If someone published an editorial cartoon every time an athlete got upset, there would be no space left in newspapers to publish actual news.
I say “actual news” because it simply isn’t news when an athlete gets upset. In the history of sports, athletes have hit themselves in the face with their own racquet after missing a shot, physically fought a fan for accidentally falling into the penalty box, head-butted an opponent in the stomach for trash-talking their family and created an iconic catchphrase in response to a questionable call from an umpire. So the question remains: what did the Herald Sun’s cartoonist Mark Knight find so newsworthy about Serena Williams, a tennis athlete, getting upset?
The answer lies directly in his choice to make a caricature out of both Williams and her opponent, Naomi Osaka. The news, for Knight, had nothing to do with the sport, the match, the umpire or the results. If it had, Knight wouldn’t have spent so much time drawing up Williams with stereotypical and racist features, making her appear twice as large in the foreground as Osaka in the background. Nor would he have made up a whole new ethnicity for Osaka, who is of Japanese and Haitian descent, instead drawing her white, blonde and petite. But he did, and in doing so he attempted to reconstruct the narrative of the game in clichéd and tired terms that draw on not only racial but gendered stereotypes.
What Williams did was certainly different than head-butting another player or fighting a fan, in that what Williams did was a rational response to what she perceived to be unfair calls by the umpire at her expense. Athletes certainly do get upset, but I’m not about to say that all athlete anger is created equal. To chalk up Williams’ comments to the umpire as an “outburst,” “meltdown,” or “explosion” is to use gendered language to ignore one of the major components of sports: you have to fight to win.
It’s unlikely that any successful athlete would have made it to the top if they just let injustice or disputes pass them by. This is especially the case for Williams who, as a Black woman, has faced obstacles like body shaming and unequal drug testing over the years. So it’s not only understandable but expected that Williams would contest first the coaching violation for coaching she didn’t receive, then the racket abuse call which would cost her a point and finally the verbal abuse call that would cost her a game. And Williams put it perfectly, telling the umpire, “This is not fair … There are a lot of men out here who have said a lot worse than that.”
It isn’t fair that Williams’ choice to behave as an athlete would, by questioning whether she was getting to play a fair game, has been widely covered as an angry outburst by the media. It isn’t fair that Williams is held to different standards because of her existence as a Black woman, standards that place her anger outside of the realm of athlete’s frustration and into the territory of female emotion and Black female rage. It isn’t fair that an editorial cartoonist watched the match and decided to turn the umpire’s questionable calls into a narrative about the angry Black woman.
An editorial cartoon is supposed to comment on something and a caricature is meant to exaggerate certain components or features. Knight should have asked himself what he was commenting on and through what caricature. Take away the tennis racquets and net, and all that’s left is a grotesque caricature of Black womanhood. Where’s the editorial, Herald Sun?