Serena, Venus and Aretha
 BIO
– RONALD D. GLOTTA
Attorney Ronald D. Glotta is a long-time
human rights champion who has turned his passion
into an effective and successful law career
defending the rights of workers “ravaged by the
excesses of capitalism.” He has been quoted or
featured in numerous progressive books and
publications, including Black Rage by William
Grier and Price Cobbs; Detroit, I Do Mind Dying,
by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin; Whose
Detroit?: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern
American City by Heather Ann Thompson; and
Muscle & Blood, by Rachel Scott.
I was settling in for a night of entertainment
watching the U.S. Open Final that matched Serena
and Venus on September 7th, 2002. The fact that
I don’t even have to mention these two powerful
sisters’ last names is a testament to their
reputations and skill.
All I wanted to do that night was watch these
two sisters of incredible athletic ability and
awesome beauty. The bond of love and sympathy
between them, juxtaposed against their ongoing
rivalry and the desire of each to play their
best game, always provides suspense and
fascination.
No sooner than I had sat through the inevitable,
incessant banality of the commercials, my sense
were assaulted by something far less banal and
far more insidious: the U.S. military drum
corps, complete with the American flag, pomp,
and circumstance. It was, after all, September
7, 2002, just one year after 9/11—and it was in
New York.
Before my eyes, this athletic event was being
corrupted by a ruling elite that cared nothing
for the people who died on 9/11, nothing about
the city of New York, and for that matter
nothing about the United States and certainly
nothing for Serena and Venus. Take General
Motors. With all the flag-waving done by their
top execs, they quietly sold their logo to a
paper corporation in the Bahamas. Why? To lease
it back and then use it as a cost against taxes.
The company that exemplifies America is waving
the flag with one hand and holding back with the
other hand the profit produced by its workers,
and instead sending the money to the Bahamas,
money which it owes to the Americans who buy
their expensive cars, with the other.
So I was going to have to suffer through this
hypocritical show of patriotism in order to
enjoy the match. After all, it was only a few
days earlier that the audience was supporting
foreign players in an obvious attempt to thwart
the dominance of the Williams sisters.
And then, just as I was ready to throw up my
hands, gospel and R&B great Aretha Franklin
began to sing. She sang the song many of us
would like to have replaced as America’s
national anthem: “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But
she didn’t sing it the way it is usually sung.
She gets to the place where it says, “…o’er the
land of the free…”
I stopped there, right at that word, and had to
take a breath. Like I said, when an African
American leader in any category speaks, picks up
a racket, or even sings, it resonates with the
world.
When Aretha sings about freedom, it becomes a
demand for liberation, not support for some
idealized concept that masks policies that
oppress working people. I wish I had a tape of
that subtle yet powerful performance. Even more,
I wish I knew how she did what she did, how she
took a song that to so many means, “America:
Love It Or Leave It,” and turn it into an
impassioned appeal for liberation. I only
vaguely understand it even now. But I know this:
it was exactly the opposite of what the media
moguls who orchestrated the event expected.
After that September 2002 match, the Willams
sisters dominated the tennis scene for all of
2003. In doing so, they re-defined femininity
for the 21st Century and exposed the inherent,
reified, yet subtle racism in our national
media. The pushback was fast and furious as a
Venus backhand. Mostly white male sportscasters
railed against the Williams’ sisters. Their
dominance was deemed to be bad for tennis, as if
the interest generated throughout the world by
the sisters in tennis was bad.
Maybe for them it was bad. Perhaps the inclusion
of millions of working class people, both white
and black, in the tennis world was bad for the
elite. After all, the elite domination in tennis
had existed for so long. Certainly, the influx
of these fans and participants would put an end
to tennis’s exclusivity, and to the notion that
success in the game was determined by caste
instead of talent and hard work.
In the Williams sisters we see the intersection
of class, race and gender. Billie Jean King
started it more than twenty years ago, when she
beat tennis bad boy and male chauvinist Bobby
Riggs. The Venus and Serena era has paved the
way for women to dominate tennis, not white
males.
If it was bad for the ruling elite, it certainly
wasn’t bad for tennis. Thirteen of the Women’s
Tennis Association’s tournaments set records in
2002, when the Williams sisters were the queens
of the game. And from 1998 – 2002, the
percentage of women interested in sports
doubled, to 58%. (Scott Salinardi, FIND/SVP.
Media and Entertainment Trend Report, “She’s Got
Game: Women’s Interest in Sports Grows
Significantly,” February 2004. website: http://www.findsvp.com/insights/trendreports/me0204.pdf)
CHANGING THE GAME
In January of 2003, Serena was down in the
third set 5-1 to Kim Clijsters, at the time one
of the top players in the world. One lost game
and the match was over. Serena came back to win
the match and the tournament. In January of
2005, Serena was down three match points to
Maria Sharapova, an excellent power player. One
lost point and the match was over. She came back
to win the match and the tournament.
How did she do it? The same way that Bjorn Borg,
or more recent tennis bad boy John McEnroe, or
Pete Sampras did it. Remember what the live
tennis commentators called them? Intelligent.
Strategic. They studied the game. They
“understood” their opponent. They were “mentally
tough.”
But not so Serena. Instead of lauding more
cerebral qualities, commentators crowed about
her “natural ability” and “power.” They say the
same about her sister.
Chris Evert defended the Williams sisters
against Martina Navratilova’s taunts and
criticisms, She spoke frequently about the
sisters’ intelligence and grace. In fact, she
even understood explicitly their particular
sister-to-sister challenge. She had, after all,
played her own sister and was quite sympathetic
about the psychological difficulties inherent in
the twin and contradictory emotions of
competitiveness versus sisterly love. And in
fact, she criticized those who would diminish
the unique excitement of a sister-sister tennis
dynasty.
But even she falls into the trap. Listen to
this criticism of Evert by writer Andy Cotton in
The Austin Chronicle:
“…Chris Evert's repetitive racial stereotyping
of the Williams sisters on NBC was stunning. As
Venus Williams was stomping all over the No.1
player in the world -- yanking Martina Hingis
around the court like a spastic puppet -- Evert
repeatedly portrayed the very white Hingis as
the intelligent, cagey, court-wise
counterpuncher, while Williams was the big,
strong, usually out of control "athlete," a
polite way of saying black. As if those nasty
slice serves pulling Hingis 20 feet off the
court, followed by down-the-line kills into the
open court, were somehow fortunate genetic
gifts. Maybe Chris, a great player in her day,
was seeing herself being pushed around the court
by a bigger, faster, stronger, and just-as-smart
opponent, and helpless (as Hingis was) to do
anything about it. When Venus and Serena met the
next day, Evert often cited the wonderful
athletic ability of the sisters, while
criticizing their "sloppy" play. Personally, I
didn't think it was sloppy at all. This was
great stuff. I've been watching tennis for 30
years, and I've never seen women play that way.
The final against Davenport was more of the
same. Lindsey -- smart/ clever/white -- against
the athlete. Somehow Evert made it seem so damn
unfair ... Venus picking on poor injured Lindsey
(the most devastating ball striker on the
woman's circuit) that way.”
~Andy “Coach” Cotton,
“Coach’s Corner,” The Austin Chronicle,
7/14/2000
Where was the talk about
“Intelligence” and “mental toughness?” It was
strangely absent. Under any other circumstances,
mental toughness, intelligence, grit, strength
of character would have been discussed and
analyzed ad naseum.
Serena herself, unfortunately, falls into the
same trap, albeit perhaps for different reasons.
She tried to put a better face on Chris Evert’s
stereotypical analysis. In a New York Times
article dated (DATE OF SELENA ROBERTS ARTICLE),
she is asked about the issue and replies, “It’s
not racism, it’s just stupidity.”
Maybe she wants to believe the best. Maybe she
feels that she will be criticized for calling
racism what it is. But somebody has to. As Peter
Noel so deftly puts it in The Village Voice:
The Williams sisters may be faster and
stronger than most of their rivals, but they
also play smart tennis, a fact that some sports
commentators and writers are loath to
acknowledge. "After the semifinals game between
Venus and Martina Hingis at the U.S. Open, you
never heard the announcer say that Hingis broke
down mentally—but that's what happened," argues
Pee Wee Kirkland. "Whenever Hingis or Lindsay
Davenport breaks down mentally, the first thing
they say is, 'Well, they're not in the same
condition as the Williams sisters. They got
tired.' When they break down it's because
they're tired, but when we break down it's
because we can't think the game of tennis. How
can that be?"
Peter Noel, “Fear of the
Williams Sisters,” The Village Voice, November
8-14, 2000.
The Williams sisters are
powerful players, no doubt. It’s just that that
aspect of their game has been overemphasized in
relation to their many other strengths. And now,
ironically, the younger women players have
adopted the power game without so much as a
mention by the commentators as to the source of
this new exciting development.
The disparate treatment extends even further.
Look at Jennifer Capriati’s father, Stefano. He
made his daughter play for money at the tender
age of 14. That didn’t work out very well for
her, did it? The pressure of being a teen phenom
was too much, and she ended up involved in
shoplifting and drug abuse before she got back
on track.
Contrast that with Venus and Serena’s dad,
Richard Williams. He deliberately and deftly
guided their sports careers to ensure that they
didn’t grow up too fast. He steadfastly refused
to allow them to play for money when they were
young. Now, he has two young adult women that he
can be proud of, who are equally graceful in
both celebrity and competition. Straight out of
Compton, California, both Serena and Venus have
become the best-known women athletes in the
world. They are very much leaders in the move to
redefine womanhood, attractiveness, and beauty
that is characterized by strength,
assertiveness, and confidence. They are gracious
and international, always working to express
gratitude in the language of whatever the
country where they are playing. Coming from
humble circumstances, they accept their amazing
success with grace, while acknowledging those
who have supported them. They have been booed,
criticized, and put down, yet they always flash
their beautiful smiles and keep on stepping.
Venus Williams is stately and regal. Serena is
voluptuous and yes, sexy. But they maintain an
inner beauty that insists that the media
characterize them by their talent and character,
not by their outward appearance.
Their father has not escaped criticism, either.
Strong and protective, he is painfully aware of
the racism that has tried to engulf and contain
his dynamic daughters:
“Williams has consistently been a public
target partly because he has been a booming
voice against racism in the country club, white
cotton world of pro tennis. For someone who
trained his daughters on the public courts of
Compton, California, walking through, in Venus’s
words, phalanxes of “guns and gangs” to get to
practice, the snooty scions of tennis have not
intimidated the Williams family a lick. That has
perhaps been his biggest sin: the refusal to
dance. Williams has just refused to know his
place.
”When Venus won her first grand slam at
Wimbledon, the royal family was said to be
displeased by Richard Williams jumping on the
court and yelling, ‘Straight outta Compton!’”
~Dave Zirin, “The Eclipse
of Venus,” politicalaffairs.net, 7/21/05
Where was the outrage when
Serena was unceremoniously and vociferously
booed during the French Open in 2004? Richard
Williams understands:
”When it became fashionable among sports
journalists in 2003 to say that women’s tennis
“had become boring” because it was dominated by
Venus and Serena, Richard Williams said, ‘So
women’s tennis is getting boring. And you know
why? Because two lovely black women dominate it.
They’re better than the white girls and that’s
intolerable. They’re disturbed by our being
there. They’ve tried everything they could to
tame us, to recuperate us and when they
couldn’t, they said I was a madman.”’
~Dave Zirin, “The Eclipse
of Venus,” politicalaffairs.net, 7/21/05
How many articles have you
seen that are critical of Stefano Capriati,
tennis pro Jennifer’s dad?
In fact, it is painfully obvious that the media
is running scared of these two powerful women.
Venus and Serena were the obvious choices to
include in People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful
People” in 2005. The editors’ choices are
certainly not just beauty, but other qualities
as well—qualities that the Williams’ sisters
have in spades. But instead, they chose blond
Maria Sharapova, who has one to date one Grand
Slam to the sisters’ ten.
In short, Venus and Serena belie the genetic
racism of Social Darwinism. They have proven
that the dominance of Anglo-Saxon white males is
nothing more than a temporary historical
phenomenon backed on opportunism, not genetics.
The sisters’ success illustrates the tremendous
untapped talent within the working class. Living
in a difficult community where a stray bullet
would stamp out any chance for athletic
achievement, their intelligence, grace,
strength, and beauty prove the tremendous
untapped and underutilized skill of the working
class. They singlehandedly destroy the entire
ideological justification for extremes of
privilege and wealth and poverty. In some
inexplicable way, their millions of fans
understand this better than the advertisers who
would capitalize on their success and the
commentators who wish that they had never come
on the scene.
Proof of how the Williams’ sisters have
redefined femininity is in the recent issue
People magazine, 5/9/05, where Maria Sharapova
is now listed as one of the 50 most beautiful
people (p.136). Anna Karnakova is out because
she can’t play tennis. The ruling class had to
find someone who was both competent and blond.
That is the contradiction for the ruling class.
Our position is not to disparage the
accomplishments of their blond substitute but to
expose their hypocrisy. After all the beauty,
strength, intelligence and popularity of the
Williams sisters cannot be denied. Their 10 plus
grand slam victories towers over Sharapova’s
one.
The Williams sisters represent a three-pronged
threat: They are Black. They are women. And they
are, as their father proclaimed that day on the
court, and reminiscent of the ‘in your face’
song penned by rapper Ice Cube, “Straight Outta
Compton!”
The African-American community, intentionally
and sometimes unintentionally, is central to
developing and demonstrating a moral vision for
America. Whether it’s Aretha turning every song
into a freedom song, or Venus and Serena
exploding sports stereotypes, it is a consistent
vision that promotes tolerance and opposes
oppression. It does so in the face of market
forces that incessantly concentrate wealth and
power in the hands of fewer and fewer people, of
political forces that would move the needle two
centuries back, of corporate forces that turn
the free market on its head with crushing
monopolies and oligarchies that have absolutely
no intention of competing on equal footing. It
recognizes that democracy includes the right to
vote without intimidation and the right to work
without discrimination. Most importantly, this
vision celebrates our differences.
In fact, we just need to admit it: African
Americans make up the core of the progressive
movement, and always have.
A Different Model
How many times do we hear, do some of us even
say, that African Americans are at the “bottom
of the pyramid” when it comes to economic and
social progress? I would like to present to you
that we’re looking at the wrong geometric shape.
We’ve been told that the world is a triangle…
…but that’s really a Western construct.
Triangular (here, in the form of a pyramid)
hierarchies are imposed by people who want to
control. The corporate-government complex
continues to promote and repeat the view that
African Americans are “at the bottom,” to
perpetuate a condition and to obscure the
central place of African Americans to the
culture and movement of America.
A circle is more natural, more organic to the
process, more truthful, and provides a more
accurate geometry to explain the centrality of
African Americans in the struggle for progress:
What’s the difference between a
pyramid and a circle? EVERYTHING. That’s why the
imagery is so important. The traditional imagery
that most people buy into is that African
Americans are at the “bottom” of this large,
imposing structure, trapped by millions and
millions of bricks that represent all the people
that are “above,” with the top comprised of
people that hold all the cards. What does that
imply? It implies that they will never be able
to pull themselves out of that bottom layer. It
implies that this is the way it will always be.
After all, how long have the pyramids been
around? And isn’t it ironic that it was African
genius that built the pyramids that are now used
as a metaphor for oppression and to describe a
static world state of affairs?
Ah, but a circle—a circle has no top and no
bottom. A circle makes us think of life, and
reminds us of forever. A circle is dynamic and
moving. It represents change. Most of all, it
represents hope.
So what does this circle diagram represent? It
shows a thin sliver of ruling class people, a
weak, thin line that is right now controlling
the energy, hope, skills, and demands of
everyone else. Right now, they control money,
movements, and ultimately, life. It shows larger
slices of white men and women in the working
class, people who really have much more in
common with African Americans than they do with
the ruling class. Finally, it shows African
Americans in the middle, at the core of a
movement for human life and freedom. It shows
African Americans in the middle of a world that
is ripe for change. Instead of being pressed
down, this circle tells us, African Americans
can show the world a better way. They are
poised, it says, to burst out.
Let me tell you exactly what I mean with a real
life example. In 2004, Terri Gross of the
National Public Radio program, “Fresh Air,”
interviewed R&B and gospel artist Aretha
Franklin. The “Lady of Soul” had written a song
called “Think.” Here are some of the words:
You better think, think
about what you’re trying to do to me,
Oh, think, let your mind go, let yourself be
free…
A lot of people saw the song as
just another “he done me wrong” song, a
plaintive, yet protesting complaint about
mistreatment of a woman by a man. But then, in
the middle, she belts out, in a
call-and-response style, a strong cry for
freedom. She sings the word over and over and
over again until we are ready to get free
ourselves.
That’s what Terri Gross addresses. She informs
Aretha that that song, “Think,” actually became
a war song of sorts for the feminist movement.
‘Did you have that in mind?’ she asks Aretha.
Aretha is somewhat taken aback. She doesn’t even
know the power of her own song. ‘I just wrote
what I was feeling at the time,’ she says.
Through the force of her own heart and soul, she
has given the women’s movement an anthem.
And she doesn’t even know it.
Whether it’s Frederick Douglass, Sojourner
Truth, Martin Luther King, Aretha, or Venus and
Serena—not to mention Michael Jackson, Oprah, or
Sean “P Diddy” Combs—African Americans have
played a central role, consciously or
unconsciously, deliberately or unwittingly, in
impacting American culture, American traditions,
American practices, and American politics. In
that way, each advance of the African American
Community represents an advance for the entire
working class.
This excerpt of an op-ed piece from the November
9, 2005 edition of the New York Times, giving an
analysis of the urban disturbances in Paris,
France, tells it all:
“Just look at the newspaper photographs: the
young men wear the same hooded sweatshirts,
listen to similar music and use slang in the
same way as their counterparts in Los Angeles or
Washington. (It is no accident that in
French-dubbed versions of Hollywood films,
African-American characters usually speak with
the accent heard in the Paris banlieues).
“Nobody should be surprised that efforts by the
government to find "community leaders" have had
little success. There are no leaders in these
areas for a very simple reason: there is no
community in the neighborhoods. Traditional
parental control has disappeared and many Muslim
families are headed by a single parent. Elders,
imams and social workers have lost control.
Paradoxically, the youths themselves are often
the providers of local social rules, based on
aggressive manhood, control of the streets,
defense of a territory. Americans (and critics
of America in Europe) may see in these riots
echoes of the black separatism that fueled the
violence in Harlem and Watts in the 1960's.
“But the French youths are not fighting to be
recognized as a minority group, either ethnic or
religious; they want to be accepted as full
citizens. They have believed in the French model
(individual integration through citizenship) but
feel cheated because of their social and
economic exclusion. Hence they destroy what they
see as the tools of failed social promotion:
schools, social welfare offices, gymnasiums.
Disappointment leads to nihilism. For many,
fighting the police is some sort of a game, and
a rite of passage.”
~Olivier Roy, “Get French or
Die Trying,” New York Times, 11/9/05.
The saga continues. Let us
continue to expose the bankruptcy of the
position of the ruling class which always
divides people. If we understand that the
African American community is at the core of the
working class, then we will set every strategy
and all tactics accordingly.
#
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Ronald D. Glotta
220 Bagley, Suite 808
Detroit, Michigan 48226
(313) 963-1320
(313) 963-1325 fax
rglotta@glottaassociates.com
www.glottaassociates.com
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