This week Slate ran a book excerpt from Citizen: An American Lyric, a book by Pomona College professor Claudia Rankine, that may well be the most absurd commentary on race and sports I’ve ever read. Called, “Graphite Against a Sharp White Background,” it demonstrates that we will never be rid of racially inflammatory controversy if virtually any adversity can be read as evidence of racism. Chronicling tennis champion Serena Williams triumphs in the “white” sport of tennis, Rankine uses the “black body” language made popular by Ta-Nehisi Coates to chronicle the various injustices visited upon Serena — the top money winner in women’s tennis history ($72 million), the 47th highest-paid athlete in the world in 2015 ($24.6 million), and a highly-compensated endorser of luxury Swiss watches.
Serena Williams is a magnificent athlete and tennis player, and — yes — tennis is mostly white. Given the Williams’ sisters dominance, their worldwide travels, and their long tenure in the public eye, they have faced their share of insults (a Russian tennis official notably called them the “Williams brothers”), including racist insults. But the dominant story of their tennis careers is of victory on the court and admiration (and endorsements) off the court. But don’t tell Rankine, who dredges up years-old stories of blown line calls — in 2004, 2009, and 2011 — to spin a tale of oppression. And in the midst of this oppression, even Serena’s furious outbursts are causes for celebration. Rankine’s commentary features paragraphs like this:
And as Serena turns to the lineswoman and says, “I swear to God I’m f**king going to take this fucking ball and shove it down your f**king throat, you hear that? I swear to God!” As offensive as her outburst is, it is difficult not to applaud her for reacting immediately to being thrown against a sharp white background. It is difficult not to applaud her for existing in the moment, for fighting crazily against the so-called wrongness of her body’s positioning at the service line.
By the way, Williams was yelling at an Asian woman, not a white oppressor. Rankine’s not done, however. This paragraph is particularly pernicious:
For Serena, every look, every comment, every bad call blossoms out of history, through her, onto you. To understand is to see Serena as hemmed in as any other black body thrown against our American background. “Aren’t you the one that screwed me over last time here?” she asks umpire Asderaki. “Yeah, you are. Don’t look at me. Really, don’t even look at me. Don’t look my way. Don’t look my way,” she repeats, because it is that simple.
Every look? Every bad call? Do white players not suffer from bad calls? Do those bad calls “blossom out of history?” I’m reminded of Coates’s new book, describing America as captured by white supremacy — yet the only incident of personal oppression that this celebrated author describes is a petty incident where a rude white woman pushed his son at a Manhattan movie theater. I’m reminded of many of my own law school classmates who came back from lucrative summer jobs describing relatively routine rudeness from senior lawyers — rudeness I’d experienced as well — as motivated by racism. To elevate mundane adversity into evidence of racial oppression is to diminish and discredit reports of actual racism. With the glaring and horrifying exception of the Left-inspired racist abortion regime, America is much, much better place for black citizens than it was a few short decades ago. Need evidence of that fact? Look no further than the fact that the horror stories in elite magazines and bestselling books include tales not of lynchings and segregation but of blown tennis calls and mean theater-goers. Cultural progress from aggressions to (perceived) microaggression is progress indeed.