Because I say so. And why do I say so? Because everyone knows it’s true.
Such is the gist of yet another racist story, this one unfolding at the US Open Tennis Championship. The two parties involved are the American player Taylor Townsend and the Latvian Jelena Ostapenko.
Jelena lost their match, which is hardly surprising, considering that she is a prime candidate for a Mounjaro jab. I don’t know the Latvian for “Who ate all the pies?”, but whatever it is, she must have heard it a few times.
Anyway, Jelena doesn’t like losing, especially to a lower-ranked opponent like Taylor. This brings to mind the famous American football coach, Vince Lombardi, who once said: “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.”
People playing professional tennis to Jelena’s standard (she has a Grand Slam title to her name) are invariably bad losers. Nothing unusual about that.
But post-match spats, like the one Jelena had with Taylor, don’t happen all that often. Jelena had two problems with Taylor’s etiquette, which gave rise to the incident later described as racist.
First, it’s customary to start the pre-match warm-up at the baseline, where modern matches are mostly played. Once the two players have established their rhythm, they usually take turns at the net. Townsend, however, defied that unwritten rule by starting the warm-up at the net, thus denying Ostapenko her baseline sighters.
Then, at a critical moment in the match, Townsend won a point on a fortunate net cord. When that happens, it’s customary for the lucky player to apologise, which Taylor neglected to do.
That caused Jelena’s ire, and after the match she told Taylor that she had “no class” and “no education”. Taylor replied, “You can learn how to take a loss better,” and you’d think that was the end of a rather trivial incident.
So it would have been if Taylor Townsend weren’t black. But she is, and no incident involving black people on the receiving end of a tirade is ever trivial these days.
Ostapenko was roundly accused of being a racist, even though her remarks didn’t mention race even tangentially. The tennis world, backed up by the press, sprang to the defence of ‘persons of colour’.
Another player, Naomi Osaka, herself a person of colour (or rather two colours: she is half Japanese, half American black) stated categorically that Ostapenko’s post-match comment was “one of the worst things you can say to a black tennis player in a majority white sport”.
If Naomi genuinely thinks so, she must have led a sheltered life. As a former resident of Texas, I can assure her that some things people can say about blacks are considerably worse than ‘no class and no education’.
The charge of ‘no education’ can be safely levelled at any professional player of any race, unless we narrow the concept of education down to basic literacy. These people spend 10 hours every day training on the court, in the gym or on the running track, and have done so since they were five years old.
Add to that rubdowns, physiotherapy, ice baths, sleeping at least eight hours a night, eating out, and there isn’t much time left to acquire anything I’d call education. Witness Roger Federer, one of the nicest and ‘classiest’ tennis players ever. When once asked what his favourite pastime was away from tennis, he replied, “Shopping”.
What, not brushing up on Thomistic philosophy? Parsing a Bach fugue? Reading Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War? Well, I never.
Nor would anyone watching players’ antics on court consider the ‘no class’ accusation misplaced, again regardless of race. I wouldn’t say that the gentlemanly Federer is an exception, but he is certainly not in the majority.
Players kick water bottles into the front rows of the audience. They smash their racquets over chair backs. They knock the chairs over by throwing water bottles at them (Ostapenko herself has been known to do that). They swear at the umpire, their opponent and any member of the paying public who dared to move a muscle while a point was in progress. They fake injuries either to default out of matches they were losing anyway or to catch their breath during the ensuing timeout.
Meanwhile, Osaka continued: “I’m sorry to say but I feel like in society, especially people of colour, we are expected to be silenced. Or there are times where we have to be very strategic as to when we speak up. And in these type of moments, it’s important for me to speak up, not only for myself, but for my culture.”
One could be forgiven for thinking Naomi was talking about the Jim Crow South, c. 1955, not today’s America. If any group is “expected to be silenced” there, especially on the subject of race, it’s white people. It’s as if they’ve all been issued their Miranda warning: “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law” or at least that of public opinion.
Townsend herself graciously conceded that Ostapenko spoke in the heat of the moment and probably didn’t mean to issue a racist insult. However, she’d better keep in mind that, every time Taylor Townsend walks onto a tennis court, she represents not only herself or her country, but also her race:
“I’m very proud as a black woman being out here representing myself and representing us and our culture.
“I make sure that I do everything that I can to be the best representation possible every time that I step on the court and even off the court… I didn’t take it that way [Ostapenko’s remark as a racial slur], but also, that has been a stigma in our community of being not educated and all of the things when it’s the furthest thing from the truth.”
“Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas,” and the demographic veritas doesn’t quite tally with Taylor’s claim. For example, only 10 per cent of American black men have bachelor’s degrees, compared to 61 per cent of their white counterparts.
But that’s neither here nor there: this statistic has nothing whatsoever to do with the problem in hand. For Ostapenko’s remark, whatever we may think of it, clearly lacked a corporate sweep. It was aimed at Taylor Townsend specifically, not her race, nor any other group she may represent.
In any case, stating, as Townsend did, that every time she hits a fuzzy yellow ball she strikes a blow for her race, is a vulgar trivialisation of a genuine problem, interracial relations. Just think what would happen if Townsend’s white, male counterpart and namesake, Taylor Fritz, said that he is proud of being white and represents his race every time he swings his racquet.
He’d be… well, I almost wrote lynched, but then thought better of it. But you get the idea.
This isn’t to say that US blacks have no reason to be hypersensitive. When I lived in Texas, I had a black friend my age who had had to ride in the back of the bus when he was a child. That experience is bound to leave scars, though Clarence did a good job hiding his.
Taylor Townsend was born in 1996, and she grew up in Chicago, where blacks didn’t have to ride in the back of the bus even in her great-grandparents’ generation. Still, the memory of being considered less than human (as American blacks were regarded a hundred years before her great-grandparents’ generation) can’t be erased quickly.
And it will never be erased if racial tensions continue to be whipped up in the media and on campuses. Too many groups in America stand to benefit from fomenting racial strife: they seek to divide so that they can conquer.
If the country suddenly went colour-blind, how would all those professors of black studies make a living? Or censors taking their blue pencils to American classics like Huckleberry Finn? Or racial equality activists, many of them white?
They’d all have to do real work, rather than just indoctrinating impressionable youngsters to hate their country (and the West in general) for its history of racism. This isn’t to say there was no such history. There was, and it was appalling at times and in places.
Treating any race as inferior is a sin, but sins can be atoned, says the formative religion of our civilisation. Which this particular one will never be if any criticism of a black person is treated as racism, against all evidence.
We do live at a crazy time, which I’m tempted to write at the end of just about every article. And unabashed propaganda of racism makes it crazier that it would otherwise be.