The South African race-card entertainment industry is enjoying boom times. A glance through any local newspaper, a listen-in to talk-radio or a look-in at Parliament will offer up multiple and imaginative variations on the same simple theme: how, according to the dealers, racial prejudice infests every last nook and cranny of our lives.
It’s quite amazing how an entirely negative value can sustain so positive, so exuberant an existence. A superb example of race-cardism at its most diverting was in an article reprinted in last week’s Mail & Guardian and in which one Jacques Martin wrote enthusiastically of how unbridled racism has dogged the careers of the two tennis stars, Venus and Serena Williams. Martin wrote his original article for the British Guardian newspaper. It should be preserved in aspic as a definitive example of the genre at its most ludicrous.
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Martin begins his piece by saying that the surly reception accorded Serena Williams by the French Open crowd at the finals of that tournament was an outpouring of unadorned anti-black bigotry. Admittedly there were quite a few Belgian supporters in the crowd, blatting on faithfully for their champion, Justine Henin-Hardenne. There was also the usual support for the underdog in a decidedly David and Goliath encounter. Williams was clearly not the favourite. But this was not reflected in anything the white commentators had to say — they pointedly avoided the subject.
The crowd’s reaction was white-hot racism, claimed Martin, who followed up by citing how, in a earlier match in the tournament, a Euro-sport commentator declared that the United States had found ‘the women’s champion it was looking for in a minor American player who was white. The Williams sisters?” wrote Martin. ‘Clearly the wrong colour.”
Another momentous sliver of evidence in the Martin manifesto was reference to Lleyton Hewitt’s ‘behaviour towards a black linesman in last year’s American Open”. Talk about clutching at straws.
Martin doesn’t pull his maudlin punches. ‘Coming from a black ghetto in Los Angeles, riven by drugs and guns, they have scaled the heights in what their father has accurately described as a ‘lily-white’ sport.” No threads of racism in that remark, are there?
And so the article went on its depressingly predictable way. Before the tournament had even begun Martin dumped on the reception the Williams sisters would no doubt be getting at Wimbledon this year. There wouldn’t be enough black or brown faces in the crowd. Commentators, spectators and tennis reporters would show little understanding for what it is like to be black. Apparently Martin believes Wimbledon is less a tennis tournament than it is an interracial social semester. He actually implied that Wimbledom officials deliberately withhold tickets from black people in order to keep the levels of white spectator prejudice intact.
As it was, the final match between the two Williams sisters was another example of an English (nearly all-white) crowd behaving as they always do, with enthusiasm for good tennis. If they didn’t rave this time it was because the match was one-sided and boring. Many Wimbledon finals are.
At the The French Open women’s final, or that part of it that the wanker French television director allowed us to see when he wasn’t being graphically cute, was much evidence that racism wasn’t the prevailing reason for the crowd’s hostility to Serena Williams. Martin ignores many other contributing factors.
Williams deserved every bit of what she got — apart from being black, that is. For a start her demeanour was deeply ungracious. The more beaten the surlier she got, the more her behaviour encouraged the crowd to boo and hiss her. Her questioning of points was confrontational, she stalked about the court glaring with narrowed eyes at the umpire and linesmen, the crowd. When she lost a point she pouted. When she won one it was with a scowl of spite. At the post-match interview she wept in self-pity.
And then there was the matter of her choice of clothing. Let me make it clear to Martin and those who think like him, that criticising a black tennis player’s appalling choice of garb is not, in itself, a racist action. Looking the other way could well be; inverse racism is just as poisonous. I don’t care what colour Serena is, or how depressing her childhood. Someone should tell her — as they have Venus — that she is a public figure and shouldn’t appear at one of the world’s great tennis tournaments looking as though she’s been outfitted by a colour-blind Pep Store manager in Parow, flouting circus-hoop-size earrings, little fluffy baubles attached to her shoes, rhinestone edging to her Alice-band. The French crowd were booing her outfit as much as anything else.
Oh well, I imagine Martin got well paid for his piece. It was excellent grist to the race-card mill and it’s sure to have had its subversive effect of rendering the racist argument even more meaningless than it’s becoming by sheer overuse. As Groucho once said: ‘Too much is enough.”
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby