The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: In 2023, Coco Gauf is Facing the Same Racism That the Williams Sisters Faced Almost Three Decades Ago
Almost 30 years after the Williams Sister came to the tennis scene another Black girl, Coco Gauff, has won her first US Open Grand Slam. And in those thirty years, a lot has changed. We now have smartphones; we have social media; we have Google; cellphones have become ubiquitous; Amazon is no longer an online book store; we have Netflix and Blockbuster has gone extinct.
Yes, a lot has changed in those thirty years.. But one thing seems to remain the same: the racism Black female tennis players face from the sports media. Coco Gauff is facing the same racism today that the Williams sisters faced when they made their debuts in the mid-late 1990s.
They were stereotyped as angry black women. A cartoonist used racist caricatures to draw Serena. The press regularly attacked their hairstyles. Chris Evert once claimed the Williams’ beaded hair style was “noisy and disruptive”. A Romanian sport broadcaster once said “Serena looks exactly like a monkey in the zoo”.
Coco is now facing the same racism that the Williams sisters have been subjected to for the last three decades.
It started with Pam Shiver, the former professional tennis player and current tennis commentator, writing this article. The article is mean-spirited and even has a mean-spirited title
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