Bim Adewunmi
How the Oscar Flub Demonstrates the Limits of Black Graciousness
Grace, we are told—specifically God’s grace—comes free of charge. It is available to all, with only a few entirely reasonable terms and conditions. This kind of grace elevates us and allows us to go about our days being productive members of the human family. And we get to extend that grace to the next person we meet, by being gracious in turn.
But grace and graciousness can also be a burden.
On Sunday night at the Academy Awards ceremony, an envelope flub created one of the most memorable fuckups in Oscars history, in which the Best Picture award was wrongly announced as belonging to La La Land, before being given to its rightful owner, Moonlight. Barry Jenkins, Moonlight’s director, came up to that stage with the rest of his Moonlight family and delivered a speech from his gut—a reaction to an absurd turn of events, a moment that if not stolen was slightly marred (a win’s a win even if your face is streaked in mud and your muscles ache, but wouldn’t it have been nice to arrive at the finish line drenched in nothing but honest sweat?). Jenkins had prepared a speech, but on live television, he said: “Very clearly, even in my dreams this could not be true. But to hell with dreams!” Later, tweets and editorial copy declared producer Jordan Horowitz a heroic “truth teller” because he did the correct thing and ended La La Land’s borrowed time on the stage, and thus the story centered on his perceived grace, rather than Moonlight’s historic win.
There is almost nothing pedestrian we will not assign as a superhuman sacrifice if it is embodied by a white person.
And Variety’s post-Oscars issue, traditionally with a cover star from the night’s big winner (over the last few years directors and a cinematographer have been the chosen ones), featured Best Director winner Damien Chazelle alongside Barry Jenkins, the director of the year’s Best Picture. Seeing the cover line—“Amazing Grace”—I wonder to whom it is referring: Jenkins or Chazelle? Its purpose was seemingly to convey a narrative of solidarity, in an industry in which that value seems like a rare commodity, but who is the default beneficiary of that solidarity? Co–editor in chief Claudia Eller’s letter introducing the issue says the shared cover idea came from Chazelle’s camp “in the eleventh hour.” Her letter went on to note “the humility and humanity displayed by the film’s producers” after the envelope mix-up was revealed.
On Tuesday, after the cover image was released, Jenkins replied to an exasperated tweet from MTV News writer Ira Madison III, saying that he was “the guest” here, and while I would never presume to speak for him regarding his thought process in writing that tweet, I can’t help but consider what the word “guest” means in general, and also in this specific context, and how gracious Barry Jenkins is being. Many of us are unfailingly gracious, all the time, and to be fair, this is sometimes unsolicited (but somehow still expected). In thinking about all of this, I feel a little tired. It’s nice to be nice. But it is also a burden, this grace and graciousness. And some days it weighs heavier than others.
Michelle Obama’s incredibly succinct and quotable election-season sound bite “when they go low, we go high” is something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we have that grace, the kind that elevates us to a relatively higher plane of existence, where transgressions are borne and shaken off so we can continue to glide through life. But in reality, the most apt retort to that well-meaning and almost superhuman exhortation came from writer Kashana Cauley: “When they go low, we lower the bar.”
Which is not to say that La La Land was somehow “going low” as a side effect of its mere existence. The narrative around mediocrity and white supremacy in the larger culture was sometimes clumsily foisted upon the film, in the same way Moonlight’s explicit blackness and queerness placed it in a specific location within the viewing public’s minds. The two films duked it out during awards season, picking up various accolades—the American Film Institute, Critics Choice Awards, the Golden Globes, the London Film Critics’ Circle Awards, and so on—and in doing so, took on far more symbolism than either needed to carry.
I loved both films. Their accomplishments, both in the actual delivery of movie magic and prowess in hoovering up awards, has only made me love them more. But they were placed into an oddly pat narrative, in which to love one was to despise the other. It was a burden added to the already weighty load atop Moonlight’s shoulders: In addition to being a story about a black boy and his coming of age and sexuality, Moonlight became a needed underdog in a new cultural narrative. It’s a good thing it’s a stunning, genuinely beautiful film in its own right, otherwise it would’ve completely disappeared under the various new mantles it was suddenly forced to bear.
The destinies of Moonlight and La La Land will forever be intertwined; expect every lazy trivia quizmaster to chuck this twosome into pub quizzes until the end of parlor games. And because history’s first pressing happens directly in the moments after the event, many of us will see a graciousness where we should have seen a clear case of honest responsibility.
Calling a halt to the celebratory speeches the producers of La La Land had begun making and ceding the floor to the Moonlight cast and crew was simply the right thing to do. No more, no less. It required very little beyond an understanding of right and wrong, a lesson many of us learn very early on in life. There was no need to hand out rewards for grace, celestial or earthbound. And none were required from those involved with Moonlight.
Facts matter. On Oscar night, Moonlight was judged to be the better film. Barry Jenkins is a brilliant director who made a masterpiece. His place on the cover of Variety in any context is earned for sure, and never just as a “guest.” Graciousness is appreciated (it is a “want,” not a “need”), but it was not necessary. That the incredible win for Moonlight—a film about black gay love, black masculinity, blackness in microcosm and writ large, co-written and directed by a black man—will forever be linked to La La Land and misplaced graciousness is a damn shame.
How Oprah Got Her Acting Groove Back
Oprah Winfrey is like space, which is to say she is all around us: familiar enough that we can rattle off her greatest hits with ease (talk show! book club! a whole network!), yet for all that familiarity, she remains vastly unknowable. Being beamed directly into our homes via her eponymous show for twenty-five years means she should be quotidian, but seeing her onscreen as an actor uncurls a mild thrill in the belly. That’s because there’s still something exotic about Oprah Winfrey the actor. Every role she takes on—choices that reflect both her personal power and the very specific identity of black American womanhood—reveals a new layer and adds to our understanding of her as a person, a performer, and a cultural icon.
Never mind actual acting talent, Oprah’s greatest gift has been the ability to sniff out the most interesting enterprises that are simultaneously the best possible exhibition of her own skills. Both as a behind-the-scenes producer and in her onscreen performances, there is a stunningly clear throughline in her projects, and what we know of her suggests this is by design rather than mere serendipity. One thing is for certain: Oprah appears to revel in highlighting the overlooked stories of black women. When viewed as a grand mosaic, her oeuvre is an exploration of the many facets of that identity, and over the last thirty years, she has crafted a surprisingly strong body of work: culturally important, critically acclaimed, and often hugely profitable. Perhaps cutting through the hundreds of projects that have been waved under her nose over three decades of sustained bankability has honed her focus into something laserlike. And given the power she wields as a producer, the temptation to cast herself in vanity projects must be huge, but her choices have largely been unimpeachable.
As a TV host, Oprah’s job was a peculiar one. For many white Americans, she was a sort of remote “interesting black friend”—they could look to her to talk about weight loss; discuss the regular, petty (or serious) dramas of families; or have an impromptu book club meeting about the latest nationwide best-seller. Oprah was one of the cultural forces that introduced and helped normalize the language of therapy in the everyday lives of Americans in the 1990s: Her plush couch may as well have been situated in a posh therapist’s office, her show your weekly appointment. Perhaps inevitably over the years, she morphed into something more than just a “friend” and became something more akin to a caretaker. A desexualisation, not uncommon for black women who are older, had occurred.
But to be clear, in the public’s imagination, Oprah was almost never fully a mammy, rather, she was just a tad … magical. Her first few screen acting roles—most notably The Color Purple and The Women of Brewster Place—were specifically of wives and mothers for whom life was a slog, under the thumb of toxic patriarchy in some form or another. A viewer might find it hard to see beyond the pain of these women (whose survival was sometimes only barely eked out) in her early roles.
By contrast, starting with the 1998 adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved, Oprah’s latter choices have been strikingly complex, a master class in leaning the fuck in to ever more knotty, often corrective iterations of black womanhood. In this period, Oprah may play downtrodden or troubled or angry. But the characters she has chosen to portray, on both big and small screen, are crucially fully rendered—acutely drawn and compassionately written human beings allowed to feel the full gamut of emotional life. Whether as an animated mother (The Princess and the Frog), a black-sheep truth teller (Greenleaf), or a civil rights activist (Selma), Oprah has been quietly carving out a stellar acting career. And as she takes on the role of Deborah Lacks in a new HBO film based on Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, she’s making a point: Oprah Winfrey’s second-wind acting career, like much of her work over the last three decades, is a quiet revolution.
Oprah’s acting career started with a bang. Her first big screen role at age thirty-two was uncommonly successful, as Sofia in the 1985 Steven Spielberg adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer- and National Book Award–winning masterpiece The Color Purple. Oprah’s first appearance onscreen was iconic: “All my life I had to fight,” she tells Celie (Whoopi Goldberg) in a still-powerful scene in a film full of them, resisting the violence her husband visits on her. All the way through the movie, Sofia’s broken spirit is manifested in her blank expression, Oprah’s performance indelible. She was nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for best supporting actress for this debut (she was not the only one snubbed; the film didn’t win a single one of its eleven nominations).
That adaptation of Walker’s novel would be the start of a fruitful relationship between Oprah and icons of African American literature. In 1986, with an Oscar nomination already secured for her last role, Oprah took on the role of Bigger Thomas’s mother in an adaptation of Richard Wright’s (now much-maligned) novel Native Son. Despite some plaudits for her performance, the film got a mixed critical response. (Roger Ebert’s review quoted a 1961 foreword to the book, written by Richard Sullivan, that essentially described it as “unbearable” and added: “So it was, so it remains.”) Only a couple of months before the release of the film, in September 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show had gone national. It would go on to become the highest-rated talk show in the history of American television—a feat that would be a distraction from a solid acting career, no matter how great the desire to pursue one.
Three years later, in 1989, Oprah made her first foray into producing a literary adaptation. Harpo Productions chose the 1983 National Book Award winner The Women of Brewster Place, by Gloria Naylor. She starred as Mattie in both the original miniseries and a spinoff sequel, the rapidly cancelled Brewster Place—two overwhelmingly black casts, and noticeably female with it, telling black stories without much of an inherent white gaze to pervert their course. Oprah followed up Brewster Place with voice acting, playing formerly enslaved woman Elizabeth Keckley, a confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln, in Lincoln (1992), before another book adaptation, this time about an inner-city black family living in Chicago’s West Side, There Are No Children Here. Costarring alongside Maya Angelou (who played her mother) and Keith David, Oprah was praised for her performance, with the LA Times TV critic Ray Loynd describing it as “her most serious role since The Color Purple.” But her acting career stalled at this point, a consequence, perhaps, of the astonishing growth and global reach of The Oprah Winfrey Show in the nineties. “I love the idea of acting [and] have always wanted to be an actress but got diverted with a little day job of a talk show,” as she told Charlie Rose in 1998.
By the time we saw her play Ellen Degeneres’s therapist on Ellen’s iconic “The Puppy Episode” in 1997, the Oprah we were seeing was the one we’d come to know by that point: a talk-show host with a pseudo-therapist facade. The Ellen producers could not have cast the role better. A supporting role in a TV movie, Before Women Had Wings (1997), followed the Ellen guest spot, before Oprah’s movie role in 1998 marked a stark turning point in the kind of project that would define her ongoing acting career. Beloved, her most ambitious project, was based yet again on an era-defining work by an African American author.
Oprah’s second wind as an actor actually started more than a decade before it began. Even before Morrison was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1987, Oprah had the foresight to purchase the rights. “I had no idea how you make a movie,” she told Rose in the same 1998 interview, “but I felt that it should be a movie.” The film adaptation, which was directed by Academy Award winner Jonathan Demme, was a coproduction of Harpo Films, a subsidiary of her Harpo Productions; no one can lock a property down quite like Oprah can. Her self-belief was unshakeable, even with her relative inexperience. In the same Rose interview, she said: “I didn’t question what Jonathan (Demme) questioned, and what Toni (Morrison) questioned—whether I could lose the persona of ‘Oprah Winfrey.’ ”
The story of Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman who literally slits her child’s throat to spare her a life of enslavement, is Morrison’s masterwork. In telling Sethe’s story, the film did a rare thing, centering the narrative of a black American woman and following her life through its various fault lines. Surrounded by a cast of veterans, including her previous costar Danny Glover and Thandie Newton along with newcomer Kimberly Elise, Oprah’s Sethe was a quietly moving character, fierce and deeply human. While reviews were largely positive, the film underperformed at the box office, as she told Al Roker in a 2013 interview: “Beloved was not a successful box office hit—I went into a depression afterwards.”
In The Princess and the Frog (2009), she played Eudora, a mother of a different sort of intensity, selling a version of the American Dream to Princess Tiana (Anika Noni Rose). It is somewhat easy to dismiss it as yet another “wife or mum” role but in a movie like Frog, with its focus on a black female character, the presence of a black mother—however fleeting—is worth noting. And when considered in the context of the Disneyverse, with its weird and enduring motherlessness, Oprah’s small role in the film is something close to revolutionary.
Away from her voice work (she also played Coretta Scott King in Our Friend, Martin in 1999, which again falls into that therapeutic zone of warm and familiar), Oprah’s gift is her look. She has a malleable face (you can see it showcased in the many reaction GIF memes she features in), and the feeling is that she has played women who seem far older than she herself is. Part of this is the physicality required of the roles she has taken on: If you’re playing an exhausted mother of young children or an assertive woman who, over the course of a life, is ultimately defeated by life’s cruelties, then the movie is going to make sure your very mien matches that. But it’s also worth noting audiences’ propensity to perceive black womanhood (in real life and onscreen) through a splintered lens—associating older, plus-size, and desexualised “caring” roles with black women.
At sixty-three, it is instructive to view Oprah’s most recent choices alongside other Hollywood actors in the same age bracket. A consideration of the traditional trajectory of female actors of a certain age hardly reveals a post-sixties boom time—unless you’re Meryl Streep or Jessica Lange, who are very much outliers. By the time you add in the fact that black Hollywood actresses are hit even worse than their white counterparts when it comes to their industry’s sexism and ageism, it all makes a weird sort of sense.
In Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), the role of Annie Lee Cooper, the civil rights activist who famously punched back after being goaded by Alabama sheriff Jim Clark, was an obvious slam dunk for Oprah. Her decision to play Cooper is not hard to decipher—in choosing to tell her story, DuVernay reinserts the missing and overlooked women of the movement, and it aligns perfectly with Oprah’s own unofficial interests, namely highlighting storied African American history and playing a character of substantial cultural heft while doing so. Her portrayal is a fine one—Oprah’s Cooper comes across as a woman forced to bow to inhumane policy until she can no longer do so: exactly as Oprah intended. Unsurprisingly, she coproduced the film.
Oprah played another woman with a front seat to the unfolding of history in Lee Daniels’s The Butler just the year before. Gloria Gaines is a rare Oprah performance, in that she finally gets to play sexy—her nails tapered and painted red, her brows sharply drawn, her lashes thick with falsies—and sexual: When we first see Gloria, she is enabling the shooing away of her son so she can kiss up on her husband Cecil (Forest Whitaker), and it is implied throughout that the fires burned all the way to the line. Gloria’s hair and fashions change, as the movie moves over the decades—a sleek bob becomes a beehive, which turns into an afro before morphing into the big waves of the eighties. Inevitably, all that buoyancy is later weighed down by family discord, sharp fragments of American life, and drink, and Oprah delivers a fluent performance. In a role that requires a lot of heavy lifting, she bends at the knees admirably, earning herself supporting actress nominations at both the BAFTAs and SAG Awards.
Her role in the Oprah Winfrey Network drama Greenleaf, about an African American Southern church-rooted family and its many secrets, could be a sort of parallel existence to Gloria’s. As Mavis McCready, a bar owner and relative wild child compared to her sister, bishop’s wife Lady Mae, she is worldly in a way that sits well on Oprah. She is tough, soft, and warm as required and, in appearing alongside fellow Brewster Place alum Lynn Whitfield (also aged sixty-three, Whitfield’s career offers a useful companion comparison to her costar’s), provides a thrilling retort to the pat narrative of the “revolution” in women’s roles on television—when was the last time you saw two black women over sixty share screen time?
The inherent glamour and wealth of Mavis and the Greenleaf family is totally absent in HBO’s upcoming The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the true story of an African American woman whose cancer cells were taken during a biopsy at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951 and have been at the forefront of medical breakthroughs ever since. As Deborah, the youngest daughter of Henrietta, Oprah gives a nervy, often emotive performance as she is forced to reckon with her (justified) paranoia while trying to let go just enough to learn the truth about her family. With a cane to assist her walking, an ever-present “WWJD” lanyard, and a “Ghana Must Go” bag stuffed with her mother’s closely guarded medical records, Oprah’s Deborah is a regular African American woman, forced to take a losing role in a symbolic narrative wider and far older than she is. At one point, Deborah cheekily encourages reporter Rebecca Skloot, who is getting answers where she herself had previously stumbled. “Go ’head on, girl. Keep on being white,” she says with a knowing smile, and you smile back at her, aware of the historical significance behind her joke.
It’s uncanny how a literal billionaire can so easily embody “one of us” but Oprah does it again and again; she’s playing only slightly younger than her years this time (Deborah Lacks was sixty when she died suddenly, of a heart attack), and her hair and makeup is reflective of a life Oprah has not had to live in decades.
Here is the considered, cold oatmeal take: Oprah Winfrey is a good actor. The intention in that statement is not to damn with faint praise but to highlight a fact that is sometimes too easy forget, given her outsize influence and image in the popular consciousness. Her acting debut at thirty-two was Oscar-nominated, and she has been turning in solid work, on and off, for literally decades. Oprah herself is straight on her ability, as she told Rose: “I know inside myself I’m an actor. I always wanted to be an actress and I know that I can do that.”
She appears refreshingly without vanity, and the very thing that made her famous—that empathy, that ability to tap into the universal human frequency—is also what makes her so effective as an actor. That you feel compelled to watch her when she’s onscreen may have to do with the ease of familiarity. But it’s also more than that. Her face, already interesting in its composition, has become something more at this stage of life—more open, capable of telling entire stories in a few muscle movements. She engaged the services of an acting coach (who’d previously worked with Tom Cruise, Diddy, and Nicole Kidman) at the suggestion of Lee Daniels, her Butler director—“It’s an instrument,” he told her, “and you haven’t picked up the instrument in what, seventeen years?”
But even before this, she has been using her body like her pro, yet another tool to tell stories, and it is the body of a middle-aged black woman, a body that viewers are perhaps not used to seeing all that often. So you look, and you keep looking.
That Oprah is buttressed by institutional power is a welcome plus and arguably necessary, even in 2017. She takes full advantage of the behind-the-scenes power in her Harpo Films and OWN-running hands—power that just isn’t the norm in Hollywood, where even bankable actors are sometimes treated like barely sentient props. The Immortal Life is a Harpo Films coproduction, and there was evidence of Oprah’s own personal hiring power on Greenleaf: On a first-season episode, I was thrilled to note the name of director Donna Deitch in the opening credits, thirty years after she and Oprah worked together on The Women of Brewster Place. In an industry where women are still playing catch-up, it really does help to have a producer with institutional memory on your side.
But while it may be difficult to divorce her acting career from her other interests, the core of Oprah Winfrey: Actor is not just about her producing power. In Sofia and Sethe and Gloria and Annie and Mavis and now Deborah, Oprah is telling specific stories, over and over. These are people we rarely get to see onscreen, and so they do not feel like arbitrary choices. More than ever, Oprah appears to be settling fully into her acting career.
The second stage of her career is calculated and precise, and at least from the outside, seems to represent a woman keen to break free of the still-too-narrow strictures placed on black women in and out of Hollywood. She is no longer just America’s therapist—instead she is (almost) just another citizen, only one with uncommon power and reach, as well as a good deal of cultural discernment. In this half of her acting career, these roles—in Selma, in Greenleaf, in her turns in the upcoming A Wrinkle in Time adaptation and Daniels’s Terms of Endearment remake—seem less about appeasing mainstream America and far more about a performer flexing her wings and seeing what she can do to claim cultural and ideological space for herself but also, by extension, for black women in America and beyond.
Maria Sharapova’s Rivalry with Serena Williams Is in Her Head
The language of racism has long been a slippery thing. It maneuvers like a greased pig, sliding out of the grasp of those who would like to hold it up as egregious, and runs along merrily, dodging responsibility all the while. It is how we got to calling for “law and order” and how we get away with calling for the annihilation of “thugs” in political speeches on both sides of the aisle. It is how a section of us gets to say with a straight face, “I’m not racist” and truly believe it. “Where was the N-word?” people will ask, obtusely. At this point, it doesn’t need to be present to make itself felt.
The ideology of white supremacy ends lives, as the evidence of hundreds of years attests. But even where it does not actively kill, it commits smaller, more insidious crimes, too. It belittles and dismisses humanity and accomplishment, and it does so by using words that appear to be innocent of illogical animus.
In reading excerpts from Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova’s new memoir, Unstoppable, it would be reasonable to see the reality of her situation: an athlete humiliated and angered by a far superior opponent over the years. But there is also an inescapable undercurrent of bitterness that relies on something more sinister when it comes to discussing the number-one player in women’s tennis, Serena Williams.
“First of all,” Sharapova writes, “[Williams’s] physical presence is much stronger and bigger than you realize watching TV. She has thick arms and thick legs and is so intimidating and strong.” Focusing on people’s bodies is par for the course in sports—there are inescapable requirements to do what athletes do. And the fact of the matter is that Serena Williams is strong. You have to be, to be perhaps the best athlete in the world, pound for pound. But Sharapova’s description has nothing to do with Serena’s world-straddling skill and ability. It is about setting her up as “other,” as superhuman (but in the detrimental way that curls into itself and reemerges as subhuman) and therefore unfair and unworthy to be in that space, on that court.
Thick arms and thick legs (coded as masculine) in addition to being intimidating (“I felt threatened, officer”) and strong (read: too strong, ergo masculine)? Well, that’s too much. How could I, a slender blonde, be expected to play against this, and win? Never mind that at six-feet-two-inches, Maria Sharapova stands a clean five inches above Serena Williams’s five-feet-nine-inch frame. Sharapova painted a shorthand cultural picture we have come to understand very well, in which a dainty white lady is menaced by a hulking black specter. It’s fake news. Misogynoir both coded and explicit. But the facts are meaningless here because this narrative is too compelling.
The Williams sisters, and Serena especially, are no strangers to having their bodies and ability discussed in othering ways over the years. In 2012, Danish tennis player Caroline Wozniacki “impersonated” Serena at an exhibition match in Brazil by stuffing the front of her top and the back of her skirt with towels. (Novak Djokovic’s done similar, as has Andy Roddick.) Serena’s response to her friend Caroline’s action was to say she doubted there was anything racist about the actions (various publications lined up to tell concerned readers emphatically that it was not racist), but, in an e-mail to USA Today, she added, “I must add if people feel this way she should take reason and do something different next time.”
Both Williams sisters have been likened to men for the absolute power of their serves, and due to that style of play, they are rarely afforded credit for playing with nuance or strategic tactics. In 2014, the president of the Russian tennis federation, Shamil Tarpischev, called the sisters “the Williams brothers” and “scary.” A year earlier, after losing to Serena at the French Open finals, Sharapova had stated it baldly. “[Serena] has no pressure going in and serving and being up a break at 5–4, and serving harder than David Ferrer when he gets to the final of Roland Garros,” Sharapova said in the after-match press conference. “I mean, I think if I was built like Serena I hope I’d be able to hit a big serve like that, too.”
Remember: There are five inches of air between Sharapova and Williams, and the latter is five years older, in a sport where age is a liability and precocious wunderkinder are fetishized. (Sharapova was one; she ascended into international stardom at the age of seventeen, when she beat Serena at the Wimbledon final in 2004, one of only two times this has happened.) Lastly, I urge you to remember that between Williams and Sharapova, only one has been the recipient of a two-year ban for using the banned substance meldonium. That was Sharapova. In an interview with Net-A-Porter magazine, Sharapova brings up her decision to include the ban in her memoir. “I talk about it with a lot of vulnerability and rawness. How it made me feel; how I felt like the world looked at me; how I felt so small. For a woman who’s tall and powerful—an athlete—it was a very distant feeling.”
The dog whistle was deafening. I am playing by the rules, and she is not. Except Serena is. She always has. She’s simply better.
The narrative of the alleged Williams-Sharapova rivalry was orchestrated by fate, in which a young upstart unseats the more established incumbent, as Sharapova did to Williams at Wimbledon in 2004. But what happened after that match failed to truly live up to that setup. A true rivalry would suggest a more balanced stats board than their match history actually gives us. Look at McEnroe and Borg (7–7), or Evert and Navratilova (37–43). Hell, even S. Williams and V. Williams (17–11) offers up something more equal. No one is denying the competitiveness. But a 19–2 W-L ratio is not a paragraph, and it is not even a chapter, let alone a whole book. It’s a sentence.
What needed to be proven has been, convincingly and repeatedly. But because we need certain lies—a world in which the willowy tall blonde wins at life, for example—we have allowed a narrative to form in which the two are evenly matched. Or at the very least, we have maintained conditions that have allowed Sharapova to profit from this line of thought. If they ever were truly equal in terms of sporting ability, that window was fleeting, and the evidence bears this out.
Sharapova posits a theory in Unstoppable as to the root of Serena’s apparent problem with her. She refers to that first time she beat her, when Serena had been the tournament favorite. She overheard Serena crying over the loss, says Sharapova, and “I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me” for witnessing this “low and vulnerable moment.” She expands on this by writing, “I think Serena hated me for being the skinny [emphasis mine] kid who beat her, against all odds, at Wimbledon. I think she hated me for taking something that she believed belonged to her. I think she hated me for seeing her at her lowest moment. But mostly I think she hated me for hearing her cry. She’s never forgiven me for it.”
It’s ironic that Sharapova says Serena believed that win “belonged” to her. Because history’s quite clear on who has traditionally gotten to advance in the sport of tennis. The Williams sisters broke into a lily-white field when they went pro back in 1994 and 1995 and were subjected to their share of racist abuse. Their emergence as champions (and specifically Serena’s absolute dominance in latter years) was not the norm, and some tennis fans as well as establishment figures have made that clear to them every step of the way. When Sharapova writes, “This is a story about sacrifice, what you have to give up. But it’s also just the story of a girl and her father and their crazy adventure,” you could say the exact same thing about Serena Williams. But that’s not the narrative she’s allowed to inhabit, is it?
The projection here is also worth noting. Sharapova reminds one of the 2014 essay by Jen Caron, in which the writer got caught up in the imagined inner thoughts of a co-yogi, a “heavyset black woman” and wondering what she could do to “help her.” And it also brings to mind the white women mentioned in “White Women Drive Me Crazy,” Aisha Mirza’s 2017 essay, who mask jealousy with faux concern, because their discomfort makes them feel powerless. She writes, “They say, ‘Are you okay?’ instead of ‘I feel uncomfortable,’ because they are not used to feeling uncomfortable and they are happy for us to be the problem instead.”
In Unstoppable, Sharapova writes of Serena, “Even now, she can make me feel like a little girl,” and one has to ask, Is that a Serena problem or a you problem? Consider that what you are feeling is your own personal lack. Sharapova’s feelings of fear and shame and disappointment are natural and very real. But that may muffle the very real dog whistle her words conjure. And while it’s probably unconscious that she reaches for those specific terms and words when it comes to detailing her own inadequacies, that doesn’t mean it’s OK.
In the meantime, the jig is up. The US Open final this weekend will feature two American women; one black (Sloane Stephens, who beat thirty-seven-year-old Venus Williams to get there) and one biracial (Madison Keys, who does not call herself black). Serena’s on maternity leave, but the future of American tennis (at least) is irrevocably in black women’s hands.
Let that be what scares you and makes you better.