LOUD & PROUD
The meaning of Serena Insight
Afriend and I were recently having dinner at a fairly upmarket restaurant when we were approached by an older white woman. Mid-conversation, our voices evaporated as we realised she was coming to talk to us. It felt as though we had stopped breathing. “You both look so beautiful,” she said, complimenting our outfit choices and bright colours (my orange hair matched my orange ski jacket, my friend was in the most gorgeous shade of pink).
We were probably standoffish in our response, smiling tightly as we said thank you. As she walked off, the two of us sat in brief silence until I said: “Oh, my goodness, I thought she was going to tell us we’re being loud!” My friend laughed, hand on her chest and said: “Girl, me too!”
Sure, we were pleasantly surprised — but we were mostly just relieved. In the seconds leading up to the stranger opening her mouth, I was already trying to predetermine my reaction and response. My friend told me she was already wondering if we were going to argue with the woman or if we would just keep quiet and keep it moving. People in the restaurant were very chatty, so there was only one reason we would have been singled out — our skin colour. Not because we were louder than everyone else in the restaurant (we weren’t), but because it would be easy to accuse us of that.
Projection not from thin air
As two “women of colour” seated in the middle of an overwhelmingly white restaurant, we were, subconsciously, waiting for someone to somehow “put us in our place”.
And while thankfully we were wrong and were projecting, our projection did not — and does not — come from thin air.
Our defensiveness and readiness to stand up for ourselves comes from lived experience. It comes from a lifetime of constantly being misrepresented, silenced and being told — sometimes explicitly, sometimes not — that we need to change who we are, that we need to be more palatable. And that failure to do so will see us punished.
When Serena Williams’s voice cracked as she shouted at umpire Carlos Ramos during the US Open final last week (“I have never cheated in my life!”), it did not come from thin air. And to reduce it to an ego-fuelled tantrum and nothing more is not only unfair, but also simple-minded. The villainisation of Williams following the drama already triggered a lot of emotion for a lot of black and brown women, but the Mark Knight cartoon published twice in Australia’s Herald Sun has been especially outrageous, deserving of every criticism thrown its way.
Lack of imagination
When I first saw the cartoon, I was shocked. Not shocked at its blatant racism (and it is racist), but rather at its lack of imagination and utter laziness.
Aren’t cartoonists and satirists supposed be some of the smartest people in media? What kind of intelligent, worthwhile statement is being made by depicting a black woman as a thick-lipped, gorillashaped, imposing, dangerous creature?
That cartoon is laziness and ignorance masquerading as critical thought. Black women aren’t angry about it because we have diminished intellectual capacity and fail to grasp satire or social commentary. This isn’t about censorship or “PC culture”. It’s about refusing to let racism — intended or not, in all its forms — go unchecked for a minute longer than we already have.
Knight’s cartoon doesn’t even look like Williams. Following the very fierce backlash, the Herald Sun republished it alongside other not-very-flattering Knight depictions of public figures, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump, to make a point that Knight lampoons everybody, not just black women.
But here’s the thing: although their features have been exaggerated or distorted in some way, Putin still looks like Putin. Trump looks like Trump. You don’t need any background or context to know who those drawings are meant to be of.
But were it not for the tennis court, smashed racquet and the tutu, you would never look at that pic and say, “Oh, that’s Serena Williams”. Knight didn’t even bother drawing Serena Williams: he just took every stereotype in the racist book of what black women look like and threw it all together.
In his criticism of her, he didn’t even care enough to at the very least see what she really looked like. But why would he, when we all look the same anyway? Draw one black woman and you’ve drawn them all. We have large noses, larger lips and even larger bodies. And we’re very, very scary. As one white man on Twitter said, his poor child couldn’t even sleep after seeing Williams’s “tantrum” during the match because they were that traumatised.
So I suppose Knight is not the only one who thinks black women are threatening and animalistic. (Heck, even black men — like Tyler Perry — love the Angry Black Woman trope.) That’s part of what makes Knight’s cartoon so disgusting: intended or not, his depiction of Williams plays into the many ways black women are treated in real life, both in personal and professional contexts.
Bigotry that’s gigantic
As New York Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted: “The black woman of the white imagination is not the black woman of reality. Over and over folks have jumped in my timeline telling [me] this cartoon was justified because Serena is SO MUCH bigger, huge, gargantuan. She is not. It’s your bigotry that’s gigantic, not her.”
While, of course, many fans adore her magnificent tennis, Williams is much more than one of the best athletes in history.
She is a very public example of the kind of rubbish black women have to live with almost daily, from micro-aggressions to outright racism. Many black women can relate to the way that Williams’s body is treated, gawked at as though it’s some freak of nature; how her body is often spoken about in an anthropological manner; how she is often dehumanised.
We are either sexually invisible to many or deemed too sexual — hardly ever in the middle. To many, the bumps, lumps and curves of our bodies are meant to be hidden. Because the existence of our bodies outside of the sexual gratification of others and outside of their use as a means to clean your house and to feed your children is a scandal.
I know women who have been hauled to human resources because of the way dresses sit on their curves, while lithe white colleagues can get away with clothing that sits just as tightly. It’s as though one body is acceptable for public display while another is not. I know women who have been described as “surly” and as having a “bad attitude” because they aren’t rays of sunshine like their white female counterparts.
Polite and palatable manner
I often shy away from voicing my opinion in professional contexts rather than tackling something that I find upsetting lest I am labelled an Angry Black Woman. Many reading this will dismiss it as an angry rant simply because it’s not packaged in a polite and palatable manner. Black women are often dismissed and sometimes even punished because they don’t carry themselves in a “polite” or “palatable” manner.
So to Knight and Co: I’m glad I live in a world where we’re no longer allowing people and institutions to get away with victimising us. We’ll keep being loud about it until we no longer have to, until our daughters can live in a world where they don’t have to be fighting all the time, in small and big ways.
We’ll keep calling out racism, sexism and misogynoir (hatred of black women) so that our daughters can sit in restaurants without worrying that they will be reminded why they don’t belong. We’ll keep fighting and kicking up a fuss so that when an older white woman approaches our daughters in future, they won’t expect to be “put in their place”, constantly ready to justify their existence and their being. They will not be in the least surprised to simply be given a compliment.
Many black women can relate to the way Williams’s body is treated, gawked at as if some freak of nature; often spoken about in an anthropological manner; often dehumanised