The Difference Between Serena Williams and Skip Gates

I had a whole series of reactions, in real time, to Serena Williams' outburst in the U.S. Open semifinals on Saturday night. First, I got annoyed at the footfault call that led to her blow-up because John McEnroe, in the announcement booth, said that the lineswoman was over-officiating. Then I felt cheated, as a fan, because the penalty against Williams cost her match point, which meant that the match ended without a final cathartic moment (and just as Williams was picking up her game). But I completely changed my mind as they replayed the tape of Williams, and then when I watched her completely lame press conference, in which, five minutes later, she said she'd already "moved on." One of the game's top players broke the rules in utter prima donna fashion and got punished for it, and amen to that. It's not the first time Serena has acted out like this. McEnroe's defense is neither surprising, given his bad boy past, nor, in the end, convincing. I agree with him that the refs shouldn't call foot faults on big points. Sliding a toe onto the line when you serve doesn't really give you an advantage. But that doesn't excuse a player who curses and threatens in response.

All of this is making me think again about the summer's big confrontation between a (wealthy black) star and a (not wealthy, not black) official—Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates' run-in with Cambridge cop James Crowley. The crucial difference is that this time, we have the videotape. We know what Serena and the lineswoman each did, and that means there's no opening for a see-it-your-own-way showdown about race and class. I'm not suggesting that if we had the tape of Gates and Crowley, we'd see Gates acting like Serena did. My point is that because we know the facts this time, we're not getting stuck in a feedback loop of assumptions based on who we're more prone to sympathize with. No one is talking about race and class at all. We can judge the line call and Serena's reaction, and then, yes, we can move on.

Tags: foot fault, henry louis gates, james crowley, Serena Williams, tennis

Emily Bazelon is a founding editor of Double X, and a writer and editor at Slate.

Comments

I second closetpuritan. I

By: you know it is | Tue, 09/15/2009 - 01:45

I second closetpuritan. I take Emily's point to be that if we did not have the videotape in the Serena Williams US Open incident, we would likely end up "stuck in a feedback loop of assumptions based on who we're more prone to sympathize with". But since "we have the videotape[, we] know what Serena and the lineswoman each did, and that means there's no opening for a see-it-your-own-way showdown about race and class."

Missing the point

By: closetpuritan | Mon, 09/14/2009 - 20:56

@bobbydee:
"I've said nothing new here, I'm just concerned that this post seems to rehashing some of the worst aspects of the Crowley-Gates affair while ignoring both the sheer illegality of Crowley's behavior and the huge contextual signals that makes neither of these stories the comparably generic "black person goes off on non-black authority figure" stories that Emily is implying that they are."

The point of the post wasn't to say that Williams and Gates were equally blameworthy, and I thought she was pretty clear in saying that she WASN'T trying to claim that. The point was that having the facts in front of us means there's no vacuum for our biases to fill up.

I think maybe part of your point was that we don't know for sure that Gates "went off" on Crowley before he was arrested, but we do know that he later had some harsh words for Crowley, which I assume is what Bazelon was referring to--not that she was trying to imply that we knew Gates was angrily yelling at Crowley before being arrested in the exact same way as Williams--since her point was that we DON'T know for sure how anyone behaved in that incident.

Bang on

By: jacksnsixes | Mon, 09/14/2009 - 20:37

Thank you, Bobbydee, for an outstandingly articulte response to a poorly written article which for some reason attempts to conflate the Serena Williams incident to the Henry Louis Gates confrontation/arrest. The crucial difference is not that "this time they have the videotape," which implies that the storylines were similar (black person overreacts to non-black person who is innocently "just doing their job"). The crucial difference is that in this case, a pro athelete with some anger issues lost her temper on someone who was following the rules, while in the other case, an officer of the law made a big judgment error any way you slice it, and arrested a man in his own home who had done nothing wrong.
To the writer of this article- Why on earth would you say "No one is talking about race and class at all," to finish off an article in which you've explicitly brought up race and class, and contrasted this case specifically against an extremely racially charged issue. You may want to do a little bit of reading about race relations in this country before you yourself step your toe over the line into some foul territory of your own.

Sigh

By: bobbydee | Mon, 09/14/2009 - 17:22

Officer Crowley did not know who Professor Gates was and so treated him like a criminal in his own house, when he might have otherwise treated him as a peer or as a respectable member of society. In behaving in this way toward Gates, he demonstrated, at least, a lapse in judgment that could possibly be attributed to an anti-democratic racism (i.e. the assumption of black criminality, especially when he had been informed that the "criminal" might not be a "criminal" and he had NOT been informed that the criminal is black).

The line judge, on the other hand, DID know that Serena Williams is one of the stars of her sport and, if erroneously, called the foot fault because she believed that Serena had broken a rule of the sport. There was no presumption of guilt involved, only her — the judge herself — witnessing the actual transgression. If Serena Williams, superstar, is subject to the same rules as any other player, this is because tennis is ruled by law, not by prejudice.

Likewise, there are laws in the game of tennis that govern a player's behavior. One has to keep their feet behind certain lines and, moreover, act within some guidelines for decorum. One cannot curse at a line judge, for instance.

There are no laws against insulting or cursing, though, a cop in your own home, if Gates did in fact do this (and the only person who claims this is so is Crowley, who we already know lied explicitly on the very police report).

In short, these situations don't really merit the comparison. To say nothing about how, as far as I know, Asian line-judge/black tennis player relationships aren't colored by innumerable encounters of unidirectional abuse and mutual mistrust — no female Asian line-judge has ever murdered a black female tennis player and gotten away with it — the world is simply not a tennis match. A white cop in a black man's home is nothing like the US Open. A tennis judge is permitted to police manners on the court, an officer of the law is not entitled to do so in ones home. The tennis judge was correct to penalize Serena; Crowley acted stupidly, and lied in the process, to illegally punish Prof Gates for being insufficiently submissive to a (white) officer of the law.

I've said nothing new here, I'm just concerned that this post seems to rehashing some of the worst aspects of the Crowley-Gates affair while ignoring both the sheer illegality of Crowley's behavior and the huge contextual signals that makes neither of these stories the comparably generic "black person goes off on non-black authority figure" stories that Emily is implying that they are.