Serena Williams isn’t just an athlete – she shows black girls their bodies are perfect-Victoria Brown

The tennis star is a cultural touchstone for everyone, but for young girls of color, she is as necessary as air

Serena Williams isn’t just an athlete – she shows black girls their bodies are perfectVictoria Brown

The tennis star is a cultural touchstone for everyone, but for young girls of color, she is as necessary as air

Have you ever seen more guns?

I am trying to be a conscientious mother to my daughter, anticipating issues as she comes of age defined as a young woman of color in America. I expected, even predicted, her questions about darker versus lighter skin and kinky versus straight versus curly hair and had affirming responses at the ready.

But prepared as I was, the child still managed to surprise me the day she asked about her backbone. Why, she wanted to know, did her spine seem to curve when her friends’ backs fell in a smooth, straight line? I had made it to my late twenties before I thought something flawed with my back’s natural arch; my daughter, who inherited my body, had asked at eight.

I took my own blackness and body for granted growing up in a small Caribbean village. If anything, I wanted to be fleshier – to have the thick thighs, solid arms and ample bosoms of the popular girls at my school who, though I didn’t know it at the time, had bodies like Serena Williams. I made it through high school without ever hearing about anorexia or bulimia. Surely, I thought, any child of mine would be equally self-confident about her appearance.

But I underestimated the effect of the exclusion of black female bodies from the American beauty pantheon – it’s pernicious, and I was wrong to think my daughter immune to its effects. She has long noticed the absence of people who look like her in museums, magazines, on TV shows and in movies. I sensed this void at Kehinde Wiley’s recent Brooklyn Museum show, where she carefully studied the first paintings she had ever seen with African American women dominating the foreground. Still, up until she came home concerned about her spine, I hadn’t realized how closely she compared herself to the images she did see regularly, and to her friends who did conform.

I tried to conform for a time, too. For years, Bikram yoga teachers encouraged me to tuck in my tailbone, and for years I tried, with futility, to reshape my back. I didn’t want to minimize the kick of my backside (which I quite like), but according to the instructors, my concave spine had come from poor posture, and if my back straightened, my abdominal wall would strengthen, and I’d become less prone to hernia, no longer have to dart every new pair of jeans at the waist, have better digestion and yes, a flatter stomach. Instead I suffered years of back pain from forcing my muscles in their opposite direction.

Long after I’d disregarded the Bikram fanatics’ desire to redesign my skeleton, I watched my daughter wait on line to dive into a YMCA pool. Because no one had ever told her to tuck in anything, her spine hung in a graceful S-curve from the nape of her neck right down to her coccyx. Her body reaffirmed the posture I was meant to have: chin forward, shoulders relaxed, hands straight, feet slightly apart, back defiantly arched.

I felt mildly panicked she might feel the need to realign her perfect self. So in the subtlest way this summer, I have been shoving Serena Williams down her throat. As the sports world and media have contested and publicly deconstructed Williams’s body, we have been celebrating her beauty and talent. Williams is a cultural touchstone for everyone, but for young black girls, living in a culture that rarely defines their appearance as beautiful, she is as necessary as air.

“Just look at her,” I tell my daughter during Williams’s games. “Did you see that shot? Amazing. She’s the best. She’s gorgeous and she can hit that ball like nobody’s business.” My daughter points Serena out in print ads, on billboards and in magazine profiles. “Look, mom,” she says with the right amount of awe, “Serena.” After Williams won Wimbledon, she asked if she could take tennis lessons.

For unavoidable reasons we missed our annual Caribbean trip. Each year prior, my seven gorgeous nieces who range from whippet thin to curvy and voluptuous, all healthy and none particularly obsessed with size or shape, crowd our rental villa and parade unselfconsciously in all state of dress and undress. My daughter organically finds her place in their midst. More than ever, this year, she needed to be surrounded by their beauty. Instead, we read about ballerina Misty Copeland and looked at videos of gymnasts Simone Biles and Gabby Douglas. I talked to her about how bodies are genetically sourced and individually made and how terribly boring a world where we were all alike would be. And (since it’s never too early encourage a little critical thinking about power dynamics) I asked her, who’d get to decide what this one ideal way would be?

On most days, Queens, New York, is a poor substitute for a Caribbean vacation, and Serena Williams, as far as I can trace, is not our blood relation. But this year in lieu of flying down to the cousins, my daughter and I will be hopping on the express train to the US Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium. We will cheer and root for Williams’s backhand, and also for her beauty and grace.

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