Mark Knight is a veteran cartoonist for the Melbourne, Australia Herald Sun who's made a career of portraying his subjects in caricature. That's how he portrayed tennis star Serena Williams after the tennis superstar's U.S. Open outburst last week. The ever-predictable Left-stream media aggressively went for Knight's "racist" jugular. For example, a Washington Post headline declared it a racist cartoon, and Lonnae O’Neal, a senior writer at The Undefeated, and others accused Knight of portraying the African-American Williams as an enraged behemoth, Aunt Jemima, three-fifths of a human being.
O'Neal's blog attempts to compare the way Williams was treated with the way a white female Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, was treated after she shot a black man. But the purposes of this blog are to examine the sports angle of O'Neal's blog. O'Neal decries how Williams is characterized in the cartoon "as an enraged behemoth. She is drawn with big lips as well as an outsize chest and arms that make her tutu and ponytail, i.e., indicators of femininity, part of his editorial judgment.
"She is jumping up and down on the wreckage of a tennis racket destroyed by her thunderous legs. Her opponent, US Open champion Naomi Osaka, a 20-year-old Haitian and Japanese brown-at-a-glance woman, is depicted by Knight as slight, white-ish, and blonde."
An internet search reveals that Williams is 5-9, weighs 185, is considered a bodybuilder and nicknamed "Momma Smash." She's hardly the Twiggy of her generation and made a fortune over-powering weaker women on the tennis court.
"(T)he cartoon features the kind of mocking imagery often seen in minstrelsy, an entertainment staple of the middle and late 19th century. It resonated far into the 20th century and the beginnings of television through the Aunt Jemimas and Amos ’n’ Andys of popular culture."
Treva Lindsey, a professor of women’s gender and sexuality studies at The Ohio State University, who is quoted in the blog, compares the treatment of Williams to the shameful 19th-century law that declared African-Americans as less than fully human:
“It makes black faces something to poke fun at, something detached from personhood. It is as much about creating three-fifths of a person as the law is."
White womanhood is the go-to standard, O'Neal complains. "(T)he cartoon is part of a long line of caricatures reducing black bodies to grotesquerie to make a point about their unworthiness and threat. Especially their threat to white women, a sentiment that has long acted as the emotional fuel and structuring fiction of white supremacy and violence. In this cartoon, it’s used even when the white woman in question isn’t, as in Osaka’s case, white. But she is drawn white-like as a proxy for upright, shimmery goodness."
Another like-minded wit is brought into the story to carry O'Neal's case forward: “This about sums it up. Serena is hulking with the exaggerated features of black caricature that we’ve been seeing for 100 years. Her 'victims,' light, slender, human. Got it,” tweeted New York Times magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Lindsey says Knight draws Osaka as smaller than she really is and appears to be white, making Williams’ anger appear "more irrational, animalistic and savage when compared with whiteness."
O'Neal closes by asking who will protect "us" from "those dangerous ideas about the magic of white femininity," which have been used to visit "physical, spiritual and emotional lethality on black people."
