Claudia Rankine On White Supremacy, Serena Williams, and the Ongoing Struggle Of African Americans For Social Justice, Cultural Independence, and Political Freedom in the United States

http://www.vulture.com/…/claudia-rankine-serena-indian-well…

Claudia Rankine: Serena, Indian Wells, and Race
By Boris Kachka
March 18, 2015

Vulture

Claudia Rankine arrives at the 46th NAACP Image Awards in Pasadena, California. Serena Williams of USA celebrates defeating Sloane Stephens of USA during day nine of the BNP Paribas Open tennis at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden on March 17, 2015 in Indian Wells, California. Photo: JONATHAN ALCORN/Reuters/Corbis and Julian Finney/Getty Images

"You want history to be forced to adjust itself in terms of the past." 

Last week was an eventful one for the writer Claudia Rankine. On Thursday her book Citizen, a shape-shifting treatise on American racism, won a National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, having also been nominated as criticism. The following day, one of her book’s key subjects, Serena Williams, returned to Indian Wells, California, for a tournament she’d boycotted for 13 years. Serena had been booed for the entirety of her championship match there in 2001. Fans suspected that her father and coach, Richard, had engineered her sister Venus’s withdrawal from the tournament, but the Williams family reported hearing racial epithets and vowed never to return. This February, following a decade and a half of Grand Slam victories and minor controversies, Serena announced a change of heart. After an emotional first match on Friday to roaring applause, she advanced yesterday to the quarterfinals. Rankine has only caught highlights between cross-country book-tour stops, but she did find time to talk to us about the latest twist in the life of a champion for whom, as she wrote, “every look, every comment, every bad call blossoms out of history, through her, onto you.”

How did you feel about Serena breaking the boycott?

I think it’s fantastic. In her statement to Time announcing it, she said an incredible thing, and I wrote it down: “Thirteen years and a lifetime in tennis later, things feel different. A few months ago, when Russian official Shamil Tarpischev made racist and sexist remarks about Venus and me, the WTA and the USTA immediately condemned him. It reminded me how far the sport has come, and how far I’ve come too.” In essence, what she said was, for the first time, an institution stood behind me. When Tarpischev referred to the Williams sisters as “the Williams brothers” and the USTA fined him $25,000 and put him on a year’s suspension, that made all the difference. Because you can’t legislate crazy or racist, but if the rest of us stand around and let it happen, that’s when you feel like you’re totally on the outside.

Reading in Citizen that the electronic line-call system was installed partly because of a series of bad calls against Serena in 2004, I couldn’t help thinking about body cameras on cops. Both are technological remedies not only for human error but blatant bias.

Vigilance is great, but we can never have a camera at every angle. So the Darren Wilsons will exist. They will kill random black men no matter what happens. But what throws black people out of the American citizenry is when it goes to the courts and no indictments come. That’s the real problem. You can have institutions that will arrive immediately and legislate against that.

So how do you feel about the Justice Department report on Ferguson?

I think that Eric Holder showed up in this instance. And I don’t remember what school it was, but the fraternity with that song — immediately that was shut down, and that’s all that you want: a kind of communal recognition that that is not acceptable. Not that you can stop it from happening. I mean, when Richard Williams was accused of match-fixing, that is not far off from why black men are being killed. It was the immediate assumption that he’s a criminal.

He and Venus are still not coming to Indian Wells. If Serena’s making the right call in 2015, what about them?

It’s not a question of right or wrong. It’s a question of comfort level. Serena feels okay, and clearly she herself was very nervous in that first match, yeah? I mean, it was a tough match for her. The trust that Serena has based on what happened with the Russian official is something personal to her. But I don’t think you can underestimate the wound and the personal disappointment one has, because these incidents are not singular. They accumulate in the body, and you’re negotiating them all the time.

So you buy that the fining of the Russian official was the main reason Serena came back?

She did say last year she was considering it, so clearly, it’s not the only reason. But it’s never a single thing. She’s at a point in her career where she’s clearly understanding herself now as a legend. I think she is seeing herself almost as a stateswoman for the game.

The chairman of the tournament recently told the Times that Serena’s was a way of “deleting” that “terrible day” of the 2001 final from the tournament. Is that even possible?

There’s no wiping the slate clean, it’s always part of the story. The fact that the story has taken this other turn is fantastic. Serena said something like she’s glad that she can create new memories, and I think she felt overwhelmingly moved by the response of the crowd and the fans. We could see that in her tears.

Some people have attributed Serena’s polarizing moments to her family’s cliquishness, or perhaps to sexism. Is it definitely all about race, do you think?

I think so. Look, we’ve had the opportunity to watch how the president has been received. And just recently, the letter that went out behind his back — what is that?

Well, it doesn’t seem to have gone well for the Republicans.

Exactly, but still, just the sense that this is a possibility, an appropriate response. So, no. Sexism is rampant, but I think that the black body in the white imagination is still equated with bestiality, criminality, on some level. It’s one of those things that can’t seem to untangle itself.

And yet a black man is president, and a black woman is the best tennis player in the world.

Well, that’s why I think it’s fantastic that Serena’s gone back. You don’t want to stand still, you want things to keep moving. You want history to be forced to adjust itself in terms of the past. But it doesn’t mean that dynamics from the past are gone just because we have a new kind of fluidity and openness in certain areas.

How did Serena become a dominant topic in Citizen? There’s obviously a lot more going o in this country when it comes to racism.

Well, I was really interested in Tiger Woods when he arrived on the scene. My husband was a big golf fan, and he would watch and I would be in the other room listening to the commentators. The ways in which he was always being accused of breaking the rules made me begin to watch when it was on, and that somehow led me to watching Serena and Venus. Then I started playing tennis myself.

You also have a chapter on Zinedine Zidane, the Algerian-French soccer player who head-butted an opponent in a World Cup final after being taunted with racial slurs. Why do sports interest you so much as a cultural barometer?

It’s documented. You have both commentary and action simultaneously and instantaneously. So it’s not just about watching what’s happening, you’re also hearing how it’s being interpreted at the moment that it’s happening. And so part of the fascination for me as someone who teaches and reads cultural theory is, you’re not only interested in what the athlete is doing, you’re interested in the ways the commentators contextualize what is happening. And then you have your own interpretation as well.

Citizen puts Serena Williams’s struggles with judges and fans on a continuum from the insensitive comments you and your friends have heard to the killing of African-Americans by cops and vigilantes. Why was it important to unify all of these experiences in one short book?

I wanted to create a narrative that showed that these microaggressions reveal a kind of positioning that allows people then to arrive on juries, and to arrive in the Senate, and to arrive in police cars, or in New Orleans organizing evacuations; that that positioning of the white imagination is inside all people. That’s how we get to those bigger moments. We’re not in the world of self-declared white supremacists. We’re in the world of regular Americans who hold those premises or beliefs unconsciously.

What’s the remedy for that?

I think consciousness is a big step, and it shouldn’t be underestimated.

Beyond Sports: The Fearless Commitment of Serena and Venus Williams To the Struggle for Justice, Equality, and Self Determination Both On and Off the Court

All,

I have been saying loudly for nearly 20 years to any who would listen that Venus and Serena Williams were by far the most impressive and socially/culturally significant of sports figures of their generation generally both globally and particularly in the United States--on and off the court--and that they were especially the most important and socially/culturally significant of African American athletes in all sports of their generation by a very wide margin.  I am very proud to say I have never wavered from that deep and abiding conviction and the article below just proves once again exactly why I love, respect, and honor them as much as I do.  Serena is truly a CHAMPION in the very best sense of the term whose massive achievements and astonishing contributions as the best damn individual athlete of the 21st century is only eclipsed by her mature and even broader social awareness and consciousness of her role off the playing field.  As usual Serena and her big sister Venus make me PROUD to be an African American human being and a fervent fan of the grace, intelligence, courage, and power that they bring to both the game of tennis and to life itself…Continue to kick ass and take names...

Kofi 

http://m.thenation.com/blog/197297-serena-williams-indian-wells-and-rewriting-future

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366

Serena Williams, Indian Wells and Rewriting the Future

by Dave Zirin
February 6, 2015
The Nation

            Serena Williams (Reuters/Philippe Wojazer)

"Serena and her big sister Venus brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston's ‘I feel most colored when I am thrown against a white background.'… Serena and Venus win sometimes, they lose sometimes, they've been booed and cheered, and through it all and evident to all were those people who are enraged they are there at all—graphite against a sharp white background."

—Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

Tennis icon Serena Williams and her older sister Venus have spent their careers not only surviving but thriving in a hostile space: a white background that often threatened to swallow them whole. As Serena's individual legend flourished, so did her antagonists in the aristocratic, imperious world of professional tennis. Biased judges, grotesque mockeries and other indignities ("crip walk"?) pock her career. While accumulating scars and enduring the burden imposed by the "white background," the girl known for years as "Venus's little sister" has also— remarkably—made herself into perhaps the greatest player to ever pick up a racket. The numbers speak for themselves: nineteen Grand Slam wins, sixty-six singles titles, along with twenty-two doubles championships, and all done with wicked flair in dazzling technicolor.

Now Serena Williams, for all she has accomplished, is attempting to enter a club even more restricted than those that host certain events on the WTA tour. It is reserved for the few defined by history as being "more than just an athlete." Ms. Williams has announced both in a video message and the pages of Time magazine that she will be returning to play at the Indian Wells Tournament after a fourteen-year absence. Serena and Venus have famously boycotted Indian Wells since 2001 when "racist slurs" and "false allegations" of match fixing were levied against the Williams family. As she recounted in Time, their father, Richard, had "dedicated his whole life to prepping us for this incredible journey, and there he had to sit and watch his daughter being taunted, sparking cold memories of his experiences growing up in the South."

Serena Williams' has decided, after years of apologies and invitations from the new directors at Indian Wells, to "forgive freely," "follow [her] heart" and return to place she describes as "nightmare," a place where at the age of 19 she spent "hours crying in the Indian Wells locker room after winning in 2001…feeling as if I had lost the biggest game ever—not a mere tennis game but a bigger fight for equality."

In an effort to grasp the momentousness of all of this, I asked Georgetown professor and author Michael Eric Dyson for his thoughts. He said:

"Serena's decision to return to Indian Wells suggests the majestic arc of forgiveness in black life that has helped to redeem America. Without such forgiveness, America may have well flowed in the blood of recrimination and revenge. Instead black folk have consistently proved to be moral pillars of American conscience, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Sybrina Fulton, black athletes in particular have carried the water of grievance for black life, sometimes against their wills, and have represented the heartbeat of black resistance to racism. Serena's—and her family's—painful experiences at Indian Wells was a low moment in American sports history. She was right to remain visibly absent. She let her lack of presence do the speaking—a protest of strategic absence. Her decision to return is equally effective. She has decided that Indian Wells will no longer be an individual sore spot, and therefore no longer a collective one for her or her fans or the black Americans who love and support her. As the most dominant athlete of her generation, Serena carries huge symbolic capital. This gesture of principled forgiveness once again proves that black athletes at their best have been thermostats who changed the temperature of society rather than thermometers that merely recorded the temperature."

What is particularly stunning about this return to Indian Wells is that Williams is not only writing a narrative of her own racial reconciliation but also linking it to a broader anti-racist struggle that touches millions of lives. 

She has announced that fans could enter a raffle for ten dollars, the winner getting to "stand with me at Indian Wells." All raffle proceeds are going to the Equal Justice Initiative, which fights racism and class bias in the jails and courts by providing legal representation to those lost in the catacombs of the Prison Industrial Complex. This is an organization dedicated to ending our system of deeply racialized mass incarceration, and Serena Williams is leveraging the "white background," that corporatized, country club world of pro tennis, to assist them in their fight.

I contacted Andrew Jones, a reporter at The Intercept and a freelance sportswriter who perhaps knows more about tennis than anyone under 30 in the United States. He e-mailed me about the joyous "shock" he felt upon learning that Serena was using this moment to promote the work of EJI. "No one expected her to do that," he wrote. "No one. It was quite the rare sight seeing a notable figure, celebrity or celebrity athlete, highlight a criminal justice organization. That was so unexpected and it added even more awesomeness to her returning to Indian Wells. Her going back to the tournament was one thing. But her support for a criminal justice law firm located in the Deep Southern town of Montgomery, with its racist past and systematic racist present, was staggeringly tremendous."

He is absolutely right. Sportswriter Jessica Luther put it this way: "Serena is literally using her return to the most racist incident in her career to raise money for an organization that actively works to dismantle the systemic racism that plagues the criminal justice system. Serena is inspiring. She's inspiring on the court, no doubt. But she and her sister have inspired me for many, many years now. This is a good example of why."
 
Jon Wertheim, editor and senior writer for Sports Illustrated said to me that he believes, "as trite as it sounds, it's a proud day for tennis. All credit to Serena for having the strength to take a principled stand for all these years; and then the intellectual and emotional flexibility to soften and reverse that stance. I credit the tournament, too, for reaching out repeatedly and making it clear that—while respectful of Serena's decision throughout the years—she would be welcomed back. I can't imagine she receiving anything other than a warm reception next month."

Wertheim is certainly correct that the people at Indian Wells, not to mention the Women's Tennis Association, will breathe a sigh of relief over her return. At this point in her career, the WTA needs Serena Williams more than Serena Williams needs the WTA. As she wrote, "I'm still as driven as ever, but the ride is a little easier. I play for the love of the game. And it is with that love in mind, and a new understanding of the true meaning of forgiveness, that I will proudly return to Indian Wells in 2015."

The background to Serena Williams is still sharply white. But she is showcasing a power to sculpt that background into an alabaster marble platform. She is changing tennis, choosing to rewrite its future instead of being victimized by its past. Nineteen career Grand Slam wins, sixty-six singles championships, twenty-two doubles championships. And utterly fearless.


http://time.com/3694659/serena-williams-indian-wells/

 
Sports tennis

Serena Williams: I’m Going Back to Indian Wells

• Serena Williams @serenawilliams

February 4, 2015

TIME 

Hannah Peters—Getty Images Serena Williams holds the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup after winning the women's final match against Maria Sharapova at the Australian Open on Jan. 31, 2015 in Melbourne, Australia.

The tennis star writes exclusively in TIME about her decision to return to a tournament that has haunted her

We were outsiders.

It was March 2001, and I was a 19-year-old focused on winning and being the best I could be, both for me and for the kids who looked up to me. I had spent tens of thousands of hours—most of my ­adolescence—­serving, running, practicing, training day in and day out in pursuit of a dream. And it had started to become a reality. As a black tennis player, I looked different. I sounded different. I dressed differently. I served differently. But when I stepped onto the court, I could compete with anyone.

The tournament in Indian Wells, Calif., held a special place in my heart. I won my first pro match there in 1997, alongside my sister in doubles. I then sat and watched Venus qualify for the singles event and make a magical run all the way to the quarterfinals. It was a giant win not only for her but also for our whole family, and it marked the beginning of a new era that we were unknowingly writing. My first big tournament win also happened there, when I beat Steffi Graf in the ’99 final.

VIDEO: Serena Williams describes her decision to play again at Indian Wells

When I arrived at Indian Wells in 2001, I was looking to take another title. I was ready. But however ready I was, nothing could have prepared me for what happened in the final. As I walked out onto the court, the crowd immediately started jeering and booing. In my last match, the semifinals, I was set to play my sister, but Venus had tendinitis and had to pull out. Apparently that angered many fans. Throughout my whole career, integrity has been everything to me. It is also everything and more to Venus. The false allegations that our matches were fixed hurt, cut and ripped into us deeply. The under­current of racism was painful, confusing and unfair. In a game I loved with all my heart, at one of my most cherished tournaments, I suddenly felt unwelcome, alone and afraid.

For all their practice, preparation and confidence, even the best competitors in every sport have a voice of doubt inside them that says they are not good enough. I am lucky that whatever fear I have inside me, my desire to win is always stronger.

When I was booed at Indian Wells—by what seemed like the whole world—my voice of doubt became real. I didn’t understand what was going on in that moment. But worse, I had no desire to even win. It happened very quickly.

This haunted me for a long time. It haunted Venus and our family as well. But most of all, it angered and saddened my father. He dedicated his whole life to prepping us for this incredible journey, and there he had to sit and watch his daughter being taunted, sparking cold memories of his experiences growing up in the South.

Thirteen years and a lifetime in tennis later, things feel different. A few months ago, when Russian official Shamil Tarpischev made racist and sexist remarks about Venus and me, the WTA and USTA immediately condemned him. It reminded me how far the sport has come, and how far I’ve come too.

I have thought about going back to Indian Wells many times over my career. I said a few times that I would never play there again. And believe me, I meant it. I admit it scared me. What if I walked onto the court and the entire crowd booed me? The nightmare would start all over.

It has been difficult for me to forget spending hours crying in the Indian Wells locker room after winning in 2001, driving back to Los Angeles feeling as if I had lost the biggest game ever—not a mere tennis game but a bigger fight for equality. Emotionally it seemed easier to stay away. There are some who say I should never go back. There are others who say I should’ve returned years ago. I understand both perspectives very well and wrestled with them for a long time. I’m just following my heart on this one.

I’m fortunate to be at a point in my career where I have nothing to prove. I’m still as driven as ever, but the ride is a little easier. I play for the love of the game. And it is with that love in mind, and a new understanding of the true meaning of forgiveness, that I will proudly return to Indian Wells in 2015.

I was raised by my mom to love and forgive freely. “When you stand praying, forgive whatever you have against anyone, so that your Father who is in the heavens may also forgive you” (Mark 11:25). I have faith that fans at Indian Wells have grown with the game and know me better than they did in 2001.

Indian Wells was a pivotal moment of my story, and I am a part of the tournament’s story as well. Together we have a chance to write a different ­ending.