Hey everyone, as you can tell from the title, today we’re talking about Serena Williams
and the recent controversy surrounding her tennis match at the US Open final.
I’m sure a lot of you don’t watch tennis or particularly care about sports, but I promise
you this has implications that go way beyond tennis.
The shit that Serena Williams had to deal with is a brand of combined racism and sexism
often known as misogynoir, and it’s something that Black women everywhere have to deal with every day.
So, let’s go over what happened.
Serena Williams was playing Naomi Osaka, and the umpire was Carlos Ramos.
Serena’s coach made a hand signal towards her, so Ramos gave her a point violation.
She later broke a racket, which was another point violation.
Then she yelled at Ramos, which was a third point violation, so Ramos gave her a game violation.
Basically, in tennis they play multiple games and she automatically lost one because of that.
The problem here is that the umpire was treating Serena in a way he never would’ve treated
a man or a white woman.
Tons of tennis fans and former players have pointed out that a man probably wouldn’t
have received a point violation for the coach making a hand signal.
Serena didn’t make the hand signal.
Her coach did.
But she was penalized for it and on top of that, the umpire accused her of cheating.
So she understandably got angry, because she wasn’t cheating and she knew she wasn’t
cheating, and yet this umpire was calling into question her character and integrity.
And then she was penalized for breaking a racket and yelling at the umpire, both things
that men and white women regularly do without receiving point violations.
There’s a really strong argument to be made that had she been a man or a white women,
the umpire would not have given her a game penalty.
In fact, here’s a video of men losing their shit at umpires.
I’m just going to leave that over here in the corner to play while we keep talking.
Former pro tennis player James Blake came to Serena’s defense, saying that he’s
said much worse to umpires and not been penalized for it.
One person on Twitter compiled a list of times that Ramos, the umpire, didn’t penalize
men and white women for yelling at him.
They found 11 examples of it.
I mean, look at all of this.
How much more evidence do you need that Serena was treated unfairly?
The thing I keep seeing in every comments section about this stuff is people saying,
“Well, she broke the rules, so she paid the consequences.”
But that completely ignores the fact that these calls are discretionary -- that means
they’re not applied evenly to all players; the umpire can decide to just issue a warning
without penalizing the player if they want.
And men and white women are far more likely to just be given warnings without any kind
of penalization, while Serena is immediately penalized because she is a Black woman.
If everyone was held to the same standard, you could maybe try and make the argument
that what happened to her was fair, but the fact is that people are held to vastly different
standards based on both their race and their gender.
And in Serena’s case, she faces discrimination on both fronts.
But I think it’s also important to remember that Serena’s anger wasn't out of nowhere.
She’s been dealing with misogynoir throughout her entire career.
That anger must have been building for years -- it wasn’t just about this call.
Her whole life she’s faced discrimination because she’s a Black woman, and I can’t
imagine how frustrating it must be to go through that for so long and to still have such bullshit
happening in the US Open final.
We only see the anger in that moment, but we don’t see all the shit that’s happened
to her over the years that led up to it.
I think her anger was completely justified.
I’ve seen so many people online, especially white people, who are just happy to file her
under the “angry Black woman trope” and move on.
But if you’re not a Black woman, you don’t understand what she’s had to go through.
Like, I’m white, I can’t fully understand what she’s been through either.
But every Black woman I’ve seen talking about this stuff has said that they feel for
her and they know what it’s like to be discriminated against like that.
Misogynoir is some shit, and I think it’s really dismissive to just paint Serena as
irrationally angry without even bothering to engage with the idea that she may have
been treated differently because of her race and gender.
Men and white women are allowed to be angry, but Black women just aren’t given that same
space for anger.
So everything that happened in the game was a mess, but the aftermath in the media has
been even worse.
News outlets have been describing Serena as having a “meltdown” when they say that
men who do a similar thing are just “having an argument”.
An Australian cartoonist drew this super racist depiction of Serena, and even turned Naomi
Osaka into a blonde white woman for some reason.
And I’ve been seeing hot take after hot take of people saying that her behavior was
unacceptable and mean and all sorts of shit, without acknowledging how unfairly she was treated.
People want to believe that rules are all enforced evenly and that the umpire always
makes the right call.
But racism, sexism, misogynoir -- those deeply ingrained ideas don’t just disappear when
you become an umpire.
And for so many media outlets to dismiss her anger and to paint her as just an “angry
Black woman” is to contribute to the hatred against her.
Even supposedly unbiased news articles I’ve seen have been giving so much more space and
time to people defending the umpire than anyone defending Serena.
It’s just so sad to watch.
Serena didn’t deserve any of this.
She deserved the right to a fair game, and given the bullshit the umpire put her through,
she deserved the right to be angry.
Had she been a man or a white woman, she probably would’ve been given a fairer game or at
least allowed to be angry without being penalized.
So, at the end of the day, it sucks that it all went down like that.
Naomi and Serena both deserved the chance to have a fair match.
It sucks that they were denied that because of an umpire who felt he had to wield his
power over a Black woman.
And the point of this video is not that Naomi should’ve lost or anything like that -- it
just should’ve been a fair game.
I think we need to be careful not to pit Naomi against Serena here when the real villain
of this story is the umpire.
You don’t have to insult Naomi to defend Serena.
And the media should be treating Serena way better than they currently are.
The misogynoir is real here, and we need to acknowledge that.
So I want to leave you with these words from Serena after the game.
I feel like, that fact that I have to go through this is just an example for the next person
that has emotions and that want to express themselves and they want to be a strong woman
and they're gonna be allowed to do that because of today. Maybe it didn't work out for me
but it's gonna work out for the next person.
She’s had to go through a lot of shit, but hopefully things will get better if we can
actually acknowledge what went wrong, and listen to the Black women who are telling
us about the discrimination they face -- in professional tennis and in everyday life.
I mean, in general, just fucking listen to Black women.
Anyway, that’s all I had for you today.
Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.