just feel like I have a little more bigger game plan going out there. You know, yeah.
Q. It took you some time before you were finally able to win one more Wimbledon than Venus. I'd like to know to remind you with your age, there will be somebody that tomorrow could be 33 years old and win Wimbledon. Do you think that is probable or difficult?
SERENA WILLIAMS: I don't understand. You think tomorrow there's going to be...
Q. Roger. Another guy who is same age as you. He may win Wimbledon, too. Is it probable?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Absolutely. If I can do it, God knows he can do it. I saw his semifinal match. He was playing unbelievable. I was totally inspired by that.
Q. Favorite or not?
SERENA WILLIAMS: You know, he's playing Novak. He's strong No. 1. He's defending champ. You know, it's tough to say. But I think it's going to be an unbelievable match. I really look forward to watching it. I'm glad I'm not playing either one of them.
Q. You wear very pretty outfits the days after and the parties. When you're choosing the outfit, did you have doubts, if I don't win, I'll wear that outfit someplace else?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Yeah, I always bring a dress just in case, always. I found out the better dresses I bring, I usually win. If I bring a not so nice one, I don't win. I brought a really nice one this time. I'm not sure. Try to think positive, you know. Try to think positive.
Q. 5 1 in the second set, a game away, you wound up serving twice, getting broken. Came to 5 4. What was that like for you? Was it sort of nerves at being that close? What happened there from 5 1 in the second set?
SERENA WILLIAMS: I mean, I think she returned really well today. How many double faults did I hit? I had a lot of double faults. Eight. Oh, my gosh. I hit a lot of double faults, so that doesn't really help you. In warmup today my serve was off. I probably served more than usual because I didn't get it right and I kept going, kept going. I just didn't feel my serve today. I think if I had felt it better during the match, maybe I would have been able to close it out. She also returned really well, so I think that helped her out and helped her get back in it. She also never gave up. She never gave up hope of raising the trophy.
Q. A pretty remarkable week for American sportswomen, you and the soccer team, as well. What is your take on what it all mean in terms of being a female playing sports in America?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Olympics, baby. USA at the Olympics. I was so happy for the USA women to win the soccer. I was cheering them on. It was great. They always do really well. A little nervous sometimes. It was so wonderful to see the ladies win the soccer. I'm just riding their wave, you know.
Q. Sorry to be blunt. Does being the oldest Grand Slam winner fill you with pride or does it frighten you a little bit?
SERENA WILLIAMS: I'm officially the eldest?
Q. Yes.
SERENA WILLIAMS: Cool. I mean, no, I feel great. I definitely don't feel old. I think in life I'm still pretty young. You know, I think, like I always say, with new technology, new workouts, all this other stuff, I think the life of an athlete is changing and the longevity is becoming longer.
Q. How many more Wimbledons do you have left in you?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Oh, gosh. I'm just living for the moment. Obviously I'll be here next year, God willing, to try to defend my title. But we'll see.
Q. Can the elder you look back and find deep inside that little girl that had these dreams? Do you think, Wow, look what I've done here?
SERENA WILLIAMS: Not yet. One day, if I ever retire, I'll definitely look back. I'll be like, Oh, I did a good job. Right now I'm really into just continuing to be the greatest champion that I can be and the best player and the best role model that I can be. I just really try to stay focused on that.
Q. Do you not enjoy the ride as much now, at the end you'll enjoy it later?
SERENA WILLIAMS: I definitely enjoy the ride, but I'm also not looking back. You know, I'll be like, Wow, I did so good. If you look back, it's so easy to become satisfied and complacent. That's one thing I don't want to have.
Q. Throughout the match you always were focused. You said you tried to kind of stay in the moment. What is your inner voice saying while you're trying to be focused?
SERENA WILLIAMS: I don't know. Usually I'm singing a song in my head. Then if I stop singing it, I usually start losing, then I go back to singing. It's crazy up there. You don't want to be up there (smiling).
Serena Williams - More Than Just Power:
For everyone out there who thinks that the only reason Serena Williams has won 21 grand slam singles titles, 13 grand slam doubles titles, 4 Olympic gold medals, and a career Golden Slam is purely because of her "power", think again! While nobody denies that Serena is among the most powerful and athletic women ever to play her sport, these attributes alone do not bring success in a technical sport such as tennis.
There are many other powerful athletes on the tennis tour who haven't even come close to matching Serena's accomplishments. Davenport, Kuznetsova, Petrova, Safina, and Sharapova were all "power" players, while Capriati, Clijsters and Henin can all match the athleticism of Williams. Venus can match Serena in both of these categories. But none of them have been able to consistanly achieve as Serena has. The main reason is the mental edge she has over them.
This video demonstrates the variety of shots that Serena can employ which often goes overlooked when people just assume that she just hits the ball as hard as she can each stroke. It also shows the strategy that she uses against certain players in different situations. Serena rarely ever gets credit for her technical abilities or her ability to out think her opponents. She scores an A in both categories!
When Serena Williams beat Garbine Muguruza 6-4, 6-4 Saturday at Wimbledon to complete her second career Serena Slam, a whole lot of entries had to be rearranged in the record book.
Here's a by-the-numbers look at some of the amazing feats Williams has accomplished.
On
Saturday morning when I dragged myself out of bed to watch Serena
Williams compete for her 21st Grand Slam title at Wimbledon, I sent my
mother a simple text: “Tennis?” More than a thousand miles away and one
time zone behind, Mama texted back, “Yes!”
This
has been our ritual since I left home nearly half a lifetime ago, just
around the time it became clear that Williams Sisters were a force that
would not go away quietly. My mother and I spent many lazy summer
weekends watching greats like Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Andre Agassi,
Pete Sampras, Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe. I vaguely remember
watching Arthur Ashe play, and my mother always took care to point out
Black players like Zina Garrison and Malivai Washington. Unlike
basketball, which I also loved back then, in the heyday of Michael
Jordan, tennis was an overwhelmingly white sport.
Then came the
Black girls—sisters from Compton with beads and braids, playing “power
tennis.” That is how sportscasters like Mary Carillo, Pam Shriver and
Chris Evert derisively referred to the Sisters’ monster serves and
walloping forehand winners down the line way back then. A few months
younger than Venus, and a few older than Serena, I was instantly
protective and proud of these young sisters the same age as me, who had
entered an all-white world and dominated white women with such
consistency and force, and so unapologetically, that white women’s heads
spun on a regular basis.
It is never a thing Black people would
admit in polite company (which is to say, in front of white people), but
watching these beautiful, powerful Black girls square up against white
girls and win is catharsis. Despite sportscaster commentary which
focused heavily on the athleticism of their bodies while giving them no
credit for being thoughtful or strategic on the court, the sisters won,
and kept on winning.
I’m sure many hoped we would not be here in
the middle of the second decade of the 20th century still watching the
Williams sisters compete against each other in grand slams. But we are.
And while Venus — long my favorite of the two (loyalty to the sister
born the same year as me if nothing else) — no longer enjoys the same
success and visibility as her sister, the two are still seen as some of
the most formidable players in the game.
Some things have changed
since we began to call the names of Venus and Serena. Their games have
improved. Serena has figured out how to corral all that power into a
gorgeous, focused finesse on the court. Watching Venus play at Wimbledon
is like watching a Black girl ballet on grass. Because of Venus’ active
campaign with Billie Jean King, women now earn equal pay with men at
Grand Slam tournaments. And Chris Evert, one of the Williams Sisters’
most ardent critics a decade ago, can now regularly be heard calling
Serena the “greatest” to ever play the game. What has not changed,
however, is the ugly and virulent racist commentary to which Serena is
subjected each and every time she wins.
Media personalities
suggest that she’s doping. And racists emboldened by the mouthpiece and
anonymity of twitter misgender her, calling her a man and deriding the
strength of her body. In a piece at the New York Times,
Ben Rothenberg interviews several current women’s tennis players who
evince varying levels of anxiety about how playing the sport makes them
look “unfeminine.” In the midst of this, Serena says, “I’m really happy
with my body type, and I’m really proud of it. Obviously it works out
for me. I talk about it all the time, how it was uncomfortable for
someone like me to be in my body.”
That kind of body confidence
from a dark-skinned, “thick” Black woman, with a round posterior that
all my homegirls and I, straight and gay alike, admire, is hard won.
This world does not love Black girls or women, and it takes every
opportunity to project its own ugliness onto our bodies. We spend a
lifetime trying to resurrect our self-esteem from these hastily dug mass
graves.
To advance to the Wimbledon championship, Serena
beat (for the 17th straight time) Maria Sharapova — a tall, blonde,
traditionally pretty player, who has been the highest paid female
athlete for a number of years. Sharapova’s thin, blonde brand of white
femininity is literal currency, allowing her earnings to outpace
Serena’s despite the fact that Serena is arguably the greatest athlete
of all time. As one commenter remarked on Twitter, “Michael Jordan is
the Serena Williams of basketball.”
The distortion and devaluing
of Black women’s gender identity is a curious feature of what Dr. Moya
Bailey has termed “misogynoir,” which refers to the unique hatred of
Black women and girls. Female athletes, of all races, are routinely
misgendered and harassed in ways that are both misogynist and
transphobic. There is nothing wrong with gender-noncomforming,
female-bodied people embracing masculinity, but there is something wrong
when femininity is viewed as exclusive to white womanhood. There is
something wrong when one’s particular “accidents of birth” are more
valued, more protected, and more well-compensated. That Maria Sharapova gets more money
than Serena is the definition of white privilege. Their shared
womanhood does not change that. In fact, the difference in treatment and
reception of these two players demonstrates quite clearly the very
different ways in which Black and White women in the U.S. experience
womanhood. But the problem is longer and wider than the dimensions
of the tennis court. In a series of papers, Emory University business
professor Erika V. Hall and her colleagues have found that in everything
from business, to dating, to sports, research participants routinely associate gender stereotypes with racial groups.
Black people, regardless of gender are perceived to be more masculine.
Asian people, regardless of gender, are perceived to be more feminine.
Blackness was associated with words like “masculine, vigorous, strong,
muscular, and burly,” whereas being Asian was associated with words like
“feminine, graceful, gentle, beautiful, and delicate.” These
stereotypes affected hiring practices,
such that jobs which were perceived as needing feminine qualities, like
say a librarian, favored Asian candidates over jobs that seemingly
needed masculine qualities, for example a security guard, which favored
Black candidates. When it comes to interracial dating, these racial
stereotypes show up starkly. The study found that white “men had a
romantic preference for Asians over Blacks” and white women “had a
romantic preference for Blacks over Asians.”
But as Charles Blow pointed out in his column this week
at the New York Times, it is Black women who lose in this game, as
perceptions about our beauty and femininity and make us the least
attractive dating option in interracial marriages and online sites.
In
the midst of this terrible mix of gendered racial stereotypes, racial
animus and jealousy, privilege, and misogynoir, Serena Williams rises as
the champion. A few weeks ago, I had the supreme pleasure of watching
Serena win her 20th major title at the French Open in person. I will be
watching next month as she attempts her 22nd title, her first career
grand slam (winning all four majors in the same calendar year) and her
opportunity to tie the title record of all time great Steffi Graf. Each
match that she plays forces America to reckon with the strength, beauty,
ferocity, indefatigability, heart, graciousness, confidence, anger,
fierceness and power of Black womanhood. For nearly two full decades
now, the Williams sisters have been the emcees of an annual celebration
of American athletic dominance — a series of moment singularly
spectacular for this one reason: I can think of no other moment when so
many Americans of all hues come together to celebrate, or merely
acknowledge the power, precision, and panache of Black womanhood.
Brittney Cooper is a contributing writer at Salon, and
teaches Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers.
Follow her on Twitter at @professorcrunk.
Serena Williams attends the Wimbledon Champions Dinner at the Guildhall on July 12, 2015, in London, England. Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images
Retired tennis champion Martina Navratilova just gave the perfect
response to misogynous internet commenters who have recently enjoyed
viciously attacking Serena Williams:
Serena Williams is widely considered the greatest
woman tennis player ever. But all too often, instead of being
celebrated, she's targeted with outrageous racist and sexist comments.
This bigotry has tarnished nearly every victory, magazine cover, and
interview of her entire incredible career.
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.
What people who tried to insist that these were merely innocent,
individual assessments of Williams's looks didn't understand was that
none of this was new, and none of it was random.
Indian Wells and beyond
(Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Serena
Williams is widely regarded as the best female tennis player of all
time. But her career has been followed by severe racism and sexism that
taps into stereotypes about black women.
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 this year.
But the most 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
on 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.
"The legacy of the Hottentot Venus will always be ready to rear its ugly head"
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 sports writer, 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."
"If Caroline truly wanted to impersonate Serena, she could have padded her legs and arms"
Just a silly stunt without any intent to harm? Possibly, but it was still part of a troubling pattern. As Ms. Magazine's
Little wrote, "If Caroline truly wanted to impersonate Serena, she
could have padded her legs and arms to represent Serena's muscled
physique, but she targeted specific body parts — breasts and booty — for
her little prank. The supposed hypersexuality of a black woman's
anatomy is a ceaseless trope that is always used to get a laugh. The
racist undertones of Caroline's stunt may not have been deliberate, but
that doesn't mean they weren't there."
Hyperbolic descriptions of her physical power
"The prominence of narratives that depict the
Williams sisters as ‘overwhelming' and ‘destroying' their female
opponents are significant for they call upon enduring stereotypes of the
‘dangerous' black body and the ‘strong black woman,'" Douglas wrote,
noting the way both Venus and Serena's strong black female bodies were
"described as ‘pummeling,' ‘overwhelming' and ‘overpowering' (apparently
frail and powerless) white female opponents."
It's true that sports metaphors include references
to violence: "crushed," "killed," and "destroyed" aren't unusual words
to hear when describing wins. But descriptions of Serena's power and the
strength behind her victories have taken this type of hyperbole to
another level — one that suggests she's absolutely unparalleled in her
strength and capacity for violence, especially as compared with her
white opponents.
Writing for Rolling Stone in 2013, Stephen Roderick
observed, "Sharapova is tall, white and blond, and, because of that,
makes more money in endorsements than Serena, who is black, beautiful
and built like one of those monster trucks that crushes Volkswagens at
sports arenas."
In 2014, Russian tennis official Shamil Tarpischev
infamously called the Williams sisters "brothers," saying, "It's
frightening when you look at them. But really you just need to play
against the ball." In response, Ms. Magazine's
Corinne Gaston wrote, "The type of body-shaming in Tarpishchev's
comment, while subtle, comes gift-wrapped in a triad from hell:
misogyny, racism and transphobia."
An insistence on seeing her as unusually aggressive and (literally) animalistic
The Telegraph's Sue Mott seemed to embrace
Tarpischev's (and others') characterization of Williams as scary and
take it another, dehumanizing level, when she wrote in 2002 that Williams and Venus had "evolved into players of Amazonian physique and piranha mentality."
Even when Williams loses, she's perceived as an
untamed source of power. Describing Serena's 2009 US Open loss, an ESPN
column noted that Williams's opponent "seemed destined to win the match
anyways," describing how she'd returned "Serena's savage strokes."
He later told the Daily News that his comments weren't racist, "just zoological"
And if it's not clear what words like "savage"
imply, some writers have spelled it out. In 2001, sportscaster Sid
Rosenberg literally called Venus an "animal" and said she and Serena
would fit better posing for National Geographic magazine than for Playboy. He later told the Daily News that his comments weren't racist, "just zoological."
David Leonard, chair of the department of critical
culture, gender, and race studies at Washington State University,
compiled the following tweets, which he recorded after Williams won her
fifth Wimbledon title in 2012, in a post for his personal blog arguing that she faced racist treatment from the media and fans alike:
Today a giant gorilla escaped the zoo and won the womens title at Wimbledon... oh that was Serena Williams? My mistake.
Serena Williams is a gorilla
Watching tennis and listening to dad talk about how Serena Williams looks like gorilla from the mist
I don't see how in the hell men find Serena Williams attractive?! She looks like a male gorilla in a dress, just saying!
You might as well just bang a gorilla if you're going to bang Serena Williams
Earlier this week I said that all female tennis
players were good looking. I was clearly mistaken:
The Gorilla aka Serena Williams.
serena williams looks like a gorilla
Serena Williams is half man, half gorilla! I'm sure of it.
Serena Williams look like a man with tits, its only when she wears weave she looks female tbh, what a HENCH BOLD GORILLA!
Serena Williams is a gorilla in a skirt playing tennis #Wimbledon
My god Serena Williams is ugly! She's built like a silver backed gorilla
"The racism raining down on Serena's victory parade
highlights the nature of white supremacy. ... her career has been one
marred by the politics of hate, the politics of racism and sexism,"
Leonard wrote.
The racism that underlies the characterizations of
her as hypersexual, aggressive, and animalistic also means that when she
dares to express frustration, she's stamped with the infamous "angry black woman" stereotype.
It's as bogus as the rest of the labels she's
endured, but given the slights against her over the years, she has every
right to be outraged.
Serena Williams' grace helps us escape the banality of racism ... for a while by William C Anderson The Guardian (UK)
The African American tennis powerhouse maintains professionalism and poise in the face of racism on and of the courts. And then she goes out and wins
Serena Williams at Wimbledon 2015
She’s so good, you have to watch. I always do. Photograph: BPI/REX Shutterstock @williamcson Thursday 9 July 2015
Growing up, my entire family used to sit around the television watching Serena Williams play tennis. We were always glued to the screen studying her every move with concern and dedication as if she was related to us. Any fictive kinship or close tie we felt to her was centered on her blackness in a sport we all played, but rarely saw ourselves represented in.
In a recent interview with the BBC, Williams reminisced about the significance Arthur Ashe, the first African American man to win Wimbledon and the US Open, held for her during her childhood. “Being African-American and when I was coming up in the late 80s, it wasn’t many African Americans playing, so it was like, you wanted to learn the history of all of them,” she said. “Reading stories about how Arthur wasn’t able to play when he was 12 motivated me because I thought, ‘Wow, because of what he went through, because of what he did I have an opportunity to play. I have an opportunity to be the best that I can be because of him.’ So because of him I’m going to try to be better for him.”
I felt the exact same about Williams as a kid. The experience of being a working class black kid in predominantly white country clubs playing tournaments and taking lessons was often awkward, to put it politely. It seemed as if I magnetically attracted the gaze of intrigued onlookers as the anomaly. The connection I felt to Serena and Venus Williams was racial, political, and economic. They are black like me, an identity that is, to me, both political as well as racial. They came from a working class background like I did. I was also “supposed” to be playing basketball (according to many people I encountered), but I liked tennis. And though some of my peers thought it was weird that the person to whom I related to most in my favorite sport was a black woman, I not only didn’t let go of my admiration for her achievements, I was forced to reconsider at an early age notions of traditional gender roles and racial expectations because of her.
I have been watching Williams compete again at Wimbledon yet again this year; she’s still regularly victorious and now she’s only two titles away from matching tennis legend Steffi Graf’s record of 22 grand slam titles. After winning the French Open last month, she may complete another “Serena Slam” – when you win all four major tennis titles in a season. Her focus and her determination consistently astonish audiences: Williams is good, she’s black, and she knows both of those things ... and the importance of her race on the court.
Her understanding of how race affects her professionally doesn’t just come from reading the histories of other African American players and the racism they endured, it also comes from her lived experience as a black woman in America. Williams has constantly had to confront racism throughout her career. Deplorable comments are hurled at her online, from officials and sometimes from sports commentators – every time she wins another match. Even her adversaries have resorted to racist stereotypes.
Despite the invective she must face to stay at the top, Williams continues to maintain professionalism and poise by often addressing the racism against her in a calm and assertive manner. Her actions to rise above the ignorance all but embodies “the talk” many black American children are given by concerned parents about being twice as good and not letting it – “it” being the racism you’ll inevitably encounter – get to you. While it’s not mandatory to react to ugliness with elegance, Williams exemplifies the art.
Serena Williams is crucial to black America because she provides an escape from what’s become the banality of racism through her performance of the fantastic; her exemplary skills are a sight for sore eyes during times of highly visible social inequality. Her black athletic exceptionalism reminds us of our survival and resilience; her black womanhood only underscores that she’s stronger and better than most – and keen to take what’s rightfully hers.
In this life, many of us should be open to what Serena’s playing has to offer us. Sometimes it’s best to win by serving up aces – don’t offer your opponent the chance to even engage. Whatever you do, don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re not good enough to be there. Come in, win and leave with your head held high.
Culture The Astonishing Greatness of Serena Williams
After winning her fourth consecutive Grand Slam title on Saturday at Wimbledon, the tennis star has become one of the most accomplished American athletes of all time.
Serena Williams of the U.S.A lifts the trophy after winning her Women's Final match against Garbine Muguruza of Spain at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, July 11, 2015. Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters
by Matt Schiavenza July 11, 2015 The Atlantic
No major sport—with the possible exception of gymnastics or swimming—worships youth like tennis. The best athletes in basketball, soccer, football, and baseball tend to reach their peak in their mid-20s, an age when experience, physical strength, and wisdom converge. But the arc of a typical professional tennis career tends to resemble that of a pop star: Ascendant at 17, dominant at 21, washed up and finished by 30.
Serena Williams, too, was a teenage tennis prodigy, a precocious girl following her older sister Venus from Compton, California, to the sport’s greatest stage. In 1999, the 17-year-old Williams won her first Grand Slam title, defeating Martina Hingis at the U.S. Open. More championships would soon follow, and before long Serena was mentioned in the same breath as the sport’s greats. King. Navratilova. Evert. Graf. Williams.
But Serena, unlike the others, has forgotten to go into decline. On Saturday, the 33-year-old Williams defeated Garbine Muguruza 6-4, 6-4 to win her sixth Wimbledon title, concluding her 28th consecutive victory in a Grand Slam match. To the casual fan, another Serena victory has the shock value of a Meryl Streep Oscar nomination. But it’s worth pausing, if just for a moment, to consider just how remarkable Williams’ career has been.
--The 16-year gap between Serena’s 1999 U.S. Open win and Saturday’s Wimbledon championship is the largest in women’s tennis history. Muguruza, her Spanish opponent on Saturday, was five years old when Serena won her first Grand Slam title. --Serena’s 21 Grand Slam victories is now the second most of all time since the Open Era began in 1968. Only Steffi Graf, the great German player who won 22 Slams in the 1980s and 1990s, has more. With four more titles, Serena would pass Margaret Smith Court with the most Grand Slam championships of all time, Open Era or not. --Serena is the current champion of each of the four Grand Slam events: the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open. Should she win her seventh U.S. Open this September, she’d become only the second player to win each of the four majors in the same calendar year. (Graf accomplished the feat in 1988.) --At 33 years and nine months, Serena became the oldest women’s tennis player to ever win a Grand Slam title, eclipsing Martina Navratilova, who won Wimbledon in 1990 when she was a month younger than Williams is now.
Even before Serena’s remarkable late-career surge, she was regarded as one of the best female tennis players ever to play. In the past year, however, she has transcended her sport and staked a claim as arguably the greatest American athlete of her era. Measuring dominance across different sports is an inexact science—how do you compare, for instance, a LeBron James to a Tiger Woods to a Serena Williams? But neither LeBron nor Tiger has yet matched Williams’ combination of dominance and longevity.
As she overcame some early jitters and dispatched Muguruza on Saturday, it became clear that Serena has not lost an ounce of poise, strength, agility, or skill despite her relatively advanced age. We aren’t just watching the greatest women’s tennis player of all time. We’re watching one whose greatest accomplishments, improbably, may be yet to come.
Wimbledon 2015: Serena Williams Defeats Garbiñe Muguruza and Closes In on Grand Slam
Saturday’s triumph on Centre Court gave Serena Williams a sixth Wimbledon singles title.Credit
Julian Finney/Getty Images
WIMBLEDON, England — Three years had passed since the Wimbledon champion’s trophy was last in her possession, so Serena Williams had some fun with it.
She
held it high on Centre Court with both strong arms (classic). She
balanced it on her head like a book in a 1950s charm school and walked
with it (unconventional). At one stage, she even playfully declined to
hand it back to a Wimbledon official (understandable).
“At
the beginning of the year, this is the one I really wanted to win,”
Williams said. “So that was the first thing and the main thing on my
mind.”
Winning
Wimbledon — which Williams has now done six times — is normally a
sufficient thrill on its own. And Saturday’s 6-4, 6-4 victory over
Garbiñe Muguruza of Spain, which made the 33-year-old Williams the
oldest Wimbledon singles champion of the Open era, was a remarkably
pleasant contrast to her dark and disorienting experience at the All
England Club a year ago.
In
2014, she lost in the third round in singles here and then stumbled
around the grass in a doubles match before retiring. She cited a virus,
yet was going through a difficult off-court period as well, according to
her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou.
But
Williams has proved nothing if not resilient during her increasingly
phenomenal career — coming back from major health scares, downward
tennis spirals, family troubles and tragedy, particularly the 2003
murder of her half sister Yetunde Price.
Williams’s
mental strength, at this stage, looks much more like a fact than a
subject of debate, and she will now need to test its limits again as she
chases the ultimate tennis achievement — the Grand Slam — at this
year’s United States Open.
“You
better ask all your questions about the Grand Slam, because it will be
banned soon,” she said, with a laugh, to a small group of reporters
shortly after her victory.
With
her victory at Wimbledon, Williams now holds all four Grand Slam
singles titles — the so-called Serena Slam, which she also achieved over
two seasons in 2002 and 2003.
But neither that run nor this one was the true Grand Slam, which requires a player to win the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the United States Open in the same calendar year.
Only three women have managed it: Maureen Connolly in 1953, Margaret Court in 1970 and Steffi Graf in 1988.
For
the first time since Graf, someone will arrive at Flushing Meadows with
the first three legs of the Grand Slam completed. Unlike Graf, a
German, Williams will be playing at home.
Muguruza, 21, was playing in her first Grand Slam final. She rallied in the second set but could not complete a comeback.Credit
Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
“It
would be really good to have this opportunity to go into New York being
American with that amazing New York crowd,” Williams said. “Hopefully,
people would be really cheering me on, to like push me over the edge and
give me that extra strength I need to go for this historic moment.”
At
this stage, history has become Williams’s major muse and only real
rival. She is now 39-1 this season, although she has had plenty of
anxious moments. The latest was her third-round match at Wimbledon, when
she was two points from defeat against Heather Watson, a fast and
unseeded British player with a clever game plan.
But
Williams righted herself and then defeated three former No. 1 players —
her sister Venus, Victoria Azarenka and Maria Sharapova — before
overcoming Muguruza, a tall and big-hitting 21-year-old appearing in her
first Grand Slam final who had upset Williams in the second round of
last year’s French Open.
Despite
the routine score line this time, victory did not come easily. Muguruza
displayed few signs of nerves and plenty of clarity of purpose in the
opening phase of the match and took a 4-2 lead in the first set before
Williams grabbed the momentum.
Williams
double-faulted three times in the opening game and lost her rhythm
again as she served for the title at 5-1 in the second set.
With
the Centre Court crowd strongly behind the underdog Muguruza, the
Spaniard managed to break Williams twice in a row, saving a match point
in the ninth game, and getting back on serve to 5-4.
But
the rally (and the rallies) would soon end there as Muguruza lost her
serve at love, missing a forehand wide on Williams’s second match point.
It
was unclear initially whether Muguruza planned to challenge the call,
but the ball had landed clearly out. No challenge came, and the chair
umpire Alison Hughes haltingly pronounced the words: “Game, set and
match, Miss Williams.”
“It
was hardly her best match of the tournament, but it was the match she
needed to win, and she did it,” said Mouratoglou, who has helped
Williams win eight of the past 13 major singles titles since joining her
team before Wimbledon in 2012.
As
for the Grand Slam, he said: “She’ll have stress at the U.S. Open. But
she showed again here that even when she had stress, she managed to
shake free and win. It’s one of her characteristics.”
Muguruza
handled the moment rather well herself on Saturday, attacking
Williams’s second serve effectively. But she has little margin for error
in her big game. Though her fighting spirit remained intact, the errors
eventually piled up, and like so many talented women before her, she
had few clever answers to Williams’s world-class power serving, even if
Williams has served much better. (She finished with eight double faults
and a 54 percent first-serve percentage.)
“In warm-up, my serve was off,” Williams said. “I just didn’t feel my serve today.”
But
she still hit enough spots and corners under great pressure to break
the family tie with Venus Williams, who has won five singles titles at
the All England Club. Venus watched from the players box on Saturday as
her sister held aloft the sterling silver platter known, by chance, as
the Venus Rosewater Dish.
There
are no plans to rename it the Venus and Serena Rosewater Dish, but the
Williamses have combined to win 11 of the past 16 titles here.
Serena Williams with the
Venus Rosewater Dish after defeating Garbiñe Muguruza, left. Williams,
33, has won eight of the last 13 major singles titles and the 2012
Olympic gold medal in singles.Credit
Julian Finney/Getty Images
Plenty
more tennis dignitaries were in the Royal Box on Saturday, including
Martina Navratilova, who was a younger 33 when she won the last of her
nine Wimbledon singles titles in 1990.
As
for Muguruza, she was gracious and teary in defeat, becoming
particularly emotional when she received an extended ovation at the
trophy ceremony.
“I wondered, ‘Have I made all these people feel what I felt on court?’ ” she said.
This
was Serena Williams’s 21st Grand Slam singles title, putting her just
one behind Graf, whose 22 are the best of the Open era, and three behind
Court, who won a total of 24.
Williams
won her first in 1999 at the United States Open, fighting her way
through a draw of her elders to create quite a surprise. But she has
endured like few athletes in any sport, although she has company in her
own sport with Roger Federer playing in Sunday’s men’s final at age 33
against Novak Djokovic.
“If I can do it, God knows he can do it,” Williams said.
But only Williams still has a chance at the ultimate tennis achievement this year: the Grand Slam.
“There’s a reason,” she said, “that it’s been 27 years since it’s been done.”
A version of this article appears in print on July 12, 2015, on page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: Setting Up a Grand Finale.
Serena continues dominance with sixth Wimbledon, 21st Slam title
July 11, 2015 by Jon Wertheim Sports Illustrated
LONDON – Three quick thoughts from the Wimbledon 2015 women’s singles final, where No. 1 Serena Williams defeated No. 20 Garbine Muguruza to win her sixth Wimbledon title and 21st Grand Slam title of her career.
A year ago, Serena Williams bowed out in the middle rounds of Wimbledon. It marked her third straight major loss and it triggered all sorts of speculation about her future. Since then? Calling Serena “dominant” fails to do justice to her achievements. It’s not simply that she has now won four straight majors encompassing 28 matches, including today’s final, a straightforward 6–4, 6–4 romp over Spain’s Garbine Muguruza. It’s how she’s earned the wins. On different surfaces and in different climates and on different continents. On days when she has dazzled and overwhelmed with her power; on days when she is far from her best and simply, defiantly won’t lose.
Tennis Serena Williams defeats Garbine Muguruza to win Wimbledon 2015' by SI.com Staff
Today there wasn’t suspense and, save a small hiccup at the end, we had little dramatic tension. Still, Serena showed why she is ruling the sport. She played with poise. She showed off her pace, but also her precision. There was defense to leaven the offense. When Muguruza reeled off three straight games to close to 5-4 in the second set, Serena smothered hope and closed it out. Want to know what's a time violation? Serena is almost 34 now, 16 years removed from winning her first major. And she is as good as ever.
Muguruza then gave us a glimpse of both her gifts and her make-up, winning three games before capitulating. She came here as a borderline top 20 player with promise. She leaves as a borderline top tenner destined for stardom, potentially greatness. But today, she became the 21st opponent to be Serena-ed in a major final.
• In early June, American Pharoah headed to the Belmont Stakes in Long Island, hoping to achieve the sport’s ultimate box set, the Triple Crown. Now we have Serena Williams heading to same area code to achieve tennis’ ultimate quest. Seeking to insulate herself from additional pressure, Serena refused to answer questions about the Serena Slam this week. We can also imagine the hype and attention that will precede her coming to New York. http://www.thedailybeast.com/…/serena-williams-and-the-fear…
UNMATCHED
Serena Williams and the Fear of a Dominant Black Woman
by Tomas Rios July 10, 2015 The Daily Beast
Serena Williams is shattering every record in tennis this year. Why isn’t she being paid like the women she is dominating in the process?
Serena Williams is on the cusp of cementing herself as the best, most dominant athlete of her generation, regardless of gender. At the age of 33—ancient by the norms of tennis’s attritive nature—Williams is by far the top-ranked player on the WTA tour and bested 20th ranked Garbine Muguruza in straight sets to claim the 2015 Wimbledon title.
That means she now holds all the Grand Slam titles in tennis and will enter the 2015 U.S. Open with a chance to complete both a calendar year Grand Slam and tie Steffi Graf’s record of 22 Grand Slam titles in the open era.
It’s an awe-inspiring accomplishment in the making, but one that will do little, if anything, to change the fact that Serena Williams’s legacy will be decided in the context of a society that has institutionally oppressed black women. This institutional oppression manifests itself across a broad spectrum of data.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that black women earn $100 less per week than white women. Black women have a median wealth of $100 compared to a median wealth of $45,400 for white women, according to the Center for Global Policy Solutions. A study by the Sentencing Project finds that black women have a 1 in 19 lifetime likelihood of imprisonment, while the same measure stands at 1 in 118 for white women. There’s even a gap in life expectancy between black and white women. The data we have all points to the conclusion that black women are institutionally oppressed and disadvantaged.
And one would need only to glance at the history of bankrupt accusations and bullshit levied against Williams for proof of how that oppression and its associated stereotypes play out in media. There was the time tennis great Chris Evert wrote an open letter to a then-24-year-old Williams chiding her for a supposed lack of commitment while Williams was battling through injuries.
“Despite quintupling Sharapova’s prize money and holding an 18-2 career record against her—including 17 consecutive wins head-to-head—Williams makes half of what her pseudo-rival manages in endorsements.”
There was also the time another tennis great, John McEnroe, baselessly accused Williams of allowing her father, Richard Williams, to fix matches between her and her sister, Venus.
Then there was the time Jason Whitlock (who is black, himself) wrote of his sexual attraction to Williams while comparing her to various animals, equating her to Paris Hilton, and repeatedly implying she was eating too much to ever topple the Grand Slam record she might tie this weekend. Whitlock was also one of many who criticized Williams for busting out a crip walk after winning Olympic gold, the underlying accusation being that Williams had somehow disrespected a hallowed institution by performing a brief celebratory dance.
There are plenty of other examples to cite, but you get the point: The mainstream depiction of Williams often hinges on depicting her as amoral, lazy, disrespectful, and animalistic.
Clearly, this isn’t just another case of a big-name athlete making for an easy target. No, because Serena Williams is a wildly successful black woman in a white-dominated sport, she occupies a fraught space both within the sport itself and the society actively informing our perceptions.
“American racist tropes tend to be constructed in ways that render black women one-dimensional,” says Mikki Kendall, a writer and cofounder of HoodFeminism.com. “So when Serena refuses to be the kindly self-effacing Mammy, the over-sexed Jezebel, or the harridan Sapphire, media organizations don’t know how to handle her. She is beautiful, strong, successful, and presents a model of femininity that is very familiar to black American communities, even if it is the antithesis of white expectations.”
The idea that Williams transgresses against feminine beauty norms, particularly within the context of tennis, is readily proven. After all, the common mental image of a women’s tennis player is white and lithe, in perfect harmony with Western ideals of feminine beauty, while Williams is black and built like a powerlifter. She is an unprecedented affront to our collective notion of the beautiful female athlete.
The cost of this transgression can be seen in Whitlock’s creepy sexualization and demonization of Williams’s body, a self-contradictory tactic that betrays a deep discomfort with Williams’s expression of femininity. Another more readily measured cost can be seen in the fact that Maria Sharapova—the 4th-ranked player in the world—is the highest paid athlete not just in all of women’s tennis, but in all of women’s sports. Naturally, Sharapova is tall, blond, and slender, a paean to the Western beauty ideals that net her endless endorsement opportunities regardless of her on-court performance.
Meanwhile, despite quintupling Sharapova’s prize money and holding an 18-2 career record against her—including 17 consecutive wins head-to-head—Williams makes half of what her pseudo-rival manages in endorsements. The racist notions of feminine beauty playing out here are as subtle as a forehand to the throat.
Further, because Williams’s body is itself so unfamiliar in a mainstream Western context, there is the sense that, like so many other black athletes, she has been gifted an unfair genetic advantage. This serves to obfuscate the fact that all elite athletes have some natural advantage of some sort while also minimizing the sacrifice and dedication it takes to become an elite athlete regardless of natural advantage.
In Williams’s case, not even her life story—one that aligns perfectly with the narrative of the American dream and has seen her represent the U.S. on some of sports’ most mythic stages—grants her the humanity she is so routinely denied.
“It’s weird, here you have Serena who won an Olympic gold medal representing the U.S. and has this rags-to-riches story, but it hasn’t helped her in the way it has helped prior black female athletes,” says Lou Moore, a history professor at Grand Valley State University who specializes in U.S., African-American, and sports history.
“Especially in the post-Civil Rights era, black female athletes representing the U.S. have been held up as examples of our progress,” he says. “But in Serena’s case, dominating a traditionally white, middle-class sport hits on American racism and sexism in such a way that it overrides the usual narrative.”
In that sense, it’s surprising that Williams’s story of picking up a tennis racquet in Compton and ending up the greatest women’s tennis player of all time hasn’t been turned into a homily on Americana.
“If Serena were smaller, lighter, and less connected to her roots she would probably be more popular,” says Kendall. “But racism means that many Americans look at her refusal to be ashamed of coming from the inner city, her rejection of European beauty aesthetics, and her spectacular record and see a negro that doesn’t know her place.”
In the strictest sense, Williams indeed does not know her place. She is a black woman dominating a white sport and that triggers the fear essential to the efficacy of racism and sexism. It is no secret that white men have owned most every sector of Western society for centuries now, and any progress made on that front has come with, at minimum, the overt vilification of those leading the fight.
And while Williams’s career will always be inextricably linked to the racism and sexism weaponized against her, there is a comforting fact at the core of this discussion: Serena Williams has already won. She has the trophies to prove it.
Serena Williams beats Maria Sharapova to reach Wimbledon final By AP July 9, 2015 Serena Williams beats Maria Sharapova to reach Wimbledon final
LONDON: Serena Williams is just one win away from another Grand Slam milestone.
The
top-ranked Williams maintained her 11-year dominance over Maria
Sharapova, beating the Russian 6-2, 6-4 on Thursday to reach her eighth
Wimbledon championship match and 25th career Grand Slam final.
In
beating Sharapova for the 17th straight time, the five-time Wimbledon
champion won her 26th consecutive Grand Slam match and is now going for a
fourth straight major title -- a "Serena Slam'' - ..
...Actually as the Serena vs. Sharapova financial meme so brazenly demonstrates, contrary to the traditional African American proverb that one has to be "twice as good to get half as much" the truth is one clearly has to be FIVE TIMES AS GOOD to get half as much. Thus the hallowed racist myth that the treatment of black workers generally (which indeed includes professional athletes) is based in and strictly predicated on the sacred principle of MERIT alone is once again exposed for all the world to see as the huge self serving LIE that it is and always was...Stay tuned...
Serena Williams Beat Maria Sharapova For The 17th Straight Time. But Serena Still Makes Less Money.
by Judd Legum July 9, 2015 Think Progress
Serena Williams crushed Maria Sharapova in the semi-finals of Wimbledon on Thursday. The 6-2, 6-4 thrashing was Williams the seventeenth straight victory over Sharapova.
It has been 11 years since Sharapova last beat Williams. Since that time, Williams has won an incredible 14 Grand Slam titles. Williams has won 20 overall, nearing the all-time record of 24 set by Margaret Court in 1974.
Sharapova has 5 Grand Slam titles. She has lost to Serena in a Grand Slam final three times.
Of late, Williams has been particularly dominant. If she is victorious in the Wimbledon final it will be her fourth straight Grand Slam victory. (The accomplishment is known as the “Serena Slam” since she achieved the feat in 2003.)
But it is Sharapova, not Williams, who makes the most money. In 2014, she was listed as Forbes highest paid athlete, earning $24.4 million. Serena earned $22 million.
The differences is endorsements. Sharapova earned $22 million in endorsements along and just $2.4 million in prize money. Williams, dominant on the court, took home $11 million in prize money but just $11 million in endorsements.
Serena Williams is the most dominant female athlete of our era and perhaps any era. So why isn’t she earning more in endorsements?
Kevin Adler, a marketing expert, suggested there is a double standard for male and female athletes. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a popular male athlete who doesn’t also have physicality and sex appeal. But that comes second to winning for guys, whereas for female athletes, looks come first,” Adler told Women’s Wear Daily in 2013.
This isn’t to suggest that Serena Williams is not attractive. But perceptions of her body are frequently overlaid with racist stereotypes. Sharapova, by contrast, is blond, thin, leggy and has worked as a model. In the eyes of corporate marketers, that is apparently valued more than on-court performance.
Serena Williams Vs. Maria Sharapova: By The Numbers by Kurt Badenhausen Forbes Staff
The two biggest stars in women’s tennis face off Thursday in the semifinals of Wimbledon with a berth in Saturday’s final on the line. Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova meet for the 20th time in their careers in what has been a one-sided rivalry with Williams winning 16 straight times. Sharapova beat Williams twice in 2004, including her breakthrough win as a 17-year-old in the Wimbledon finals, but Williams has treated Sharapova as her personal punching bag ever since. Williams enters the match on a huge roll with only one loss in 33 matches in 2015. As the world’s No. 1-ranked player, she has 64% more rankings points than the No. 2 player, Petra Kvitova.
Williams and Sharapova shake hands after their latest match in the women’s singles final at the 2015 Australian Open. (Photo: MAL FAIRCLOUGH/AFP/Getty Images) Williams has established herself as arguably the most dominant player in the history of women’s tennis during her two-decade career. But for all of her brilliance, she has looked up to Sharapova when it comes to endorsement earnings since Sharapova was dubbed the “It” girl after her 2004 Wimbledon victory. Much has been made of the disparity, and Sharapova’s 10-year run atop the world’s highest-paid female athletes. Race, corporate bias, likability and beauty are all part of the discussion in why Sharapova earns almost twice as much as Serena from endorsements and appearances, despite only one-quarter the singles Grand Slam wins.
One big winner of the match already is Nike NKE +0.16%. The $30 billion-in-revenue sports giant has had both women under contract for more than a decade.
Here are some of the numbers that define the two stars. 1: Williams has been the No. 1 player in the world for 247 weeks during her career, which ranks fourth all-time. Her current 124-week run is the third longest in women’s tennis. Sharapova has held the top spot for 21 weeks in her career.
4: Sharapova’s current world ranking.
5: Career Grand Slam titles for Sharapova. Her 2012 French Open win made her just the 10th women to win all four major tournaments during her career. The win triggered lucrative bonuses from sponsors Nike and Head.
13: Straight years with a singles title for Sharapova, which is the fourth-longest streak in the history of women’s tennis.
17-2: Serena holds a decisive edge in their head-to-head matchups.
20: Grand Slam titles for Williams, which is four behind Margaret Court’s record.
31: In 2013, a then 31-year-old Williams became the oldest top-ranked female tennis player ever. Now 33, Williams is five years older than Sharapova.
35: Career titles for Sharapova. Williams has 67.
85.5%: Career winning percentage for Williams vs. 80.6% for Sharapova.
3 million: Bags of candy sold by Sharapova’s line of candy, Sugarpova. She launched the brand in 2012 and sales doubled in the most recent fiscal year.
$24.6 million: Williams’s earnings between June 2014 and June 2015, including $13 million off the court from appearances and partners Nike, Wilson, PepsiCo PEP -1.07%, Chase and Audemars Piguet. She ranked No. 47 on Forbes list of the world’s highest-paid athletes.
$29.7 million: Sharapova’s earnings between June 2014 and June 2015, including $23 million off the court from appearances and sponsors Nike, Head, Samsung Electronics, Evian and Tag Heuer. She ranked No. 26 among the highest-paid athletes.
$69.7 million: Career prize money for Williams, which is double Sharapova who ranks second all-time.
$1.3 billion: Value of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, which Williams owns a small sliver of.
Tennis 10 Serena Williams Wimbledon Facts by Susie Arth June 25, 2015 espnW.com
We've got 10 facts to help you get your mind around everything Serena WIlliams has accomplished in her storied career at Wimbledon. 1. It's a first!
This year marks the first time Serena Williams has come into Wimbledon as the defending champion of the Australian Open and French Open. In 2002, Williams won the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open after an injury forced her to miss the Australian Open. She went on to complete the Serena Slam at the 2003 Australian Open.
2. Cashing in Serena Williams has won $8,275,252 in her singles career at Wimbledon. Five of her 20 major singles titles have come at the All England Club.
3. All-around winner
In addition to her five singles title at Wimbledon, Serena Williams also has won five doubles titles (all with sister Venus) and one mixed doubles title (with Max Mirnyi).
4. Playing the percentages
Serena Williams' winning percentage at Wimbledon is .878. Her best winning percentage at a major is at the US Open, .898. Next is Australia at .883. The French is last at .830. Venus Williams Karim Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images Venus Williams is the only player on the planet to have more than one win over Serena Williams at Wimbledon. 5. Sister, sister
Serena Williams has lost 10 singles matches in her career at Wimbledon. Only one player has two wins over Serena at Wimbledon, sister Venus in the 2000 semifinals and in the 2008 final.
6. Upset special?
Of Serena Williams' 10 singles losses at Wimbledon, two have come against unseeded players (Jill Craybas and Virginia Ruano Pascual) and two against players seeded in the 20s (Alize Cornet and Sabine Lisicki). Serena has fallen to an American opponent four times (Venus twice and Craybas and Jennifer Capriati once), the most of any country. France is second with two (Cornet and Marion Bartoli).
7. Justice served
Serena Williams holds the record for most aces in a single Wimbledon. In fact, she's held it a few times. In 2008, she served 57 to tie Alexandra Stevenson. In 2010, she had 89 en route to the title to stand alone. In 2012, she served 102 to break her own record and once again won the title.
8. Looking out for No. 1
This will be the sixth time that Serena Williams is the No. 1 seed at Wimbledon. She has won the title as a No. 1 seed twice before, in 2003 and 2010. Her overall singles record as the top seed is 25-3.
9. Trophy time
With another championship, Serena Williams would tie Blanche Bingley, Billie Jean King and Suzanne Lenglen with six Wimbledon singles titles. Martina Navratilova has won the most with nine. Helen Wills Moody won eight, and Steffi Graf and Dorothea Lambert Chambers won seven. As for the men, only seven-time champions Roger Federer, Pete Sampras and William Renshaw have more than Serena.
10. Setting it up Serena Williams lost five sets on her way to the French Open title earlier this month. In her five runs to the Wimbledon title, she has dropped a combined seven sets. Twice, in 2002 and 2010, she has won the Venus Rosewater Dish without dropping a single set.
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Serena Williams (Credit: Reuters/Daniel Munoz)
Serena Williams (Credit: Reuters/Daniel Munoz)
