The Racist, Sexist History of Tennis

From Harper's BAZAAR

In Mark Knights’ cartoon of Serena Williams, she is portrayed as bestial. Her black features are exaggerated. Her athletic body is drawn bulkier as she jumps up and down on a racket. Her opponent, Naomi Osaka, a woman of Japanese-Haitian heritage, is depicted as a demure, slim blonde lady.

This is all because Serena Williams called an umpire a “thief” at the U.S. Open. She was penalized for doing so, and it cost her the game, and she lost the match to Osaka. As many people pointed out, men have called umpires far worse things than “thief” and not been penalized for it. It’s another reminder of the racist, sexist history of tennis.

For a very long time, tennis has been a game for well-bred white ladies to channel their aggressive impulses into. In what may be the realest moment Sex and the City's Charlotte ever had, for example, she remarks that her parents thought you could cure mental problems with enough exercise, and “that’s why I’m really good at tennis.” Notably, when Charlotte goes on to marry a man with a tennis court, you never see her play. She is resigned to the sidelines, watching her husband play with other men. Ditto, Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives. In it, the protagonist, a feminist who is having a hard time adjusting to life in Stepford, meets another woman with a tennis court. They begin playing. When that woman becomes a robot, she destroys her court, remarking that her husband hated tennis.

You are not expected to express your anger while playing tennis, young WASPy girls learn growing up. Tennis is where you are supposed to put your anger. Until you grow out of anger altogether.

Until then, the least you can do is express any aggressive impulses you might be feeling in a pristine white dress with your hair tied back into a neat ponytail. You’re permitted to play provided you also uphold an incredibly antiquated view of ladylike decorum as you do so. And for many people, the idea of being ladylike still means being white, petite, and preferably blonde.

Hell, the notion of wearing tennis whites-which is still required at a lot of clubs, and at Wimbledon-was instituted because of a horror of seeing women sweat. Perspiration would show up on darker fabrics if women ran around the court too vigorously. It was “quite unthinkable that a lady should be seen to perspire,” fashion history Valerie Warren wrote in Tennis Fashion: Over 125 Years of Costume Change.

And that rule is still in place today. Often it’s just about policing whether women seem rule abiding and ladylike enough. “I had all white on, with white bloomers, but they had red ruffles,” Chris Evert, a three-time Wimbledon champion told The New York Times. “They weren’t noticeable at all because our dresses were longer. But the guy, he lifted up my skirt and looked at the red and told me to go back to the changing room and change them.” This notably did not happen to, say, Bjorn Borg when he wore a tennis shirt covered with green pinstripes.

Meanwhile, former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash told the Guardian, "Some of the girls have been told to go back and change their bras and tops because they had slight color on them," he said in 2014. "I believe some of the girls didn't have suitable sports bras and had to go without them.”

So, basically, this is a sport where men are going be closely checking women’s underwear to make sure it’s spotless enough to meet their standards.

Someone who, mercifully, does not appear to give a shit about these archaic standards is Serena Williams. She was taken to task for wearing a black catsuit at the French Open. She described the suit as “Wakanda-inspired” and explained she wore to prevent blood clots and keep blood circulation going following her pregnancy. “I feel like a warrior in it, like a warrior princess kind of, queen from Wakanda maybe,” she told Reuters.

Her description of that outfit as “warrior” like is wonderful, and it says a lot about how she’s perceived. She does not play this game in a way that even so faintly alludes to a debutante at a country club who is afraid of perspiring in public. She plays like a warrior. She plays to win.

This is not really what some people want when they look to female tennis players. You can see as much from the 2009 column in Fox Sports, in which a reporter remarked sadly that she had “drop-dead looks” but “She's chosen to smother some of it in an unsightly layer of thick, muscled blubber.”

They were mad she had muscles. The kind you might need to win at sporting matches.

Unsurprisingly, tennis officials threw a fit over her catsuit, and French Tennis Federation President Bernard Giudicelli announced a ban on the garments claiming that players, “must respect the game and the place.”

Serena responded by wearing a tutu and compression fishnets.

In case you were wondering, yes, that was a great response to that.

So tennis has always been steeped in a fair amount of misogyny and, as is always the case, it’s worse for black women. Misogynoir-the term for the specific hatred of black women, coined by Moya Bailey-is its own special problem in arenas where antiquated views on femininity are supposed to be upheld.

And make no mistake, there’s plenty of racism directed towards the Williams sisters to go along with the general sexism you see in tennis. In 2001, Serena Williams' father told USA Today: “When Venus and I were walking down the stairs to our seats, people kept calling me nigger. One guy said, 'I wish it was '75; we'd skin you alive.”

At that same match, people cheered every time she made a mistake. Later, in 2007, a heckler was ejected for shouting, "That's the way to do it! Hit the net like any Negro would!" When Serena made a mistake.

If Serena Williams is mistrustful of the tennis establishment, if she is angry, it is with very good reason. Who wouldn’t be?

But black women’s anger is seen as especially threatening, especially to white people who aren’t keen on women being terribly emotional to begin with. From the Antebellum South onwards, popular culture has contributed to the notion that black women are bad tempered, whether it’s Mammy yelling at Scarlett O’Hara (bizarrely, it was once suggested that Serena Williams could play Prissy, Scarlett’s other maid, if Gone with the Wind were remade) or in Amos ‘n’ Andy. It persists today in Tyler Perry movies like Diary of a Mad Black Woman and in reality television.

The consequences of those stereotypes extend across fields-not just in tennis.

A study of women in color in STEM fields reported that 50 percent of women of color received pushback when they expressed anger at work (interestingly, expressing anger is found to benefit’s men’s careers when they apply for jobs.) One woman in the study remarked: "I don’t raise my voice.... Because if I were as assertive as some Caucasian colleagues that are male, I would be called a mad Black woman."

By existing, by asserting herself, by behaving like her male counterparts, Serena is doing more than just standing up for herself. She’s hopefully changing the game for all women. And she intends to. After the loss at the U.S. Open, and congratulating Osaka, she gave an interview stating, “the 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 going to be allowed to do that because of today.”

I believe she’s right.

And I believe at some point in the future, tennis is going to have to stop being a way to enforce traditional dainty behavior, and just start being a sport.

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