ELAINE THOMPSON/AP PHOTO
Serena Williams was mum about the racism she continually faced, but she used her voice in other ways.
This article appears in the December 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
In 1949, Paul Robeson flew to France and, in a fury that came from the bowels of systemic oppression that only a Black man in segregated America could understand, made a speech at the World Peace Conference. “Why should the Negroes ever fight against the only nations of the world where racial discrimination is prohibited and where the people can live freely? Never!” he declared. “I can assure you, they will never fight against either the Soviet Union or the peoples’ democracies.”
The media and American public were quick to condemn Robeson for such an un-American statement. Speculation grew that he was secretly a Communist, because there was no way an oppressed man from America would dare speak against America.
Not if he cared for himself or his country. Not if he was a good Negro.
The response had the potential to make waves across the Black community. And here is where Jackie Robinson enters the picture.
Robinson, who two years before became the first Black player in Major League Baseball and a hero to practically every Black American, was marched in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and all but made to denounce Robeson’s statements.
But Robinson did not just denounce Robeson’s comments, he made other comments that got little to no attention.
“The fact that it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality, and lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of his charges,” Robinson testified. “Negroes were stirred up long before there was a Communist Party, and they’ll stay stirred up long after the party has disappeared—unless Jim Crow has disappeared by then as well.”
This saga was the beginning of the end of Robeson’s career; his income subsequently fell by 94 percent. It was also, as Howard Bryant writes in the 2018 book The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism, an early episode in the struggle Black athletes have faced to come out of oppression and find their voice in the American conversation.
OUR CULTURAL ATTITUDES toward fame are senseless: We love building up heroes as much as we love knocking them down. But Black athletes in particular have their bodies, their talent, and their morals challenged on a level few others can relate to. Society reveres them for their physical ability, while disparaging them for daring to think on their own or, even worse, disrupt the status quo. They labor for America’s entertainment and are loved less—not more—for it.
This creates a vicious cycle where Black athletes are uplifted for their talent and denigrated for speaking out against the injustices they or their people face. Many never have a choice but to engage in this familiar dance of public commentary and backlash. They pass this struggle down to younger athletes by setting the stage and sometimes mentoring them: hence Bryant’s use of the term “heritage.”
Black athletes are uplifted for their talent and denigrated for speaking out against the injustices they or their people face.
The most famous Black athletes are often famous because they engaged with the heritage. Muhammad Ali was not just an amazing heavyweight boxer, he was the man who railed against the Vietnam War and refused service. Tommie Smith was not just an Olympic gold medalist in the 200-meter dash, but the man who threw his fist in the air with a “Black Power” salute at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, shocking the world.
But the heritage is not the same as it was. It was born out of a limited pool of Black talent that powerful entities—media, government, industry heads—could manipulate and abuse. It grew out of the remarkably heightened racial tension of the ’40s and ’50s American society, and a fledgling sports industry. Speaking out became, as Bryant put it, an “expectation [that] soon grew into a responsibility.”
While Black athletes continue to break color barriers, some simply rise to the top of their sports over dozens of other talented people of color. And not everyone feels the need to speak out, choosing instead to protect their image and earning potential. Michael Jordan famously chose this path in 1990 when, instead of getting involved in a contentious North Carolina Senate race, he simply said, “Republicans buy sneakers too.” Despite the race being between a Black person and a notorious racist in his home state, Jordan had no strong words. In 2020’s documentary series The Last Dance, Jordan said it was just a joke, but conceded, “I never thought of myself as an activist. I thought of myself as a basketball player.” He had seen what happened when the lines were blurred.
Even stars who have made it their career to play and to speak out, like LeBron James, pick their causes carefully in today’s digital and increasingly capitalistic world. When an NBA executive named Daryl Morey was criticized by the league for expressing solidarity with oppressed citizens in Hong Kong, James joined in, stating the executive wasn’t “educated on the situation at hand.” It was an ironic statement given the incredible abuse of human rights in Hong Kong at the hands of China, but par for the course considering the massive amounts of money the NBA makes in China.
However, racism and oppression never sleep. Whether they are the lone Black athlete challenging barriers, or one of many, they still have a perceived obligation to use their voice. How they choose to do so is entirely up to them, and that’s the power of the heritage.
COLIN KAEPERNICK’S PROTEST against police brutality made waves across the sports industry and the media. The simple action of kneeling during the national anthem sent pundits and social media into a frenzy, ultimately costing Kaepernick his NFL career.
The response to his protest is one of the quintessential elements of the heritage—the backlash that leads to devastating repercussions. After his protest at the 1968 Olympics, Tommie Smith never raced again. John Carlos, the bronze-medal winner who made the salute with Smith, fell into a life of poverty.
But despite the sector of the population that wanted Kaepernick to “shut up and play,” a similarly large sector of people understood his message. Police brutality has hung heavily over the lives of people of color since the inception of the police, especially amid the high-profile murders of Black people in recent years, and it deserved to be called out on the national stage.
Kaepernick did more than just kneel. He engaged with the community, raising $1 million for social causes and hosting workshops in the Bay Area. He inspired more athletes to join his protest, from NBA players to the U.S. women’s national team.
TED S. WARREN/AP PHOTO
Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police brutality ended his football career.
This story was the subject of a Netflix series, Colin in Black & White, as well as an upcoming Spike Lee documentary. And by all accounts, Kaepernick is doing pretty well. He started his own publishing house, Kaepernick Publishing, which recently published an autobiography by Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, another Black athlete who protested the anthem. His advertising deal with Nike made the company $6 billion in market value.
Kaepernick also joined forces with a private equity investor to buy a specialized minority-lending bank, The Change Co. He refused to advertise the deal widely, and it fell apart. This signals that the optics may have looked bad even to Kaepernick. He’s run into the classic stalemate, where the pursuit of capitalism often comes at the expense of core beliefs. In many ways, you can’t be a capitalist and an activist.
Kaepernick’s not in the NFL anymore, but he solidified the foundation for his fellow football players, and athletes more widely, to speak up and make waves. Maybe they never will, but at least the option, the legacy, is there.
WHEN SHA’CARRI RICHARDSON burst onto the scene in 2021, she was impossible to miss. From her long colored hair and acrylic nails, to the way she dominated the 100-meter sprint, Richardson was immediately regarded as a force to be reckoned with.
This power and talent did not protect her from the treatment all Black athletes face. It never does. Richardson had raw emotion on and off the racetrack, such as when she qualified for the Olympics and immediately ran up to embrace the grandmother who raised her. She grins with delight as she speeds past her opponents; she declares that she is “THAT girl.”
But the confidence of a young Black woman is never received well. The world always makes it a point to beat them down. When Richardson failed to qualify for the 100-meter final at the USA Track and Field Outdoor Championships in June, social media was ablaze, mocking her for overconfidence and reveling in her defeat.
Richardson stood up for herself: “Y’all should understand whether they’re coming from winning, whether they’re losing, whatever the case may be. Athletes deserve way more respect than when y’all just come and throw cameras into their faces,” she said. “Be more understanding of the fact that they are still human, no matter just to the fact that y’all are just trying to get something to put out in an article to make a dollar. Thank you.”
The outcry was even worse when Richardson was disqualified from the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 for failing a drug test, coming up positive for THC, the psychoactive substance in marijuana. Again, Richardson stood up for herself, first with a simple tweet: “I am human.”
She made her voice known again by calling out the IOC’s double standard in February, when figure skater Kamila Valieva was allowed to compete despite testing positive for another banned substance. “The only difference I see is I’m a Black young lady.”
Richardson has consistently refused to be silent, just like those before her.
SERENA WILLIAMS’S STORY is slightly different from the others. Williams was historically mum about the racism she faced throughout her professional tennis career, but she used her voice in other ways to defend herself and her talent.
Williams did not really have to say anything about the racism she faced. It was often so obvious, dozens of people would jump to defend her. The infamous Australian comic, where she was depicted as a petulant child in minstrel-esque fashion after a loss to Naomi Osaka, is just one example. The backlash against that comic was so swift that the Australian Press Council had to actively defend the artist, declaring it “non-racist.”
Still, Williams said nothing, instead preserving her energy and her voice for when it mattered to her.
When Williams decided to retire this year, she decided to control the narrative and prevent anyone from making the decision for her. In a Vogue cover story, she wrote on the impossible decision between motherhood and career and the emotion she was often vilified for.
She wrote on her love for the sport, and her desire to be more: “I’d like it to be: Serena is this and she’s that and she was a great tennis player and she won those slams,” she wrote. “I’m going to miss that version of me, that girl who played tennis.”
Simone Biles withdrew from the Olympic gymnastics team competition in 2021, stating a need to work on her mental health. Naomi Osaka did the same that year, withdrawing from the French Open. Their actions revealed another plight for the Black athlete: In a country with staggering mental health issues, some will still vilify them for prioritizing themselves.
Whether an athlete speaks up about pertinent social causes or about the personal oppression they face, the world demands their silence. But attached to these powerful Black bodies that the world watches in awe is a voice, a voice that many have used and that countless are sure to use later. It is in the genes, in the legacy, in the heritage.
